Nucor uses an integrated approach to employee motivation that focuses on empowering frontline workers. This includes listening to employee ideas, taking risks on their proposals, and sharing corporate wealth generously. For example, electricians from different Nucor plants voluntarily helped a plant in Arkansas restart production after a power outage. Their efforts saved the company time and money. Nucor also has an unusual profit-sharing system where employee pay is directly tied to plant performance, incentivizing collaboration. This approach has helped Nucor post strong financial results while being difficult for other companies to replicate.
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Nucor uses an integrated approach to employee motivation that focuses on empowering frontline workers. This includes listening to employee ideas, taking risks on their proposals, and sharing corporate wealth generously. For example, electricians from different Nucor plants voluntarily helped a plant in Arkansas restart production after a power outage. Their efforts saved the company time and money. Nucor also has an unusual profit-sharing system where employee pay is directly tied to plant performance, incentivizing collaboration. This approach has helped Nucor post strong financial results while being difficult for other companies to replicate.
Nucor uses an integrated approach to employee motivation that focuses on empowering frontline workers. This includes listening to employee ideas, taking risks on their proposals, and sharing corporate wealth generously. For example, electricians from different Nucor plants voluntarily helped a plant in Arkansas restart production after a power outage. Their efforts saved the company time and money. Nucor also has an unusual profit-sharing system where employee pay is directly tied to plant performance, incentivizing collaboration. This approach has helped Nucor post strong financial results while being difficult for other companies to replicate.
Copyright:
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Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Nucor uses an integrated approach to employee motivation that focuses on empowering frontline workers. This includes listening to employee ideas, taking risks on their proposals, and sharing corporate wealth generously. For example, electricians from different Nucor plants voluntarily helped a plant in Arkansas restart production after a power outage. Their efforts saved the company time and money. Nucor also has an unusual profit-sharing system where employee pay is directly tied to plant performance, incentivizing collaboration. This approach has helped Nucor post strong financial results while being difficult for other companies to replicate.
Copyright:
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Motivationgo It was about 2 P.M. on Mar. 9 when three Nucor Corp. electricians got the call from their colleagues at the ~ickman (Ark.) plant. It was bad news: Hickman's electrical grid had failed. For a minimill steelmaker like Nucor,which melts scrap steel
from autos, dishwashers, mobile homes, and the like in
an electric arc furnace to make new steel, there's little that could be worse.The trio immediately dropped what they were doing and headed out to the plant. Malcolm McDonald, an electrician from the Decatur IAla.) mill. .
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was in Indiana visiting another facility. He drove down,
arriving at 9 o'clock that night. Les Hart and Bryson Trumble,from Nucor's facility in Hertford County, N.C., boarded a plane that landed in Memphis at II P.~.Then they drove two hours to the troubled plant. No supervisor had asked them to make the trip,and no one had to.They went on their own. Camping out in the electrical substation with the Hickman staff, the team worked 20-hour shifts to get the plant up and
running again in three days instead of the anticipated
full week.There wasn't any direct financial incentive for them to blow their weekends, no extra money in their next paycheck, but for the company their contribution was huge. Hickman went on to post a first-quarter record for tons of steel shipped.. ,. At Nucor, the art of motivation is about an unblinking focus on the people on the front line of the business. It's about talking to them, listening to them,taking a risk
on their ideas, and accepting the occasional failure. It's a
culture built in part with symbolic gestures. Every year, for example, every single employee's name goes on the cover of the annual report. And,like lverson before him, DiMicco flies commercial, manages without an executive parking space, and really does make the coffee in the office when he takes the last cup.. .. But Nucor's path is hard to follow. Itrequires managers to abandon the command-and-control model that has dominated American business for the better part bf a century, trust their people. and do a much better job
Money is where the rubber meets the road. Nucor's a rolling mill is to thin out the steel made in the hot mill unusual pay system is the single most daring element furnace, preparing it to be cut into sheets. In the days of the company's model and the hardest for outsiders before the Nucor acquisition, if the cutting backed up, and acquired companies to embrace. An experienced Hutchins would just take a break.'YVe'd sit back, have a steelworker at another company can easily earn $16 to cup of coffee. and complain: 'Those guys stink,'" he says. $2 1 an hour.At Nucor the guarantee is closer to $10. "At Nucor, we're not 'you guys' and 'us guys.' It's all of A bonus tied to the production of defect-free steel us guys. Wherever the bottleneck is, we go there, and by an employee's entire shift can triple the average everyone works on it." steelworker's take-home pay. Ittook six months to convince Auburn workers that -.. --
With demand for steel
scorching@ese_dayls, -paxday they would do better under Nucor's pay system. During has become a regular cause for celebration. Nucor that time the company paid people based on their old gave out more than $220 million in profit sharing formula but posted what they would have received unand bonuses to the rank and file in 2005. The average der Nucor's formula. Pretty soon the numbers became Nucor steelworker took home nearly $79,000 last a powerful argument to switch. Hutchins saw his pay year. Add to that a $2,000 one-time bonus to mark climb from $53,000 the year before the sale to $67,000 the company's record
