Q. How does that benefit your company?
We have a turnover
rate of less than 2 percent and a great deal of
employee loyalty. We’ve
got people who know
the processes and that
also helps in our responsiveness; we’re not trying to retrain people all
the time. A strong core
of long-term employees provides an advantage to your
customer.
Q. How do you foster breakthrough thinking among your
employees?
We encourage them to look
at things that are not value-added. Nobody can improve
our processes more than the
people who touch them every
day. They’ll say, ‘Why am I doing this? Can it be done
faster? Can it be done cheaper,
or do we really need to do it
at all?’
Breakthrough thinking really
helps you remove the old
euphemisms like, ‘Bigger is
better.’ In reality, better is better, no matter what size it is.
Good people are always energized by that process. When
they’re able to get involved,
the ownership that they have
increases to a level that is very
exciting and satisfying. Once
you get that momentum going,
it’s exciting.
The process becomes so
much more simplified when
you start with good people
because they love breakthrough thinking. They love to
take crisp action. They love to
see results, and they’re not
afraid to say, ‘That’s ugly. Let’s
fix it.’
We think about it this way:
If you see something right,
you should celebrate it; if
you see something wrong,
you need to fix it, and in our
internal processes, if something is indifferent and not
making an impact, then we
need to question why we do
that at all. If it doesn’t add
value, we need to remove it
from the process.
There’s a term — paralysis
by analysis — where you
spend a lot of time grinding
over whether you should do
something or not. Our thought
process is, ‘Let’s just do it,
then quickly measure the
results.’ If it works, great,
we’ve done a good thing, and
if it doesn’t, fix it.
If you’re going to have an
impact and service a customer
base, you have to be responsive. If customers call us,
they’re looking for a call back
in a very short period of time.
If they e-mail us, they’re looking for an answer as quickly as
we can get it to them.
Our mission statement is,
‘Consider it done.’ It’s fairly
simple, but that’s how we treat
each other, internally and
externally. Nobody wants to
hear, ‘I’ll get back to you in a
week.’ That’s just not the way
to garner customer loyalty and
customer longevity in our
business. The way you do that
is by being responsive.
HOW TO REACH: Genesis Electronics Manufacturing Inc., (813) 854-1661
or www.genesismfg.com