Before and After

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That helped. So did Henkelman's early experience with the process-control team. What had long made work such a deadening experience for him was the yawning gap between what he felt he had to offer and what he was asked -- or allowed -- to contribute. He was reminded of it every day, in the never-ending battle between the plant and the lab. What the lab ordered, the plant did, period. Knowledge was power, and the lab had it all. But during the spring of 1991, as Sandstrom set about transforming itself into a company of owners, mistrust slowly evaporated and the doors to knowledge began to open. For example, the conference room -- its shelves lined with technical manuals -- was no longer off-limits to plant workers. If a batch of paint came out lumpy, Henkelman was free now to check the manuals and try to solve the problem himself.

Eventually, Henkelman got a password that gave him access to the formula menu on the company computer. Before, the formulas had been the sacred texts of Sandstrom Products, closely guarded by the priests in the lab, handed down like commandments to the workers in the plant. It made all the difference, Henkelman says, when he could finally "get in there and look around and update a formula, actually change it so the process was on file differently."

Henkelman was living now in a one-room apartment so small that the bed and the table folded up into the wall. And, as of November 19, 1990, he had stopped drinking. So he was alone, and he had a lot of time on his hands. He had his own key to the plant and took to coming in on weekends, just so he could log on to the computer and explore. It was a way to fill the empty hours, but it was more than that. Henkelman was also filling himself -- with knowledge about the business, with confidence in his skills and abilities, and with hope.

Once his whole world at work had been the mill he stood over and the platform it was bolted down on. Now his sense of what mattered -- of what he could influence and what he was responsible for -- was rapidly expanding. He was working hard, trying to absorb "the whole process," he says, "rather than just bits and pieces of it." Getting the password "was definitely a big step. It gave me, I don't know, self-esteem, I guess I'd call it. It was like, 'Hey, they finally trust me."

* * *

In the summer of 1991 Henkelman and the other members of the merit-pay team took on by far the most challenging assignment yet: designing a new compensation system. In the past, deciding how workers would be paid had been the plant manager's prerogative; seniority and favoritism were the key variables. Many plant workers were unhappy with that. They thought pay should reflect usefulness on the job, period: the more things you know how to do and the better you can do them, the more you should make. That was fine with Hartsock, who wanted basically the same thing: a highly skilled workforce with interchangeable skills.

By July the team was ready with a proposal that offered plant workers incentives to cross-train. But as Hartsock quickly pointed out to the team, it was unrealistic. Together they studied the numbers -- looked at the cost of labor and its necessary relationship to raw materials, overhead, and packaging -- and eventually came up with a figure for total payroll that made fiscal sense to everybody. Then Hartsock stepped aside, and the team went back to work.

By now, though he doesn't say it exactly this way, Henkelman was thinking like an owner. "It boiled down to realizing that there are constraints," he says, "and incentives aren't the only things to consider. Then it became, 'How can we make this work?' And the only way was to take from some people."

That was too big a leap for some of the original team members; rather than going back to the drawing board, they quit. But Henkelman stayed on and was joined by others. It was hard work, and it went on for months -- the group was meeting formally once a week, debating continually with coworkers on the job, searching all the time for a balance between an incentive system ("whoever does the best job should get the most") and what Henkelman calls the "union perspective of equal work, equal pay." But one day, says Henkelman, "it all kind of fell together."

The new system identified 10 essential skill sets. Every plant worker was entitled to a peer evaluation three times a year, resulting in a numerical ranking in each skill set: one (experienced), two (qualified), or three (proficient). The higher the total score, the bigger the paycheck -- more than $15 an hour for anyone who could demonstrate proficiency across the board -- and the higher the multiplier for the gain-sharing checks. The shipping, maintenance, and purchasing employees were given special consideration, on the theory that the company was better served by not having those key personnel wasting time learning how to mix paint. Otherwise, no exceptions. Annual raises were out. Seniority no longer meant a thing.

"One of the things that clicked for me," says Henkelman, "was the fact that when it was all said and done, there were smiles on all but a couple of faces. And the ones that weren't smiling were the ones that were gonna be hurt by it."

Including, as it happened, a plant worker with 20 years at Sandstrom, who went straight up the hill to Hartsock and complained. When Hartsock advised him to speak to a member of the team, he admitted he was one, that in fact he had voted to approve the new system. But, he said, only because he figured Hartsock would make an exception for a loyal employee.

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