Cascading Strategy

Employee engagement is one of those terms thrown around by business managers that can be difficult to achieve. Some employees tackle their jobs with enthusiasm regardless of the circumstances. But many people need help to see how their contributions matter to fully occupy their work roles. Feeling that they have a stake and a say in what happens can spark engagement—and boost retention rates.

Colder Products Company, a St. Paul–based producer of quick-disconnect couplings, fittings, and connectors, uses a number of strategies to keep employees energized and “in the loop.” A system combining the Kaplan/Norton Balanced Scorecard and a goal deployment process helps to manage the company’s strategic planning process and clarify the expectations for everyone in the company, regarding both long-term efforts and day-to-day responsibilities.

We talked to Colder’s chief financial officer Jeff Domler about these and other tools for engaging employees.

Mary Connor: Tell us about your Kaplan/Norton Balanced Scorecard system.

Jeff Domler: [The process has] evolved since it began, so that in the last probably two or three years, we have augmented that with goal deployment process key performance indicators by each department. The idea behind it was to bring the initiatives from the corporation and cascade them down to the individual contributor level. The cascading was the key thing to it.

MC: How does it work?

JD: We’ve got four areas we look at: profitable growth, increasing the value of the customer experience, process improvement, and then basically enhancing corporate life, and that would be training and things along that line. So those are the four areas as far as the Balanced Scorecard, and those were pretty much repetitive year after year.

For instance, profitable growth: What do we want sales to be? Do we have certain key financial metrics, such as working capital and cash flow that we want to improve on? [The scorecard includes both] longer term initiatives for the corporation and business fundamentals that we would like to track.