From the perspective of the electronics industry, Julian Taylor says he believes his company has been fairly fortunate and “quite honestly” has not heard an allegation of inappropriate behaviour during his 15 years in business.
Taylor is co-founder and CEO of Sunsel Systems Manufacturing Corp. in Dartmouth’s Burnside Park. Sunsel is an electronics manufacturing services business, which Taylor and co-founder Jeff Levy began in fall 2004. It offers customized solutions from concept and design stages through to product commercialization.
He says Sunsel has about 52 people on staff and that number will grow by the end of the month.
“I’ve always thought there’s been a lot of respect in this industry and now, as with society, we are evolving and we’re getting better at how we handle all the issues,” Taylor says.
“There is good representation, diversity, in our industry whether it’s gender or nationality or ethnic background. All these things are well respected, (Sunsel) sees people who are multicultural, highly respected people, and doing quite well in management positions things like that ... so we’ve been very fortunate in that way. It tends to feel like it’s a softer industry in general.”
Beyond just that, Taylor says changes in society are leading companies to expect more of themselves.
“You know, you start thinking about policies in your company. Things like, making sure you have zero tolerance for certain types of behaviours,” he says. Bullying, for example, which has been a big topic of discussion, means Sunsel has zero tolerance for that, he says.
“You know, as far as how people are treated, we have full expectation that it doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, we expect people to treat people with respect,” says Taylor.
Beginning with that expectation, he says it starts to show up in company policies.
“I think there’s a general consciousness, awareness that we should be paying attention to things like this and make sure that we don’t leave things open for there to be cases (of abuse) that could happen. I think you have to be proactive,” he says.
“I do feel fortunate but at the same time there’s always room for improvement. We believe that and we’re trying to stay ahead of the curve. We’ve been fortunate to be dealing with some really great people, our diversity is strong and I think that is the key to everything. Keep things diverse, ... and we do try to hire the right type of people.”
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