Businesses have a hard and a soft side but have traditionally focused on the former rather than the latter. Increasingly, however, greater attention is being paid to the soft side, and there are examples from outside the broiler and processing industries that can offer valuable insights.
The hard side of a business comprises numbers, plans and organigrams, for example, which are easier to quantify and can offer quicker returns.
The soft side is more challenging and comprises culture and relationships. It is difficult to achieve as it may require changing employee attitudes.
Getting the soft side of business right may include offering training or guaranteeing a harassment free environment, ensuring equality and empathy, or encouraging greater focus and curiosity about the ideas of colleagues. Once achieved, however, organizations become healthier places to work and are better prepared to survive crises.
There are a number of elements that are key in helping to create such working environments.
Hiring
Hiring needs to focus on a candidate’s empathy as this may offer an insight into how that person may respond to coworkers’ needs. The attribute is characterized by being friendly, careful, grateful, altruistic, service orientated and having integrity.
Training
Training is the most important use of capital that companies can make. Unfortunately, in too many, skills are not given due importance, but they are what meeting objectives depends upon.
Human resources
While traditionally the term human resources is applied to staff, this needs to be rethought and replaced with the term Infinite Mind.
Resources are finite and can be exhausted, while the staff needs to be viewed as a fundamental pillar supporting the existence of the company, that must be protected. Viewing employees as an Infinite Mind must be carefully nurtured, to continuously grow.
There are examples of how this approach to management has benefitted well-known companies operating outside of the poultry business that have developed their own ways of capitalizing on their Infinite Mind.
Collective management
The concept of collective management has been implemented at U.S. technology company 3M, perhaps best known for its paper block Post-it Notes to the market.
How Post-It Notes came about perhaps illustrates the company’s attitude to its employees.
The company had been developing a glue that, it was hoped, would be stronger than anything then available, however, its test product fell far short of expectations. Rather than rejecting it, the company called on staff for ideas on how the adhesive might be used.
Years later, an employee was at choir rehearsal. The sheets of music were repeatedly falling off their stands, and he remembered the failed glue. At a subsequent rehearsal he applied it to the sheet music which stayed in place but could easily be removed at the end of practice. The idea for Post-it Notes emerged.
In 3M innovation comes through a collective culture, in which all staff participate. The company has proved that people work better when they work together, sharing ideas and borrowing from others. The concept of mine simply does not exist within the company.
Ideas are never discarded because, one day, they might be useful. Innovation comes from interaction, workers are encouraged to share their ideas – listening to a solution that one colleague may offer another could, in fact, solve the problem of a third colleague.
Balanced Management
Major global retailer Costco follows a philosophy of Balanced Management, treating employees as family members and garnering trust and loyalty.
The company has built what it calls a security circle, designed to make the most of good times and survive difficult times. Rather than reduce worker incomes, for example, when times are hard, the company believes that it is more profitable to minimize staff turnover and maximize productivity.
Costco has a philosophy that no client will ever love a company unless the company’s employees love it first.
U.S. Southwest Airlines also takes the Balanced Management approach. Its priority is its employees. If employees feel satisfied, they will serve clients well, and the result will be continuous growth.
Southwest also has a circle of security, made up of employees with identical values.
When security circles function well, information exchange and communication flourish. Such an environment is essential for innovation and preventing any problems that may arise from worsening.
There are various areas where these management methods could be applied in the broiler industry.
Might adopting these approaches result in a way of moving harvesting crates without using forklift trucks, reducing broiler stress? Could enclosures be controlled remotely, to allow the harvesting team to work more efficiently? Are there ways to reduce fatigue for those handling heavy boxes at the processing plant?
Circles of security could bring together representatives from feed suppliers, farms, transport companies, processing and quality control staff, through to maintenance and those who deal with sub-products, benefitting the company and employees alike.
