Fulfilling The Needs of the Customer With Healthy Growth
When considering the needs and demands of the customer it is very important to be able to meet those demands and be able to help when called. In the contracting industry it is commonplace to hire and lay off people quickly and often to fluctuate with the demand or lack thereof. In our experience this often opens the possibility of hiring people who lack the skill and safety culture the customer should expect from us. It also creates a workforce that feels no sense of stability within the company they work for.
At Prime Industrial we have put a lot of thought into balancing the needs of the customer and appropriately ramp up to meet those needs. It is important to first look at the demand of work. Are we unable to help with a job every once in a while or is it becoming more frequent than once in a while. Signaling the workload is increasing and will continue to be busy for the team, as well as busy for a few additional members if we hire more people. It’s a balancing act of some very important factors. Needs of the customer, reputation of Prime Industrial, appropriate fatigue days and ensuring a happy engaged safe team.
The knee jerk reaction sometimes can be to go grab anyone we can in order to tell the customer, “yes, we can also do that job”. In that action we are selling the work but we are potentially ignoring safety and quality of the execution of work. It is important above all else to bring in good candidates that we believe will work safe, follow instruction and deliver quality work. It is worth the wait to scale up slower to meet our criteria and in turn the criteria of the customer.
What does it say to the team if we hire aggressively vs hiring quality candidates and scale up cautiously? They can see and experience the negative impacts of bringing people in who do not hold the same safety and quality work values as them. Can they feel the culture they built slipping as a negative culture starts to root itself? Do they start to feel like their attention to detail, efficiency and above all else dedication to safety is undervalued? If we bring in a bunch of people who do not hold those values there is no other way of seeing than we do not appreciate the good values our team has. Hiring with intention and having criteria for hiring adds members to a family that holds the same values. This reinforces that we care about those values and want our team to have new members that will appreciate the team's values.