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Doing the Easy Things First

By Corey Rosen, NCEO Executive Director

I was painting my porch the other day and started by doing the hard part— carefully painting the edges where the blue porch met the yellow walls. Doing the hard part first is an ethic that pervades much of how we approach any task. Somehow, if we can get the unpleasant or difficult part out of the way, then the rest will seem easy.

The approach works well for painting, but when it comes to business, especially the business of managing an employee ownership company, it may not work so well.

I learned this lesson first when we set up the NCEO in the early 1980s. Some people urged that we focus our efforts on such things as trying to get The Wall Street Journal or 60 Minutes to run a story, or that we write to companies that we thought should have employee ownership plans and show them the light. We tried this for a while, but, frankly, it was just too hard. On the other hand, it was pretty easy to get articles published in business trade magazines. That got us some inquiries, and these people were much more likely to join than people who had never heard of us. Our fear was that going after these most likely recruits to employee ownership seemed like "skimming the cream," and that when we had reached all of them, life would get much harder. In fact, what happened was that as these companies set up plans, they told their colleagues about the idea (and, hopefully, about us). These business owners would have been very reluctant about employee ownership before, but seeing that someone they knew had already done it, they now became more open to the idea. So the cream got skimmed, but as it did, more cream rose to the top.

This concept has particular resonance in creating employee ownership cultures. Take the idea of sharing financial information, for instance. Most companies begin by giving out income statements and balance sheets, no doubt the most confusing aspect of a company's various financial measures. Employees are given training to help them understand these numbers, and sometimes an effort is made to show them how these numbers relate to day-to-day work. The easier alternative would be to start with the numbers people work with everyday, such as how many units their machine produces, what percentage of customers pay bills on time, or the profit margins of the products that salespeople are pushing. Once these concepts are mastered, you can move on to show how they relate to the overall cost structure of the work area. Costs can then be compared to revenues generated to create a work-area specific income statement. The final step would be to relate this to the entire business. The whole process would be less discouraging to people and much more relevant.

The concept of doing the easy things first applies to employee involvement as well. Some companies start by setting up an elaborate employee committee system with extensive initial training to help bring people’s skills and attitudes into alignment with the new involvement practices. It is hard and often frustrating work that can take years to yield results. Other companies start with a simple, easy approach to solving particular problems through a participatory technique. Is there a production bottleneck? Set up an ad hoc committee to see if employees can solve it. Use what you learn from that process to extend the concept to other areas, modifying the approach as you get feedback on how it is working.

After a while, you can ask people what they need to know to use this approach better. Now you can focus training on the specific skills that will be needed, and people will be able to see how they can use these skills to make their jobs better. As people behave differently, their attitudes will change (attitudes follow behavior more than the other way around). Once people get used to making decisions this way, you can expand the system to other areas, perhaps creating more permanent and elaborate structures.

Trying to do everything at once not only can be very difficult, but it runs the risk of creating employee skepticism about the underlying concepts of involvement. There are situations, of course, where only wholesale, dramatic changes can convince people that management is serious about a new corporate culture, but, absent the need for this kind of major turnaround, doing the easy stuff first will usually make the hard stuff easier.

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