HartWood - A small business, a big boost in management confidence

What do they do?         Digital print business    
Using PI since               June 2008    
No. of employees          25
Primary use of PI          Employment and management
PI as company culture  Planning to explain PI and make it a part of everyday operations
Staff turnover               Greatly reduced since implementing PI

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HartWood is a digital print business that employs 25 people. Despite initial scepticism about what PI® could do for them, they signed up with PI SouthAfrica in June 2008, largely to resolve their recruitment challenges. Business owner Mike Wood now prizes the business confidence it has given him and his partners.

On recruiting the right people
What we had was quite a few people not performing, also quite a few people joining and leaving very quickly. So they were obviously not fitting in to the company – from their point of view, not just ours.

This was obviously a big drain. They’d come in, we’d train them and then they’d leave. We weren’t keeping staff in certain areas. Or we’d get staff and then realise they weren’t right for the job, but it was too late.

We were employing people based on an interview. You know, ‘I like this guy, he supports Liverpool…’ We would just employ them, not realising that you need to actually target people in terms of what they would be more suited to.

What has PI done for Hartwood?

I don’t think we use PI fully. But our employment strategy is definitely around PI. We won’t look at someone unless they’ve done a profile first; we’ve become very efficient in terms of who we interview.

I don’t think we’ve had any resignations in the last year. In our sales department in particular we’ve got guys who are stable, they seem to be enjoying themselves, they get on with their work and they’re good at what they do.

Among the partners, we understand each other a lot better in terms of why we do certain things and why we want certain things. I think it would be good to see that with everyone – a better understanding of how everyone likes to operate.

What impact has PI had on morale within the company?

If people are happy in their job it impacts on their morale. And we’ve got a great bunch of guys here. We’ve been slowly but surely placing people in the right jobs. So we’ve got fewer unhappy people. Someone who isn’t happy makes others unhappy.

Has there been any development/instance/event where you felt it was good to have PI in your toolkit?

Quite a few. Not momentous things but underlying everything, the whole time. PI gives us confidence. [You lose confidence] when you’re employing people and going through a phase of not getting it right. The organisation stands and falls on that – getting the right people. If you don’t have the right people you can’t perform.

In what ways have you seen a return on your investment with PI? How have you seen it save your organisation money?

Yes, I think so. If I think of the cost of having the wrong person, PI pays for itself. And you can’t quantify it all – there are those unquantifiable amounts, like training time. Training usually involves one of the partners, another employee, after hours work… Never mind the cost of lack of performance and loss of opportunity.

How does PI make you money?
I think you see [how it does] in the development of our people, especially our sales team. We were battling to keep sales people for longer than three months. Now we’ve got guys who’ve been here for a year. Salespeople need the technical knowledge that can only come to you over time. You can’t believe the amount of experience they have. [This] probably protected us a lot over the so-called recession and I think we’ll see a big benefit in the next year.

And yes, it’s my belief that they’ve stayed because they’ve got the right profiles for the jobs.

Has your relationship with PI SouthAfrica added value to your organisation?
For sure. Across the board. It’s actually more than money; it comes down to a business confidence. You feel like you’re getting the right people and that you’re moving forward. We don’t get resignations every now and then, anymore – we don’t have to go through that whole reemployment process. So it’s given us time to do other things, to move forward, and to run the business.