GET A HEAD START, EVEN IN A SHAKY ECONOMY
Monday, April 14th, 2008
It’s 8:00 Monday morning and we’re in the boardroom of Superior Widget, Inc. The atmosphere is tense as the Leadership Team take their seats for the meeting.
Mr Drake, the CEO, peers at the attendees over his glasses and demands: “I want to know what is going on here. Our profits are down and we seem to be fighting a losing battle in every aspect of the business. All I hear about are problems.”
Joe Brown, VP of Manufacturing, clears his throat and says: “Well sir, we have had a lot of employees leave in the last few months. Just this morning two more people quit. And when we get new ones, they don’t seem to want to work at all.”
“Wait a minute!” interjects Marge Smith, VP of Human Resources. “Do you know how difficult it is to find qualified employees? With unemployment as low as it is, we have to scrape the barrel just to find warm bodies to man the machines. We are doing the best we can with the applicants we’re getting.”
“I know that, Marge, I’m not accusing you of anything”. Joe continues. “It’s not just the employees who leave who cause problems. The ones who are staying can’t seem to understand how important it is to run qualitu checks during manufacture. Yesterday we had to rework a whole run of widgets because the operator did not notice there was a problem with the setting on the machine. Then there was a mis-shipment we had to take care of because someone in orders did not read instructions, not to mention the overtime we had to work just to catch up.”
“What about the new finishing machine we bought two months ago?” asks Larry Little, CFO. “For a cost of $3million, it does not seem to give us the projected increase in numbers on the line.”
“We have trained people to operate the new machine, but they don’t seem to last long. Either they quit, or they just don’t seem to care.” Joe says.
Is this scenario familiar? In a shaky economy, it is easy to lose sight of what needs to be done, and simply do what we can to stay afloat till the economy picks up again (if we can last that long).
High performing companies and companies with visionary leadership look at times like these for investing in developing their people. The norm for lesser organizations is to cut out any “fluff”, and they often see investing time and money into people development as such, while when boom time comes, they claim to be too busy to train and develop their workforce. So, either way, they never get around to doing any real development.
If this is your company philosophy, you will always feed from the hind nipple, so to speak.
High performance organizations develop their workforce on a continuous basis, but more so when things are not so great. Why? They realize the value of having an educated, committed workforce who will carry the organization through bad times, and who will be there to celebrate their company’s victory in the long run.