David Dingwall, Royal Canadian Mint • John Schram, We Care, Home Health Services • Gerry Frascione, BBDO Canada • Michael Wilson, Agrium Inc. • Robert Johnson, Purolator Courier Ltd.
Consultants say they can “sense” a company’s culture the moment they walk through the front door. It’s in the way staff from the reception area to the innermost hallways behave. And a lot of it comes from the executive suite. Canadian HR Reporter asked chief executive officers about the cultures of their organizations and how the people at the top influence the corporate environment.
David Dingwall
President and CEO
Royal Canadian Mint
The Royal Canadian Mint is headquartered in Ottawa with a production facility in Winnipeg. The mint employs more than 450 people for all aspects of coin design, production and marketing.
When David Dingwall was appointed CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint in March, 2003, he wanted to move quickly to put his stamp on the company.
The mint was a very proud, historic and important Canadian institution, he says. But it was also a for-profit Crown corporation that was more than $7 million in the red.
As a rule, government institutions are less responsive to market and customer demands than private-sector organizations, admits Dingwall, who spent 17 years in Ottawa as an MP from Nova Scotia and four years in cabinet. But the mint had to change, and it had to change quickly.
“What I brought to the table was a sense of urgency, not only because of our deficit, but also because we had to grow this business,” he says.
In just 16 months, that sense of urgency has led the corporation to cut more than $15 million in spending, introduce a new lean enterprise model, bring in a slate of new executives and, in effect, change the culture from top to bottom.
“There is no question that when I went in, I had to stop the bleeding,” he says. “That is why we had $15 million worth of cuts.”
But along with the cost-cutting, a complete overhaul of business processes was in order. “There was no discipline. There was no focus. There was no accountability and there was no transparency,” he says. “We changed that by opting for a lean enterprise.”
With such drastic cost-cutting and radical structural and operational change, the possibility of employee backlash, resentment and resistance was a real one. But to be successful, the input and commitment of employees were absolutely essential, he told them. “I gave a commitment to all of our employees that nobody, but nobody, would lose their job as a result of the lean enterprise. And some of them didn’t believe that, but when they saw that we were walking the walk, that we weren’t laying people off as a result of lean enterprise (practices), then it became more believable. We started to see the exhilaration from employees in terms of improving our processes,” he says.
“Sixteen months ago the mint was running a 7.5 million deficit. By Dec. 31, 2004 we will have a $12 million profit, if not more. (Employees) are the ones that have done it.”
Since taking over, Dingwall appointed a new chief financial officer, new chief operating officer, a new vice-president of sales and marketing, a new director of marketing, four product managers, a new vice-president of communications, a new vice-president of HR. All of this was to underscore a new commitment to urgency, discipline in execution and customer focus, he says.
The need for a new focus on customer was really brought home shortly after Dingwall took over.
In April last year, after Canadian golfer Mike Weir took an early lead at the Masters Tournament, one of the representatives from Weir’s management company called the Royal Canadian Mint to explore the possibility of having a commemorative coin produced should Weir maintain his lead and become the first Canadian to win the ultra-prestigious tournament.
“Our staff person said, ‘You will have to send in a letter and when we get the letter we will look at it. But obviously, we couldn’t do anything this year,’” recalls Dingwall.
“Apparently the guy on the other end of the phone said, ‘Well, how long will I have to wait.’ And (the mint employee) said, ‘At least a year.’ When we found out about that a month or two after Weir won the Masters, we knew then and there that our business processes were not focused toward the customer or the market. So we took that as an example and turned it around,” he says.
At that time it took more than 460 days to get a product to market. “We have cut that down to about 150, and it is coming down quite quickly,” he says.
“That was probably one of the leading examples of our processes not being in line with the demands of the customer.”
To further generate employee commitment and input, Dingwall created a new leadership council to develop and discuss ideas for changes and growth. “The leadership council is about 50 employees that I personally have picked,” he says.
“We ask ourselves the question, ‘What do we have to do to grow our company?’ Some people will advocate we need to do more in sales and marketing. Others will advocate we need to do things differently on the production floor. Some will even argue we have to have new capital acquisitions. Others will say we have to have strategic initiatives with retailers across the country and internationally in order to move our product. So you get a breadth of ideas and then you say, ‘Okay that is a good idea but what do you mean and what is this going to cost? Did you do an analysis?’ And they have been very helpful to the management team in terms of the direction of the corporation going forward.”
Since the group was created as many as 100 ideas have been explored in depth. “Not all have been done, because it just wasn’t feasible to do. But one for instance was a capital outlay for a new silver refinery in Ottawa.” The company already had a gold refinery, but had to turn away the business of some clients who wanted both gold and silver refined because the mint would not invest in a silver refinery. “In previous years it was always frowned upon, but this year we took it under advisement, and looked at the business case and said this is starting to make sense, so we are moving on it in 2005,” he says. Actions like that, based on the suggestions of front-line employees and managers, prove the company wants to grow and move forward and that employee insights will be instrumental in taking it in that direction, he says.
Success stories like these, arising from a new commitment to meeting customer demands and doing so quickly and efficiently, deserve recognition. That wasn’t the way things were done under the old model, he says.
“One of the big things I found at the mint was a real reluctance to celebrate,” he says.
It doesn’t have to be a big night out at an expensive restaurant, he says. It can be a simple pizza party at the office. “I think celebration is so important, and people have to be recognized for their good work because they are certainly recognized when their work is not good.” Each vice-president now has a budget for celebrating achievement and it is expected a department will have enough reason to celebrate and the vice-president will take the time and effort to do so. “I am sure there was some celebration in the past, but now if you don’t have celebrations in your operations, I want to know why. That is the difference.”
John Schram
President and CEO
We Care, Home Health Services
Founded in Brandon, Man., in 1984, and now headquartered in Toronto, We Care is an independently owned home-care service provider with more than 50 locations and more than 5,000 staff (1,000 of whom are nurses) across the country.
John Schram uses words like “caring,” “committed,” “friendly” and “respectful” to describe the culture of his organization, and he considers it a part of his job to ensure the workplace matches these descriptors.
“One of my jobs is to shoo people out of here. I walk down the halls at 5 p.m. or 5:30 p.m. and tell people to get going. You should not be here when I come in on a weekend. If I find people in here it doesn’t please me,” he says.
So why is he in at work on weekends?
“I took a lot of time off this summer,” he says. “A lot of Friday afternoons off to play golf and I just got back from a week’s vacation in Florida. So I have to get caught up. Why are they in here is the question.” He says budget planning for next year will take into account whether the company needs to hire more people to reduce work levels.
And everyone, at all times, must be treated with dignity, says Schram.
“I have fired directly dozens of people over the years, hundreds indirectly. And I can walk up and shake hands with most of those people. I provide a lot of dignity through even adverse situations like that.”
He admits that while some of those values seem kind of soft they are vitally important nonetheless. That said, beyond these characteristics, Schram says when he took over the company five years ago he brought a strong personal belief in the importance of teamwork, a new sense of urgency, a fierce commitment to winning and accountability.
“I found everybody always wants to be responsible. I want to make sure they understand they have accountability too. And then I define it for everybody. I am fond of saying, ‘I want to know who to blame if it doesn’t go well.’ That gets a lot of people backing off,” he says.
“And I am also fond of saying, ‘If we succeed everybody is going to put up their hands.’ But when we succeed, I want to make sure that person who has the responsibility and accountability really gets the reward first and foremost.”
The key phrase here is “when we succeed.”
“I like to celebrate when appropriate, and I really mean when appropriate,” he says. “I mean when we win. It is not when we get the task done and (we have to wait to) find out whether we won or not. It is when we actually get the win.”
Schram says he, and by extension the organization, is dedicated to nurturing and developing employees, but only if they have an absolute commitment to co-operation, collaboration and teamwork. Schram says he wants to be known as a leader who is willing to roll up his sleeves and prove he’s committed in this regard.
“Leading by example is something I pride myself on,” he says. At conferences, he’ll often pitch in to help set up and he’s been known to stay late to help take down the booth. And at the Toronto office, Schram will even take his turn unloading the dishwasher in the morning. “That sends a message,” he says. “It says, ‘Hey, this is not below me.’ And then everyone else pitches in to do things. All you have to do is do it and it sets the example and suddenly everybody is doing it,” he says.
“I believe in a team approach. I believe in collaboration and co-operation. That is a fundamental value of mine,” he says.
“I can live with unproductive or just barely productive people,” he says. “I cannot live with counterproductive people. And those are the ones I get rid of right away. If they are not team players I cannot live with them.”
Of course in the health-care service industry, with a lot of caregivers and nurses who care more about the patient than the “sale,” Schram learned early on that many of his staff don’t look at everything in quite the same way he did.
“I don’t use the words ‘sales’ anymore,” he says. “We talk about ‘building relationships.’”
That is in fact how you sell, he says. You build personal relationships first, then sell a product second. “But we don’t talk about the ugly ‘S’ word or the ‘M’ word — marketing.”
“We build relationships, we build trust, we show them that we care… and hopefully that leads to a contract.”
Gerry Frascione
President and CEO
BBDO Canada
Advertising agency BBDO Canada employs 350 people in its offices in Toronto and Montreal.
When Gerry Frascione came into the role of president and CEO of BBDO Canada three years ago, his mandate was to do away with what he now describes was a bureaucratic culture reinforced by layers of hierarchy.
“What we wanted to do was liberate everybody in the agency to act as mini-CEOs. We wanted to do away with the traditional command-and-control structure and move to a values-based structure, where it’s not just a few people at the top who have all the knowledge and all the power,” says Frascione.
“But we wanted to make sure that everybody, while advocating an entrepreneurial way of doing business, acted and behaved as one cohesive team. And the glue, the cohesive agent, is our set of values.”
Those values — creativity, client passion, collaboration, accountability and enthusiasm — are stenciled on meeting room walls, elevator doors and colourful styrofoam plaques made to look like grade-school notebooks. At the company’s “town hall meetings” every two weeks, employees present these notebooks, called “walkies,” to those co-workers who “walk the talk.”
Every quarter, senior managers review the “walkies” and select the best for a $500 prize. The winner comes up to the podium and talks about what she did to earn it. This ritual, says Frascione, is important to the company because “we are transforming the culture through storytelling.” The narrative helps “everybody feel on a visceral level what the values actually mean, what collaboration or what enthusiasm is all about.”
Balancing out the “walkies” are “candour moments,” meant to empower employees to call each other on behaviour that goes against company values, even junior employees who want to be candid with managers, says Frascione.
“The one thing we tried to do at the beginning of this was, instead of going to the staff in the first or second week of the new management team with a ‘speech from the mountain,’ we actually led by example first,” says Frascione.
Over a period of six months, “through a series of successes, everyone started to feel the intensity and the entrepreneurial spirit that we’re talking about, so when we finally did share with everybody the vision, the values, the metrics, there were no barriers to adoption because everybody had lived with it for a while.”
Leading by example was not optional. That’s because the people to whom Frascione was selling the new vision, were already ad-savvy people who could easily spot hollow rhetoric.
“Employees in any company have heard the same story over and over, ad nauseum. What they really respond to is leadership in action,” says Frascione. That’s why it was crucial to make sure “that everybody on the management team buys into the values, walks the same talk, is completely consistent, is very clear on what will be celebrated and what will not be celebrated,” he added.
Helping Frascione make the pitch for change was a 2002 employee survey of 1,200 BBDO agencies across the globe. In that survey, BBDO Canada ranked at the bottom or second-bottom quintile in several categories.
The beauty of using the unfavourable employee survey to help marshal the workforce behind the change, is that he can say he’s responding to a message from the staff, says Frascione. Two years later, BBDO Canada placed at the top or the second top quintile in all areas. Turnover is at eight per cent.
As an example of the entrepreneurial spirit BBDO is cultivating, Frascione refers to one team leader on the Campbell Soup account. One wintry meeting, the team leader overheard a Campbell’s representative muse that it would be great if, when the weather dips below a certain temperature, a program advertising Campbell’s Soup would be activated.
“Instead of waiting to get approvals, she acted very entrepreneurially and took it upon herself and made the whole thing happen in one week,” says Frascione.
“She went back to the client, analyzed the situation, fleshed out the opportunity, came up with an integrated communication plan, came up with a budget, and it was all done within five days. And there’s tons of these examples.”
Michael Wilson
CEO
Agrium Inc.
Agrium Inc. is a Calgary-based producer of fertilizer with production plants in Canada, United States and Argentina. Agrium employs about 5,000 people.
At Agrium Inc., workers have a good-humoured rule that if they ever mention Sherritt or Cominco or the name of any former employer, they have to put some money in a pot. The total goes toward a “team-building event” such as a lunch or dinner out together.
That’s just one example of what it takes to build a cohesive corporate culture at Agrium, says chief executive officer Mike Wilson. Having grown out of the fertilizer division of Cominco, Agrium continued in the past decade to absorb the fertilizer divisions and spin-off companies from firms in both the mining and oil-and-gas sectors, including Esso, Sherritt and Unocal.
Hence, its mixed heritage, says Wilson.
“We take the best of the mining culture, which is very proactive, decisive, willing to act, willing to take appropriate risks,” says Wilson, noting that these are only generalizations.
“We blend it with the oil-and-gas culture,” which Wilson describes is “very thorough in its analysis, in dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s, in making sure eveyone’s marching at the same pace,” but which also “spends too long on the analysis and not wanting to take risk.”
To that mix, add Wilson’s own 18-year background at Dow Chemicals, where he learned “how to build collaboration across very strong business units, how to get results when you don’t have full accountability.”
Looking at where the company is today, Wilson says, “I think it’s rapidly heading towards the best of all those cultures.”
But building a new culture also means “you get rid of people who aren’t prepared to accept best practices and move towards that,” says Wilson, who joined the company in 2000 and became CEO in May 2003.
“You cannot afford to have a naysayer in the team. If someone’s not in support, you have to take them out of the company.”
The rest of the work involves getting people to understand that if they want to stay at Agrium, they have to demonstrate the five company values: results-oriented, ownership, capacity for change, integrity and leadership. Capacity for change means being “willing to open up to other people’s ideas,” and ownership means “when you are working on a project and someone on the team is faltering, you are accountable to make sure that teammate comes along. You are not only responsible for yourself,” says Wilson.
Wilson says he brings to the company a strong belief in the importance of leadership development, succession planning and individual performance management. Wilson believes in ranking people on a bell curve, which allows managers to identify the top performers and the bottom performers “so you can manage them both appropriately.”
Wilson says he measures by the success of the company culture on earnings, but not just earnings.
“I have a saying, ‘You have to be happy, healthy, and wise,’ in that order,” says Wilson. “There’s nothing nicer than when you’re at a convention with all your competition. And you look over your team, it’s the bottom of the cycle, business is tough, and they’re smiling. And you look over to the competition and they’re all depressed because business is tough. And that’s one measure right there: is your team happy?”
Robert Johnson
President and CEO
Purolator Courier Ltd.
With its head office in Mississauga, Ont., Purolator has about 13,000 staff across Canada, and is one of the nation’s largest employers. The company has 143 operations locations across the country and handles more than 6.1 million packages each week.
When he took the helm in 2001, the culture at Purolator Courier was already very good, says chief executive officer Bob Johnson.
For the most part, employees were clearly very dedicated, creative and community-oriented. The company had been through a tough time, and had almost gone bankrupt. Yet staff had made the kinds of contributions and taken the actions necessary for the organization to stay afloat, he says.
So he had to ensure that any changes he made as the new president and CEO did not damage that already sound foundation. “When I arrived I was suitably impressed so I didn’t try to change the world, I tried to take what we had and build on it,” he says.
Most importantly, he wanted the organization to be more customer-driven.
“There was always a view that the customer was right,” he says. But customer demands were changing and, in fact, increasing.
“Customers have a short fuse,” he adds. So every employee, while continuing to be creative, also has to be more proactive to meet those ever-increasing customer expectations.
“We have to provide them with an overall solution to their shipping needs,” he says. “That may involve more than the transportation of A to B by 9 o’clock the next morning. It may mean we have to give them temperature controlled vehicles… feedback and information about the package, or any number of other requirements that the customer needs, and that will allow us to add the value that will keep that customer around for the long term.”
If Purolator employees care about those customers, and are working to anticipate customer needs, the likelihood of customer satisfaction goes up, he says.
Johnson has also acted to ensure Purolator is known as a “caring” organization. That doesn’t just mean caring about customers, but also caring about co-workers, superiors, subordinates and the community. “Caring is all encompassing. That is why I like the word ‘caring’ rather than ‘community-oriented,’ or ‘people-oriented.’ Caring is comprehensive,” he says.
To show that the executive team cares about what employees think, a new employee survey was launched.
“I saw us, as an executive team, expressing opinions about what the Purolator people thought were important… but it had no substantive empirical value. It was just the opinions of six or seven people.”
So Purolator launched an internal effectiveness study. “Not a job satisfaction study, but an internal effectiveness study,” he says. “We really asked employees what they think of the company. What do they think is important? What do they think needs to be changed?”
Follow through and action were important.
“We have probably put in, without exaggeration, over 800 various action plans to address employees’ concerns,” he says.
The company is also in the midst of an initiative that will reduce the harmful effects of vehicle exhaust on both employees and on the communities in which they operate.
“We are just about to launch into the marketplace some diesel hybrid electric vehicles,” he says. “It will reduce our emissions by more than 50 per cent (and) reduce our reliance on fossil fuels by more than 50 per cent. When we drive into one of our facilities there will be no emissions, because it will be purely electric and that will help our employees,” he says. This is the kind of initiative that demonstrates the company’s commitment to the community and employees, “Albeit, right now, one that is economically very attractive,” he adds. The new vehicles will cost the company five to 10 per cent more than the regular trucks, though the immediate capital outlay will be offset somewhat by long-term savings, he says. “So this is a short-term extra cost.”
The idea came from the drivers and people working with the trucks. They wanted to know why, if the technology was available, the company wasn’t considering it, says Johnson. “Our fleet manager personally appeared before our executive committee and fought for this and has turned us all into believers. So much so that we are now prototyping, in Mississauga (Ont.), a hydrogen electric hybrid vehicle, one which will have no emissions and no reliance on fossil fuel. And we think that in several years that is going to be a reality so we are going to put that forward as well.”
In the past three years, with Johnson in charge, Purolator has also reviewed and refined its charitable activities to improve their impact and strengthen the ties between company and community. “Shortly after I got here we looked at the contributions we were making to various charities and we were all over the map. We weren’t making a difference as a company, so we consolidated all of our givings into two initiatives.” The company kept its relationship with the United Way. “But we also decided that we were going to tackle hunger. Hunger is something that I think we all care about, and it is a byproduct of our society at this time, and it is not pleasant.”
Two years ago, Purolator partnered with the Canadian Football League to launch a program called Tackle Hunger. “Every time a quarterback is sacked in the backfield we donate, in kilograms, the weight of the quarterback in food to the local food bank.” In the first year of the program, Purolator donated about 50,000 kilograms of food for food banks across the country. This year, Purolator has contributed more than 120,000 kilograms of food.
While these initiatives have a great deal of merit in their own right, have these efforts to improve the culture of the organization made a difference to how the organization performs? Johnson is convinced they have.
Customer satisfaction has gone up, he says. But more importantly, the bottom line shows the company has improved. “In 2001, we weren’t growing. In 2004, we are growing by about 4.5 per cent in top-line revenue. So Purolator is improving on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis. And while all of this isn’t driven by a new focus on values and culture, it certainly supports it.”
David Dingwall
President and CEO
Royal Canadian Mint
The Royal Canadian Mint is headquartered in Ottawa with a production facility in Winnipeg. The mint employs more than 450 people for all aspects of coin design, production and marketing.
When David Dingwall was appointed CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint in March, 2003, he wanted to move quickly to put his stamp on the company.
The mint was a very proud, historic and important Canadian institution, he says. But it was also a for-profit Crown corporation that was more than $7 million in the red.
As a rule, government institutions are less responsive to market and customer demands than private-sector organizations, admits Dingwall, who spent 17 years in Ottawa as an MP from Nova Scotia and four years in cabinet. But the mint had to change, and it had to change quickly.
“What I brought to the table was a sense of urgency, not only because of our deficit, but also because we had to grow this business,” he says.
In just 16 months, that sense of urgency has led the corporation to cut more than $15 million in spending, introduce a new lean enterprise model, bring in a slate of new executives and, in effect, change the culture from top to bottom.
“There is no question that when I went in, I had to stop the bleeding,” he says. “That is why we had $15 million worth of cuts.”
But along with the cost-cutting, a complete overhaul of business processes was in order. “There was no discipline. There was no focus. There was no accountability and there was no transparency,” he says. “We changed that by opting for a lean enterprise.”
With such drastic cost-cutting and radical structural and operational change, the possibility of employee backlash, resentment and resistance was a real one. But to be successful, the input and commitment of employees were absolutely essential, he told them. “I gave a commitment to all of our employees that nobody, but nobody, would lose their job as a result of the lean enterprise. And some of them didn’t believe that, but when they saw that we were walking the walk, that we weren’t laying people off as a result of lean enterprise (practices), then it became more believable. We started to see the exhilaration from employees in terms of improving our processes,” he says.
“Sixteen months ago the mint was running a 7.5 million deficit. By Dec. 31, 2004 we will have a $12 million profit, if not more. (Employees) are the ones that have done it.”
Since taking over, Dingwall appointed a new chief financial officer, new chief operating officer, a new vice-president of sales and marketing, a new director of marketing, four product managers, a new vice-president of communications, a new vice-president of HR. All of this was to underscore a new commitment to urgency, discipline in execution and customer focus, he says.
The need for a new focus on customer was really brought home shortly after Dingwall took over.
In April last year, after Canadian golfer Mike Weir took an early lead at the Masters Tournament, one of the representatives from Weir’s management company called the Royal Canadian Mint to explore the possibility of having a commemorative coin produced should Weir maintain his lead and become the first Canadian to win the ultra-prestigious tournament.
“Our staff person said, ‘You will have to send in a letter and when we get the letter we will look at it. But obviously, we couldn’t do anything this year,’” recalls Dingwall.
“Apparently the guy on the other end of the phone said, ‘Well, how long will I have to wait.’ And (the mint employee) said, ‘At least a year.’ When we found out about that a month or two after Weir won the Masters, we knew then and there that our business processes were not focused toward the customer or the market. So we took that as an example and turned it around,” he says.
At that time it took more than 460 days to get a product to market. “We have cut that down to about 150, and it is coming down quite quickly,” he says.
“That was probably one of the leading examples of our processes not being in line with the demands of the customer.”
To further generate employee commitment and input, Dingwall created a new leadership council to develop and discuss ideas for changes and growth. “The leadership council is about 50 employees that I personally have picked,” he says.
“We ask ourselves the question, ‘What do we have to do to grow our company?’ Some people will advocate we need to do more in sales and marketing. Others will advocate we need to do things differently on the production floor. Some will even argue we have to have new capital acquisitions. Others will say we have to have strategic initiatives with retailers across the country and internationally in order to move our product. So you get a breadth of ideas and then you say, ‘Okay that is a good idea but what do you mean and what is this going to cost? Did you do an analysis?’ And they have been very helpful to the management team in terms of the direction of the corporation going forward.”
Since the group was created as many as 100 ideas have been explored in depth. “Not all have been done, because it just wasn’t feasible to do. But one for instance was a capital outlay for a new silver refinery in Ottawa.” The company already had a gold refinery, but had to turn away the business of some clients who wanted both gold and silver refined because the mint would not invest in a silver refinery. “In previous years it was always frowned upon, but this year we took it under advisement, and looked at the business case and said this is starting to make sense, so we are moving on it in 2005,” he says. Actions like that, based on the suggestions of front-line employees and managers, prove the company wants to grow and move forward and that employee insights will be instrumental in taking it in that direction, he says.
Success stories like these, arising from a new commitment to meeting customer demands and doing so quickly and efficiently, deserve recognition. That wasn’t the way things were done under the old model, he says.
“One of the big things I found at the mint was a real reluctance to celebrate,” he says.
It doesn’t have to be a big night out at an expensive restaurant, he says. It can be a simple pizza party at the office. “I think celebration is so important, and people have to be recognized for their good work because they are certainly recognized when their work is not good.” Each vice-president now has a budget for celebrating achievement and it is expected a department will have enough reason to celebrate and the vice-president will take the time and effort to do so. “I am sure there was some celebration in the past, but now if you don’t have celebrations in your operations, I want to know why. That is the difference.”
John Schram
President and CEO
We Care, Home Health Services
Founded in Brandon, Man., in 1984, and now headquartered in Toronto, We Care is an independently owned home-care service provider with more than 50 locations and more than 5,000 staff (1,000 of whom are nurses) across the country.
John Schram uses words like “caring,” “committed,” “friendly” and “respectful” to describe the culture of his organization, and he considers it a part of his job to ensure the workplace matches these descriptors.
“One of my jobs is to shoo people out of here. I walk down the halls at 5 p.m. or 5:30 p.m. and tell people to get going. You should not be here when I come in on a weekend. If I find people in here it doesn’t please me,” he says.
So why is he in at work on weekends?
“I took a lot of time off this summer,” he says. “A lot of Friday afternoons off to play golf and I just got back from a week’s vacation in Florida. So I have to get caught up. Why are they in here is the question.” He says budget planning for next year will take into account whether the company needs to hire more people to reduce work levels.
And everyone, at all times, must be treated with dignity, says Schram.
“I have fired directly dozens of people over the years, hundreds indirectly. And I can walk up and shake hands with most of those people. I provide a lot of dignity through even adverse situations like that.”
He admits that while some of those values seem kind of soft they are vitally important nonetheless. That said, beyond these characteristics, Schram says when he took over the company five years ago he brought a strong personal belief in the importance of teamwork, a new sense of urgency, a fierce commitment to winning and accountability.
“I found everybody always wants to be responsible. I want to make sure they understand they have accountability too. And then I define it for everybody. I am fond of saying, ‘I want to know who to blame if it doesn’t go well.’ That gets a lot of people backing off,” he says.
“And I am also fond of saying, ‘If we succeed everybody is going to put up their hands.’ But when we succeed, I want to make sure that person who has the responsibility and accountability really gets the reward first and foremost.”
The key phrase here is “when we succeed.”
“I like to celebrate when appropriate, and I really mean when appropriate,” he says. “I mean when we win. It is not when we get the task done and (we have to wait to) find out whether we won or not. It is when we actually get the win.”
Schram says he, and by extension the organization, is dedicated to nurturing and developing employees, but only if they have an absolute commitment to co-operation, collaboration and teamwork. Schram says he wants to be known as a leader who is willing to roll up his sleeves and prove he’s committed in this regard.
“Leading by example is something I pride myself on,” he says. At conferences, he’ll often pitch in to help set up and he’s been known to stay late to help take down the booth. And at the Toronto office, Schram will even take his turn unloading the dishwasher in the morning. “That sends a message,” he says. “It says, ‘Hey, this is not below me.’ And then everyone else pitches in to do things. All you have to do is do it and it sets the example and suddenly everybody is doing it,” he says.
“I believe in a team approach. I believe in collaboration and co-operation. That is a fundamental value of mine,” he says.
“I can live with unproductive or just barely productive people,” he says. “I cannot live with counterproductive people. And those are the ones I get rid of right away. If they are not team players I cannot live with them.”
Of course in the health-care service industry, with a lot of caregivers and nurses who care more about the patient than the “sale,” Schram learned early on that many of his staff don’t look at everything in quite the same way he did.
“I don’t use the words ‘sales’ anymore,” he says. “We talk about ‘building relationships.’”
That is in fact how you sell, he says. You build personal relationships first, then sell a product second. “But we don’t talk about the ugly ‘S’ word or the ‘M’ word — marketing.”
“We build relationships, we build trust, we show them that we care… and hopefully that leads to a contract.”
Gerry Frascione
President and CEO
BBDO Canada
Advertising agency BBDO Canada employs 350 people in its offices in Toronto and Montreal.
When Gerry Frascione came into the role of president and CEO of BBDO Canada three years ago, his mandate was to do away with what he now describes was a bureaucratic culture reinforced by layers of hierarchy.
“What we wanted to do was liberate everybody in the agency to act as mini-CEOs. We wanted to do away with the traditional command-and-control structure and move to a values-based structure, where it’s not just a few people at the top who have all the knowledge and all the power,” says Frascione.
“But we wanted to make sure that everybody, while advocating an entrepreneurial way of doing business, acted and behaved as one cohesive team. And the glue, the cohesive agent, is our set of values.”
Those values — creativity, client passion, collaboration, accountability and enthusiasm — are stenciled on meeting room walls, elevator doors and colourful styrofoam plaques made to look like grade-school notebooks. At the company’s “town hall meetings” every two weeks, employees present these notebooks, called “walkies,” to those co-workers who “walk the talk.”
Every quarter, senior managers review the “walkies” and select the best for a $500 prize. The winner comes up to the podium and talks about what she did to earn it. This ritual, says Frascione, is important to the company because “we are transforming the culture through storytelling.” The narrative helps “everybody feel on a visceral level what the values actually mean, what collaboration or what enthusiasm is all about.”
Balancing out the “walkies” are “candour moments,” meant to empower employees to call each other on behaviour that goes against company values, even junior employees who want to be candid with managers, says Frascione.
“The one thing we tried to do at the beginning of this was, instead of going to the staff in the first or second week of the new management team with a ‘speech from the mountain,’ we actually led by example first,” says Frascione.
Over a period of six months, “through a series of successes, everyone started to feel the intensity and the entrepreneurial spirit that we’re talking about, so when we finally did share with everybody the vision, the values, the metrics, there were no barriers to adoption because everybody had lived with it for a while.”
Leading by example was not optional. That’s because the people to whom Frascione was selling the new vision, were already ad-savvy people who could easily spot hollow rhetoric.
“Employees in any company have heard the same story over and over, ad nauseum. What they really respond to is leadership in action,” says Frascione. That’s why it was crucial to make sure “that everybody on the management team buys into the values, walks the same talk, is completely consistent, is very clear on what will be celebrated and what will not be celebrated,” he added.
Helping Frascione make the pitch for change was a 2002 employee survey of 1,200 BBDO agencies across the globe. In that survey, BBDO Canada ranked at the bottom or second-bottom quintile in several categories.
The beauty of using the unfavourable employee survey to help marshal the workforce behind the change, is that he can say he’s responding to a message from the staff, says Frascione. Two years later, BBDO Canada placed at the top or the second top quintile in all areas. Turnover is at eight per cent.
As an example of the entrepreneurial spirit BBDO is cultivating, Frascione refers to one team leader on the Campbell Soup account. One wintry meeting, the team leader overheard a Campbell’s representative muse that it would be great if, when the weather dips below a certain temperature, a program advertising Campbell’s Soup would be activated.
“Instead of waiting to get approvals, she acted very entrepreneurially and took it upon herself and made the whole thing happen in one week,” says Frascione.
“She went back to the client, analyzed the situation, fleshed out the opportunity, came up with an integrated communication plan, came up with a budget, and it was all done within five days. And there’s tons of these examples.”
Michael Wilson
CEO
Agrium Inc.
Agrium Inc. is a Calgary-based producer of fertilizer with production plants in Canada, United States and Argentina. Agrium employs about 5,000 people.
At Agrium Inc., workers have a good-humoured rule that if they ever mention Sherritt or Cominco or the name of any former employer, they have to put some money in a pot. The total goes toward a “team-building event” such as a lunch or dinner out together.
That’s just one example of what it takes to build a cohesive corporate culture at Agrium, says chief executive officer Mike Wilson. Having grown out of the fertilizer division of Cominco, Agrium continued in the past decade to absorb the fertilizer divisions and spin-off companies from firms in both the mining and oil-and-gas sectors, including Esso, Sherritt and Unocal.
Hence, its mixed heritage, says Wilson.
“We take the best of the mining culture, which is very proactive, decisive, willing to act, willing to take appropriate risks,” says Wilson, noting that these are only generalizations.
“We blend it with the oil-and-gas culture,” which Wilson describes is “very thorough in its analysis, in dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s, in making sure eveyone’s marching at the same pace,” but which also “spends too long on the analysis and not wanting to take risk.”
To that mix, add Wilson’s own 18-year background at Dow Chemicals, where he learned “how to build collaboration across very strong business units, how to get results when you don’t have full accountability.”
Looking at where the company is today, Wilson says, “I think it’s rapidly heading towards the best of all those cultures.”
But building a new culture also means “you get rid of people who aren’t prepared to accept best practices and move towards that,” says Wilson, who joined the company in 2000 and became CEO in May 2003.
“You cannot afford to have a naysayer in the team. If someone’s not in support, you have to take them out of the company.”
The rest of the work involves getting people to understand that if they want to stay at Agrium, they have to demonstrate the five company values: results-oriented, ownership, capacity for change, integrity and leadership. Capacity for change means being “willing to open up to other people’s ideas,” and ownership means “when you are working on a project and someone on the team is faltering, you are accountable to make sure that teammate comes along. You are not only responsible for yourself,” says Wilson.
Wilson says he brings to the company a strong belief in the importance of leadership development, succession planning and individual performance management. Wilson believes in ranking people on a bell curve, which allows managers to identify the top performers and the bottom performers “so you can manage them both appropriately.”
Wilson says he measures by the success of the company culture on earnings, but not just earnings.
“I have a saying, ‘You have to be happy, healthy, and wise,’ in that order,” says Wilson. “There’s nothing nicer than when you’re at a convention with all your competition. And you look over your team, it’s the bottom of the cycle, business is tough, and they’re smiling. And you look over to the competition and they’re all depressed because business is tough. And that’s one measure right there: is your team happy?”
Robert Johnson
President and CEO
Purolator Courier Ltd.
With its head office in Mississauga, Ont., Purolator has about 13,000 staff across Canada, and is one of the nation’s largest employers. The company has 143 operations locations across the country and handles more than 6.1 million packages each week.
When he took the helm in 2001, the culture at Purolator Courier was already very good, says chief executive officer Bob Johnson.
For the most part, employees were clearly very dedicated, creative and community-oriented. The company had been through a tough time, and had almost gone bankrupt. Yet staff had made the kinds of contributions and taken the actions necessary for the organization to stay afloat, he says.
So he had to ensure that any changes he made as the new president and CEO did not damage that already sound foundation. “When I arrived I was suitably impressed so I didn’t try to change the world, I tried to take what we had and build on it,” he says.
Most importantly, he wanted the organization to be more customer-driven.
“There was always a view that the customer was right,” he says. But customer demands were changing and, in fact, increasing.
“Customers have a short fuse,” he adds. So every employee, while continuing to be creative, also has to be more proactive to meet those ever-increasing customer expectations.
“We have to provide them with an overall solution to their shipping needs,” he says. “That may involve more than the transportation of A to B by 9 o’clock the next morning. It may mean we have to give them temperature controlled vehicles… feedback and information about the package, or any number of other requirements that the customer needs, and that will allow us to add the value that will keep that customer around for the long term.”
If Purolator employees care about those customers, and are working to anticipate customer needs, the likelihood of customer satisfaction goes up, he says.
Johnson has also acted to ensure Purolator is known as a “caring” organization. That doesn’t just mean caring about customers, but also caring about co-workers, superiors, subordinates and the community. “Caring is all encompassing. That is why I like the word ‘caring’ rather than ‘community-oriented,’ or ‘people-oriented.’ Caring is comprehensive,” he says.
To show that the executive team cares about what employees think, a new employee survey was launched.
“I saw us, as an executive team, expressing opinions about what the Purolator people thought were important… but it had no substantive empirical value. It was just the opinions of six or seven people.”
So Purolator launched an internal effectiveness study. “Not a job satisfaction study, but an internal effectiveness study,” he says. “We really asked employees what they think of the company. What do they think is important? What do they think needs to be changed?”
Follow through and action were important.
“We have probably put in, without exaggeration, over 800 various action plans to address employees’ concerns,” he says.
The company is also in the midst of an initiative that will reduce the harmful effects of vehicle exhaust on both employees and on the communities in which they operate.
“We are just about to launch into the marketplace some diesel hybrid electric vehicles,” he says. “It will reduce our emissions by more than 50 per cent (and) reduce our reliance on fossil fuels by more than 50 per cent. When we drive into one of our facilities there will be no emissions, because it will be purely electric and that will help our employees,” he says. This is the kind of initiative that demonstrates the company’s commitment to the community and employees, “Albeit, right now, one that is economically very attractive,” he adds. The new vehicles will cost the company five to 10 per cent more than the regular trucks, though the immediate capital outlay will be offset somewhat by long-term savings, he says. “So this is a short-term extra cost.”
The idea came from the drivers and people working with the trucks. They wanted to know why, if the technology was available, the company wasn’t considering it, says Johnson. “Our fleet manager personally appeared before our executive committee and fought for this and has turned us all into believers. So much so that we are now prototyping, in Mississauga (Ont.), a hydrogen electric hybrid vehicle, one which will have no emissions and no reliance on fossil fuel. And we think that in several years that is going to be a reality so we are going to put that forward as well.”
In the past three years, with Johnson in charge, Purolator has also reviewed and refined its charitable activities to improve their impact and strengthen the ties between company and community. “Shortly after I got here we looked at the contributions we were making to various charities and we were all over the map. We weren’t making a difference as a company, so we consolidated all of our givings into two initiatives.” The company kept its relationship with the United Way. “But we also decided that we were going to tackle hunger. Hunger is something that I think we all care about, and it is a byproduct of our society at this time, and it is not pleasant.”
Two years ago, Purolator partnered with the Canadian Football League to launch a program called Tackle Hunger. “Every time a quarterback is sacked in the backfield we donate, in kilograms, the weight of the quarterback in food to the local food bank.” In the first year of the program, Purolator donated about 50,000 kilograms of food for food banks across the country. This year, Purolator has contributed more than 120,000 kilograms of food.
While these initiatives have a great deal of merit in their own right, have these efforts to improve the culture of the organization made a difference to how the organization performs? Johnson is convinced they have.
Customer satisfaction has gone up, he says. But more importantly, the bottom line shows the company has improved. “In 2001, we weren’t growing. In 2004, we are growing by about 4.5 per cent in top-line revenue. So Purolator is improving on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis. And while all of this isn’t driven by a new focus on values and culture, it certainly supports it.”
