It’s not the best of times for auto dealerships, but Bruce GM in rural Nova Scotia is thriving with record sales. And all it took was a shift in its corporate culture to make sure its staff was happy
by Robert Martin
This spring, as Chrysler Canada went bankrupt and General Motors Canada slashed over one-third of its retailers in a desperate effort to stay afloat, one GM dealership in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley not only survived the purge but also had its best month ever in April. And the guy in charge gives all the credit to the organization’s human resources culture.
“It’s all about recognizing peoples’ strengths,” says Justin Barker, the 28-year-old general manager of Bruce GM in Middleton, N.S., and instigator of a paradigm shift in HR policies at the 55-employee car dealership over the past four years. Despite its size Bruce GM has a full-time HR person, Brenda Lewis, 36, who has brought organization and structure to a company that was always a good place to work but now strives to punch above its weight.
The dealership has been around since 1948 when it was opened by Carl Bruce. Barker’s father, Leslie, 59, a 35-year car-industry veteran, bought it in 1996 and held on to Bruce’s small-town gentleman’s business philosophy. “He told me I should try sitting on the other side of the desk every now and then just to see how the other fellow feels,” says Leslie, in his office decorated with model cars (GM of course) and autographed pictures of Boston Bruins hockey star Bobby Orr.
What the younger Barker has done is codify Bruce’s instinctive business practices of respect for employees and fair dealing with customers, into a system based on what he learned while studying business administration with a major in the automotive industry at Georgian College in Collingwood, Ont., and Northwood University in Palm Beach, Fla.
When Lewis joined Bruce GM in July of 2006, the company didn’t have an HR department. In two years she has developed the benefits offered into a package that has almost eliminated turnover and created a two-way communications system that Barker says now “aligns our HR function with our strategic goals.”
Bruce GM offers competitive pay, bonuses, and profit sharing; and cost-shared coverage for medical, dental, vision, prescription drugs, long-term care, disability, and life insurance. It allows for job sharing, cross-training for internal job mobility, and telecommuting. They’re the sort of practices usually associated with much larger organizations, and Barker readily acknowledges that the shift in corporate culture didn’t come without a cost. Maintaining both the programs and a dedicated HR person is expensive—at least in strictly bottom-line terms.
“You can’t gauge exactly the cost of the benefits but you can’t gauge the costs of turnover either,” he says. “But I do know that I’m not having to retrain sales people three times a year.” In addition to the benefits of reducing staff turnover, Barker says the company also talked to workers to ensure they were happy in their work. “If they were not in the right job, then we found them a job they were good at,” he says.
Bruce GM established a performance system whereby each employee set his or her own goals, wrote them down, and posted them on the wall. The practice was a bit of a shock for the more traditional technicians in the service bays. “Justin had the employment agreement system in place when I got here,” says Lewis. “I just tweaked it and fine tuned it.” There was resistance and some initial turnover, but through a combination of baby steps and constant communication, including town-hall meetings and individual coaching sessions, she eventually got staff buy-in.
Now service personnel are divided into teams, not to compete with each other but to better pool resources and organize work time. Increased productivity pays off; as Barker reported recently in one of his frequent memos to staff, the service department’s revenue increased 28% this April compared to the year before, and was, in fact, the department’s best month ever.
While Bruce GM has become more professional in using staff more productively through HR techniques, it has also tried to become more family friendly in dealing with the challenges that employees inevitably bring with them to work. While too small to offer in-house child care, it allows staff with sitter problems to bring their children to hang out in the showroom’s kids’ play area. It supports a long list of local charities and civic organizations and encourages employees to take paid time off to assist them. “People give extra when you’re flexible,” says Lewis.
One such person is Bette Holland, a 53-year-old receptionist whose younger daughter, Amy, has watched TV in the reception area while awaiting a sitter. And when she had to help her older daughter, Catherine, move to Halifax to start her studies at Dalhousie University, “they gave me a cargo van to do it.”
“There are probably other places where I could make more money,” says Holland, who had a career as a radiological technologist in Toronto before a separation from her husband brought her home to Middleton. “But I don’t know how they could compete on job satisfaction.”
Holland is impressed with how Justin Barker handles the company’s employees.“Justin rallies the troops,” she says. “He sends notes [such as the email announcing April’s sales results]. These are volatile times. There’s a lot of uncertainty but he handles it well. We seem to be holding our own and he shares that with us. We feel involved and informed. This is one of those places where you like to come to work and people socialize after hours. It’s like family.”
Bernice Thomas, 32, has been coming to work for the past 14 years, since she was a mechanics student at the local community college and needed some extra income. She started out washing cars and pumping gas and is now a service manager, running one of the teams that service cars. That she is a woman supervising men in a traditionally male trade makes her a walking symbol of the Barkers’ hiring policy. “We hire on aptitude and attitude,” says Barker. Thomas says she has encountered few problems with sexism: “Oh the odd time, there’s the odd person, but you learn to deal with that over the years.
Thomas’s years with the dealership have included time off for the births of her two children and a variety of job experiences, including the parts department, accounts payable, and business development. While she appreciates the variety, the team approach, and the bonus sharing, what she seems to like the most is the human side of HR.
“They’re very family oriented,” says Thomas. “Justin’s just like a brother to me.” Like Bette Holland, Thomas also has a story of the company going that extra step. After she had a car accident and called in to say she would be late, Thomas went home to find a replacement car waiting in the driveway. The best part, she says, “is whether it’s work-related or personal, they’re there to talk to, like part of your family. There’s someone to care, someone to listen.”
Barker hasn’t reinvented the wheel; he has simply implemented a lot of what he learned at school—systems that have been developed over the past half-century as the auto industry developed from Henry Ford’s cogs-in-the-wheel assembly line approach to the employee-involved teamwork methods of the Japanese auto makers.
Barker’s system is obviously working, since Bruce GM’s numbers are going up while the much of the industry drives off a cliff. Barker sees the current challenge as an opportunity. The dealership now operates under the Barker Group Limited banner, as he actively seeks new dealerships. He won’t give details but says a deal is in the works. It appears that a new family-run car empire is in the making in the Annapolis Valley. And Barker makes no secret that his modus operandi is keeping it all in the family.
