Tapping employee's insights to expand productivity - sheet music distributor J.W. Pepper & Son Inc. cuts working hours but increases productivity and morale - Managing Your Small Business - Brief Article

Nation's Business, Nov, 1996 by Roberta Maynard

The challenge for Ron L. Rowe was making sometimes-boring work more interesting to his 150 mostly clerical employees while simultaneously improving productivity.

For J.W. Pepper & Son Inc., a sheet-music distributor in Paoli, Pa, business is cyclical. Workers pack and ship sheet music to schools and orchestras, with 70 percent of the year's business occurring in a couple of periods that add up to about four months.

During peak times, such as the weeks before each new school year, work was chaotic; during valleys, workers were bored. Sales were on the rise, but profits weren't. Crisis management prevailed.

When employees said in an anonymous survey that 30 to 50 percent of their time was wasted, Rowe, the company's president, decided to make changes. Bypassing supervisors, he met with 10 front-line employees over a brown-bag lunch once a week for a year. He had no idea at the outset how dramatic the changes would be.

The group came up with a plan that has developed over time: For the 29 weeks that are the slowest for his business, all employees work four 7.5-hour days and get paid for five; this is m addition to vacation days. During the other weeks, employees work five 7.5-hour days. Having 29 days off--still less than the wasted time reported m the survey--keeps employees from being bored and motivates them to work harder, Rowe says. The greatest boost in productivity came by involving them in solving work problems, he adds.

There is no paid sick leave. Employees who have to be absent for illness make arrangements to have their jobs done by co-workers. Rowe says the peer pressure has resulted in little absenteeism and an effort by workers to schedule personal appointments on their days off.

Schedules are devised to fit the work, not the traditional workday. In place of job descriptions, each person has an assigned skill level. Regular training in multiple tasks allows for the fluid movement of workers to departments where they are needed most.

"It made no sense to have six full-time people m the shipping department at 8:30 am. when there was nothing to ship. It was also not right to have six there at 4 p.m. when we needed 20," says Rowe.

The breadth of training and the time off keep people interested in their work, he says. "I've seen people change their perspective from `This is my job' to `This is my company."' In the six years since the system began, profits have soared, turnover has been low, and productivity has risen dramatically. Instead of shipping within days of receiving an order during peak seasons, workers now ship within minutes.

Though exciting, the solutions to J.W. Pepper's work problems were secondary to a greater achievement, Rowe says. The real story is how he let go of the traditional management style he had used for 22 years.

"I was the general I had my sergeants' meeting every Friday morning I went around with a clipboard checking the amount of Xerox paper we had. ... Management 101 told us wrong," he says. "Most of us CEOs get in the way. Our job should be focused on bigger things.

"I'm not proposing our time allocation system to anyone. My message is to turn to the people doing the jobs. They create the solutions and buy into it. The fact of the matter is that if you want true quality, you can't rule it, dictate it, or policy it. It only happens when people are involved."