See the full numbers behind Toyo Tire's turnaround
Mia covers the story in the webinar. The case study lays out the rollout, the reporting cadence, and the results in detail.
Read the Toyo Tires case study
In this live customer spotlight, Mia Williams shares how implementing TeamSense didn't just fix a retention crisis, it gave their entire leadership team a new way to see the shop floor: call-off patterns connected to production costs, absence data driving forecast accuracy, and reliability scores feeding directly into performance reviews.
The challenge: a voicemail box and a guess
Cell phones aren't allowed on the plant floor at Toyo Tire, so before TeamSense, calling off meant reaching a landline and hoping.
- Messages that never arrived. Employees called the plant, hoped someone picked up, hoped the voicemail box wasn't full. Often it was.
- Blind shift starts. On 12-hour shifts in a 24/7 operation, supervisors regularly began the day not knowing who was in the building or what equipment would be covered. Mia describes losing tires at the start of every shift.
- Overtime as insurance. With no way to forecast coverage, the plant overstaffed on purpose. Mia's word for it is hemorrhaging, and it drove up cost per tire.
- No idea why. Without reason codes, there was no pattern to see and nothing to get ahead of.
When Mia pulled the numbers, roughly 100 employees out of 1,500 were one attendance point from termination.
Key insights from Mia Williams
- Reliability, not attendance. Changing the word changed the conversation. "I was counting on you" lands differently than a point total.
- Ask and people will tell you. Mia's view is that employees are honest about what's going on. What you do with that information is what builds or breaks trust.
- Attack the issue, not the person. If one person is dealing with something, others usually are too.
How Toyo Tire turned attendance into operational information
1. Overtime became a decision instead of a hedge
Once the plant could see expected coverage before a shift started, overtime got planned. Mia reports a 30% reduction in overtime hours in the department that had carried the most, and daily overtime spend is now reported in the 9:00 meeting. There was a morale effect too: employees stopped watching coworkers collect overtime pay with nowhere to be placed.
2. Reason codes pointed at fixable problems
This is where it got interesting. Repeated transportation, child care, and family-crisis reasons convinced the COO to fund a dedicated role Gina who connects employees to community resources, child care assistance, housing support, and a bus program in development. In one department, a cluster of back and fatigue reports brought in the ergonomics team, which added mats. The people reporting it turned out to be tenured employees who'd stood on concrete for years.
Frequently asked questions from the webinar
Did the connection to production forecasting and cost per tire exist from the start? No. Mia says it wasn't planned. Once the pilot gave supervisors advance headcount visibility, they started forecasting coverage and triggering overtime only where a department would genuinely be short.
How did employees take it? Employees reference absences reported through TeamSense unprompted, and department managers send kudos messages through it.
What results does Toyo Tire report? Attrition from 53% to 34.47%, and monthly turnover from about 50 people down to roughly 18 to 20. Mia also credits reduced overtime and improved reliability with contributing to a gain-share payout for the hourly workforce.
Webinar length: 56 mins
Webinar Length:
30 mins
