Employee ownership and a formal neurodiversity programme set the business apart, says David Lonergan, after Ed Davey opened its new site.
David Lonergan, managing director of Framework Recruitment and co-founder of the Institute of Architectural Glazing, has held up Structura as the model the rest of the glazing sector should follow. He spoke after Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey opened the company’s new factory last week.
Lonergan attended the opening. He said he had not expected it to affect him as it did, and that it had stayed with him since. Watching the company celebrate what it had built, and what it planned to build next, had left him with something he kept returning to.
He pointed to Structura’s employee ownership, its formal neurodiversity programme and its investment in staff. That spending, he said, comes “straight out of the margin”. These were not marketing lines, he argued, but decisions that cost money and were made anyway because the company’s leadership believed they were right.
Framework Recruitment works with Structura. Lonergan said that relationship had let him see how the business treats people after a placement. He described it as a company that lives its values rather than listing them on a website.
He called the new factory the next chapter of a story built carefully and deliberately. He said a national political leader marking the occasion showed that Structura’s approach mattered beyond the sector.
Plenty of companies talk about values and investing in people, Lonergan said. Structura, he argued, shows what that model looks like in practice. The rest of the sector should be paying attention.
