Courtesy of TerraCycle

Sustainable Profits

The challenges of a waste-recycling business.

Do you tell your employees everything that’s going on? Or only what you think they need to know? I have grappled with this question since I started managing a business.

Early on, I leaned toward limiting the information as I didn’t want people worrying about something that wasn’t their job and becoming distracted and unproductive. The problem was that when challenges came up I felt pretty much alone on them — and the staff was left guessing what was happening. Predictably, the lack of information fueled rumors and damaged morale.

Over the last decade of leading TerraCycle, however, my mindset has slowly migrated to the other side of this question. Today, I’m inclined to give as much transparency as possible. I say as much as possible because we don’t really give total transparency. Human-resource matters (such as company payroll or stock options), legal matters (of all kinds) and certain financial matters (like merger deals we’re working on) are not shared with the entire team. Instead they are shared with those who have responsibility over them.

But outside of these areas, our transparency is proactive and constant. All of our employees see everything — from what we invoiced that month to positive and negative changes with our clients — and they see it in great detail. Two years ago, we started a weekly reporting structure that requires every employee to send a weekly report to his or her manager. The manager comments back to the employee and then compiles the reports into a master departmental report.

This master report is then sent to every employee in the business, every two weeks. One week we do our United States departments, the following week we do international. I review each report and write detailed feedback to each department — trying to be very frank — and send that feedback is also sent to every employee. As a result, Mechi, who manages public relations for TerraCycle Argentina, will receive the same reports as Michael, our global vice president of brigades.

The benefits of this method have been astronomical. All of our 100 employees know exactly what is going on and can learn from what other departments are doing. It has created a feeling of ownership and trust, and it has fostered communication. It also brings issues to the forefront much faster than ever before and serves as our critical feedback engine — the feedback given by myself and by managers is not just fluff. So employees always know how they are doing and how their performance compares to their peers. (A friend of mine, David Hassel, recently started a company called 15Five.com, which automates this process.)

For example, we had a major retail success in Mexico earlier this year that involved Colgate and Wal-Mart. We deployed oral care waste collection programs (for your toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes) in every Wal-Mart in Mexico. Because of the weekly report procedure, our employs in other countries were able to see the program progress from planning to execution and were able to keep their local Colgate contacts up to speed, creating excitement and opportunities to do similar programs in other countries.

While we have not yet achieved 100 percent transparency, we have turned a non-transparent system into one that is as transparent as I think we can go.

Tom Szaky is the chief executive of TerraCycle, which is based in Trenton.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=01328c7426200c4d091399590080ace0