Employee Engagement: Making it happen for the Customer

I've mentioned unions before in previous posts, and how some folks find unions to be an obstacle to getting things done.  This week, I'd like to give you another example of a success story from a unionized plant.

At the first B2B manufacturing business I worked for, whenever our general manager was going to be away on vacation, he rotated the job of assuming his role among the members of the management group.

Eventually it became my turn to run the morning production meetings and coordinate production schedules and customer orders for a week. Things started out being very much a routine.

We had an order in house for a new product we were doing for the first time for a new customer my team had been developing.  It wasn't a complex product - just a foil lid for a major yogurt producer - but our production team encountered a serious problem.  The foil we had received to run this order had some significant quality issues that adversely impacted how easily we could run the product on our presses and downstream operations.  It wasn't something we could easily replace.  The lead time for this particular grade of foil was 16 weeks, and the customer's purchase order required it to be delivered the week I was in charge.

Our production manager suggested running the order on an older press that wasn't used much, but we had only a couple of operators who'd ever been trained on this press.  He suggested we ask for volunteers to put together a crew to run this order.

The union assisted us in assembling a crew for this old press and managed to finder an operator from among their membership who had once run this particular piece of equipment.

We met with the crew and explained the challenges to running the job and offered whatever help we could.  They agreed to give it a try.

Not only did they manage to run the order, we also managed to deliver it on time to the customer.  The order took longer to run than we would normally have planned, but the job needed to be run slowly so the press crew could maintain control over the substandard foil they were running.

At no time was the customer aware of the problems we had in producing their order.  The product ran fine on their lines.

At our next communications meeting, the management team recognized the crew who ran the yogurt lid job, and they got lots of cheers from their union mates - and a lot of respect from our management team.

In this case, the men on that crew wanted to demonstrate their skill in running a very challenging job.  None of them wanted to let the customer down.  They came through without the traditional union-management rhetoric.  it was just one instance in which union and management showed they could both be on the same side - the side of the customer.

Employee Engagement: Are Unions Really a Barrier?

Ask most people who work in manufacturing about how they feel about unions, and you’ll get mostly negative responses.

Unions have rules that are counterproductive. They protect poor or lazy employers. 
They’ll strike at the drop of a hat.  They result in higher labor rates.  Union people are antagonistic.

In my career, I‘ve worked in both unionized and non-unionized plants and had equal success in both. 

When in moved from CPG into B2B, I moved from one company with a history of labor woes to another. At my previous company, the plant employees had struck about a month after I’d joined.  At my new employer, I attended my first communications meeting in the first month.  The union representatives were extremely outspoken and confrontational with my boss, the general manager.  At my previous company, the plant was in a different city from our where our offices were located, so I was relatively insulated from the conflict during the strike there.  This time, I was seeing the result of years of poor labor relations first hand.  It was very unsettling.

Our management team overcame the labor relations issues at this company by devoting a portion of our time to being on the plant floor and to becoming approachable so the employees felt comfortable coming to us with questions or issues.

My next employer also was a unionized plant, though I never really noticed the presence or influence of the union when I was on the plant floor.

My sales team and I had been working on developing a new customer in the US. We had provided them sample material.  They never ran it.  I took their sales manager out on sales calls to see if we could jointly develop a new application for the customer’s product.  The project didn’t move forward, but at least we were able to communicate better, though they still had not found time to run our sample material.

It turned out the customer was planning to exhibit at a major industry trade show (as was my company) and I contacted the sales manager to suggest to him it might be a good idea to hand out some samples of their product at the show, and that we’d be happy to supply the material.  I’ll never forget his response.

“Ron, we have four other suppliers for our films and we still haven’t gotten around to qualifying the samples you provided.  However, none of those other suppliers offered to supply film for the samples we wanted to run.  Consider this your first order with us. And please bill us we couldn’t have you provide the film at your expense.”

We wanted to make a really good impression on this customer and provide him a first class product.  I asked our plant manager if I could meet with the operators who would be running the customer’s order.

I told the operators of our goal on this order and asked them how they wanted to run it.  What kind of printing plates?  What kind of inks? Which film supplier to use?  It wasn’t a very long meeting, but I came away feeling like we had a clear plan on how to produce this order.

When the customer received the order (on time, by the way), he called up to complain.

“We aren’t going to pay for gravure printing (a higher-resolution, more costly process than flexography). This job was supposed to be done flexo.  We need flexo printed film ASAP to make the show”

I explained to him, over the phone, that we had definitely used the flexo printing process on his order and that there would be no change in the price.  I asked him to get a magnifying glass and take a close look at the printing, and pointed out to him the characteristics that verified the printing was flexo.  The customer responded,

“Well, this is the best damn flexo printing I’ve ever seen!  I’m impressed.”

The trade show was a huge success for the customer.  His samples were well-received.

I also conveyed to the crew that ran his order the comments he’d made.  They loved it and you could see the pride on their faces.  They knew they’d done a great job.

Did I remember to mention this crew was all union?  I can only see how these guys put aside management-union bias to show off their skill.  And I never heard a negative word from the union local about meeting with their people or working with them.  We all won that day.

Employee Engagement: Learn to Walk the Line

A couple of years ago, I interviewed for a job as a General Manager for a manufacturing company.

When I was briefed about the position, I was told their employees were on strike and that I'd have to cross the picket line for my first interview.  I'd never crossed a picket line before, but there had to be a first time.

On the day of the interview, I drove out to the plant, and allowed some time to get there early enough that I could see the picket line and observe the procedure for crossing it.  The company had told me to allow 15-20 minutes just to get through the picket line.

The strike was an issue for the company.  They asked me if it would have any impact on their ability to acquire new customers. I told them it would, in my opinion, convey a company that was dysfunctional.  Even more so because the strike had gone on for two years without a settlement. The union involved in this case was the steelworkers, and I knew they had a reputation for being nasty.

I approached the picket line with trepidation.  One of the picketers came over to my car and formally told me there was a strike in effect and that I would have to wait for 15 minutes before I could proceed to the parking lot.

At this point, I thought about what I should do.  These picketers could potentially be employees I would have to work with on a day-to-day basis.  I could stay in my car for the 15 minutes or get out and talk to the picketers to see what I could learn about the strike.  I chose the latter.

Having told one of the picketers I was there for a job interview, I asked what the strike was all about.  They were very open in explaining the key issues behind the strike.  I asked them how they managed to cope with living having been out on the strike for such a long time and I heard stories about how some moved into other jobs or companies to be able to support their families.  They told me about what they had to sacrifice to make ends meet.  Somehow our conversation segued into talk about golf, football and other things.

The 15 minutes went by pretty quickly and the picketers gave me the go ahead to drive to the parking lot and gave me directions on how to find the entrance to the office.

The formal part of the interview was comparatively tame - a plant tour and discussion with the plant manager and the company's HR manager.  I was subsequently invited for a round of interviews at the company's corporate offices.

For this phase of interviewing, I met with people from R&D, Finance and Sales.  My final interview of the day was with the CEO.

He asked me how the day had gone and about my interest in the position.  Eventually, he got round to asking about the strike. The CEO proudly stated the company had brought on replacement workers who were exceeding the productivity of the union employees and the company was able to keep pace with demands of exiting customers.  He asked, as I'd been asked before, if I felt the strike would adversely impact their ability to attract new business.  

I told him the strike definitely WOULD give potential customers some concerns about the company's ability to supply them in a reliable manner.  Settling the strike had to be the top priority for the new GM.

The CEO told me, in no uncertain terms, he had absolutely NO intention of settling the strike.  They'd made offers to the union and the union was unable to sell those terms to their members, so the union was the problem.

From my viewpoint, I now had a clearer idea of why the strike had gone on as long as it had and who was responsible for that situation - and it wasn't the union.  At this point, I made up my mind that this was not a position or company I wanted to work for.

The Leadership of a company sets the tone for how it runs.  In this case, the leadership of this company was confrontational and this had created an atmosphere of distrust among the employees.  As it turned out, the plant I interviewed at was closed down and sold off within a year of my visit there.

They may be picketers, but they still are people.  If you treat strikers on an adversarial basis, you'll probably get a lot of push-back. Approaching them as people and showing some empathy helped me make the best of what could have been a bad situation. My approach was to treat crossing the picket line as a first interview.  I was almost 100% certain there would be some feedback to the company about how I behaved on the line, and I wanted that feedback to be positive.  I think I took the right approach.

Employee Engagement: Get Out of Your Office

It's been a long time since my last post - partly because I've been working and partly because I was working on one of my other blogs, Packaging: The Forgotten Medium.

My inspiration for this post - and for the next few - came from a meeting I had yesterday with a person in Human Resources, and we were discussing taking employee relations a step up into employee engagement.

When I moved from the world of Consumer Packaged Goods marketing into B2B sales and marketing, the general manager of the company I then worked for brought me into his office and gave me some of the best advice I've ever received.

He told me to buy some safety shoes and spend 30% of my time on the shop floor.  I asked why, because I  thought sales and marketing people needed to be out on the road in front of customers.  He said I needed to know everyone in the plant on a first name basis because, as part of the management team, we would be going out just prior to the Christmas break to extend our holiday wishes to all employees, and he wanted it to be more than just a perfunctory handshake.

Our plant had two unions and a history, under previous ownership, of bad  management-union relationships.  There'd been a few strikes in the past and the current owners wanted to make a fresh start.  Our GM told me that, in the past, it was like there were two worlds in the plant - shop floor and office - separated by a wall.  We needed to break down that wall and make the management more accessible and responsive to the union personnel.  Knowing everyone in the plant on a first name basis was an important part of this.

I followed his advice and remember putting on my safety shoes in preparation for my first time on the shop floor by myself.

I'd already been introduced at an all-employee meeting as a new member of the management team, so everyone knew I was the new kid on the block.  I'd also been around through the plant a number of times, but never on my own - usually giving customers a tour with my boss.

I walked up to the first of several laminators we had in the plant and approached the operator.  I asked him what this machine could do and how it worked.  For the next hour, I was taken on a thorough tour of the machine by the operator and learned a lot!  I appreciated the tour and what I could see was a sense of pride the operator had in his machine centre and a willingness to share that.

This was the start of a process of learning how to make a plant work more effectively, and my next few posts will be structured around this topic.

FAMILIARITY BREEDS RESPECT

One of the best lessons I learned came from the general manager who recruited me from the packaged goods industry into the packaging industry.

The plant we worked in had two unions and a history of poor labor relations. The first week I was there, we had a communications meeting, and the union reps were not only very vocal about their views on management, but also seemed very aggressive.

The general manager’s advice to me was to get a pair of safety shoes, spend at least 25% of my time in the plant and to get to know everyone in the plant by name.

That first week, I tried to put it into practice and walked up to one of the machines, introduced myself to the operator and asked what his machine did. I think we spent about an hour together as he showed me what the machine could do and what capabilities weren’t being used. He took time to answer all my questions.

The company eventually suffered a financial setback, and we had to lay people off. Now, when I walked through the plant, you could sense the employees were scared. Because I was not only on the management team, but also the Marketing Director, I had some insight into the fortunes of the company.

When I encountered the union reps, the tone was very different from what I’d seen in the first weeks. They wanted to know what the future was for their members (and probably themselves), but the tone of communication was much more sober and the questions came not as “the union line” but at a more personal level.

I told them that quite honestly, I didn’t know what the future held. I didn’t promise everything would work out. I think they sensed and appreciated the candor in what I said, even though what I’d said didn’t really put their minds to rest.

At this point, it dawned on me that our role as managers was not just to run the business profitably, but we had a responsibility to the employees for their jobs. Their livelihood, in fact, depended on our ability to keep the business going. We had more control over their employment than they had – even with the unions – and therefore if we let the company go down, we were also letting down a whole team of employees who relied on us.
The lesson from this is that managers must remember that their employees are dependent, in more ways than we generally realize, on their actions. There is a need for mutual trust to make the organization work effectively and the best way to build that is to get out of the office and put a face to every employee in the organization. For the employees, it means there is a face to management and they can see managers as humans. Similarly, for the managers, it is an opportunity to remember a business is more than numbers: there are people whose livelihood depends on their actions.