Visibly monitor projects
Sometimes, Waggoner apologizes to employees for putting them through so much change — but it’s an indicator of Echo’s agility.
“We’re willing to make adjustments quickly,” he says. “We’re not mired down in hierarchy. We try something; if it doesn’t work, we stop doing it and we try something else.”
Your work is never done. Once an idea is activated — and you’ve given credit to the employee who suggested it, of course — continue monitoring to make sure it achieves expectations.
Waggoner watches for red flags in three areas.
“You do it with the intention that it’s going to make things better, right? That’s the thesis going in,” he says. “What you look for is, A.) Do service levels decline? Does our cost-per-transaction increase? Then finally, does our contribution margin deteriorate? The amount of revenue that falls to the bottom line that’s associated with this process or business unit, if that’s deteriorating, then it was probably a bad idea. As long as we could tie the cause and the effect together, we would stop doing it.”
Waggoner tracks those and other metrics that define each project’s success. Plasma screens throughout the floor display stats in real time — contributing to the Wall Street intensity visitors feel. Overall company performance is monitored in two-hour intervals against five-day, 30-day and 60-day averages. He also measures the performance of sales and operations — both on team and individual levels — to hold everyone accountable to a project’s success.
“Transparency and visibility make everybody accountable so you don’t really have to manage people,” Waggoner says. “When I’m a salesperson and my up-to-the-minute performance is up on a screen where all my peers can see it, nobody has to tell me to work. It’s kind of like playing a football game and looking up at the scoreboard; you know if you can toast or if you’re going to have to work a little harder.”
By balancing those tight operations with an environment open to ideas, Waggoner welcomes Generation-Y innovation.
“I would say, culturally, we’re very laissez faire,” he says. “But operationally, we’re very intense and we’re very data-driven and we’re very metric-driven. That’s the yin and yang of the thing that allows us to be this way.”
How to reach: Echo Global Logistics Inc., (800) 354-7993 or http://www.echo.com/
