By Dr. Tom DePaoli See my book
on Amazon Leadership by
Storytelling for more leadership stories. When I took over as a new Employee Relations Manager
there was a backlog of over a thousand unanswered grievances. The Employee
Relations Manager position had been vacant for over six months and the
grievances were not answered. No one had taken any initiative of answering the
grievances. The atmosphere in the plant was hostile to say the least. The
process for answering grievances and the stages was very well documented and
clear. There were three stages to the process. The grievances had not even been
answered at the first stage. Contractually you could not change the process
unless the union agreed to the change.There were two administrative
assistants that I had reporting to me. They were visibly upset and overwhelmed.
We soon realized that the union just wanted the grievances answered. I remained
positive and told them that I was sure that we could get through the grievances
and answer them quickly. They were skeptical. I did tell them that we were
under the gun or in a crisis mode. The union might file an unfair labor practices
complaint against us if we did not get to work and answer the backlog of
grievances.
We then decided to use an affinity-type tool often
used in understanding the voice of the customer. We started to classify the
grievances by type and soon discovered that generally there were only seven
categories or types of grievances. Then with the help of a database that I set
up, we entered all the grievances and sorted them by the agreed-to seven
affinity types. We proceeded to craft similar but consistent answers to the
grievances by affinity type and moved the all grievances out of the first step.
The database gave us an advantage of answering the grievances consistently and
quickly. We now had a history of our answers for future grievances.
The union was astounded that we had answered all the
grievances, although many were not the answers that they wanted; they now had
answers that they could show to their union members. We had introduced a
professional way to track and answer future grievances. Be
positive always but do not sugar coat a crisis.
Dr. Tom DePaoli,
(Dr. Tom) is currently an independent management consultant, the Principal of
Apollo Solutions, which does general business consulting in the human
resources, supply chain and lean six sigma areas. His organization was
self-founded in 1995. He retired as a Captain from the Navy Reserve. In other
civilian careers, he was a supply chain and human resources executive with
corporate purchasing turnaround experience and lean six sigma deployments. He
has worked for over ten major companies and consulted for over fifty
organizations throughout his career. Some of his consulting projects include:
information systems projects, re-engineering organizations, transformation,
e-procurement, e-commerce, change management, global sourcing and negotiating.
His industry experience is in the chemical, paper, pharmaceutical, IT,
automotive, government, consumer, equipment, services and consulting
industries. He has been published extensively in journals, magazines and books.
He is the author of eleven books all available on Amazon. He has instructed at six education facilities
in numerous roles. He is active in supporting the YMCA, Wounded Warrior, and
the prevention of the bullying of children.https://www.amazon.com/author/tomdepaoli = Dr.
Tom’s Amazon author’s page
http://www.apollosolutions.us = website of
Apollo Solutions his business
drtombooks.com = more information on Dr. Tom’s books
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