Small Wonder

Stoner expects every one of its employees to be a leader. Before starting their jobs, new employees complete two weeks of orientation that includes shadowing every job in the company—including that of the president. They can do all that in two weeks because Stoner only has 45 employees.

Located in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, Stoner makes specialized cleaners, lubricants, and coatings, primarily for car care. In 2003, it became the smallest company to win the Baldrige Award.

“We first learned about Baldrige in 1991 through the local Lancaster County program,” said Rob Ecklin, Jr., Stoner’s president. “We started to familiarize ourselves with the criteria then.” Stoner became the first company in the county to win the award in 1995. A few years later it submitted its first Baldrige application.

“We like to learn, to challenge ourselves and to be challenged,” said Ecklin. “Only a small percentage of companies truly want to improve. We’re one of them. We get excited about performance excellence. This is not a sexy business. It’s not high tech. Not flashy. But we’ve been able to get extraordinary results from ordinary people.”

Stoner gets these results by expecting every employee to be a leader. It involves all employees in setting the direction for the company. It uses teams to flatten the organization and push accountability to the front lines. It reinforces accountability by giving every employee the authority to spend up to $1,000, without supervisor approval, to resolve…

10 Critical Questions: Your Workforce

Several articles on Baldrige.com have emphasized the value of employee engagement and satisfaction. “Valuing workforce members” is a Baldrige core value, as the Criteria state: “An organization’s success depends increasingly on an engaged workforce that benefits from meaningful work, clear organizational direction, and performance accountability and that has a safe, trusting, and cooperative environment.”

The best way to evaluate how well you are creating an engaged and satisfied workforce is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.

The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your workforce focus, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:

1. How do you determine the key factors that affect workforce engagement and satisfaction and assess performance on them?
2. How does your culture promote open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce?
3. How does your organization benefit from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your workforce?
4. How does your workforce performance management system engage employees and support high-performance work?
5. How does your learning and development system address your organization’s core competencies and strategic challenges, action plans, performance improvement, innovation, ethics, employees’ needs, knowledge transfer, and reinforcing new knowledge and skills on the job?
6. How do you manage career progression and succession planning?
7. How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs including skills, competencies, and staffing levels, and…

World-Class Employee Orientation

According to its Web site, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company “sets the gold standard in luxury hospitality worldwide.” A recent Luxury Brand Tracking Study verified that The Ritz-Carlton has become the most preferred luxury brand among other hotels in its competitive set. Twenty-four of its hotels received AAA Five Diamond Hotel Awards in 2009 and 16 received Four Diamond Hotel Awards. The company has won the Baldrige Award twice.

The Motto of The Ritz-Carlton—one of its gold standards—is “Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.” The company employs 38,000 Ladies and Gentlemen. Every one of them is empowered to use his or her own judgment, without seeking permission from a supervisor, to spend up to $2,000 on each guest each day.

In his enlightening book, The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Joseph A. Michelli devotes a chapter to describing how the company hires, trains, and empowers its employees to provide world-class customer service. I encourage you to read the book. Here are the key points:

• It selects people from the same candidate pools as everyone else and pays the same as others in its industry.
• It involves frontline employees who have been certified as interviewers in evaluating potential employees.
• It adheres to its rigorous selection process no matter how urgent the need, which is one reason its turnover rate is one-third the industry average.
• It applies its customer service…

5 Powerful Process Questions

Organizations new to process thinking—and there are a lot of them, even in healthcare and education, which you would expect to be more process oriented because of the continuum of care and educating students for nearly two decades, but are decidedly not—welcome new tools that will help them make the transition from a functional, silo mentality to process thinking.

Here is an approach that any type of organization can use. It is part of a system of process management and continuous improvement in place at Brevard Public Schools (BPS), a large public school district that received Florida’s 2007 Governor’s Sterling Award and is in the running for this year’s Baldrige Award. The system asks and answers simple but powerful questions:

• What do you do and what needs are you meeting? (Process name and description)

• How do you do it? (Process flow chart)

• How do you know you are doing a good job? (Status of outcome measures)

• How do you monitor the process to ensure you meet or exceed customer requirements? (Status of in-process or predictor measures)

• How do you improve? (PDCA, DMAIC, and by-the-numbers)

To make sure these questions are systematically and effectively addressed, BPS trained its senior staff, district leadership, and functional managers in 2006 and 2007 and then trained its principals and school leaders in 2008 and 2009. According to a case study published by ASQ, “more than 100 priority processes have been identified with defined process control systems. The district believes that a key to sustaining…