Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

One of the best I've seen that's similar to this model is Publix:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal-...

They're an employee-owned, private company in one of the most low margin and cut-throat industries around. Both their profit and effect on the competition is incredible. Also, their management to worker ratio. ;) It would be interesting to see tech companies adopt a model like this. The results could be exciting to watch and maybe lead to more job security as well given every other kind of company likes to sell out.

View on HN

> Also, their management to worker ratio.

Can you elaborate?

From this line of the article, quite low: "A distribution-center manager overseeing 800 associates..." That is, many workers per manager.

Which suggests that workers 1) know their jobs, 2) do them, and 3) managers facilitate and largely get out of the way.

Is that uncommon for warehouse/factory work?

Exactly. Likewise, their stores had 400 workers and 2 managers. Most retail workers I know say their company keeps staff too low to get the job done while having way too many managers with micromanagement. One of the top chains local store recently had only 2 stockers per fast moving department with about 40 managers auditing and coaching them on best practices. Walmart and Target employees told me they had similar issues but not as extreme effect.

So, as dredmorbius says, they have managers that pick good employees, give them incentives, show them justifiable best practices, listen to feedback, and otherwise stay out of the way. And the management works for the employees, who are the shareholders, not Wall St. Results: highest profit in industry, highest customer satisfaction, one of highest retention, and little risk in operation. IT startups should copy this if they're not just about selling out.

> Most retail workers I know say their company keeps staff too low to get the job done while having way too many managers with micromanagement.

This is definitely not a problem limited to retail. I see it all the time in software development.

I believe it. One grunt I know always says "too many chiefs and not enough Indians" in all these companies.

What if they combine it with Holacracy?

I had never heard of that minus the self-organizing teams concept. I'll have to read more on the subject, esp empirical data, before I can answer such a question. Thanks for the link and bringing it to my attention!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com