Jim Smith saw the growth that was going on at Elford Inc. This wasn’t the general contracting business that Edward “Pop” Elford started back in 1910 with $153.75 out of his savings account. It’s a company that has invested more than 15 million hours on construction since its inception.
In the last decade alone, Elford has built more than 13 hospitals in Central Ohio and the company continues to build its presence in the region in 2010. This growth has created a complex array of projects that, if not handled properly, could easily become difficult to coordinate.
“We not only grew in size, but we also grew in some of the areas we cover for our customers,” says Smith, the company’s president and chief operating officer. “We end up working with new team players as in our subcontractors and our vendors. How do you keep the communication current? How do you keep everybody feeling part of the HQ and part of the home team and not feeling disenfranchised?”
If each of his 240 employees came into the same office every day, Smith could just issue a morning message to everyone all at once. He could then go about the rest of his day reasonably confident that they knew what he expected out of them.
But when one team is out working on the Riverside Methodist Hospital project in Columbus and another is busy planning the Springfield Regional Cancer Center project, it’s not that simple.
How do you make sure all of your employees are getting the information that either they need or that you need them to have when they’re scattered about on various job sites?
“What it’s taken is a little higher level of intentional focus on communications and keeping everybody in the loop as far as what we’re doing and why we’re doing certain things,” Smith says. “We’ve empowered everybody in the organization with as much knowledge as possible so the mission and values are felt from top to bottom and bottom to top.”
It’s not always easy, but Smith says it’s his job to make sure things are getting done throughout his company. It’s also his job to know when to use resources and make sure he doesn’t become a micromanager.
Here’s how Smith strikes the right balance to make sure Elford meets the needs of its customers.
