Q:
We have eight foremen and about seventy-five field workers on our crews. Most of them are pretty good workers who follow the company policies. But we have two foremen who have been with the company for a long time. They get the jobs built on budget but just won't do their paperwork or learn the computer. Got any ideas?
David Keath
Rock Hard Concrete
A:
The reason your foremen don't learn the computer is not because they're dumb. In fact, they are very smart--they have trained you to do their paperwork for them!
When you let people off the hook, you are hurting your company, and others lose respect for you as a weak boss. Could you imagine a successful restaurant letting the waiters decide whether or not to use the computerized point of sale system, or just write down their orders on a scrap of paper? The waiters who didn't learn the computer would be gone in sixty seconds! When you let employees decide which company policies they want to follow, what is the point of having any policies?
Give these two foremen the training required to learn the paperwork and computer system, and give them six months to get on board or ship them off to another company.
Construction Business Owner, June 2010
