Focusing on people helps increase productivity
With Meridian Group's guidance the incoming plant manager pushed his management team to focus on involving people to achieve higher performance goals.
"I committed to no long-term layoffs. That meant a lot of retraining. Over five years we cut the workforce from 2,500 people to 1,700. On the way we had one million man-hours without a lost-time accident. I had a coherent master plan—reduce cost by one million dollars a month. We aimed at sixty million over five years. We easily achieved that. The actual savings were almost double our goal over the five years and we did all this while keeping people on-board."
New leadership improves cooperation and teamwork
Meridian Group worked with the overall plant leadership and in some departments. One area was the laboratory, where leaders and employees were quarrelsome and aggressive. We established employee problem-solving groups where adversarial behaviour became inappropriate. A new kind of leadership emerged. The previous leaders who had vehemently opposed every suggestion that promoted understanding and cooperation between management and employees lost their dominance. The laboratory became a model of cooperation for other parts of the plant.
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