Business Guide
How-To Guide for Business offers step-by-step instruction for preparing your workplace for a prosperous and sustainable future.
Download your free copy of the Tomorrow’s Workplace Guide for Business
TOMORROW’S WORKPLACE BUSINESS GUIDE
Community Guide
Enjoy a Community Guide of the project scope and context for your Community/Business project.
Learn how community services and business can collaborate to enhance the workplace and integrate diversity in a variety of contexts.
Download your Free copy of the Community Guide For Tomorrow’s Workplace.
Facilitators Guide
Chambers and HR Consultants: Enjoy a Power Point Presentation of the project scope and context for your Business/Community project.
Tomorrow’s Workplace projcet was driven by the needs of business owners and revealed:
- * the importance of addressing priorities identified by the business
- * levaraging workforce diversity
* the importance of partnership with community and employment service providers to improve the competitive edge
Diversity is the new competitive advangtage for sustainable business. Rethink, reshape and renew your business community.
Download your free Tomorrow’s Workplace Overview Presentation. Learn the scope of the project and what is needed to initiate your community/workplace/business collaborative model.
Research Guide
Enjoy an extensive Literature Review of the project scope and context for your Business/Community project.
Download your free copy of Tomorrow’s Workplace Literature Review
Workplace Creativity on a Budget
Employee Ingenuity Needs Boost in Beleaguered Economy
In today’s economy with rising costs and struggling governments nursing it back to health, creativity and inventive imagination amongst employees is downsizing. However, this is one cost of doing business that can have long reaching effects as it permeates the workplace and slowly syphons the growth of the future.
In the Saturday edition of the Globe and Mail, February 19th, 2010, Jennifer Myers posted an article entitled: “Workplace creativity shrivels on the vine.”
You can access that article here, and we recommend that you do. Myers offers valuable ideas and suggestions as well as practical application of “creative ways” to innovate on a budget.
What is A Business Strategy?
To Be Successful in Business, There Must be A Working Strategy
Strategic Planning
Stragetic outline is crucial to your business success. It’s your roadmap, you chosen path, you contingency plans, your plan B, C and includes the “run for you life, every man for himself” plan.
Once a company has a plan, the next step is to communicate your strategy in effective ways to your employees, partners, suppliers and customers.
The first place to start is to answer some of the following questions. You might find this excercise helpful with a consultant or third party facilitator who will ask the next questions: why, what if, why not, and who says.
Before you call the board of directors or your management team, begin working with these foundational strategic questions:
- Direction: where is the business trying to get to in the short and long term.
- Markets: Which markets does the business compete in and what kind of activities are involved in such markets?
- Advantage: How can the business perform better than the competition? What’s their competitive edge?
- Resources: What resources (skills, assets, finance, relationships, technical competence, and facilities) are required in order to be able to compete?
- Environment? What external, environmental factors affect the businesses’ ability to compete?
- Stakeholders: What are the values and expectations of those who have power in and around the business?
Where do you run into roadblocks? How have you communicated your strategy to the game players in your company? Your comments are always welcome and others will benefit from your perspective.
Leading Change
- Change Needs a Focus
The Real Deal on Change
There’s a popular belief that people resist change. In reality people don’t resist change–they resist being controlled. People have predictable concerns with change that once identifies, can help valued employers shape their plans to support individuals through business growth and all the changes that brings.
Here’s the inside information on six predictable concerns that can hinder successful change implementation. With this understanding, you’re set to shape your future with employees who are on board.
- The first predictable concern is information concern. People want to know why the change is needed and what needs to be done. They don’t want to be sold on a plan, but they want to understand the necessity of change. Tell people what is it that you know, that if they knew, they will come to the same conclusion. If people know what change agents know, understand what they understand, they will be less resistant to change.
- The second concern is personal concern. People want to know how the change will impact or benefit them. Will they, as individuals, win or loose as a result of the change? If personal concerns are not addressed, people will be more resistant to adopt change, and they will tend to revert back to their old behaviors once they have the chance.
- The next concern is implementation concern – the logistics of the change. They can understand the business need, the personal benefits, but they need to know the steps in the change process and the available resources in case things won’t go as planned. It is important to provide them with information about who can answer questions and provide them with assistance in case things don’t go as smooth as anticipated.
- Another concern is impact concern. People want to know how much of a difference the change will make. If the three previous concerns are successfully attended to, you won’t need to design details of the impact concern. Your people will provide you with feedback and tell you what’s making a difference.
- The fifth concern is collaboration. More than just addressing everyone’s concerns, involve employees in the changing processes, and they will help you move the change forward.
- The last concern is refinement. Source continuous feedback and make adjustments along the way. Make the journey together.
If change leaders understand these concerns, they can anticipate and address them, and facilitate an informative change process. Concerns are not necessarily negative, they are merely unanswered questions.
The key to addressing those concerns is a high involvement strategy. You need to give people an opportunity to have their voice heard. If people are involved in decision making and they feel they contribute to the change, they will be less likely to resist it. “People who plan the battle, rarely battle the plan.” Go forth.
Gayle Hadfield; Nicoleta Ratiu
Changing Demographics Impacting Tomorrow’s Workplace
Changing Demographics Will Impact Tomorrow’s Workplace in BC
Sohee Ahn
Staffing issues will be challenging for BC business in the coming decades warned Ahn: BC Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour, George Khoury: Alliance Sector Councils, and Rita Hernandez: Immigrant Employment Council of BC.
Strategic thinking and planning is key, and collaboration between government, the business community and service providers is the only way to insure future growth for the workplace.
Alisa Choi Darcy from Quote End Quote:Cross Cultural Strategy was passionate in her call to businesses to reach out to ethnic communities for both customers and staff in order to make their diversity values credible. “Cultural integration is absolutely necessary to the future success of the workplace” said Choi.
MC, Mary Jane Stenberg, Acting President of the Surrey Board of Trade.
Dr. Ginger Grant’s presentation presented a metaphor for change and the way it creates emotional reactions. William Gruber of the BC Hydro Multicultural Society shared what Hydro has done and is doing to create a true multicultural workplace.
Lively discussions in breakout sessions surfaced themes and challenges for future development. Donna McFadden, Tomorrow’s Workplace Project Manager, urged participants to use the conference as a beginning of a new relationship allowing employers and service providers to work collaboratively toward a successful workplace.
Bill Beatty, Project Director, SUCCESS Business & Economic Development Division, underlined the importance of the learning outcomes that have come from the first phase of the project.
Sam Sing Full Line Specialties (Left)
Highlighting the conference were businesses owners Jim Hargrove of Analytic Systems and Ken Ehman of Full Line Specialties, actual project participants, who talked about project impact on their businesses and on their thinking.
Did you attend the conference? We would appreciate your comments: what you learned, what you experienced, who you met, future goals based on the conference concepts? Do you have suggestions to offer? Use the comment box below.
Are you new to the blogging experience? Not sure how to comment? Read Here.
Related Material:
Sohee Ahn Presentation Notes Oct 22, 09
George Khoury Presentation Notes Oct 22, 09
Rita Hernadez Presentation Notes Oct 22, 09
Analytic Systems: From A Strong History to Tomorrow’s Workplace
The following article is reprinted with permission from Surrey Board of Trade: Business in Surrey, September 2009 Edition (pg 6, 11)
JIM HARGROVE
In 1976 Lloyd Hargrove, previously the chief civilian engineer for the underwater acoustics division of the Department of National Defense, which was also known as Anti-Submarine Warfare started Analytic Systems Ware using the ASW acronym for the company name.
Company President Jim Hargrove, son of the founder, began working for the company in 1979 as a student engineer, while studying the professionat UBC. He described his background and involvement in the company, through the succession from his father in 1993 and the company’s future directions with Editor Ray Hudson.
One of the early projects I worked on was developing an automatic pilot for steering boats and we ended up spinning that project off into a separate company in 1983. Originally called Compunav Systems, it’s still in business as ComNav Marine and is very highly respected in that field.
In 1991, following a dispute, my share was bought out. In deciding what I was going to do, I considered taking over Analytic Systems, but my Dad was operating out of a little office in East Vancouver, where I didn’t want to be. Just by serendipity while driving around Newton one night, we found a small strata warehouse unit in Walnut Industrial Park. I had a look at it with our real estate agents, brought my Dad out and showed it to him, and said “if you’re interested in a partnership in Analytic Systems, I’ll buy this building and we’ll move the company here.” It took him only a few seconds to say yes.
Our first unit was about 2,000 square feet on two floors, and along with one employee, he and I moved the business and set up shop there (We now hold 16 thousand square feet at that complex). At that time we also re-incorporated it as Analytic Systems Ware 1993 Ltd. It was considered a prudent thing to do to sever any legal commitments with the previous company and start anew under my direction.
Were you building the products you designed or were you jobbing that part out?
I did what you’d call a vertically integrated facility, where we do most everything in house, designing and building everything here. We also decided not to do any more custom engineering. Over the years my Dad had done a number of projects in the power electronics area, so I knew there was a base of design work in that field we could draw on. Once I took the company over, we finished whatever projects we had on the books for clients, but we never took on anything new. We said that from that day forward we were a power electronics company, and we would use the intellectual property that we already owned, and work to develop new intellectual property in that specific niche.
You know it was pretty scary in the beginning.
You know it was pretty scary in the beginning. I think in the first year we did $70 thousand in sales, which doesn’t even come close to covering the cost of having the door open. But we persevered, and we came out with our first catalogue in 1995. We focused initially on the marine industry because that’s where we had all our contacts, and slowly but surely things started to move forward. The sales continued to pick up. Because I kept in touch with everybody that I knew, we started to get some opportunities outside of the marine industry. One of the key ones was with the Teleflex Canada in Richmond, where we were invited to come to the table to do the power electronics portion of a new military cook stove they were designing for the US Army.
We helped to design one of two power electronics products for that project, and when Teleflex subsequently won the contract to build the stove, we were given a contract for what was called a battery pack. When we got that contract, we took over another half bay unit in our Surrey complex. From there we reinvested the income into the development of new products as the business kept on growing. A lot of our growth came from what is called the Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) military marketplace. Slowly but surely, although we’ve continued to service the marine industry and the industrial marketplace, a lot of our key growth has come from the military, particularly the American military, either directly to military or through prime sub-contractors like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin.
Those sorts of contracts are almost recession-proof too.
We’re so busy right now we haven’t even been touched by what’s going on economically. We’ve grown from 2 owners and one employee in 1993, to 75 today, and we have set up facilities both in Delta and Surrey. In Surrey we continued to buy additional units in Walnut Industrial Park, so now we own or control about 16 thousand square feet of space there.
We use a lot of aluminum extrusions for building heat sinks or housings for the products that we make. It was one of the biggest sources for our quality problems we had with both on-time delivery and quality of the extrusion. We’d order this stuff from California where it would be made to our design and shipped to a local machine shop which would cut and machine it, have it anodized and deliver it to us with all its value added. But it would arrive with the fins bent or something would happen in the shipping of the raw extrusion – yet it would be processed anyway, which caused us no end of problems, so about five years ago we finally decided we had to go into the CNC machining business, which is a dirty messy process compared with electronics. Originally we were going to move the CNC operation in to Delta as well, but we’ve decided now after seeing how things played out, we’re leaving that in Surrey and expanding it into an independent enterprise. So the CNC work will happen in Surrey and the electronics side will be in Delta.
We’ve built this one step at a time – a process of putting one foot in front of the other.
All of our growth has been financed through either bank financing or re-investment of income, so we have complete control over what the company does. We’re not beholding to Angel or Institutional investors. We have a lot more flexibility in what we do.
What is your dream for Analytic Systems now?
We were just meeting with the people with the Tomorrow’s Workplace project and we said that this year our sales will hit around $9 million. Our three year goal is to hit somewhere around $20 million. In order to do that, we want to introduce four new product families in the power-electronics field over the next 36 months. We want to continue to develop the markets we’re in but we’re also committed to growing into and exploiting the green energy marketplace as well. So we’ve identified those three key objectives for the next three years.
What attracted you to become involved in the Tomorrow’s Workplace initiative?
Although we were pretty happy with the way things were going with the business, the concept of having people come into the business to do a global assessment of how we run our business and give us feedback on how we could do it better, was very interesting to us. We weren’t really sure what we were getting into at the outset. It’s been a very good program, but it’s been very challenging: everything from reworking our mission statement our values, our vision to the nuts and bolts of how we get to where we need to be to be a twenty-first century employer.
Can you describe some of the aspects of the program from your perspective?
It’s going to give us a vision across the business for how we can grow that is accepted by everybody. One of the key points is, rather than developing the vision at the top and flowing it down, the Tomorrow’s Workplace consultants are helping us build the vision from the shop floor up.
We’re engaging key people in every aspect in the organization that we probably would never have done otherwise. So you get a complete vision that’s easy to get buy-in from everybody in the company from the entry level assembler on up to our VPs.
Soon businesses aren’t going to be able to meet all of our workforce requirements from our domestic workforce, and we’ll need to look to new-comers to fill that demand. How diverse is your workforce, and how do see that evolving?
We have people from virtually every continent on the planet working here.
It seems that in the summer, half our staff goes to Romania for example. But we have a lot of Europeans, people from Fiji, Indo-Canadians. I think that the diversity of the community is well represented in our workforce, and everybody brings value.
Your involvement with the Tomorrow’s Workplace project is just about done, September or October. What would you say to anyone else thinking about getting involved with this program?
I think they should jump at the opportunity.
They’re going to learn an awful lot about themselves and their business, and what it takes to remain competitive. In order to keep your business competitive, you have to have good people. It doesn’t really matter what business you’re in, business comes down to the people you employ, and they walk out the door at 4 o’clock everyday. You want them to come back to work the next morning. Often that has little to do with money and everything to do with quality of life and vocational challenge. So where I think Tomorrow’s Workplace is really helping us is to identify how we can build on and improve on those areas. It’s easy to grow the business when people want to come to work for you, when you’re identified as a workplace where people will be fulfilled.
Labour is going to be in short supply and this recession isn’t going to last forever. We will see things turn back to when it’s a buyer’s market for the labour supply, and getting and holding good employees becomes difficult again. Preparing for that, I feel is the underlying theme of Tomorrow’s Workplace, how to differentiate your workplace from the one next door.
Our thanks to the Surrey Board of Trade and Analytic Systems for their generosity to print.
Cultivating Innovation
Almost the only thing I know about the world of work in the future is that I probably won’t recognize it. – Lynn Corrigan
Innovations in the way we work and communicate continue to create headlines, and the answer to the question of how we add value evolves more and more quickly.
Both the lead articles in the Training + Development’sJuly 2009 issue focus on innovation. Michael J. Moscynski asserts that innovation is a skill that can be taught in “3-2-1 Innovate!” Michael Laff, in his article, “The Roots of Innovation”, reflects that the real source of innovation is the response to market demand ( See Article ). The message, that innovation is something that comes from identifying market needs and trends is something that I’ve heard before, but Michael Laff takes it further, noting that process improvements can be just as important as creating new products, citing Toyota’s skills in process improvement as the key to their takeover of the market. He notes that Anjan Thakor, of Washington University in St. Louis, has identified four types of innovation:
- collaborative
- control
- competitive
- breakthrough
Connecting innovation with the idea that we can teach it, and knowing that we can innovate in ways that don’t call for genius, somehow makes it much more accessible, and that’s a good thing since innovation is quickly becoming a critical skill for tomorrow’s workplace.
You may find the following interview from the Harvard Business Review with David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council. helpful in considering your own plan for innovation in your business:
Do you consider your work environment one that fosters innovation? If so, how? If not, what could be done to change it?
Post submitted by Lynn Corrigan, Consultant for Tomorrow’s Workplace
