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Why did you decide
to work with Stop At Nothing?
We had very low employee satisfaction marks with Technical
Operations, one of the lowest in the company. Our attrition
levels were too high. You could just see by walking
around in the organization that stress levels were
incredibly high.
I saw instances where people were going home almost
furious with their counterparts within our division.
The fights were almost open. It was impacting their
effectiveness at work. There was a lot of covering
up going on; no one would admit to a problem.
When I went to the one-week High Impact Leadership
Seminar, I returned with a sense that this looked like
it had the basis for very significant improvement.
It sounds like you got some personal benefit from the
High Impact Leadership Seminar.
I was almost obsessive with details of a very minor
nature. Coming out of that course and looking forward
to where I wanted to be personally and where I thought
the organization needed to be forced me to look at
a much higher level, much longer range. Just by doing
that, I eliminated a lot of stress, not only on me,
but also on the people who were reporting to me.
Did you have any concerns when going into your first
project with Stop At Nothing?
Quite frankly, I did, from the standpoint that the
kinds of things you do are not always easily accepted
by technical people. In fact, because of previous programs,
it was probably not held in very high esteem. But that
was quickly overcome by the quality of what Stop At
Nothing has done.
How well do you think the approach worked?
It's been tremendous for us. The employee survey results
have gone from the low 50s to 81 percent. Our attrition
rate is down to under 10 percent, compared to 20 percent
in other businesses. And in the highly technical field
that we're in, that's amazing.
What other changes have you noticed?
People talk about things openly. They have a common
vocabulary to address problems with other people.
Everybody on the management team is having a lot more
fun than we ever had before. People are a lot more
open to accepting issues, and taking accountability.
Stress has fallen off, and people are more effective
together.
Was there anything unique in the way that Stop At Nothing
worked with WORLDSPAN?
I think it may be the approach of coming at it from
the intrapersonal and then moving outward from there.
You receive very heavy support from the people at Stop
At Nothing. They are always there as a resource, always
there with other ideas on how to keep things going.
I never saw that before in a program by anybody else.
How would you quantify the results in dollars or percentage
of productivity?
Before we started this program, attrition was around
the 15 percent range, and it's around eight percent
now.
From a dollar standpoint, every person who does not
leave saves us $70,000 to $100,000—suppose you
save five people per year—it's anywhere up to
half a million dollars a year in savings just on the
attrition side. It doesn't take very many of those
to have a program like this pay for itself fairly quickly
in a division of 700 people.
How do you feel your and your employees' quality of
life has changed?
Prior to starting this program, we had almost everybody
in the shop on call all the time. There was no regard
for their personal lives. As a result of getting this
very strong message through this process, we built
second-level support groups. The net effect is that
the second-level support groups have freed up peoples'
weekends and nights. That has been tremendous and the
feedback has been excellent from the staff just on
that one point.
What advice would you give others in a similar situation
to the one you were in a couple of years ago?
I would highly recommend the program, but I would not
call it a "program." It's something that
has to happen whereby you make the commitment to change
the fabric of the organization and you knit everything
that you're doing into that new fabric. Unless the
entire leadership team goes into it with that understanding
and willingness to stay true to the end, you are not
going to make a lot of progress. You need to stay in
common and you need to be thinking of it and trying
to find ways of promoting it day in and day out. Stop
At Nothing does a nice job of helping you support that,
yet it comes back to you and your team to really make
that happen. |
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Interview with Mike DiBernardo,
Vice President, Worldspan |
