In a manner of speaking, employees of Austin Water Utility treatment plants used to work in silos. They operated as independent entities, largely isolated from each other’s best management and operation practices.
But propelled by an intense quality improvement program, management and employees grabbed their figurative sledgehammers and slowly broke down the walls. By sharing ideas and best practices for various processes, they improved water quality, met increased demand for water services with fewer water plant employees, significantly raised the utility’s bond rating, and increased employee and customer satisfaction.
“We gained efficiencies through standardization,” says Bart Jennings, business strategy manager for the utility, which serves about 850,000 customers in metropolitan Austin, Texas. “For example, if an employee moves to a different plant to fill in for a retiring employee, they don’t have to learn a whole new way of doing things. This gave management greater flexibility. The intellectual power of employees is greatly enhanced when people work outside those silos.”
Tangible results
The results were dramatic. By challenging employees to develop better treatment processes, the utility improved water quality from 0.22 NTU in the early 1990s to 0.01 NTU in 2008.
Efficiency also increased. For example, the miles of water and wastewater pipe for each full-time water plant employee increased from 5.0 in 1996 to 6.1 in 2008, and water and wastewater accounts have increased by 127,000 since 1992.
The utility handled the growth even though it slowly eliminated 24 full-time plant positions during roughly the same period. The utility achieved the reductions, which now save $1.2 million annually, by not filling positions as they became vacant. In addition, the utility’s bond rating rose from A2 to Aaa, the highest possible ranking.
Last but not least, customer satisfaction with water quality increased from 61 percent in the early 1990s to 83 percent in 2008. Those gains would not have been possible without cooperation from the employees’ union, Jennings says.
“We created a partnership with the union by explaining that we needed to become more efficient and improve productivity,” he says. “The total quality management wave of the 1990s was hitting, and community businesses were asking us what we were doing to treat ourselves more like a business. We needed a totally different way of looking at how we operated. It took some time, but the union bought into it and worked well with management.”
Focus on excellence
The silo demolition process started with formation of a quality council of managers and workers from all departments. “We wanted input from all levels of the organization,” Jennings says.
The team was charged with benchmarking utility operations against industry standards set by the American Water Works Association. Through that process, the team established strategic planning processes, created new employee reward and recognition programs, developed new job evaluations that tied performance to measurable goals, and initiated cross-training programs to improve efficiency.
Process improvement drives everything the team considers. It even affected more mundane programs, such as employee recognition, which used to focus on service longevity. “If you lived and breathed long enough, you’d be recognized,” Jennings says. “But that doesn’t drive improvement.” Now the program rewards and recognizes teams and employees that make the plants operate better than they did before.
Employee training is another example. Training used to focus mainly on teaching workers to use tools and equipment for license certification, not on leadership skills or career progression. “The former looks strictly at legal requirements,” Jennings observes. “The latter is a holistic perspective — how employees can better their contributions to the team and improve themselves, too.”
Cross-training added even more benefits. As vacancies arose, mainly through retirements, the utility didn’t always have to fill the position. Moreover, when employees have downtime, they now can help in other areas. “They’re more vested in the overall plant operations,” Jennings says.
Big-picture perspective
Before the quality management programs, there was a disconnect between employees’ jobs and the utility’s goals. For example, reducing per capita water usage is one of the utility’s goals, because it delays the addition of treatment facilities and reduces water purchases from the Colorado River Authority. Yet employees didn’t always know they could influence that goal by the way they did their jobs.
“If we can improve irrigation audits, then we can reduce the amount of water used,” Jennings says. “That saves customers money and helps the utility achieve its goal of reducing water usage. Now there’s more linkage between em-ployees’ activities and tasks and the utility’s strategic objectives and goals.”
Now about 15 years old, the quality improvement program is still evolving. Once a month, all maintenance and operations supervisors from the three water treatment plants and two wastewater treatment plants meet to discuss topics from employee training and retention to operating problems.
“People learn from each other,” Jennings notes. “They talk about issues, and someone will say, ‘Oh, we already dealt with that and solved it this way.’” Surveys show that employees are much more satisfied now than years ago. That’s a result of management taking their input seriously and using it to make visible improvements. Moreover, better communication between management, supervisors and employees means people more clearly understand job expectations.
“When we first got started with total quality improvement, someone in our human resources department pulled out an employee survey from the 1970s, and it was really depressing,” Jennings recalls. “We were dealing with the same problems in the 1990s that we were in the 1970s.
“It underscores the need to be constantly vigilant about making even incremental changes and improvements in our corporate culture. It’s an ongoing issue.” And it’s a lot easier when silos don’t block the view of the big picture.
