How Our Culture of Recognition Drives Innovation & Excellence

Relentless innovation fuels our daily actions that, ultimately, turn our vision into reality and are central to our culture. Recognizing those efforts – big and small – is an important way that we create an environment in which innovation and strategic risk-taking are celebrated and encouraged.

Because of the commitment our team has to innovation in ALL they do, we believe it’s important to recognize the individual and team contributions that help propel Nexteer forward. Afterall, our ability to create value and develop solutions to our customers’ toughest motion control challenges are the direct result of the hard work and ingenuity of our team.

At Nexteer, we have an extensive award program that recognizes people at the global, regional and local level within the company overall and within specific functions. We recognize employees who help foster innovation in our products and technologies, as well as those who innovate in how we do what we do to improve quality, customer relationships, time and cost efficiencies and more. Overall, it takes a strong and dedicated team across our entire company to move forward.

Celebrating Innovation & Excellence Around the World

Nexteer’s annual Inspire Awards are our highest level of recognition, acknowledging both regional and company-wide innovation and excellence across five categories that cover all the organization’s functions and an overall award recognizing the best of the best. They highlight the importance of relentless innovation, teamwork and our internal culture. The Inspire Awards include:

• Innovation of the Year – Recognizes the year’s top innovation (patent or trade secret), demonstrating the company’s highest value potential.
• Customer Team of the Year – Recognizes the team that realizes a significant success for the company through deep customer engagement.
• Launch Team of the Year – Recognizes outstanding achievement across a range of launch team metrics that align with Nexteer’s goal of a perfect launch.
• Quality Cup – Recognizes outstanding achievement by a manufacturing plant across a range of quality performance metrics that align with Nexteer’s goal of perfect quality.
• Heart of the House – Recognizes individuals or teams within corporate functions who implement business initiatives which demonstrate innovative solutions for new and existing business needs, aligning with the company’s One Nexteer culture and creating significant value for the company.
• Exemplar Award – Recognizes a success achieved through such great feat that it stands out above all the rest while exemplifying the characteristics above.

Additional innovation award programs, such as the Melvin L. Wilcox Awards and the Innovation Hall of Fame, recognize employees who have made significant intellectual property (IP) contributions to the company – thus enhancing our competitive position.

The Melvin L. Wilcox Engineering Award is our most prestigious IP award and recognizes inventors who have made a significant contribution to Nexteer technology, business impact and brand promotion.

The Innovation Hall of Fame Award Program is a tiered award program based upon the accumulation of IP points from patents, trade secrets and defensive publications. Employees can continue to move up to higher tiers in the Innovation Hall of Fame Award Program as they achieve more IP points throughout their career.

We also recognize our operations teams by honoring employees who help promote lean manufacturing methodology, which reduces costs, decreases waste, increases productivity and maintains a high level of quality. These awards are held numerous times throughout the year to showcase our ongoing commitment to operational excellence.

These major global recognition programs work in coordination with our regional and local recognition programs – thus multiplying the impact of recognition across Nexteer. These regional and local recognition programs (both formal and informal) provide employees with opportunities to say thanks and recognize colleagues for going above and beyond. We encourage employees to use our peer-to-peer recognition tools across Nexteer to keep strengthening our culture of recognition and show our appreciation for the hard work and creativity our team brings to work each and every day.

The true driving force behind Nexteer’s success is our people – our global One Nexteer team. And we’re proud to recognize our outstanding employees for their contributions to our collective success. We believe that a culture of recognition inspires and empowers our team, strengthens connection and drives relentless innovation every day.