Specialty Fabrics Review April 2020 - 6

BRIEFINGS

FORETHOUGHT

A running balance

B
Galynn Nordstrom
senior editor

ack in my salad days at Lakewood Publications, when I was in
my mid-30s I was working with a lot of people in their mid-20s,
who liked to ask me about woolly mammoths as pets and were
always ostentatiously trying to help me across the street, whether
I wanted to cross the street or not. (I would generally respond with
sympathy, and in one-syllable words, about having no other cultural
reference than disco, and we'd all get back to work.) Ten years may not
seem like a significant age difference in the workplace, but it only took
about a year for us to move from typing up our copy with typesetting
codes and physically sending it to the typesetter to doing our own
typesetting on our desktop computers.
Things were moving fast at the time, and they're moving faster now.
As businesses struggle to find and train skilled workers, and as boomers,
busters and bridgers bring different work ethics and expectations to the
job, I reviewed two articles in this issue (Perspective on page 24, and
"Attracting younger workers to the trades" on page 38) with an eye toward
creating one simple equation for workforce engagement, if such a thing
exists. Two key factors seem to be at work:
Trade-offs. Does everyone need to attend college? Will everyone find
a high-paying job, a career or a vocation that way? Chris Eicher, a student
at WyoTech, says: "Schools really do tell you that you need to go to college.

PERSPECTIVE

Investing in employees
Patrick Howe, owner of Wholesale Shade™ in San Marcos,
Calif., puts business perspectives into practice by creating a
welcoming culture at his workplace: "Happy people like coming
to work, like the people they work with, and do a great job
for the customer," he says, and the most important aspect
of those beliefs is to include employees in the successes
and failures of the business. In 2018, Howe and his team
launched Shade Sail University, a free book and website designed to make the
best practices of the shade sail business available to everyone, "which will in turn
get more people into the business," he adds. That ultimately means more people
investing in"those triangle things," and helping customers understand the benefits
of quality shade sails ... and keeping a happy and productive workplace growing.

The way your employees feel
is the way your customers
will feel. And if your
employees don't feel valued,
neither will your customers.
~Sybil F. Stershic

But you don't. The trades are a really cool
opportunity." For me, my only technical
training came in 8th grade Home Ec class,
and once I'd made an apron, an A-line
skirt and a hotdish, that was pretty
much it. (And I didn't get an "A.")
A rewarding workplace. Not
necessarily in terms of salaries, or
even interesting work-but the kind of
business that Patrick Howe has created
at Wholesale Shade™, of which he says,
"I'm just the happiness glue that holds
these high performers together." When
employees know they're valued, they
value their jobs. And their customers.
With a business balance sheet, it has
always seemed to me that along with debits
for "resources consumed," there should
be a credit for "resources conserved."
Employees should be on the revenue side
of things as well as expenditures, and not
just in terms of products created. The
benefits aren't exactly intangible, but
could be challenging to quantify at first.
Different generations at work and
increasing technology don't have to clash:
just because an editor doesn't see a need
to post a picture of every meal online, that
doesn't mean she can't craft a meaningful
social media strategy on the job.
Or start a Woolly Mammoth Daycare.
There are always opportunities.

Direc

i

If you'd like to nominate a fellow IFAI manufacturer member for coverage in
a future "Perspective" article, please contact Galynn Nordstrom, senior editor,
at gdnordstrom@ifai.com.

6 REVIEW APRIL 2020

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3/23/20 10:27 PM
Specialty Fabrics Review April 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Specialty Fabrics Review April 2020
