Taking Care Of Business: Quality Control, Tecza Environmental Group

To grow the business, Tecza Environmental Group managers believe they must also provide each employee with a chance to grow.

Ted Tecza admits there was a time when he wasn’t a very good listener.

“I had some good people working for me at one time who I just wouldn’t listen to,” explained Ted, president of Tecza Environmental Group, Elgin, Ill. “For many years, I was the hard-driving entrepreneur who didn’t trust anybody and did all the work myself.”

Due to Ted’s controlling approach, the company struggled to retain employees and lost some of them to other Chicago-area landscape contractors. “Nobody wants to jump on board with a person like that,” he said. “I limited my own potential.”

As he grew into his position as the second-generation owner of the family business, Ted realized that the same ego providing creative energy to drive the company was the same ego he had to harness in order to keep the company moving. “Don’t misunderstand me - it’s the ego that gets you going,” Ted said. “And I’m not saying that today I still don’t have that ego - just the emphasis and drive of it have been changed and redirected.”

Ted now believes that company growth cannot happen without employee growth. “It wasn’t until I started to grow and change some of my philosophies and viewpoints that the company could really grow. Today, not only do my people trust me, but I trust them.”

SHARED VISION. For a company to grow and succeed, employees must be able to share opinions and work in a team environment, Ted pointed out. In addition, employees and managers need to share the company vision. “Without that shared vision, you’re not all pulling in the same direction,” he said.

To create this environment and communicate this vision at Tecza Environmental Group, the company managers initiated an involved planning process six years ago. The strategic plan involves four steps: departmental planning, strategic planning, operational planning and budgeting.

During departmental planning, each department supervisor meets with his or her employees to review department procedures. They tackle issues, including customer service, equipment, training and safety.

During the strategic planning session in December, the management team reviews the prior year’s plan and evaluates its effectiveness, looking over volume growth, profit, the company mission, organization and structure, and the effects of the economy as they prepare next year’s plan. Notes are prepared for the company-wide operational planning meeting in January, which is held off-site for two or three days and incorporates team building, brainstorming and training.

Throughout operational planning, all employees can share their ideas. As different strategies are discussed, the necessary steps to accomplish these tasks are identified. Then a person and date is assigned to each strategy and progress is tracked throughout the year.

The final budgeting process gives managers a chance to address income and expenses for the creation of an annual budget.

An Employee
   Retention Tool

    Instead of several separate bonus programs for each division or employee, Tecza Environmental Group, Elgin, Ill., utilizes an overall master bonus to foster a team approach, said President Ted Tecza.

    The bonuses are derived from 10 percent of the company profits. Then an employee’s salary is multiplied by his or her company tenure, resulting in a number of points. (The company limits the tenure number to 10 years).

    By adding the bonus points and dividing them into 10 percent of the company profit, a dollar value is established for each bonus point. Bonuses are determined by each employee’s total points, based on the established point dollar value. For example, if each point is 1 cent, then 50,000 points is $500 and 300,000 points is $3,000. If employee X has a $30,000 salary and has been with the company 10 years, then he or she has a total of 300,000 points and would receive a $3,000 bonus.

    “They know their bonus is coming long before it does, and it’s rare that they are surprised about getting a bonus or not getting one,” Tecza said. “Granted, there might be some laborer who’s not listening or doesn’t want to understand the information being shared throughout the year, but that’s rare because we communicate this bonus regularly as it acts as a good employee retention tool.”
    - Nicole Wisniewski

WALKING THE TALK. Though strategic planning happens only once a year, Tecza Environmental Group communicates its vision and encourages employees to share their ideas daily. This happens by tracking the progress of the strategies assigned to employees during planning and as employees go about their daily schedules.

“On a daily basis, we’re talking about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and how we can do it better,” Ted said. “Our strategic planning process begins to express our shared vision. But our vision is not cast in concrete, it is meant to be fluid and malleable to the whims and vagrancies of the market, and the changing needs of the internal customer - our employees - as well as the external customer.

”Along the way, we can’t be afraid to say, ‘Hey, maybe this isn’t quite where we want to be. Maybe we need to redirect and go in a different direction,’” Ted continued. “Changing a little bit doesn’t mean failure or that you’re not as adept in business or don’t have the business acumen you once had. It simply means you are open to making adjustments so that everybody is with you.”

While some parts of the company vision change continuously, others remain consistent, such as job quality. Making sure quality is on employees’ minds daily is challenging.

“When you talk about quality, you can’t say you want to do a quality job and then tell the construction manager to go out and buy the cheapest trees he can find,” Ted explained. “You can’t tell the maintenance guys that the site must look pristine when they leave, but then tell them they have half the time originally budgeted to complete the job. Employees won’t believe you when you say you want quality if your actions speak otherwise.”

Tecza managers not only communicate this message of quality service to employees, they act on it. One way they do this is by taking care of their safety. Not only does the company wash its trucks every week and touch up paint jobs when needed to give employees pride in the vehicles they drive, but it also constantly buys new trucks to replace the old ones.

“This is a commitment to our future,” Ted remarked. “When we talk in our strategic planning about where we want to be in three years, a definite feeling of long-term stability is created. Employees see us taking our profit and reinvesting it back into the company.

“We have people that come to us and want to work here because they see we’re in this for the long haul and we’re not just taking the money and running,” he continued. “So they can think in terms of not just having a job for this year and next year, but for 10 years.”

To show employees they are reinvesting in their future, the Tecza management team has to be confident in profit and make sure various parts of profit are earmarked for certain reinvestments, such as new equipment and employee training.

The bottom line is something the Tecza management team watches very closely. During monthly financial reviews, the managers scrutinize month-end financial statements for the company as a whole and for each department, including revenue, expenses and net profit, Reier said.

“Because we watch the bottom line so closely, adjustments can be made on spending or in other areas 12 times a year,” Reier explained. “For example, if we had to buy a piece of equipment that was unexpected, yet needed, we could plan to hold off on spending in that area for the next month or for the rest of the year to make up that cost. Or, if we see that we’re getting 15 percent less work than we planned, we could spend less on materials, not hire the additional employees we budgeted for or wait one more year to trade in a truck to keep expenses down.”

The company needs to carefully protect this bottom line because the employees’ bonuses rely on it (see sidebar on page 84). “We have a strict budget and we report the budget figures to everyone monthly,” Ted pointed out. “Each division is accountable for its own growth, and the master budget is broken down into division budgets so that employees can see how each division is doing. Employees can see how profits add up on a monthly basis this way. We then have a strategic update in August during the operating season. Part of that is a financial report I give right down to the bottom line.”

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HABLAS INGLES? Tecza Environmental Group employs a predominantly-Hispanic workforce - approximately 98 or 99 percent, which is typical of companies in Chicago.

Managing this high level of Hispanic workers is challenging. One recurring complaint from clients is lack of communication with the employees who are on their sites, Reier pointed out. Consequently, the company recently started spending $15,000 to $25,000 annually on English and Spanish training, Reier said. Another $10,000 is spent annually on additional training, such as industry seminars, job policies and procedures.

In past years, the company paid for its Hispanic employees to take English classes, Reier said. To encourage more employees to learn English, the company brings a teacher into the office to teach English classes to the Hispanic workforce and Spanish classes to the English workforce.

“The teacher spends half the day with each group in a classroom setting with flashcards and games,” Reier said. “We want to have all of our foremen speak English.

“At our company, once Hispanic employees learn English, they become very valuable,” Reier continued. “We need some people on site who can knock on the client’s door and say, ‘I’m here. Is there anything special you need me to do?’ Finding and training the right people for this is our biggest challenge for the next couple of years. Rarely can we find someone who already has been trained by another company to speak English and is familiar with the whole process of how we work. So we are bringing them in as laborers and starting the training now that needs to happen to grow these people. We are probably three years out from where we want to be with this process.”

The value of English-speaking foremen is driving the company to require this along with other skills for its Level One foreman, which is one of the classifications for maintenance foremen, noted Reier. “These levels are one, two, three and apprentice and having them allows us to base our foremen’s pay on their skills, but it also shows them a specific way to make more money and grow within the organization.”

A LITTLE T.L.C. Tecza Environmental Group retains 85 to 90 percent of its employees annually, according to Adam. “We have about 80 or 85 employees and we may have to replace 10 of them every year, if that,” Adam said.

This rate reflects the company’s family atmosphere, Adam remarked. “We’re not pulling any strings or screwing around with our people,” he said. “If someone in their family is sick and they need to go back to Mexico, we have a strict open door policy: They come in everyday, do the work, but if an employee’s wife is having a baby and he needs three days off, they can go and come back and be ready to work.”

Scheduling usually isn’t a problem during these times because employees or jobs can be moved around on the schedule pretty easily, Adam said. If needed, the maintenance manager will run a mower for three or four days to cover a fellow worker’s absence. “Whatever our employees need to do, very rarely does it impact what we’ve got going on at work,” Adam said. “The setups that we have and the changes that we’ve made over the past four to six years are really working. We have a stable system running well.”

To support its Hispanic employees, Tecza Environmental Group flies the Mexican flag along with the American flag in front of its office, pointed out Reier. “We try to understand the Hispanic culture so we know our employees’ priorities and what’s important to them,” Reier said. “What’s important for us may not be important for them and vice-versa. For example, they are very family-oriented, so we know how important it is for them to get home when they need to.

“We want them to know that if there is something that we can do or be sensitive to in reference to their culture, we are going to do so,” Reier added. “We may not be paying them what the guy next door is, but we’ve found that pay doesn’t matter when it comes down to how they are being treated.”

The author is Managing Editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine.

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December 2000
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