Dashboard
By Robert Counts
robert@countsbusinessconsulting.com and Chad Counts
crcounts@countsbusinessconsulting.com
Three Things You Must Do To Grow & Survive: Part 2 Empowering Employees
mployees are your largest asset. They are the frontline of your business. As such, they must be trained, equipped, made accountable and then managed to achieve stated expectations: • Trained: know what they are responsi- ble for and how they are supposed to accomplish this task. • Equipped: have the tools and talents necessary to complete their tasks inde- pendently in an efficient and effective manner (self-correcting). • Accountable: know what is expected of them and that they will be rewarded or held accountable according to these expectations. • Managed: ability to seize opportunities and catch mistakes either by the employ- ee or manager.
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Create a Winning Environment If you had your choice wouldn’t you
have a highly qualified, highly engaged, and highly productive team of employ- ees? Of course you would! The reality is that you do have that choice, but you just have not chosen to exercise it. You settled. You quit looking and/or you just had too much going on at the time. You should always be on the look out for talent. If you are actively look- ing for people with intelligence, skills and a can-do attitude you will find them. But you have to be looking! We want to hire winners: people who have the desire to be better and to keep reaching for that next level. Winners want to win. They always keep score and they love being told that they are good. The major difference we see between compa- nies that are dynamic and growing is the quality of the people they hire. • Highly productive companies have frontline employees who know what they must do for the company to win.
• They understand that what they do impacts other team members.
14 Automotive Recycling | January-February 2016
• They have a sense of responsibility, pride, and duty about their work.
• They perform better when the stakes are higher.
• They want the work they do to mat- ter to the company and to customers.
Reward Success & Manage Failure Establish what success is and celebrate
when it happens. We all measure things in life whether it is our number of friends, number of things we possess, or the size of our bank account. What we do at work 40-plus hours a week should not be any different. We need to know and be able to measure what “good” performance is.
Scoreboards: • Every employee should know for his or her position what success is and there should be a visual indicator for others to see.
• Winning matters more when people know if they have won or lost.
• Make adjustments and corrections after poor performance. • Celebrate victories!
Set Expectations: • How will your employees accomplish expectations?
• Plan & procedures should be: - Set jointly between the manager and the employee;
- Walk through and adjustments made if needed; and
- Evaluate to see if tools and layout are best suited for the task.
Control Overtime
Why do we have overtime? The reasons I see that are legit are that we have too much work for the available manpower that you have. You can accept this for the short term. The best examples are that you have employees out sick or on vaca- tion, or that it is a very busy time that is
seasonal. However, I should budget and manage these times as best I can. I can flex hours to extend coverage if needed. Authorize vacation in my non-busy times of the year. Frontline managers should only be able to authorize a limited num- ber of hours of overtime per week. Any over that has to be approved by the owner.
Overtime is not a blank check and should be budgeted by department. Procedures must be in place that specify: • Who can approve.
• How much can they approve, and • What are the consequences and rewards?
Remove obstacles and roadblocks in production that contribute to overtime. This may require:
• Change in plant layout, • Upgrade or change equipment, • Flex hours, and/or
• Change procedures and policies. Look for the following: • Bottlenecks – is there too much work happening in one area?
• Interruptions: Are there employees who need help frequently, who possi- ble are not trained well enough?
• Collaborations: How smoothly does the work that requires more than one persons involvement flow?
Employee expenses are in your control and they need to be managed effectively. This does not mean paying employees less. It may mean fewer, but better paid employees, who can produce more with less waste.
CBCDashboard and CBC support salvage and recycling business owners to improve and grow through PRP Profit Teams, Inde-
pendent Owners' Groups, On-Site Consulting, and Online Consulting using CBCDashboard: personnel, buying, in- ventory, income, sales activity, operations, and financials. Contact Chad Counts at (512) 963-4626 and Robert Counts at (512) 653-6915. Visit
www.cbcdashboard.com and
www.countsbusinessconsulting.com.
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