Of course, some managers would cringe at the thought of slowing down their most productive salespeople by pairing them with new hires. Others, however, see such a "buddy system" as an opportunity to increase overall productivity and add to the ranks of the top producers. "Formal orientation," says Brown, "doesn't hold a candle to sitting next to a good, experienced co-worker for a month or two." He can't quantify the cost of this approach but he knows he was losing out under the old setup.
Job rotation -- or "cross utilization" -- is another effective technique for acquainting new people with the business. Probably its best-known practitioner is People Express Inc., which uses cross utilization to help control its total labor costs. By showing employees how to handle multiple tasks, People has more flexibility in scheduling workers than most other airlines.
Other companies use much the same system for orientation purposes. At W.L. Gore & Associates Inc., new "associates" (as employees are called) take a long voyage through the business before settling into their own positions, regardless of the specific job for which they're hired. A new sales associate in the fabric division may spend six weeks rotating through different areas before beginning to concentrate on sales and marketing. Among other things, he will learn how Gore-tex, the company's patented fabric, is made; what it can and can't do; how Gore handles customer complaints; and how it makes investment decisions.
Peter Gilson, who heads the fabric division, concedes that the process can be expensive and dull: there are days when a new employee does a fair amount of "standing and looking." But even then, he says, newcomers learn how things operate and how ideas move through the system. "You get to see the whole picture," agrees Steve Shuster, a 26-year-old sales associate, who went through the process in 1983. "And you see that motivated individuals can get an awful lot accomplished at Gore."
To a large extent, Gore's approach to orientation reflects the beliefs of its 73-year-old founder, Bill Gore (see INC., August 1982, page 34). But personal conviction is not the only reason for introducing job rotation. Skyway Freight Systems Inc., for example, adopted a very similar system as a matter of survival.
For its first seven years, Skyway had distinguished itself from other express-delivery companies by means of a clever marketing strategy that required a highly motivated work force. While such competitors as Federal Express emphasized speedy, and expensive, deliveries, Skyway offered its customers -- mainly larger companies -- somewhat slower (two to five days), but very reliable, service, at a significantly lower price. The company's welltrained operators were able to track every shipment and inform a customer of its precise whereabouts at any hour of the day or night. During crunch times, moreover, every employee was expected to pitch in -- to pick up phones and to enter data in computers.
But three years ago, it all began to unravel. As a result of Skyway's growth -- the company was up to almost 70 employees -- it was promising far more than it could comfortably deliver. Founders Jim Watson and Bob Baker began to notice that some of the newer employees weren't even able to answer routine customer inquiries. Worse still, they had no idea who in the company would know the answers. As a result, they were putting customers on hold for a few minutes or telling them to call back. "It was an awful feeling," recalls Watson. "We were sounding more and more like our competitors -- or New Jersey Bell."
With the help of a former teacher, Skyway developed a creative orientation program aimed at showing every new person how the business works, and why Skyway does things the way it does. They call the system "walking in the other person's moccasins." During the first week, each newcomer follows a customer order from pickup through delivery and learns about every aspect of data entry, tracking, and billing. New employees meet co-workers throughout the company, and see how the various functional areas interact with one another. "It's not that we like being in the training business," Watson explains. "It's that we like quality. Our customers expect it. So if one person in the accounting department doesn't understand the commitments we've made to our customers, that undermines our entire goal."
Like Brown of Charrette, Watson can't quote you a figure on the cost of the new prientation program. What he does know is that it's helped the company upgrade its service and create a loyal -- and growing -- clientele. At the same time, it has had a demonstrable impact on employee morale and turnover. This, in turn, has allowed the company to concentrate on finding new people for expansion, instead of having to hunt down replacements.
Watson is so convinced of the program's value that either he or co-founder Baker meets individually with each new employee for at least half an hour. During these sessions, which typically happen at the end of the first week, Watson or Baker ask about the employee's background and review the highlights of the company's history. They also make a point of telling each newcomer about Skyway's current goals, and the individual's role in reaching them.With several new people joining the company every month, the employee meetings can add up to a lot of time, says Watson, but it's one more way to show how Skyway is different. "We want them to know that we're real people and that we're counting on them."
When you think about it, such meetings represent an opportunity for the chief executives of small growing companies -- an opportunity that their counterparts at large companies simply don't have. To that extent, it may also represent a competitive advantage. Such, at any rate, is the view of Al Burger, the founder of "Bugs" Burger Bug Killers Inc., a pest-control company with approximately 600 employees. Every two months or so, 15 or 20 recent hires from around the country come to the company's Miami headquarters, where they are put up at a nice hotel, given the use of rental cars at company expense, and exposed to 12 days of special training. Burger even goes so far as inviting everyone to his house for a meal. All of this in an industry notorious for treating workers the way it's supposed to deal with insects and rodents.
Before each new group of employees, Burger spends the better part of an afternoon pacing the floor and talking about what has made the $30-million company so successful, and how the new hires can be part of that success. Burger shares his personal pride in building a pest-control business that promises "perfect service," and he offers his own recipe for fighting failure. "I tell them that they'll make mistakes, that they'll have their ups and downs, and that there will be those days when they're sick or exhausted," he explains. He warns them that, late at night, when nobody's around, there will be temptations to scrimp on quality, to compromise on service. Safe as it seems, Burger says, it's a dangerous thought: they're always better off asking for help than cutting corners.
"We once lost a chain of 22 restaurants because a guy spent six minutes instead of two hours," he tell them. That was 10 years ago, and the company never got another chance. "But it was really my fault," Burger says, as if to remind himself of the incident, "because I hadn't told people that it could happen."
