60 SECONDS: Investing In Human Assets

Picture this: Your first day on the job as manager of the bindery department and you notice an argument starting to escalate over by the folder. Before you know it, the fists are up and out. “Yikes!” I thought. “What have I gotten myself into?”

That was three years ago. Today, my department is a much better place.

After day one, I knew things needed to change and fast. It was apparent that the change had to start with people. I knew if I had my staff rowing in the right direction with the right mindset, everything else would fall in line.

In today's competitive world, we don't have time to fight the baggage and negativity that plague some bindery operations.

My solution was to invest in my staff to raise their skill level, empower them to make decisions and elevate their status in the company.

I had two different pep talks for guiding employees on the new path. My “Life's too short to be miserable in your job” speech was delivered to the hard cases, while “Help me help you” was given to the more optimistic workers.

Bindery workers were empowered to make quality decisions and taught to be customer advocates. Bindery staff inspect jobs for errors (misspellings, printing flaws, font reflows, etc.) and have the authority to send flawed work back to other departments.

With the bindery being the last stage of the game, our team acts on behalf of customers to ensure that they would buy the product we're producing for them.

If a job is not up to snuff, we reprint it at no cost to the customer. Most of the time, customers don't know we manufactured it twice because we still hit their timeline.

The bindery staff assuming the role of customer advocate has even had a trickle-up effect in the company. Other departments now look harder at what they do.

The strategy worked—after six long months, our shop became a happier place to work.

My department is now full of content, smart, innovative and driven people. We have so many good ideas coming from staff that we must pick and choose which ones to implement and which to put on the wish list. It is like hiking past gold nuggets along a trail and only having a backpack big enough to pick one up every once in a while.

Our goal at PrintingForLess.com is to help our small business customers be successful by providing them with great marketing materials to promote their business.

There's a big rock outside of our shop that says, “PFL, America's Print Shop.” We see it every day when we come to work and challenge our crews to figure out what that means to them.

We know at PFL that it's not what we do; it's how we do it and who we do it with. We ask ourselves, “What is going to set us apart from everyone else so that we can proudly call ourselves America's Print Shop?”

Now picture this: We've built a happy culture in our bindery production area, and I spend my days surrounded by flying ideas rather than flying fists.