A tile maker presses, glazes and fires ceramic or vitrified tiles on lines that run through the night, then sorts them by shade and calibre. Kiln hands and sorters decide whether a lot sells at full rate or as a second.
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Share your requirementsBody material is milled and spray-dried, pressed into green tiles, dried, glazed and digitally printed, then fired in a roller kiln. Sorters check each fired tile for shade, size, warp and surface, and the lot is boxed, palletised and sent to dealers, builders and exporters. The kiln stays lit round the clock, since a cold restart wastes gas and tile, so crews rotate nights. A small drift in press moisture, glaze weight or firing curve may only show as pinholes or shade variation after the kiln. A sorter grades by eye under a light, and a mixed lot is found by a builder with a half-laid floor. Glaze and kiln specialists are few and hard to replace. See also HR for construction and real estate.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
Firing curve tweaks, roller faults and burner problems are told across a corridor, so the incoming shift often repeats the same mistake.
A tired sorter lets two shades into one box, and the complaint arrives from a floor in someone's home, not from the plant.
Work near dryers and kiln exits plus changing night turns bring fatigue, slips and missing hands the day after wages.
Pinholes or warp from a press or glaze change appear only after firing, and no record names the shift that made the change.
Only a handful can tune a firing curve or a glaze recipe, and nearby plants will pay them more.
Packers and pallet loaders are asked to stay on with no notice when a large order has to leave.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a tile manufacturers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Firing curve, burner or roller faults, changes made and jobs pending, signed by outgoing and incoming leads.
What this coversHideFiring curve, burner or roller faults, changes made and jobs pending, signed by outgoing and incoming leads. The attendance, shift and leave process sets rosters and rest between turns.
A board of shade and size reference tiles, a short test before a sorter works alone and a rotation to ease eye strain.
What this coversHideA board of shade and size reference tiles, a short test before a sorter works alone and a rotation to ease eye strain. The learning and development process builds the path.
Press moisture, glaze weight, kiln curve and shift names go on one card per lot, so a reject leads back to a stage.
What this coversHidePress moisture, glaze weight, kiln curve and shift names go on one card per lot, so a reject leads back to a stage. See HR reporting and analytics.
A named grade, a pay band and a mentoring duty for people who can tune a curve or a recipe.
What this coversHideA named grade, a pay band and a mentoring duty for people who can tune a curve or a recipe. See compensation benchmarking.
A short list of reliable extra packers, a note of dealer order peaks and a written overtime rule agreed with the crew before the surge arrives.
What this coversHideA short list of reliable extra packers, a note of dealer order peaks and a written overtime rule agreed with the crew before the surge arrives.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Rosters, rest and tidy handovers for kilns that burn all night.
A route to grow sorters, glaze operators and kiln hands from your own crew.
Batch and shift records that tie a defect to what changed upstream.
Grades and pay for kiln and glaze specialists that make poaching less tempting.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
8 min readRead article
A calendar of courses, a budget spent by March and no record of what any of it changed. What a learning and development process contains when it starts from need rather than from the catalogue.
7 min readRead article
A laminated notice, an annual drill, and an incident register with three entries in two years. What workplace health and safety looks like when it is real.
7 min readRead article
How to spot an unmanageable workload before it becomes an exit or an error, what to look at, how to talk about it and what to change, without guessing.
5 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Put the firing curve, faults and pending actions on one sheet that both leads sign, and keep a few minutes of face-to-face overlap at the kiln.
Build reference tiles for each shade and size, test every sorter against them and rotate stations. Go through any mixed lot with the person who sorted it.
A named grade with its own pay, a part in teaching others and a route to technical lead. Compare their pay with nearby plants each year.
Roster extra cover for those days, ask the crew why it happens and consider small recognition for steady attendance. Do not shorten rest between turns.
Keep a batch card with press, glaze and kiln settings and shift names, and read it with the leads whenever a lot is rejected.
Last week's kiln notes, who is learning to sort by shade, and whether one rejected lot can be followed back by shift. A kiln handover sheet and a sorter reference board would be a sensible opening, and scope is put in writing after a first conversation.
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