A. Employee Surveys

How healthy are you? How healthy is your organization? To answer the first question you need a medical exam. If there is a problem, you find it and treat it before it gets worse. How do we answer the second question? The psychologists at Scontrino-Powell use employee surveys. There is a close parallel between the medical exam and employee surveys. To assess their patients’ health, physicians ask specific questions and conduct a battery of tests. Similarly, we ask employees specific questions to assess the overall health of your organization. We have a large bank of tested survey items that makes it easy to prepare a custom survey for any organization. We can conduct surveys on paper or on the web. Depending on the survey results, we may conduct follow-up tests to isolate specific organizational health problems that need to be addressed. In the same way that you have your annual checkup, we recommended regular organizational assessments to ensure that your company stays in the best of health. For those organizations desiring to use the internet for survey responses, we have a sophisticated survey engine to collect numerical and written survey responses.

B. Retreat Facilitation

As psychologists, we know how to help groups of people work together more effectively. No setting demonstrates the importance of group processes like an offsite meeting or retreat. How many times have you been to a meeting where one person talked the whole time while others fell asleep or checked voicemail? We help you run top notch meetings by establishing agendas, working the flipcharts, and managing the group. When we facilitate for you, it allows you to participate in the meeting without having to worry about running it. Moreover, we have broad experience with other organizations and can offer insights to help your group solve problems or make decisions. The end result is a meeting where people say, “Wow, that was a good use of my time.”

C. Team Building

In the thirty years we have been doing team building, we have experienced the shift in the focus of team building from encounter groups to focused activities that help teams be more effective. We have helped design and implement team building sessions that include structured retreats, problem solving sessions, orientation of cross functional task forces, interpersonal skill development, conflict resolution and self managed work teams. With some clients we have linked team building with employee involvement and empowerment systems. With other clients we have used the work task, such as strategic planning, as a foundation for team building. Our work in the area of team building has included large companies, small companies, public sector, and private sector.

D. Employee Involvement, Engagement & Empowerment

Empowering employees is a great way to generate new ideas and harness the energy and commitment of any organization’s greatest asset—its people. We have worked with companies of all sizes to increase employee involvement and empowerment. Joint employee-management design committees played a pivotal role in all of these efforts. We worked with each design committee to create an employee involvement process that fit that organization’s culture and needs. During our thirty plus years of experience in this area we have experienced the shift from participative management to quality of work life to quality circles to employee involvement. We have helped design and implement employee involvement systems that include structured suggestion processes, problem solving teams, cross functional task forces, and self managed work teams. We received the Chairman’s Award for our employee involvement work with Columbia Aluminum.

E. Continuous Improvement & Lean Manufacturing for the Office and the Plant

We have supported our clients in a number of continuous improvement activities. These activities include the introduction of formal total quality programs, statistical process control activities, set-up time reduction programs, improved maintenance–production department cooperation, order entry-production department cooperation, and employee involvement activities focused on continuous improvement. One of our staff has served as a Baldrige Quality Examiner for the State of Washington’s annual quality awards program. Another staff member received a factory of the year award for improvement efforts. We have coordinated numerous five-day Kaizen events that apply lean concepts to specific improvement areas. Kaizen is well suited for applying lean to the front office.

F. Gainsharing Incentive Plans

Recognized by The Scanlon Leadership Network as approved gainsharing consultants, Scontrino-Powell has been helping clients leverage employee talent for over thirty years.  In this time we have shifted our focus from single dimension gainsharing plans to multi-dimensional approaches to gainsharing. We have helped design and implement gainsharing systems that include structured suggestion processes, problem solving teams, cross functional task forces, and self managed work teams as the employee involvement component of gainsharing. Our work on gainsharing has included large companies, small companies, public sector, and private sector.

G. Board of Directors Facilitation

We have been facilitating board meetings and retreats since the 1980’s. We have worked with boards in both the public sector and the private sector to help them in the following areas: develop mission, vision, and values statements; assessment of board development needs; meeting facilitation; board member selection; board member feedback; CEO selection and evaluation; strategic planning; retreat design and facilitation. We have developed a board assessment and feedback tool that can be completed by each board member in less than twenty minutes. This tool forms the basis for both feedback and development efforts which can help the board meet its policy, guidance, and fiduciary responsibilities. This board evaluation process is also a great way to show shareholders how the board is meeting its obligations.

H. Strategy Development

We have assisted our clients in the development of strategic plans and three-year and one-year business plans that grow out of the strategic plan. These efforts have involved both members of the senior management team as well as members of the board of directors. We use a structured, fact-based process to support the development of a strategic plan. This process begins with a thorough environmental and competitive assessment of the client’s situation.