Academik

Well Tuesday and Wednesday swept by rather quickly.

Tuesday began with some prayer around the issues facing Wintermar,
Kiki, and Martin. The time went very quickly as we prayed mainly for
families and then we went into a visioning session where we encourage
clients to broaden their minds and think big about what they want to
do. It’s the grade-school exercise where your counselor asks you, “If
you had a million dollars, what would you do?”, but in business form.

The session did not go as hoped because we brought up a sensitive
issue (we didn’t know it was sensitive at the time) and tried to pull
some ideas out of them. They didn’t respond. It was like their
tongues has been taken away from them. It was frustrating for all of
us, and the leaders said that it was the only one during the day like
that.

Afterwards we went over to City Walk and worked on our Scorecard for
Wintermar. We spent time filling in the blanks that we had.

Wednesday we covered our last two P’s - Place and Process.

Place asks the question - does your office or store communicate your
purpose? does it reflect the values of the company? What are the
colors? How much natural light is there? Does the place help reinforce
good health?

Having visited Wintermar several times now I knew they were doing many
things right. There’s a basketball court in the basement and a
fitness center on the top floor. The office looks very professional
and contains one of the nicest board rooms I’ve seen. Kiki mentioned
that the office can grow pretty loud because so many of the employees
are communicating with crew on the boats - I asked if they had
headsets to make them more comfortable being on the phone all day. No
- well there’s one thing we can do to make the employees feel better
at the office. I noticed a Muslim prayer room - was there anything
for Christians? No. There’s another option. The company name was in a
few places, but I didn’t ever see anything that stated the company’s
purpose or values - we decided it would be good to have a plaque with
Wintermar values in the entryway so that clients and employees would
be reminded of them every time they entered the building. Martin also
had a great suggestion that the company could encourage family values
by providing dormitories for families to stay when their husbands/
fathers are working long-term away from home. We didn’t know how to
quite manage that so I’ve recommended crew be given vouchers for
flights home during long term stays. The idea will need some
refinement, but by realizing what was missing on the boat, we were
able to create a dual impact : making employees happier and
encouraging strong family values.

As for Process Wintermar has a lot of great processes in place for
communication and evaluation. Kiki had mentioned to me though that
crewing and office HR use different payroll systems which makes extra
work for everyone. Aligning those two systems was our first
priority. Then I asked how prayer was included in the hiring
process? If they had given the company to God, then why were they
continually making decisions without consulting the CEO? We
encouraged Kiki to include prayer over resumes when she’s hiring and
for the CEO to pray over new employees (also a way for him to talk to
new employees about their values). The goal would be for staff
turnover to be reduced, and for new employees to be the right
employees (measured by the percentage who stick around after their 3
month probationary period).

With our last 2 p’s behind us we went back to work on positioning and
presence, two p’s that were a struggle considering we were dealing
with the HR department and not an entire company. We decided that
the positioning statement of the HR department would be “the
communication bridge between management and employees” and we worked
on strategies to communicate from the top down and from the bottom
up. For the former, that included creating a communication structure
within the company and creating a company vision/planning letter from
Pak Sugiman every 3 months so that employees had some idea of where
the company was going.

For the bottom up strategy we advised the creation of crew and staff
support teams that would talk with employees and low-level managers on
a regular basis. All employees (including boat crews) should be given
access to email on boats and on-shore. Wintermar already had a lot of
the right processes in place for fielding employee comments, or
communicating emergency issues so we hoped that the support teams
would give them an outlet for the minor day-to-day issues that they
never thought to communicate to management.

Tomorrow is the last unstructured day and we should have all our
materials done tonight… we don’t, but I’m sure we’ll be ready by our
Friday 11am deadline for our presentation!