Communication in custom metal fabrication: Good ideas, good stories, good community

These days custom fabrication operations create an amazing amount of data, often presented so employees know how well they’re doing and where they need to be. Displaying comprehensive and (especially) up-to-date metrics is a sign that a shop is really on top of things.

You see those up-to-date metrics at Jones Metal, a custom sheet metal fabricator in Mankato, Minn., southwest of Minneapolis, but much of it isn’t presented in the typical way. On the floor, in the break room, and in the front office, you find touchscreen kiosks where employees can read the latest edition of the Jones Journal, an employee digital newspaper of sorts, stored and accessed through the company’s intranet. Here’s the kicker: People actually read it.

According to Sarah Richards, Jones Metal’s president and CEO, the publication stands apart from typical employee newsletters. One, the newspaper automatically draws company metrics from the fabricator’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. If an employee wants to know the on-time delivery rate for the previous week, he can find out with a few taps on the touchscreen.

Two, the paper comes out weekly. The information isn’t stale, and the custom fabricator devotes the resources to keep it that way. It actually contracts with a professional photographer and writer to put the publication together.

Three, the paper shows the humanity behind the data. Improvement stories, weddings, problems with certain orders, anniversaries, 5S efforts, new grandparents, camping trips, college graduations, a visit from a big customer, and more make it into the paper. It doesn’t just cover company news; it covers real problems on the floor, and an employee reading it may be inspired to improve his or her own area. It also doesn’t just cover the “hard news,” but keeps people abreast of what’s happening in their co-workers’ lives.

In a literal sense, the newspaper keeps everyone on the same page.

A Communication Idea With Manufacturing Roots

The idea for such a newspaper came from another business leader in Mankato, Dennis Dotson, chairman of Dotson Iron Castings. “He was looking to communicate with everybody, especially with front-line employees who aren’t in front of computers all day.”

So said Kelly Peterson, who a decade ago was working at Dotson’s forging company. It was then that Dennis and his brother Gerald developed a software platform for an internal employee newspaper, and about nine years ago Dotson started to market the technology to other companies. This ultimately led Dotson to spin off a new media startup in Mankato, PDP Solutions, in 2008.

PDP now helps produce Jones Metal’s weekly newspaper, along with numerous other employee publications across the country.

“We focused initially on the manufacturing world, where you have a lot of front-line employees,” said Peterson, now director of account development for PDP. “It was a way to bring them up to speed as to what’s going on with the company, its performance, and building that sense of community and trust. That’s how it started, and it has now expanded into many other [sectors]. We’re now in health care, in banking, even in luxury car dealerships.”

The company has different levels of service. For some, PDP acts primarily as a software provider and communications consultancy. In these cases, PDP’s client has an internal communications team. PDP employees may work with the team the first several months to offer guidance, help write articles, and lay out the newspaper. How long this continues depends on the company and the internal resources it wants to devote to employee communication.

Others, including Jones Metal, contract with a PDP photographer and writer who basically acts as an embedded employee who interviews workers, takes photos, writes articles, and lays out the paper.

Making Employee Publications Meaningful

Many companies have tried to publish employee newsletters, but they didn’t last. Why, exactly? According to sources, the type of content matters. It needs to be engaging, spur interest, and have takeaway value just like any other publication.

But as Peterson explained, one of the biggest problems with many employee publications is their infrequency. “One of the key pieces is the importance of it being a weekly paper,” she said. “When you talk about things that are happening right now, this week, this helps the publication become a lot more engaging.”

Say a fab shop has a quarterly newsletter that, among other things, announces that Cindy in the assembly department got married—two months ago. That’s interesting, but it’s old news, and the fact that people in the fabricating and welding departments didn’t know Cindy got married, eight weeks after the fact, certainly doesn’t help build a closer company culture.

In fact, this actually reinforces the fact that employees don’t talk with each other and, more broadly, don’t really know each other as human beings. This can be an understandable problem, especially for a busy fab shop with multiple shifts. But as sources pointed out, it’s a problem an employee publication should aim to solve.

A related reason employee publications can fail involves data, specifically the formatting of that data. “Data should be really easy to understand for someone who is not reading data every day,” Peterson said. “It needs to focus on ‘we’re either hitting the bullseye or we’re not.’”

Sources added that the newspaper can actually help make metrics more useful. For instance, say a fab shop reports on-time delivery rates. At first the metric states that on-time delivery to customers is at, say, 70 percent. That in itself doesn’t help a press brake operator or an assembler. In fact, just seeing the metric may spur finger-pointing.

The metrics and articles in the newspaper get people talking. The on-time delivery metric really doesn’t provide much information, but what if the metric included the reasons behind those late deliveries? Peterson described how Dotson, the forging company that led to the launch of PDP, now does this very thing. The manufacturer splits the on-time delivery metric into about 10 different reasons, which employees then can act upon. It’s no longer “just the shipping department’s fault.” A problem in upstream manufacturing steps can snowball into bigger problems downstream.

Peterson added that the employee newspaper should be a vehicle for company transparency, and something that can minimize the rumor mill. “Once you have an avenue for constant communication, it becomes easier,” she said. “We encourage people to be as transparent as possible. Just because you don’t talk about it doesn’t mean people don’t know or wonder. The [publication] can be used to kill the rumor mill.”

This is one reason, Peterson said, that PDP encourages companies to form a communications team that includes people from as many departments as possible. During a weekly 10-minute meeting, team members can report what people in their departments are talking about. “What is happening? What are the rumors? Is there anything that’s happening that we need to address?”

PDP Media Manager Matt Johnston, a writer and photographer, has worked with various companies over the years. At Jones Metal, Johnston leads a weekly meeting with what the fabricator calls the “editorial board.” People come from all areas of the company, not just from a few front-office cubicles.

Johnston starts with a question: Are there any comments or concerns about the previous edition? “Then we move ahead, and I have a list, a hopper of story ideas, that we keep every week. I send that out to the members of the editorial board the morning of the meeting. We discuss the potential stories on my list, and then we do a roundtable and ask for any input from anyone else.”

As Jones Metal CEO, Richards writes a message in the paper every other week or so. But otherwise, Johnston writes most of the articles in each paper.

When Jones Metal began publishing the newspaper in December 2008, story ideas abounded. “We were told not to expect this to last, that we’d be down to about four to six stories a week,” Richards said. “But that really has never happened.”

Today every edition still has between 10 and 15 stories. After the initial editorial meeting (usually at 1 p.m. Tuesday), Johnston then works on the paper Wednesday and Thursday. The paper is proofed on Thursday afternoon and is released at midnight.

“Our night shift on Thursday nights gets to see it first,” Richards said. “They get a peek at the next day’s news.”

Articles range from births and wedding announcements to delivery performance, training, customer visits, 5S and other lean initiatives, new customers, and new employees. For employee stories, Johnston goes beyond simple work histories and writes narratives about who people are and what makes them unique.

Several years ago, for instance, Johnston interviewed an employee in the quality department. The article covered his professional accomplishments but mainly focused on the man’s hobby: flying ultralights. The paper came out, complete with a photo of the man flying his ultralight high over the rolling hills of southern Minnesota.

Richards said that most likely many people in the company would never have known about the man’s hobby if it weren’t for the paper. The newspaper, she said, helps people see each other not just as a press brake guru or expert welder, but as human beings. “That’s what helps us build community.”

Johnston, who previously worked at the Mankato Free Press, added that the nature of this work—embedding himself in a company—helps develop content that would be difficult or impossible for an outside reporter to uncover. “I’m interviewing the same people all the time,” he said. “And I really feel like I’m part of the family at Jones. I know the employees. I know where they go on vacation. I know their kids’ names, and they know the same about me too.”

When it comes to continuous improvement, articles in the newspaper can help spread the word, educate people beyond the improvement team, and, in turn, spur new ideas. Jones Metal has what it calls SIPs, or small improvement projects, which get regular coverage in the Jones Journal.

“It makes people who aren’t familiar with [these improvement techniques] more familiar,” Johnston said. “If a guy on the production floor runs a brake press all day, he can learn about it. It’s not just about who’s gotten married. It has information that’s important to employees and the company.”

Peterson added that with many companies, PDP often needs to encourage employees to report on personal stories, too—the kids, weddings, grandchildren—not just meat-and-potato improvement projects. Some companies try to avoid the “fluff,” but human interest articles have their place. (As Richards pointed out, Jones Metal actually has no shortage of these personal stories in the paper.)

Jones Metal uses touchscreen kiosks. Most employees aren’t sitting at a desk all day, and even if they are, sitting at a desk certainly doesn’t encourage employee interaction. “We really wanted the newspaper to be separate from the terminals people use for work,” Richards said. “That’s why we have separate kiosks.”

Other clients access the newspaper through their PC connected to a secure website. Because the newspaper is digital, Jones Metal and other PDP clients can pore through analytics that show which articles employees read, for how long, and which articles they skip. The most-read pieces usually have a human interest focus. “Those fun stories get people started reading the paper,” Peterson said.

She added that the approach differs from a lot of company communication efforts in the fact that it doesn’t borrow aspects from social media. “If you take a social media approach, it can be very unfocused, and before long you just have a lot of noise. This is focused communication, with everybody seeing the same thing, and everybody gets the same message.”

PDP does offer social media aspects to its service; companies can link their public Twitter, Instagram, and other feeds, and they can implement internal feedback that resembles the back-and-forth nature of social media. But sources emphasized that the core of the communication effort still lies in the narrative within the newspaper itself.

Benefits of Weekly Communication

That narrative updates everyone on important happenings, which in turn can streamline meetings. Peterson described various instances in which companies had monthly or quarterly all-hands meetings that essentially went over what just occurred over the past weeks or months. With a weekly newspaper, everyone is up to speed, so there’s no longer a need to rehash everything.

“They turn into much more productive meetings, because you’re not spending time on the past,” she said. “You’re spending time on where you’re going. Meetings become much more interactive and forward-thinking.”

Sources conceded that simply publishing a newspaper isn’t a silver bullet for fixing a toxic company culture. In fact, if a company’s culture truly is toxic, and managers have no desire to change it, then they probably wouldn’t be investing in a weekly employee newspaper in the first place.

But if the desire for change exists, the newspaper can bring about a gradual shift in the company culture.

“We talk about this as a journey. It takes time, and it needs to be supported at the leadership level,” Peterson said. “But some of our clients have been with us for nine years, and if they were to take away this communication tool, I don’t know what they would do.”

Jones Metal, 800-967-1750, www.jonesmetalinc.com

PDP Solutions, 866-737-4894, www.pdpsolutions.com