“We’re proud of the fact that we initiated an employee involvement program at Brunswick long before it became fashionable at other mines,” Moerman says. The company introduced its first flexible compensation program for employees in 1976 when William James (now president of Falconbridge Ltd.) was in charge of the company. But an arbitrary 10% reduction in the workforce that year taught the company a more important lesson. That reduction was so painful that the company began searching for a better way to treat its employees. “It’s no longer acceptable to treat employees as numbers and just lay off people when times are tough,” Moerman says.
Three programs — a gain-sharing program, an employee stock option plan and a productivity improvement program — have paid off handsomely for the company, according to Moerman. They have resulted in more than a decade of peace among workers and management. Last year, the gain-sharing program (in which employees initiate changes for the benefit of the greater good) generated 240 individual ideas.
However, only 5% of all eligible employees participate in the stock option plan — regardless of the fact that it’s almost impossible for workers to lose money on the plan. Under the terms of the plan, an employee uses 5% of his annual paycheque to purchase shares in the company and the company contributes a third more shares to his or her portfolio. Participation is poor, Moerman says, because the people of northern New Brunswick don’t follow the market as they do in other mining towns in Canada. “They’re too conservative,” Moerman explains. “But now that there is a stockbroker in town (Jean- Marc Vienneau of Levesque Beaubien), things may pick up. It takes a while to get these things started.” Moerman hasn’t stopped there. For the past two years, about 60 Brunswick employees have taken a 1-week semina r from Dr. W. Edwards Deming of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Deming is a U.S. management guru made famous in Japan. Now in his nineties, he has been urging employees to involve themselves in solving company problems. “He articulated my philosophy better than I ever could,” Moerman says, “so I’ve decided to have as many employees learn from him as possible.” The company has also engaged the Canadian affiliate of Tennessee Associates, a consulting company, to institute the program at Brunswick.
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