Production in the New Normal
Collected from CCN Members
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our production crews are essential workers and can't work from home. With COVID on the rise again across the country, this presents new management challenges every day, mainly to keep people safe and keep people feeling safe. Sometimes those are not the same thing. What happens if someone gets symptoms? What happens if someone is diagnosed? What if they come to work, regardless of your policies? What's the threshold for sending someone to quarantine? We're all learning together what works and work to keep crews in the field. Here are some of the interventions CCN members have been taking. As always, please consult your local ordinances as well as the CDC for the most up-to-date information.
Mindset The biggest thing we did was switch mindsets and replace the word “issues” with “opportunities” COVID is a change agent allowing us to renew relationships with employees, subcontractors, customers, and stakeholders. We're now a stronger company because of these opportunities. It was a bit thing early on to not focus on negatives, to reframe those, and see the opportunity. We have to give up the short term for the long term. It’s easy to say we can throw around money from loans. If you can make lasting changes to help the company grow and be sustainable, there will be more dividends down the road.
There is opportunity in chaos. Culture is a really big thing in our organization and making sure people feel we’re all in this together is a huge deal. So many opportunities have come out of the crisis. Our margin is up, and people have stepped up. We’re going to be a stronger company at the end of this. This made us a better company. We’ve had to strip everything in our company and rebuild. Now leads are up and there's heat on the demand side.
Incentives We instituted hazard pay based on the PPP loans, which seems to be a mixed blessing. People were excited at first but got used to it pretty quickly and it pales in comparison with the 4
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nightly news, so it hasn’t been as effective at keeping people working as it was. We said the hazard pay is yours to keep if you earn it. The books are open and the profitability of each job is there for anyone to examine. If the crews can find efficiencies and increase productivity, and we can be profitable at a higher wage, we’re happy to pay it. Our incentives were focused on the long-term sustainability of the business. We did deep sales discounts for the salespeople, which then also benefited production and kept people working. We also implemented increased commissions, unlimited OT, and 40-hour minimums. We put a lot of money back into the company, which was difficult to do. We had to get everyone on the same page about how the biggest gift we can give them is uninterrupted business and continued employment. Everything became about making that happen. As a primarily external contractor, we haven’t had to incentivize working, because there haven’t been many interruptions to our sales. That may change, but for now, we’ve focused on keeping things as normal as possible. We didn't go with hazard pay, because we had to shut down. We had to go in the opposite direction and warned people they may come back to a reduction in pay. We didn’t end up having to do that with the PPP loans we received. We even gave some raises out that were scheduled with annual reviews. We offered discounts in April, which got the gears moving again, now we’re looking at price increases because demand is up.
