The Power of Listening

Difference No. 1, if you were to put the differences into categories, would include a bunch of little things -- little, that is, only to people who have spent their working lives in white collars and well-lit offices. The bathrooms are spotless. There's a big room dubbed the Learning Center, where employees can take classes or pursue self-directed training programs on company computers, and another room equipped with Nautilus machines. Employees and spouses alike can pursue high school equivalency degrees (G.E.D.'s) and other educational goals at the company's expense; children and grandchildren who need help for supplementary tutoring get it at a Sylvan or Huntington Learning Center. "My wife got her G.E.D.," says Bruce Foster, the lead man in the press department and die cut area, "and it ended up costing me 10 grand -- because then she went back to get a college degree."

Another "little" thing: The door that separates the shop floor from the office and the doors that lead into the Centenaris' offices are open both in theory and in fact, a small revolution in itself. During the old regime, "you didn't even talk to management," says Tim Blevins, a press operator who has worked at the plant for 15 years, under the previous ownership and the present one. "You weren't allowed past the door." Blevins and several other employees say that today they really do go talk to Paul or Peter if they have a problem -- or, in fact, pretty much anytime they feel like it. In a factory, that's no small matter.

Difference No. 2 revolves around ownership and open books. Atlas is an S corporation, so the Centenaris can't issue stock directly to employees. Instead, they've created a legal device called stock appreciation rights (SARs), a kind of phantom stock that can be bought through payroll deductions and that pays off, according to a formula, when the employee retires or if the company is sold. About 100 of 150 eligible employees joined the plan when it was offered three years ago; 90 of those 100 are still with the company. Another round of SARs is likely to be offered to employees in the near future, so that newer employees can buy in as well.

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.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7  NEXT