Simple steps to begin transforming your company
I left the comfort of a fortune 500 company and joined a small family owned snack food manufacturing company as the plant manager. The company was bleeding cash, had employee issues, disconnected senior management, disgruntled customers and faced fierce competition. The company was just trying to survive one day at a time.
There were no management systems to speak of and the employees were just showing up for work and glad they got a paycheck. For the first couple of weeks, I just wandered around the plant and talked to folks, I had to understand where we were and the order and magnitude of the issues.
There was no single indicator (metric) that showed day to day performance, so I invented one, Pounds per Labor hour. It was a simple metric, the total pounds of product made during the day divided by the labor hours used to make the finished product pounds.
Then I communicated the performance by writing it on the wall... literally! I painted a 10 foot by 10 foot section of wall that every employee walked by and titled it P.I.N.O. (Performance is not optional) I personally calculated and painted every weeks performance on this wall in a simple chart format. It got people's attention! Everyone watches the boss and loves to chat about what the crazy boss is up to. I had begun the transition by creating a focus point and I started and ended nearly every discussion with the most recent posting on the wall.
Things didn't change overnight but overtime and with relentless focus, the productivity number increased by a factor of nearly 10. The message here is start simple, stay true and focused and you will see results no matter how desperate your situation is.
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