The more you read my columns, the more often you’ll notice I use the word ‘culture’ a lot when I talk about my business. Developing a successful culture has been my focus for a number of years. A good culture, I believe, is the basis for success in every element of your business — production, customer service, financial performance, etc.
That came to mind recently because my earlier columns about our employee pay plan led a number of shop owners to contact me, generally asking me for the spreadsheet of how our pay-plan works. They said they’re eager to switch pay plans, from flat-rate to hourly (or vice versa) or to go the team-pay route. (No matter what your payroll plan is, it seems, the grass always looks greener on the other side.)
My response has been that they likely have other steps to take before they even start to build a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet or pay play is not going to solve problems like an unmotivated work force or slow cycle times.
Don’t get me wrong: The right pay plan can drive change and motivate employees to perform. But if you don’t start with the right culture in place, one in which your employees trust you and each other, the change won’t be successful. I’ve talked to a lot of shop owners who changed their pay plan but then ended up switching back because employees didn’t trust the company enough to give the new plan time to play out.
Building that culture of trust is really the first step. Employees have to know that any change you make will potentially benefit them (as well as your company and customers), and that they can trust you to make things right if the change doesn’t work out.
I highly recommend the book The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey. It talks about how in business you can have all the right procedures and all the work in the world, but if employees don’t trust management or each other, they and the business will always under-perform. If there’s trust, things can move at a crazy speed.
In a previous column, for example, I talked about how one of my managers (also a working tech) saw a new technician making notes about every flat-rate hour he turned. The manager told the tech he’d stop doing that after a few weeks when he realized it wasn’t necessary to cross-check what we paid him.
“I’ve been here 10 years and I’ve never been shorted once,” the manager told him.
Just from that one example, think about how much more productive techs can be if they know they can trust you and don’t have to spend time tracking all of that. They can concentrate on what they do best, rather than trying to figure out how they’re going to get ripped off.
That’s the culture of trust you need to build to make a change in pay plans successful, but building trust takes time. Culture is a slow-moving ship. You don’t change it overnight.
Part of what I’ve done is being an open-book. Almost anything any of my team wants to know about our business, I’ll show them. There’s very little I’ll hold back, other than maybe some of our contract negotiations or things like that.
You also have to be willing to admit mistakes and make things right. Years ago, we tried paying our disassembly/reassembly techs off just the labor hours for those processes. We quickly found there’s not enough time on repair orders for those specific processes to allow those guys to make a paycheck. So we had to backtrack and adjust, and I made it right by my technicians who had agreed to try it. They trusted me enough to give it a try, and I re-earned their trust by showing they will never suffer from my miscalculations.In upcoming columns, I’ll explain more about what I’ve done to try to build a positive culture at our company — and what I see as some of the benefits that have resulted.
