Jim Callaway -- Black Star
Strength in numbers:
James E. Bushman, CEO of Cast-Fab Technologies, wants employees to share in the responsibilities -- and success -- of the company.
Cast-Fab Technologies in Cincinnati consists of vats of molten iron, huge cranes, dirty windows, catwalks, and gunmetal gray pieces of industrial machinery the size of whole rooms. Except for the computers that operate the equipment, the metal fabricating company looks very much like your basic turn-of-the-century industrial plant; the kind of place where employees arrive at work, put away their lunch boxes, and wait to be told what to do.
Look into the hearts and minds of the 440 Cast-Fab employees, though, and you'll find anything but the downtrodden, picked-on manufacturing employees of yesteryear. Here employees have input into job responsibilities, they make decisions, they work together to solve problems, and they know how their jobs contribute to the company goals. It wasn't always this way. When James E. Bushman, CEO, purchased the company in 1988, he was met by a group of skeptical, burned-out employees who had suffered through several downsizings. They had learned long before he arrived that their input didn't count. Determined to change the environment for the better, Bushman embarked on a program designed to give employees more responsibility and ownership for the success of the business.
It's been a long haul for Cast-Fab, but today employees feel better about their jobs and it shows in the quality of work. "We are selling product today for less than the cost of 10 years ago, and we're making money at it," Bushman says. Not only that, but Cast-Fab is turning inventory six times faster than it did in 1988, and employee complaints have dropped significantly. It turns out employees actually like having a say about their job responsibilities. |
What Bushman has discovered is something many other manufacturers are starting to realize -- when employees are empowered the business gets better results.
In 1998 the term "empowered" has nearly become cliche, as conferences, consultants, and magazines continue to tout the benefits of employee empowerment. But after being part of the national lexicon for at least seven years the term is still misinterpreted, misused, and misunderstood. Empowerment occurs when power and responsibility is transferred to employees who then experience a sense of ownership and control over their jobs.
John W. Hayden, vice president and practice leader at Development Dimensions International (DDI) in Pittsburgh, says, "An empowered environment is one in which people have accountability, responsibility, and decision-making authority that is appropriate at their level to meet customer needs."
Why is empowerment important? In today's rapidly changing and competitive business environment, companies just don't have time to wait for every decision to slowly make its way through the organization. Who knows better how to improve a specific work process than the employees who work with that process every day? When employees are empowered to make decisions about how their work gets done, quality, service, speed, and productivity all stand to benefit.
Unfortunately, empowerment efforts typically fail more often than they succeed.
"I give over 100 seminars a year to manufacturing people and what I hear from employees is that managers are saying they want involvement, but in reality they are still oriented toward the command -and-control style of leadership," says James R. Lucas, president of Luman Consultants in Kansas City, and author of Balance of Power (1998, AMACOM). And although managers might want participation, they aren't creating the kind of environment that allows participation to happen -- you can't just tell employees they are empowered and expect them to immediately start making more decisions. Today's manufacturing employees are a skeptical lot who aren't going to stick their necks out unless it is safe to do so. For this reason, managers have to create the kind of environment where empowerment is not a program or a policy but a new way of doing business.
At the risk of oversimplifying the highly complex practice of empowerment, here are 10 steps manufacturing executives should follow if they want the kind of workplace where employees don't just show up, but bring their hearts, minds, drive, and initiative along with them. |
