You can see very clearly when teams are working together, or not working together. “What you see in the plant is the most visible personification of that objective. “It’s something we’re constantly working on,” Scaringe said. It begins with what the company calls its “Compass Values,” which include “Come Together” and “Ask Why” and “Over Deliver.” The hope, Scaringe said, is that Rivian adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Scaringe said establishing a good one is a major priority. If Rivian wants to keep its workers and continue ramping up EV production, it has to be a good place to work. Of course, the low cost-of-living and all the Constitution Trails in the world only go so far. It’s not something we’re pursuing right now,” he said, adding they’ve “brought a few developers into the mix” to spur more home construction. “It’s certainly something we’ve talked about. Would Rivian ever consider investing in building employee housing? He said the Hyatt and Marriott hotels in Uptown Normal are frequently chock full of Rivian employees and visitors. One of the most tangible economic byproducts of Rivian’s arrival has been felt in the Bloomington-Normal housing market, where inventory is low, home prices are rising, and rentals are scarce. I find I’m really enjoying it here,” he said. It’s a great place to raise a family, have kids in school here.’ That’s really important to me. “So I’m able to authentically say, ‘This is a great place to live. How do you sell someone from the West Coast or East Coast on central Illinois? Scaringe said it helps that he did it himself Scaringe moved from Southern California to Bloomington with his wife and three young sons, the oldest of which is now in school in Normal. It’s looked to other areas and other states to recruit people to Normal, with some success, Scaringe said. Rivian wants a diverse mix of people from diverse industry backgrounds, Scaringe said. It’s that rate of growth that makes finding and sourcing the right folks challenging.” Due in part to supply chain issues, Rivian is only projecting to make 25,000 electric trucks, SUVs, and vans this year – inside a plant that theoretically can make 150,000 per year. This week I think we added 240 people to the company. “We’re a large employer that continues to grow quite dramatically. “The scale at which we’re operating, relative to the scale of Bloomington-Normal as a community, creates inherent challenges,” Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told WGLT. But the community’s historically low unemployment rate and small size – relative to massive metros like Chicago or Detroit or Atlanta, which have bigger labor pools – also bring unique hiring challenges for Rivian. Those factors are playing out in Bloomington-Normal too. And an unusually high number of workers have been quitting their jobs for other, better opportunities – the Great Reshuffling, as one economist puts it – a professional re-evaluation some attribute to the pandemic. Nationally, employers are scrambling to find scarce workers. And then growing again when the supply chain allows for the plant to increase production capacity. But now comes the hard part: Keeping them. Rivian has already hired over 5,000 people in Normal, making it McLean County’s second-largest employer almost overnight. “Without the human capital, none of this other stuff matters,” said Tim Fallon, who is two months into his new job as Rivian’s vice president of manufacturing. It has some of the biggest robots in the automotive manufacturing world too – capable of moving something as humongous as the side panel of a soon-to-be Amazon delivery van.īut all the robots in the world won’t be enough for Rivian to achieve its lofty electric-vehicle ambitions. The nearly 4 million square feet of space at Rivian’s Normal plant is lined with some of the most advanced manufacturing equipment in the world.
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