No soft soap

Lesson one is that managers communicate all the time, whether they want to or not. What they do, more than what they say, sends a message about their real priorities. The first sign of clogged communications channels is a 'them and us' culture. This was one symptom of malaise at the automotive components factory of German bearings company Schaeffler in Llanelli, south Wales. Plant manager Roger Evans has a strong view that communication starts with a vision of who and what you want to be. Llanelli's vision was to be the production location of choice for its parent, but five years ago it was nearer to be closed than being chosen. "Morale was as low as you could imagine morale could be," says Evans. HR manager Adrian Roberts says the workforce complained of poor training and communications, as well as of the 'them and us' gulf between staff and hourly paid workers. "We couldn't sit back and carry on as we had done," says Roberts. "We needed to change the way we operated." As determination to put communications right goes, it doesn't get better than this: senior managers set about personally interviewing every factory employee, one by one. This is mainly why, last November, the plant won the CBI's education, skills and leadership award. Roberts says the company needed to tell them that the plant did have a future, what needed to be done to achieve that and what would be expected in return. The interviewers had certain subjects to cover, but beyond that "we encouraged them to open up", says Evans. They learnt more than they bargained for. "You walk around the shopfloor and the business," says Evans, "but that's different to sitting down with them with a plan and a way forward, telling them where they fit in to it... [and] asking them what they think they could contribute." Management underestimated both the time the exercise would take and how emotional some of these meetings would be. They were shaken by how deeply some of the workforce felt about their jobs. "In a couple of cases, they were in tears," says Evans, and they were the strong silent types. The result? "We've moved away from managing things - machines, processes, all that - to managing people." That, he says, is now what the business is about. Routine approach Lesson two is that, unless communications become as routine as the industrial process you're using, they will go pear-shaped. In 2001, Acas, the government's industrial consultancy, went into the Clitheroe, Lancs, site of ICI Synetix to help the site move from national to local pay bargaining. Acas's involvement at the site, which became part of Johnson Matthey's catalytics division in 2002, was one of a number of initiatives the company and workforce engaged in as part of an effort to develop a partnership relationship among the 200 employees. Bart Dinsdale, the site's senior Amicus shop steward, says it was a big change. "We, as reps, were never involved up to then," says Dinsdale. More lack of communication. And when the site's joint consultative committee of 30 managers and union reps met, they had no experience of negotiating. The meetings, says Acas, "tended to be adversarial and focused on trivial issues." With Acas's help, managers and reps went to conferences, training courses, company visits and workshops. They learnt through participation instead of instruction, and their debates began to challenge existing attitudes by bringing them into the open. All the trivia "was filtered out of the process", says Acas. More important was that, following the partnership agreement, problems began to be resolved "through frequent, everyday communication between line managers and representatives, rather than referred up the line". The resulting changes in attitude and practice improved stock turns, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), output and profits, and led to further parent company investment in the site. Fine. So why, in November 2004, did the site go on strike? Partly because when Johnson Matthey took over, some managers on the partnership team moved to other positions in the group. The partnership didn't fail, says Dinsdale. "It's just that we lost touch with key people at management level." Some of the new managers found it hard to accept the reps' status as partners in a team. Evidently, in other words, someone, somewhere, hadn't valued the new arrangements highly enough to impress their worth on the new boys. South African Hendrik Koornhof's recent arrival as works manager has tipped the scales back towards partnership. Koornhof wasn't available for comment but, as Dinsdale sums up, "he wants to drive back to a relationship of working as a team". At recent meetings under Hendrik, Dinsdale says, the management team will talk about its corporate role, but also any other things the rest of the workforce is concerned about, such as hours, performance-related payments and holidays. There's one stumbling block. "I can negotiate around the top table with works managers and deputy managers," Dinsdale says. The process then is to cascade whatever is agreed down to the team leaders and middle management. "They want to do it their way", so you end up with "different sections doing different things". The middle managers aren't being obstructive, says Dinsdale. They just interpret what's needed their own way. With 30 team leaders on site, you can't expect a uniform view, he says, "but we need to get it as close as possible". As it is, "there are teams getting away with more flexibility on holidays, time off for funerals" and that kind of thing. Lesson three, then, is that, if you agree something that others have to pass on, set it out in detail. But back to lesson one. David Light is site manager at the liquid soaps business of PZ Cussons in Kersal Vale, some distance from Cussons's Stockport head office. Example is one of the most powerful communication tools, he says. "The lead had to come from us as a management team." But getting to the point where senior managers understood that, he adds, takes hard work. Kersal Vale was last year's Manufacturing Institute Business of the Year and winner of its People Development award. It faces enormous competitive pressure from Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Sara Lee and other multinationals. Cussons can only fight their bigger advertising budgets with innovation and speed, says Light. So twice a year, Kersal Vale changes most of the plant's 120 SKUs - their fragrances, the way they look on the supermarket shelf or the shape of the bottles. The giants do that, too, says Light, but a small company like Cussons can be quicker off the mark. But only if the workforce is responsive. Light is frank. He sums up Cussons's communications record: "we've struggled". Three years ago, however, the company began regular briefings to tell employees how the business was changing, and what new business and product developments they could expect. Setting objectives and goals thoughout the business, says Light, "really allowed us to see what was important". Now, he says, Cussons has established the idea of cascading communications throughout the company. Every shift begins with a meeting to discuss problems that may have arisen or to impart new company information and take views. The operators "found it alien at first", says Light, and there was a lot of scepticism, "but you've got to get through that". Now communications are "a constant". Eighteen months later, Light and his team reorganised Kersal Vale into business units, working closely with marketing, sales and R&D teams. The change helped operators to identify more closely with the products they were making and motivated them to speed up changeovers. With strong union support, Cussons changed its shift pattern from five three-shift days to six days of 12-hour shifts in six weeks. To deal with any problems that might arise, Cussons set up an informal weekly meeting at which managers and operators could raise anything they liked. That format of weekly conversations has been maintained, says Light. Most of the time, they're about non-work, but work-related, issues: travel distances, child care and other quality of life issues. The people who convert and make the product are the front line of business, he adds. By communicating better with them they get the respect they are entitled to and, in return, take ownership of what they are doing. The regime isn't soft. At first, those who struggled with 12-hour shifts merely said they 'didn't like them'. But persistent questioning revealed that some found 12 hours very hard on the feet. So the company installed anti-fatigue matting and brought in a podiatrist to make sure the operators had properly fitted safety shoes. Cussons has outsourced occupational health (OH) to a consultancy. Absences have fallen from 6% to less than 2%, partly because everyone has now signed up to the same absence process. If employees can't come in to work, they must phone OH, which may say 'we'll see you in three days' or 'take an aspirin and we'll see you in two hours'. Getting senior managers on board wasn't easy. The key was to have frank and furious management meetings, reach agreement, then speak as one. Some first-line managers tried to opt out, which led their teams to try the same. Senior managers had to step in and tell supervisors what was going on in their teams and that it was unacceptable. More 'them and us': Kersal Vale's HR, finance and other admin departments "started to forget why they were there", says Light. It took a lot of work trying to remind them that "the people doing the conversions are the reason we are here... If head office takes first priority, then that's a difficult situation [and] it's taken us quite a while to get through". Back at Schaeffler, Evans has simplified the company's messages. On the shopfloor, for example, KPIs are displayed so that they can be readily understood: instead of graphs there is a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Quality levels are now in the single parts per million, says Evans. Absenteeism has collapsed. Team briefings are now part of the working day. The plant has a newsletter and, every two years, an operators' conference . But it's the company's actions that have communicated that it values the workforce. Evans had no budget when, by the usual back-door methods, he scraped together enough for a three-year investment in learning, training and development to give employees the skills and knowledge, especially in leadership, to take the plant forward. Now all hourly employees are trained to NVQ level. The workforce got the message, for there was a turning point. Eighteen months after the programme kicked off, says Evans, "I was told by headquarters that we had to transfer one product from here. It would have meant one hundred jobs going. It was a bitter blow and knocked us back. But we could either decide to do nothing or do it quicker, better and more as a team to fight it off." When Evans and his team told the workforce, they expected a negative response. But spontaneously they drew up an 'employees' pledge' of commitment to the company, and its vision and values. They even presented it to an astonished visitor from headquarters. "He was bowled over," says Evans. "It made a lasting impression." Schaeffler not only abandoned the product transfer, but made enough further investment in the plant to bring back products which had once been moved to Europe.