Atlas employees vote on disciplinary policies, whether to keep managers in their jobs, and what equipment to buy.
As for opening the books, that caught employees by surprise. "We were like, hey, this ain't gonna work," remembers Blevins. "This is unreal. People don't do this kind of stuff. And so we figured it was a fake deal." But Paul and Peter persisted in the tools and techniques associated with open-book management. Employees took in-house classes to learn basic financial concepts. The company began showing them the real numbers -- sales, costs, profits, and so on -- along with virtually every other piece of information they might want to know. Atlas today pays monthly bonuses whenever a month's EBITDA, the company's preferred measure of profitability, exceeds a certain level. At regular employee meetings -- monthly for the whole plant, weekly for most departments -- the numbers are reviewed and results are forecast. "We get to where if things slow down, we pull up the financials to see how're we doing in the middle of the month instead of at the end of the month. And we see what we gotta do to make our goals," says Foster.
So far, Atlas is much like a few thousand other small companies with imaginative, employee-oriented cultures. But then there's difference No. 3, which is that people actually do vote on stuff. In some small way, Atlas Container is what you might call a democratic workplace.
Since this is a notion freighted with fears and fantasies, it's worth spelling out what Atlas is not as well as what it is. It is not a constitutional democracy. It's a closely held business that is 80% owned and wholly controlled by two people. Some things don't get voted on, such as buying other companies. "We have never and probably never will vote on an acquisition," says Peter. It's not, he adds, because he believes employees aren't qualified to have an opinion, but because any acquisition opportunity demands secrecy and speedy action. Nor is there any set of rules for what gets voted on or who may cast a ballot. Typically, a vote takes place when Paul decides it should. The voters include everyone who will be directly affected by the outcome.
All that said, it's sort of amazing the things Atlas employees have voted on. They chose between competing health insurance plans. (See "Anatomy of a Vote," below.) They voted on whether to take a bonus when the company came within an inch of hitting its profitability targets. They vote on disciplinary policies, whether to retain managers in their jobs, and what equipment to buy. A couple of years ago, the Centenaris decided to invest roughly $1 million in the corrugator, the giant machine that turns big rolls of brown paper into the corrugated sheets that will eventually become boxes. They asked shop-floor employees first to vote on which part of the multistep machine should get the investment, and then to choose between two competing suppliers for what they had collectively decided on, a robotic slitter-scorer. As it happened, Paul and Peter favored an Italian vendor, while a majority of the employees voted for the American competitor. Atlas bought the American equipment. To say that that pretty much blew the employees' minds is to put the matter mildly.
"Paul went ahead and said, 'Okay, that's what you people want, we'll get that' -- and Paul didn't want that!" remembers Foster, shaking his head in incredulity. "But he took it to a vote, and that's what the people wanted, and that's what the people got."
Of course, the Centenaris and Atlas may have marched boldly into a minefield here: Democracy, as countless political leaders have discovered to their chagrin, is a costly and unpredictable process, notoriously hard to control. In a business, it has some obvious downsides.
One problem is simply the unfamiliarity of the terrain. "People are more used to the command-and-control model, where decisions are made for them," says Peter. The Centenaris -- usually Paul, both acknowledge -- have had to push voting, and at first had to convince the employees that they were serious about it. Nobody was too sure, either, exactly what could and could not be put to a plebiscite. Can you vote on reinstating an employee who violates a drug policy, for instance, as Atlas once did? Oops! To make an informed decision, you'd want to know whether he had used drugs since, whether he was in a rehab program, and so on. Ask those questions in public, the Centenaris have learned, and you violate confidentiality laws.
A second problem: Nobody wants decisions made by people who don't understand what they're voting on. "We weren't about to empower dummies," Paul told a reporter a few years ago. His choice of words may not have endeared him to Atlas's work force, but his point was valid: Somebody needs to spend time researching alternatives and communicating them intelligibly to the voters. In the case of the corrugator, the competing vendors made elaborate presentations to the workers who would make the decision. More often, the preparation is done by someone on staff. The process takes time, so it costs money.
What's striking about democracy at atlas is how much the concept has become part of the cultural woodwork.
Given such obstacles, what's striking about democracy at Atlas isn't how far it has progressed -- we're talking baby steps here -- but how much the concept has already become part of the cultural woodwork. Paul has pushed votes on big things, like the corrugator, and on little things, like the colors used when the office was redecorated. Most recently, he held an election for the new team leader of the customer service department. Amazingly, that didn't faze anybody.
