How to improve productivity.

• Author: Frigo, Robert L.
• Position: Finance Reshapes Its Corporate Role

When GE decided to rethink its corporate values, the company's objective was to become the most productive company in the world. GE executives believe they're well on their way.

Robert L. Frigo, Manager

Financial Services Operation

General Electric Company

To successfully compete on a global basis in the 1990s, General Electric believes a radical change is required in the company's culture-a revolution that must touch every single person in the organization every business day. We want to create a company free of the artificial boundaries of status or security. We want to grow a work ethic that plays to our strengths, like the productive energy we know resides in our workforce. The principal values we emphasize today? Speed, simplicity, and self-confidence-a significant cultural change from the hard values of the 1980s: candor, leanness, and agility, and being hard-headed but soft-hearted at the same time.

To achieve this goal, GE has launched a major initiative, called "WorkOut."

We see WorkOut as a movement, not as a program with definite timetables. In fact, we'll measure its progress over a relatively long period, perhaps as many as 10 years.

Under WorkOut, all business and organization leaders in the company are responsible for bringing about the desired cultural changes in their organizations, and the company is providing external consultants to facilitate the process.

In GE's Financial Services Operation, we're using the WorkOut concept to build awareness levels and empower our people to be more productive. Financial Services is comprised of approximately 1,000 employees in four accounting centers. These centers provide payroll services for about 175,000 employees and process about five million vendor invoices per year.

Our first objective was to eliminate unnecessary work, which is where the term "WorkOut" came from. in this phase, we are trying to build the confidence of our people. We believe that as employees develop self-confidence, they will challenge existing practices and help improve the speed and simplicity of business processes.

Like other organizations at GE, we're using two workshop formats. The basic workshop calls for 50 to 60 people to meet offsite and discuss such subjects as mindsets, team-building, communication skills, and idea generation. The advanced workshops call for smaller groups to meet for a day or less. They discuss issues and processes, and we bring in customers to participate in action-planning sessions.

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