Ep. 67: Gordon Hofman - How Can I Improve My Organizational Culture for Better Productivity?

Contact Gordon Hofman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grhofman/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)

Welcome back for episode 67 of Count Me In. I'm your host Mitch Roshong, and I'll be bringing you to Adam's conversation with the vice president of finance for SSA Marine, Gordon Hoffman. SSA Marine is a global transportation and trucking firm with operations across five continents. Gordon is responsible for directing the financial strategy of the company and leading people in teams to efficiently move commerce. In this episode he talked to Adam about how organizational culture plays such an important role in employee retention and personal productivity, particularly within his finance function. Let's head over to their conversation to hear more now. 

Adam: (00:48)

So to start off, what are the drivers that help to create a culture of productivity within an organization? 

Gordon: (00:56)

Yeah, so there's, there's three main drivers that we're really focusing on right now and what those are is, you know, one is just providing meaning in the work that's being done. If you have people that are just showing up and doing tasks, you find that, you know, they'll start to space out, they're not really focused and then they'll get what needs to be done, done. But there's never really any emphasis to go above and beyond that or look for process, you know, to look for ways to improve. And what we've been doing to bring some focus in that is really just trying to create a connection between the company vision and the actual work, which can be a little bit tricky when you're, you're talking about finance and accounting because you know the vision for our company is we partnered to move commerce with efficiency, flexibility and integrity and at top level that's really kind of challenging too say, well, what does that have to do with finance? But from there what we've done is broken that down and, and really made a trail from our vision, which, how does that translate into values? How does that translate into more core long term objectives? And then finally, what are the strategies that help us achieve those objectives? And once you've done those three, four pieces, it's much easier to sit down with your team and say, you know, this is what we're trying to accomplish. This is how it fits with the overall company vision. And that kind of brings people into the company and what we're trying to accomplish. And so it's, that's a bit of a motivational factor that I think is really important to having people engaged and really thinking about how they can improve and how they can be productive and how they can add value. Once you have people engaged at that level, there's, you know, some more, you know, task related items that we really focus on them, which is one maker productivity measurable. Really you need to have some KPIs. I noticed in the past for us, we were on the operation side very focused on KPIs, the business operations side. But when I actually came to finance and accounting, you started asking about what our metrics are and they were, they're just weren't very many of them. Yeah. So once we, once we've really created that motivation and buy in for the company, you know, coming up with ways that you can actually measure your productivity. Cause you know, a lot of the times on the business side you can really focus on your operations. In our business, what's important is how many containers we've moved in an hour. And so a lot of our business was focused around that. But then when we got on the back end of finance and accounting, we stopped doing KPIs. And so we now adjust that. So those KPIs are just as important for measuring productivity within your finance. It really driving and showing people how you're improving. And then the final item on there is just creating priorities and making sure that you're checking into those priorities on a weekly basis. It's very easy, I've found on the finance accounting side, you know, where are the people that fix the problems and you're always putting out the fires and then you boost focus on really what is value adding. So taking some time on, on a weekly basis to readjust your priorities and make sure that you're focused on whatever those top three items or five items are in the coming week that really can add that. 

Adam: (04:20)

So now, you know, it seems like everybody in the whole world currently is working from home. How have you been able to kind of implement these things switching to a work from home workforce. 

Gordon: (04:31)

Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, we were talking about this probably three or four weeks before covid really started impacting everyone who said we want to, we want to be able to make it so that people can work at home and work remotely more often. Cause you know, especially with the younger generations, this is incredibly motivating for them and it's like a value they see in their business. So it's, it really comes around like, but once again, it's like setting priorities and then setting expectations, and then being able to measure them so that because you can't sit down and have a chat with someone or walk over to their desk and have a chat with them and say, well, how are things going? What do you have on your plate? You have to have other ways to really be able to demonstrate that no, you are getting what needs to be done, done. Everybody's on the same page. So in a way it's more documentation, which is thinking a little bit scary because it feels like you're creating a lot of bureaucracy. But by creating that, that documentation, it forces you into like the third item I talked about like, you know, really doing that weekly review of what the priorities are and then making sure that you're staying on task for them. So it really just, the work from home culture has just reinforced that you need to, you need to do this going forward. 

Adam: (05:51)

So do you have some examples to share of, of success? 

Gordon: (05:55)

Yeah, so we've got some like really granular levels of examples. One thing that we've found that's been incredibly successful for us is time blocking, where people just, you know, set out like two hours in their day and I'm going to get this done and I'm not going to answer email. I'm not gonna miss chat or anything like that. And you know, when we have people do that and really honor those two hours, the feedback we consistently get is like, I can't believe how much I got done. It's like I was able to knock that out. you know, and it was a lot easier. And I was originally thinking rather than taking what I thought was going to be a full day project, I got done in like two or three hours. So time blocking has been one of the first successes that we've gotten a lot of positive feedback from. The second thing that's been very beneficial to us on the prioritization we as an organization really mix our FP and a or historically we'd mix start FP and a and our accounting groups together in what we were seeing is that there was a lot of conflict in demand for if people's time that that wasn't really effective in actually getting things done. So people were kind of doing both jobs halfway instead of doing one of them completely and we just, we weren't making no, the deadlines that we're expected to make or the quality of product wasn't good. So we ended up really splitting those pieces up and we did that by like just digging into each of those processes and understanding what the bottlene...