Move forward
In the days and weeks following a round of cuts, along with giving employees an explanation about the state of the company and why the cuts were made, you also need to start mapping out a vision for your future.
You need to acknowledge that cuts have affected your work force and remain sensitive to that fact. But you also need to begin prodding the company along and not allow for a long period of dwelling on negative news.
Hershberger emphasizes strategic planning at PGT Industries and gets employees in every level and department involved in the planning process. Even though a strategic plan is mostly a document constructed by upper management and for upper management, you still need to have employees throughout the company involved. In addition to giving you ground-level insight, they can help you streamline the concepts to a form that can be easily communicated throughout the company.
Employees might not concern themselves with the inner workings of your strategic plan, but they do need to see what you’re planning in bullet-point form. Hershberger and his leadership team whittle their plan down to a number of basic drivers that will power the company — usually between three and eight in a given year.
“Strategic plans are often fairly complex documents, but if we don’t walk out of our strategic planning phase with one page that clearly defines where we want to go, something that we can clearly communicate, then we have failed in our strategic planning. Everyone needs to know the three, five, seven drivers that we are going to measure ourselves against.”
Even though you want to recover quickly and completely after a period of cuts, you need to make sure that you aren’t trying to rally your employees around too many drivers. There are only so many factors that your company can classify as a priority. In your strategic planning process, you need to ensure that you are zeroing in on what is truly important for your company moving forward.
“There is a number of drivers that are going to be too many, but I’m not sure I can give a specific number,” Hershberger says. “But you can’t achieve if you can’t focus. If we have 20 things that we put on paper and say, ‘This is what we want to accomplish strategically,’ we’re not going to accomplish 20 things. So you have to figure out which things are strategic, which things are tactical and how you assign everything out. That’s why we try to stay between three and eight drivers.”
During the economic downturn, many of Hershberger’s drivers focused more on the short-term goals instead of long-range goals.
“In the old days, we had actual financial numbers focusing on where we wanted to be in sales and how we would get there,” he says. “During the downturn, we’re probably focused more on the shorter term, measuring by product development and introductions into the market. We look at some of our leadership development classes taken by some of our leaders. We also believe that we’re a customer-intimate company, so we have some measurements on that. Some are more objective; some are based on customer feedback.”
