170 Years of Total Tenure at Williams Refrigeration: How Long Employee Tenure Can Translate into Operational Advantage?

In the professional kitchen equipment sector, employee engagement is often not as visible a topic as product development, energy efficiency, or sales growth.

Williams Refrigeration’s 2026 long service awards bring the role of human resources in production performance back into focus.

According to Foodservice Equipment Journal and the company’s own statement, this year six employees reached a total of 170 years of service. Lee Cook and Karen Redhead have 40 years, John Hopgood has 30 years; Warren Giffin, Ian Bruce, and Richard Eke have completed 20 years.

This figure alone is extraordinary.

However, the more important question from an operational perspective is:

What does it gain a manufacturing company when employees stay for 20, 30, or 40 years?

The same employees were also on the long service list in 2016

Williams’ historical records show that today’s picture is not a one-off.

In 2016, the company celebrated Karen Redhead and Lee Cook’s 30 years and John Hopgood’s 20 years of service. At the same time, Williams announced that the average employee tenure in King’s Lynn was over 15 years.

Ten years later, the same names have surpassed the 40 and 30-year thresholds respectively.

This situation signals a strong continuity in employee retention.

The company’s current CSR page also states that 60% of King’s Lynn employees have over 10 years, and 5% have more than 30 years of tenure.

These figures are from the company’s own data; they should not be seen as independent audited workforce statistics. However, they support that long service awards are not an exception for a few individuals.

Why is long tenure particularly valuable in manufacturing?

Employee knowledge in manufacturing businesses can be divided into two parts.

One part can be documented:

SOP, quality control criteria, maintenance procedures, technical drawings, occupational safety standards.

The other part is the tacit knowledge acquired over the years.

A machinist, assembly operator, production supervisor, or service worker can learn how a specific material behaves, what sound indicates a particular malfunction, or how a small production deviation affects quality over the years.

This knowledge is not always fully transferred to the procedure book.

Therefore, high turnover not only creates costs for finding new employees; the business can also lose firm-specific knowledge.

CIPD emphasizes that employee turnover can have a more serious impact on performance in jobs where skills are limited and training costs are high.

The skills gap in manufacturing still persists

The timing of the Williams example is also significant.

Make UK’s 2026 Executive Survey shows that there are approximately 48,000 open positions in the UK manufacturing sector, and a significant portion of manufacturers are turning to retraining their existing employees.

In the survey, 66% of companies plan upskilling in leadership and management, 58% in advanced technical skills, and 37% in digital competencies.

Make UK’s Labour Turnover Report published in April 2026 also states that manufacturers continue to monitor employee mobility and retention as significant workforce issues.

In this environment, employees with 20–40 years of tenure are not just "loyal staff".

They are also carriers of technical knowledge that may be difficult to recruit and train in a short time.

Long tenure is not automatically proof of a good culture

There is an important editorial boundary here.

An employee staying with the same company for a long time does not alone indicate that the company is an excellent employer.

Labor market conditions, geography, pay structure, retirement expectations, local alternatives, or an individual's personal life can also affect tenure.

Williams executives associate long tenure with employee satisfaction and a "family" culture. This is the company’s own assessment.

Therefore, a more accurate approach is:

long tenure is a strong indicator of retention; additional employee data is needed to understand the reasons.

For example, without knowing engagement scores, voluntary turnover rates, pay benchmarks, internal promotion rates, and employee complaints, no definitive conclusions can be drawn about culture.

Training and tenure should work together

The biggest risk of long-serving employees is the concentration of knowledge in a few individuals.

If critical production knowledge is lost when a 40-year employee retires, the advantage of high tenure weakens.

Therefore, the second pillar of the retention strategy should be knowledge transfer.

Williams states on its current CSR page that a large portion of manufacturing employees have achieved at least NVQ Level 2 qualifications and that training is provided in areas such as sourcing, brazing, forklift, and production operations.

Using such structures alongside long-serving employees is more valuable.

For example:

senior employees can mentor,

critical job steps can be documented,

cross-training can be conducted,

succession plans can be prepared,

technical knowledge can be transferred to digital training modules.

Thus, long tenure becomes not just a record of past success but a system that nurtures new employees.

Very low turnover is not always ideal

When discussing retention, it is also necessary to avoid another extreme.

CIPD states that very low employee turnover can limit the entry of new ideas and diverse experiences into the organization. A healthy turnover level varies by sector and the nature of the job.

Therefore, the goal should not be "no one should leave the company".

A stronger goal is:

to keep critical knowledge and skills within the business, while not retaining underperforming structures just for the sake of tenure.

From a human resources perspective, a good retention strategy balances engagement with renewal.

Why is this issue important for HORECA suppliers?

Although Williams is an equipment manufacturer, the issue directly extends to HORECA operations.

In professional kitchen equipment;

product development,

service,

spare parts,

technical support,

project implementation

requires long-term knowledge.

When a hotel’s kitchen cooling system fails, what the customer expects is not just a call center response; it is the technical competence to understand the equipment, the application, and the field issue.

Therefore, high employee turnover on the manufacturer or distributor side can also affect the quality of service provided to the end user.

What can businesses in Turkey measure?

The long service award is not a retention strategy by itself.

If hotels, restaurants, or equipment companies in Turkey want to track employee engagement more functionally, they can monitor the following indicators together:

voluntary turnover,

critical role turnover,

average tenure,

first 90 days turnover rate,

internal promotion rate,

post-training retention,

critical position succession coverage.

Especially in knowledge-intensive functions such as technical service, kitchen, engineering, and production, the question of who left and what knowledge left with them is as important as how many people left?

Stafflink’s view

In our opinion, the remarkable aspect of the Williams example is not the awarding of six employees.

The real value is that employee tenure can transform into production knowledge and corporate memory.

If a 40-year employee can only pass their knowledge to the new generation, it is a strategic advantage for the company.

Otherwise, tenure becomes a collection that will disappear when retirement day comes.

Therefore, the strongest retention model should consist of three parts:

retaining employees, developing employees, and multiplying their knowledge within the system.

In an environment where the skills gap is increasing in the HORECA and equipment sector, retained experience can increasingly turn into a competitive advantage.