Nokian Tyres Completes Housing for Plant Workers
By Shura Collinson
Staff Writer
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Nokian Tyres has built four apartment buildings for the employees of its Vsevolozhsk plant, and three more are planned.
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The Finnish company Nokian Tyres on Wednesday unveiled Hakkapeliitta Village, a brand new housing complex built for workers of the company’s local factory. Four five-story buildings containing 167 apartments with a total area of 10,300 square meters have been constructed 10 kilometers from the Nokian Tyres plant in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast. In exchange for working for the company for a minimum of seven years, the plant’s employees can purchase an apartment in the complex for significantly less than the average market price. The aim of the housing program is to attract and retain qualified personnel, the company, which has invested more than 10 million euros in the project, said in a press release. “A factory is all about the people who work there, and this complex has been built for them,” Kim Gran, the president and CEO of Nokian Tyres, said at the opening ceremony of the housing complex on Wednesday. “We need qualified, professional personnel, and this complex is one of the main factors in attracting and retaining personnel. We hope they will view us accordingly,” he said. Workers who are employed on permanent contracts at the local Nokian Tyres plant, have a good work record and have been recommended by their supervisors are eligible for the housing scheme. The average cost of an apartment in Hakkapeliitta Village is 41,000 rubles ($1,400) per square meter, said Andrei Pantyukhov, general director of Nokian Tyres in Russia. Participants of the scheme can obtain a mortgage issued in rubles with an interest rate of 7.3 percent per year over a period of seven to 20 years. This figure is also considerably lower than the average mortgage interest rate, which currently stands at 13.1 percent, according to a report published by Vedomosti last week. Three more blocks of flats are planned for the complex, which will eventually be able to house about 600 employees and has its own boiler, CCTV and security guard, as well as parking spaces for each apartment and a children’s play area. A bus service will run between the compound and the Nokian Tyres factory — a fifteen-minute journey — every day, and in true Finnish style, there are several covered bike racks in the grounds. Plant employee Andrei Bogdanov, who will be moving into the new housing at the beginning of next month along with his wife Yelena and their toddler twins, said he was “very happy” with his new accommodation. “Previously, we lived in a wooden building in Vsevolozhsk,” he said. “The conditions here are much better.” He said they would sell their previous property, for which they had taken out a mortgage on less agreeable terms. Bogdanov, who is originally from Kirov, said he did not think difficulties would arise among the residents from living and working together. “Our team is a friendly one, so I don’t think that will be a problem,” he said.
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Bogdanov family pictured in the kitchen of their new home in Hakkapeliitta Village. A nursery is planned to open next year.
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Bogdanov said he would send his children to the village’s nursery school, which is due to open on the first floor of one of the buildings next year. Both local authorities and HR specialists were positive about the project and its implications. “This project was born out of negotiations between the authorities and an enterprise,” said Igor Samokhin, head of the Vsevolozhsk district municipal administration. “It is a social project, and shows how a partnership between the state and a private enterprise can play a role in the development of a territory and the realization of social housing programs. “I think this idea should be continued, especially at a time when the construction of private housing has stopped to some extent, and I think these ‘mono-villages’ for enterprises in the Vsevolozhsk area should appear. There is enough land.” Samokhin added that it was worth thinking about how to improve the engineering infrastructure of the area. “We often hear about social responsibility, here we have a clear example of it,” said Anatoly Katalevich, chairman of the construction committee of the LenOblast. “It’s a very positive example, and must be continued.” Katalevich said he believed that knowing that they had good, comfortable accommodation would make people work more efficiently at the plant. Yury Mikhailov, managing partner at Consort St. Petersburg recruitment agency, said he believed the housing project was the first and perhaps only one of its kind in St. Petersburg and the LenOblast, and a pilot project for western companies who have started manufacturing operations here. “The housing project is likely targeting mid-level management and qualified personnel who either have no property in St. Petersburg and have to rent something there — since the apartment market in Vsevolozhsk is quite limited — which entails traveling to the tire plant every day by car or company shuttle bus, or those specialists who have been recruited outside of the northwest region,” he said. Mikhailov said the project could be considered an effective way to ensure staff loyalty. “I think that solving the accommodation issues of their personnel can be viewed as a novel way of approaching motivation policy, which can give a competitive advantage to the company first in attracting and then retaining the best people,” he said. He said he did not foresee serious problems caused by the staff living in the same building, but said there might be an issue with infrastructure. “People will have to travel for the most part to St. Petersburg for major entertainment over the weekend,” he said. Nokian Tyres opened its plant in the Leningrad Oblast in September 2005. More than 60 percent of the company’s tires are now made there, Kim Gran, president and CEO of Nokian Tyres, said Wednesday.
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