Wear Your Safety Belt!

A very dear friend of my brother-in-law had an horrendous auto accident Sunday bringing sadness to our Thanksgiving weekend. I have been planning to do some blogs on safety in glass shops and plants and this now is the time to start.

Always wear your seat belts in a moving vehicle. If you are a company owner, insist that all employees wear seat belts at all times. No exceptions. Teach your employees, and your family that seat belts save lives. Sure I have seen that rare newspaper story that talks about how someone was trapped by their seat belt, but I have seen many more about people whose lives were saved by a combination of airbags and seat belts. Forty nine out of fifty states require seat belts (or child seats with belts) for all people in a car. The reason--they work.


The one state out of fifty that doesn't require belts, you ask? Why it is right here in New Hampshire where the 'live free or die' movement says the state can't tell people what to do. We also don't require motorcyclists to wear helmets. There is no coincidence that New Hampshire is one of the largest states in medical transplants. The reason is, of course, cycle and car accidents with severe head trauma, leaving organs available for transplant.

Make this a bold type statement in your employee handbook. This is for the employee's safety; and for you, an employee who is less severely injured will have a lower claim, which has a lower impact on your worker's comp insurance.

It is your job to make sure every vehicle has working seat belts, and that you have told each employee the importance of this rule. After that, it is up to each person within the company. You should set the tone by always wearing yours.

If you have a forklift, make sure it has a seat belt, and that it is used. Besides being a easy target for an OSHA visit, it just makes good sense when the night shift has their forklift races.

So, if an employee pulls in to your shop and is not wearing his/her seat belt in a company vehicle...warn them, and educate them. Make this rule have teeth. The second offense is a suspension...the third should be a longer suspension, and the fourth becomes termination. No excuses allowed. Don't listen. This is a black and white situation.

This and That at Thanksgiving

Woke up this morning to a steady snow fall. About an inch of the white stuff on the ground in the front yard already and more on the way. The best part was opening the door for our cat, Whitely. She runs out under a protected entry and then like you see in the cartoons, she applies the brakes. She skidded into the snow and looked at me like what the heck is this. We adopted her this year as a young cat, and we are not sure how young, so this may be her first snow. She took a fearful step and then pulled her paw back, then another step, and suddenly she leaps out and rolls over. Oh, to be a kid again.

Does anyone really want to talk glass now? I had an interesting visit recently which would be right for a discussion on a short week. Moving to New Hampshire we needed new wills. We met with an attorney and everything is really simple--all to the kids--but wait, he said, what if you are involved in a tragic accident and the four of you are all killed. Do you want the state of New Hampshire to decide who gets your assets?

It was an interesting question and one which Elaine and I couldn't immediately answer. IF there are not provisions for what he called a "nuclear accident" then Elaine's Mother would receive half our assets, and a cousin of mine in California would receive the other half. The lawyer asked us to prepare a list of who would receive assets in this case...a school we had attended, our Temple, nieces on Elaine's side of the family?

It is an interesting exercise to go through as we were forced to specifically think about our lives, what impact they have had on society, and what impact we would leave by allocating sums of money to certain people and institutions.

Elaine and I have discussed this, and still do not have a final list. But, this has been a real eye-opener for me to create this list. I'm told that everyone with a will should have this list attached. Think about it this weekend when we are being thankful for what we have. Who do you want to say thank you to?

Improving Employee Reliability, Part Two

Last week we talked about financial incentives to improve employee reliability, specifically hitting them in the wallet. There are many other ways to improve this most-important of all employee characteristics. Let's look at a few.

Have an on-time lottery. Set a prize each week, if you are a 3 man shop, make it a $20 bill. If you are 30 man shop, a DVD player or a small TV, or a VISA gift card. Put all employee names in a hat. Pull one name and if that employee had perfect attendance for the week, not a minute late, he or she would win the prize.

If you pulled a name that was disqualified, no prize is won, and it carries over to next week. The disqualified name is not put back in the pot. It's fun and will work. Once a quarter have a super prize of all people with perfect attendance for the quarter.

Explain to each different work team or job crew how important each person's role is. Show how each team is slowed down, or even stopped if one person is late. Peer pressure is stronger than employer pressure in any job condition and will work if you have a team type environment.

This next one sounds corny, but it really is true. People react to accolades from peers and employers better than money. For each person who has perfect attendance for a quarter, give them a framed certificate they can hang in your shop. Give a better certificate for two consecutive quarters, and even better for a year. Make each certificate presentation a big deal in the company, and this will pay dividends. Remember back to first grade---you got a gold star if you had perfect attendance. It works just as well now as it did then!

Create an administrative attendance system that understands people do need time off on occasion. We used to call it paid personal days (PPD), and employees earned a certain amount each year. They could be used when sick, or to extend a vacation by a day, or to visit Grandma. As long as they were scheduled in advance, they didn't count against any attendance awards. The scheduling in advance is the key comment.

We even went as far as to allow conditional PPD's. A person requested to take off a day if it were a sunny day so they could play golf. If the weather was bad, they came in. We had our plans in place to cover the job if they did play golf: if the person came in we had them train in another department. A win all the way around.

Have a real bereavement policy covering parents, grandparents, spouse, children, brothers and sisters. Some companies include in-laws, some don't, its up to you. Whether it is one, two or three days is up to you. Make it a standing rule that the newspaper notice has to be turned in for every person. This way you are not discriminating by asking some people for proof and not others. If a person wants to take extra days for a bereavement, then use the PPD's as available. Don't count these against perfect attendance goals.

People often ask for other legitimate days off, not to count against goals, but you, as owner, have to draw the line somewhere. You do have a business to run. If someone wants to take a day off for xyz reason, they are going to take it by calling in sick that morning. If you pre-schedule it, at least you are keeping the firm running.

Another attendance problem is the lengthy lunch...when a person is due back at their work station at 1:00, and really get there at 1:10. If you have a lunch facility in your shop is it clean and fun to go into? If not, people will rush out to a fast-food shop and can be late. If you have 10 people, and one microwave, people will leave their posts early so their food can go in the microwave. Buying two more microwaves is a small investment.

Most businesses and shops have a lunch truck that visits. If your specified lunch period is 12:15 to 12:45, but the lunch truck gets there at 12:30, people won't go back to their work stations on time. Talk with the driver and see how you can alter the schedule, or maybe alter your lunch period.

Most companies pay on Friday, and most employees go to the bank to cash or deposit their checks. This is a classic cause of getting back to work late. A couple of solutions are: extend the lunch break on Friday by fifteen minutes and work the extra time at the end of the day. Direct deposit of checks will cure this. Many employees are afraid of direct deposit for a variety of reasons. Encourage all people to take direct deposit. In some states you cannot force people to enroll. Check with your banker.

Do you have enough parking? Does the second shift have to wait until the first shift leaves to open up a parking space. If an employee is in your parking lot, and you have not given them a space to park in, they will consider that as your problem, and expect to be paid. Silly? Of Course, but it happens.

If I say 'Cal Ripken' you would say the longest consecutive games of baseball ever played. Think of this as Cal's job. He went 15 years without missing a day of work. The country went wild of this. If you have people who have gone five years without missing a day...have a party in their honor on a Friday afternoon. If someone has achieved ten years...take the whole company out for dinner in honor of this great worker. People get motivated to achieve this same goal when they see recognition like this. Take an ad in your local paper showing a picture of your achiever. Maybe the business section of the paper will follow-up and do a story. Send a photo to trade magazines. Publicity about people achieving goals is great publicity.

We talked about penalizing people for missing time, with the hope that inflicting financial pain will solve the problem, and we've talked about positive reinforcement. Every company has to use a combination of the two to succeed. Good luck with crafting your plan.

Reliability is the Most Important Employee Habit

I was in a conversation with a business owner the other day, and he asked me what was my biggest employee headache, and how did I turn it around.

An easy answer---employee reliability---was number one. Simply defined as "Did the employee show up, ready for work, when she/he was supposed to?"

In my thirty years of leadership responsibility this is the one thing that got under my skin the most. If an employee can't do an assigned task, then it was my fault for not teaching well. If an employee was injured, it was my fault for not having the proper guards and protective equipment in place. If glass was delivered broken, it is my fault for not having the correct trucks or packing supplies available.

The only thing my employees ever had to do was show up on time, ready to work. Everything else can be taught.

This was my hot button. Come in late to work and you would not be on my good side. (Prejudices do come in to play here...A late night Mets game was a good excuse for being late!)

And this is definitely a case of do what I say, not what I do. I kept an abominable schedule, but we won't go into that here.

We allowed a five minute late period for punch-in. After that, the employee was tardy. Even if they worked the extra time at the end of the day, it didn't make up for the fact that a crew was one person short and had to scramble to get started. Three tardys earned an employee a written warning about the importance of being at work timely. Two written warnings earned a one day suspension with out pay or benefits. Three suspensions lost the person a good job.

As an employer you must set and monitor your standards. Having a mechanical or even a computerized time clock is absolutely mandatory. If you leave it to a sign in sheet, you will not get good results. A supervisor who doesn't want to seem like a hard case will adjust the time to keep from getting into an argument. And, it is a matter of whose watch is correct.

At work on time and READY TO WORK are two separate concepts. A worker who stumbles in at 7:00, but needs five minutes to put on their hard hat, safety glasses and steel-toed shoes, and is ready to work at 7:06 is late. Make sure you use this as a standard. There have been some recent Supreme Court decisions that say if an employee has to come to work early to be ready for a shift, they have to be paid for that time. So if you have a heavy dress code, consider this. But if a man has to punch in, walk to his locker to hang up his coat, put on safety glasses and he's ready to work, than a simple act like this does not qualify for the exclusion.

If an employee comes to work at 7:00, and needs a bathroom break at 7:15, you have a right to be upset. You should be. If an employee clocks in and then takes ten minutes to walk to their work station, be upset.

What can employers do? For a chronically late employee, buy them an alarm clock. They are three or four dollars for a little digital one. Wipe out the excuse. Explain that they are part of a team, and if the whole team is not efficient because of one member being late, it is a problem. Another tool to use is the pocketbook. Allow every employee to make up one or two lates per year, by working past the normal ending time. After that, they should be docked for a quarter hour, or whatever your timekeeping standard is.

People will react better when the penalty is real.

We had a program, that with the blessing of our union, helped us. One year we were due to give a fifty cent raise. Instead of giving the raise in the hourly rate, we created an attendance bonus system. Each employee was given a sixty cent per hour bonus, if they worked 40 hours per week. So, a man who didn't miss any time was paid an extra $24.00 per week. The employee who was late once, earned their regular wages, but lost out on the $24. This really helped with the chronic come-in-lates or leaves-early crowd. If an employee had pre-scheduled a late, then we were OK with it, for we could move people around the day before and not leave a crew short one man. This seems so simple, come to work every day, on time, and earn a bonus. Come in late, and loose big time. There were a few people who didn't earn their bonus. People realized the old excuses didn't apply and their paycheck now ruled all.

It used to be, on a snowy day, we would hear, "you know what the roads are like, so some people would be late. Under our bonus program, even with the weather excuse, people were not paid the bonus. Amazingly, people woke up earlier, and left their homes earlier to get to work on time.

People used to make doctors appointments at any time, and would just leave work early. Now, one early leave cost $24. It worked. We didn't do it not to pay our workers...we kept track...we paid out just as much as before, but with greater efficiency among our workers. This was a win-win for all of us.

As a follow-up, it worked for six years. There was a little bit of extra bookkeeping along with this, and some exceptions were made, but it was a great success. When our firm was purchased by Oldcastle Glass, they discontinued this policy as it didn't fit with their corporate plans.

I don't know if there has been any backsliding, but I doubt it.

Next week we'll talk more about what you can do to encourage reliability of your employees, so you can be reliable to your customers.