Some Broken Windows Management Tips and Stories

Some Broken Windows Management Tips and Stories

By Dr Tom DePaoli

 

For more tips read Dr. Tom’s Book Broken Windows Management available on Amazon.

 

 

Anticipate Opposition to Broken Windows Management. Many people think that spending money on constantly fixing the issues that employees have is coddling them. However, there are many other management theories or flavors of the month, that are used, and do not have significant results on employee morale or the bottom line. My thesis is that broken windows management is more effective than many other management theories. It does require immense attention to detail. The reason it gets more buy-in from employees is that it actually does something for them and they get involved in the fixes.

Be Relentless. It is your job to make sure that all the complaints are heard and solved. Make sure you persevere and remove as many obstacles as you can to making the workplace more tolerable and pleasant for your employees. If you give up, they will give up, and fall silent about their complaints. Complaints are like gems so treat them like gems. Make sure you learn from solving their complaints.

Build Their Empathy Intelligence. Get your employees out to other departments to understand their issues and barriers to doing a successful job. In addition to understanding of the department's issues; the employees may come up with ideas that make your department run better and create better interdepartmental cooperation. Make sure you give them a chance to learn and work with other departments.

Clean Up for CEO Story. I worked for a company where once a year the CEO would tour the plant. The activity of the week before his tour was hectic. Things that were broke or that were not cleaned for an entire year were scrubbed and fixed. This is the exact wrong approach to broken windows management. You must continually fix the issues that employees have and make sure that your plant is spotless and tour ready for customers at all times. Doing this only once a year sends a message to employees that they are not really important only the CEO is important. Make the employees the most important ones year-round.

Coddle Employees Not Top Executives. Broken windows management in essence creates an atmosphere where employees know that when they have an issue or complaint it will be fixed expeditiously. This builds a confidence in employees that when they have a complaint or an issue that it will be solved and not ignored. It snowballs and employees bring up more complaints and issues with the confidence that they will be solved and their leader will not ignore what they value as important for their quality of work life.   Customer Tours of Broken Windows Management Success Story. One of the best ways to sell your product to a particular customer is to show them your facilities and how you do your work. I worked for a company that manufactured packaging machinery. They were very upset because they lost the sale of fifty machines ($500,000 each) to a competitor company. As a last step they urged the potential buyer company to send people to our manufacturing plant to just tour the plant. When the touring party arrived, the plant was in its usual spectacular shape, well-organized, clean and the employees were just incredibly positive and happy.  Soon after they arrived back to their home country; we got the word that they had changed their mind. They gave us the order for the fifty machines.  Broken windows management can be one of the bestselling points to your customers. Take full advantage of it.

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 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-thomas-depaoli/0/736/6b3/  = LinkedIn home page

 

Empower your employees with Broken Windows Management. #empowerment #walkthewalk

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