It was an atmosphere that caused employees to second-guess what they said and didn't say. For example, most of them didn't tell Jim they thought the training program was a waste of time. "It was all stuff we already knew," explains Jerrell. Gradually, poor communication degenerated into lack of communication -- starting at the top. The body men said squabbles between the two owners got more frequent and higher pitched. "Jim and Don routinely got into screaming matches . . . one threatening to sell out to the other," says Kenny Dickess, a painter's helper.
Then there were the gibes -- not much to talk about at first, but slowly they got irritating. "Jim started griping about how we were making too much money," says a body man who wishes to remain anonymous. "It was his way of nudging us to switch over to profit sharing. Jim thought we were too greedy, just out for ourselves, not the company." Jim's approach, says the body man, "didn't make you feel you were playing on the same team as management."
Jim, meanwhile, did little to hide his own good fortune. "One day Jim would complain to us about sagging profits, and the next week he'd show up to work in a brand-new Corvette," says Jerrell. The more Jim moaned about profits, the more skittish the men became about tying their livelihood to such a bleak number.
Still, many of the body men forgave these discrepancies. "Put yourself in his shoes," says Jerrell. "Jim spent big money building a new facility, buying fancy new equipment. He can spend his money any way he wants to. So what if there are a few mess-ups?" None of that was worth giving up a steady paycheck, especially in an area that had been hard hit by the heavy loss of mining and steel jobs. "It's not easy to walk away from a job in these times," says Kenny Dickess.
But in the spring of 1989 Jim introduced a program that tipped the scales -- from a few missteps to a question of character, as his employees saw it. The innovation was part of Jim's master plan: computerizing the workplace. He wanted to use information technology to gain a competitive advantage, just as he had read countless companies had done to great bottom-line benefit. It was a decision that sealed his fate with most of his longtime employees. "He thought the computer was a secret weapon," says body man Greg Ellis, who had been at Graley's for a year. To Ellis, however, it appeared to be "a clever way to lie."
Traditionally (at Graley's and elsewhere), body-shop men are given the original estimates as their work orders, which include hours allotted for the repairs to be completed. In 1989 Jim stopped handing out the originals in favor of his simplified computerized versions. "It didn't take long before we saw our pay was falling," Jerrell claims.
Suspicious, a posse of shop men organized into a mini-investigative squad. Some scoped out original appraisals left by customers in their cars, others requested them from the local insurance office, and still others called customers at home. What they found seemed to confirm their worst fears: computerized, in-house versions shaved time off the original estimates, which both reduced their pay and made it harder to turn hours. To the employees that meant only one thing: management must be pocketing the difference. Jim tried to counter those rumors by inviting any employee with questions about a computer worksheet to come to him, to scan his files -- to get the story straight. And come they did, in droves. Soon after, the Graleys installed a paper shredder -- fueling further ill will. The reaction of the two Graleys, according to the body men, only made the situation worse. Recalls Jerrell, "They told us we could live with the system or move on. It was our choice."
For five of the eight original shop men, the choice was to move on.
Jim Hamilton, the local car dealer and a former admirer of Jim and Don, remembers when "the Graley boys" started out with a family atmosphere in their shop. Thanks to "ego and big ideas," he says, they've now forgotten a crucial business tenet: "Happy employees create happy customers."
* * *
Is it true? has Jim lost faith in this simple dictum? He insists no. From where he sits, he's fighting every day to make Graley's a better shop for customers and employees alike. Just look at what he's put in place: a new lunchroom, new uniforms, training, and so on. None of those, he emphasizes, are the hallmarks of an owner who doesn't care about his employees.
"Sure, maybe I miscalculated," he admits, pondering his earlier actions. About the discrepancy between original estimates and computer printouts, Jim explains, sometimes to get business he cut his price. Yes, the workers' hours got cut, but he made less on the job, too. Did he tell employees when that happened? "Not always."
Yes, he invited employees to come to him with questions when he heard of their skepticism, but he never imagined the onslaught. "Every day there were questions," he says. After a while, "it wore me down . . . I got sick of them questioning my integrity." News that employees were organizing posses and calling up customers and even insurance companies to validate their suspicions only further angered Jim and convinced him he should buy the paper shredder.
Jim counters each accusation from former employees. At times, he admits, he misjudged. "I did speak too much at the release meetings," he says. "Now I bring a yellow pad, scribble, and listen." About installing the time clocks, he says he had no choice. Since the shop was being audited by a regulatory agency, he said, he needed to prove that his men didn't work more than a 40-hour workweek. Why didn't the men in the body shop know that? Faced with questions about the TV monitor or the firing of an employee who questioned the hours on his computer printout, Jim blurts out, "If an employee doesn't trust me, I don't want him working for me."
