Procurement Employees Create 5-by-20-Foot Painting for Company’s Troy, Michigan Headquarters Lobby
When the Procurement team at Meritor, Inc. (NYSE: MTOR) began to plan a global employee engagement event, organizers heeded the words of Plato: “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.”
The company today unveiled a 5-by-20-foot mural painted by its Procurement teams in eight countries during a gallery-style open house at Troy, Michigan headquarters. Similar events were held at participating locations around the globe. The colorful mural representing Meritor’s business, products and work environment now hangs in the lobby for visitors, customers and recruits to see.
“We’re serious about being a great place to work because companies perform better when they have engaged teams of people who feel valued and have fun in the workplace,” said Jon Rose, vice president, Procurement. “Although effective global teambuilding can be a challenge, we united Procurement employees across borders and built relationships by teaming up to paint segments of the mural.”
Meritor Procurement teams in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, China, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and Brazil submitted photos symbolizing their country, workplace and Meritor products to nationally recognized artist Daniel Cascardo. He drew representations of those ideas on a truck-shaped template and divided it into eight separate canvases for shipment to Meritor’s participating global facilities.
Groups of employees at each location painted their portion of the mural. The team in Italy, for example, painted a fighter plane because Meritor’s Cameri facility once produced military hardware. Teams in Bangalore, India painted the Taj Mahal, and Florence, Kentucky employees painted one of their city’s landmark images − a water tower with the saying, “Florence Y’All.”
Teams were encouraged to be creative when painting in the white space. Dave Rice, a U.S. Army veteran at Troy headquarters, painted the American flag into a free-flowing ribbon that runs through part of the mural. When finished, the individual segments were returned to Cascardo for assembly into a single mural.
The metro Detroit artist has been commissioned by several companies and other organizations to work with hundreds of employees to create what he calls Art, Action, Experience murals. He likens the exercise to increasingly popular adult coloring books that become art when pieced together.
Due to the global nature of Meritor’s business, Cascardo created a video explaining the project’s scope and process as well as materials each site would need. Cascardo gave very little additional instruction, except to say that everyone should just team up and fill in the white spaces.
“In workplace environments – whether on plant floors or in office cubicles – employees may work together but never really engage each other,” said Kate Lieffers, manager, Employee Engagement. “With this kind of project, we bring people together to do something really fun, and afterward they can look at the piece and be reminded that we’re all part of something much bigger. When we pull together and work collaboratively, we celebrate our strength as one global team.”
