Stepping Up
Ben Cole
Stone Industry Consultant
You have a small countertop company and the work is flooding in. You have decided to expand to handle the increased volume. How do you proceed? Your shop is having a hard time as it is keeping up with the work coming in, and you are worn out from juggling more responsibilities and jobs than you can handle. If things keep up this way your quality and reputation are bound to decline despite the increased sales. Hopefully, you have a business plan in place and of course you are studying up on the new machinery available that can increase production and efficiency. But more importantly, does your near and long-term planning include the development of your employees?
The core foundation of your company is the employees. A company can only grow if the proper staff is in place and the employees can learn and expand their skills and take on new responsibilities. As an owner and member of the human race, you have a max number of tasks you can perform. Once you start to reach the max amount you become the limiting factor for your company and how many jobs you can complete. That is why you should strive to develop your workers to take on a greater number of responsibilities – to not only keep your stress levels manageable, but to also allow the company to grow.
So where do you start with a plan to increase your team’s responsibilities? First it is important to classify each worker’s role. The smaller the company, the more likely it is that each employee may have several roles. That is fine. List their main role along with the other multiple tasks they are responsible for. This will help you better plan and organize the present and the future.
Second, you should look at each team member’s strengths and weaknesses. What would be the natural or obvious progression of each person’s role in the company, based on their current role and abilities? What areas would you like to see each employee improve in and what would you like him or her to learn? Is a certain member of your team capable of handling more responsibilities or do you need to find someone else to develop to take over higher-level tasks. These are all questions you should be thinking about as you look to the future, to ensure you have the right people in place to handle the increasing workload of a growing company.
Once you have a written and well thought out understanding of your employee’s roles and future development, it is important to sit down with each member of your team. Review their current role and the future roles and responsibilities they are working towards filling. Essentially this is or should be a part of your employee review process. An unexpected benefit you will find with this planning is that almost every worker wants to know that they have an opportunity to take on more responsibilities, to learn new things, and grow with the company. And of course, with greater responsibilities and the ability to complete more complex tasks, the greater the compensation or hourly rate should be.
A great example of employee development in my shop that helped ease the burden of my responsibilities and enabled company growth occurred recently with my head fabricator, Steve, who has been with our company for over twelve years.
Steve knows the ins and outs of the shop and we had also been teaching him to operate our bridge saw. As our company sales were increasing and my role in the office and field were being stretched to the limit, we were able to follow our plan and promote our head fabricator to shop foreman.
We hired another fabricator to help offset the production lost with Steve handling the shop foreman role, and my old shop foreman was able to take over a greater role in the field and allow me to focus and take on more work in the office, which will in turn help our company continue to grow. An added bonus was an improvement in worker moral as Steve was able to grow with the company and increase his compensation. The fabricators behind him were also able to take on more complex tasks and responsibilities allowing them to grow and expand with the company as well.
What I am presenting here is nothing new and you have likely thought about the changing roles of your employees. But if you have not sat down and put on paper an organized developmental plan for your team members, you are doing both them and your company a disservice. When the work is pouring in and your company is struggling to keep up, what members of your company are going to be ready to step in and handle the increasing number of managerial, shop, and office duties?
Ben Cole grew up in the stone industry working in his family’s shop and currently manages a family-owned fabrication shop in southern New Jersey.