Mind the gap - What Vulkan do Brasil, the Sugar Cane Mountain in Rio de Janeiro & the Anfield stadium in the UK have in common
Hi all You readers of my posts and followers of my blog. Time has come for writing a new post here once again.
Actually this is post number 80 in this blog since I started it and since I wrote my first post here on June 18, 2020. I am very positively impressed by the success of this project, which I had initiated from out of nothing more than just a spontaneous idea and the wish to try this out. Thanks to all You supporters who keep motivating and inspiring me for continuation.
The first time I really attentatively noted the warning phrase "mind the gap" was when I visited the beautiful Sugar Cane Mountain in Rio de Janeiro about two years ago with one of our new African business partners.
No matter all undoubtedly existing bad things in and about Rio, I continue with my deep passionate love for this Marvelous City since I had first visited it for the first time in July 1996. During the last 25 years I have been there very often, mainly for spending wonderful weekends with colleagues from our international Vulkan Group (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding) and/or with business partners and friends from all over the world, but also for meeting with our fantastic Vulkan do Brasil (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/brazil) Couplings division sales & engineering team @ our office in downtown Rio and - last not least - for participation in the events and meetings of the Brazilian-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (AHK, https://brasilien.rio.ahk.de/pt/), where I have the great honor to make part of the board of directors as one of the Vice Presidents.
To drive up to Sugar Cane Mountain with the famous cable car (https://bondinho.com.br/) is always exciting for my guests and for me. The incredibly beautiful view of the city, the harbour, the beaches, the long bridge across the sea from Rio to Niteroi and the whole Guanabara Bay from the sightseeing platform on top is definitely one of my favorites in Rio, especially during the transition period from the late afternoon on, when the sun is still bright and the sky is still deep blue, and the soon afterwards starting evening, when the sun downs over the mountains in the back of the city, when the lights in the city are beeing switched on one after the other and when soon afterwards night falls over the whole breathtaking scenery.
The audible or visual warning "mind the gap" at many places in the world alerts passengers to take caution when crossing the horizontal, and in some cases vertical, spatial gap between the doors of railcars (in Rio: the cable car) and the station platforms. As Wikipedia tells us furthermore, the phrase was first introduced in 1968 on the London Underground in the United Kingdom.
Since then, several times "mind the gap" has been used as a warning for totally different situations in life, economy and policy. Here in Brazil the national oil & gas giant Petrobras has tried during the last years - against massive interventions of the majority owning Brazilian government - to apply this principle for the - very frequent and often very harsh - adjustment of it`s prizes for the re-sale of imported destilled fuels like gasoline and diesel at the Brazilian gas stations to the very high and very frequent fluctuations of the exchange rate gap between our local Brazilian currency Real and the "hard" world market currency US Dollar, in which Petrobras purchases these fuels.
I personally have - since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis - taken the "mind the gap" warning very serious with regards to the continuation of the uninterrupted and unharmed communication and information flow between myself, my management team colleagues, all our employees in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, our suppliers, service providers, all our sales & distribution partners in the whole Latin America region and - for sure ! - our customers all over the world, including the global network of our Vulkan Group sister companies and sales subsidiaries.
After more than meanwhile one year since Covid-19 appeared and started changing the conditions and rules for our daily live and business, this has obviously become an even more important - I would even go so far and call it decisive - success factor for the uninterrupted continuity of our key business processes and it has also clearly become one of the facilitators of the strongly ongoing growth and success of our national (Brazilian), Latin American and global business and sales.
In our case we had the great luck, that we had been fantastically prepared for such kind of challenge. Since the realisation of our first lean projects at our company from the end of 2014 on, we have very successfully implemented a full cascade of routinary daily "shop floor" resp."admin floor" resp. "sales floor" meetings in all operations and administration areas of our company including participation of our employees in our offices in Rio de Janeiro, Bogota/Colombia and Mexico City. During these standardized and very short (15-20 minutes) daily (!) "lean" meetings all relevant subjects are "bottom up" beeing identified, analised and attacked with effective immediate measures. The culture for doing these meetings - since March 2020 most of them online - has very deeply penetrated our complete organisation during the meanwhile more than 6 years since we implemented these and has really become a fix element of our DNA.
And besides this very well structured and extremely disciplinated daily "lean" meeting routine, for sure, we have also several additional routinary meetings on different levels of our company, for particular projects etc. I do - since my arrival @ Vulkan do Brasil in September 2014 - weekly follow up conferences (in the past very often - always when my travel agenda allowed this - as physical meetings) with each of my direct reports, means with all our management team members. This also works perfectly and my colleagues and I have meanwhile developped a very efficient systematic for treating all important matters during our weekly conferences of between 30 minutes and 1 hour without loosing attention for any important subjects but also without wasting unnecessarily time with not really important things. Our relationship, colaboration and cooperation is very trustful and we have meanwhile internalized a strong "we are all in the same boat" conviction.
Since mid March last year approximately 70 Vulkan do Brasil employees in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are mostly or even permanently working from out of their home offices. Some of us go to our factory once or twice per week for doing things there, but many of us - like me - are practically fully working from more or less far away of our former offices in our factory in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, at our homes.
And this works very nicely. Our HR team is permanently in contact with all of us. Thus we make sure, that - seen from the human, personal view - nobody gets "lost". We have so far conducted 2 very detailed inquieries for all our home office workers and we are about to do another one right now, because we want to make sure, that we capture the real actual situation and feelings and opinion of our employees, which for sure develop and even change during such a long time and with the lots of different individual experiences accumulated by each of us.
Together with the Vice Presidents and all Directors of our company we are developping a new strategic plan for how we want to proceed with regards to our work and office routines from the beginning of 2022 on. We are - from out of the current situation - deeply convinced, that until the end of this year nothing important in this respect will change and that we will just continue with what and how we are doing within our company so far. Unfortunately we believe, that this also means that practically none of us will become able to leave Brazil for travelling abroad and also we do not foresee to receive any visits from colleagues and external business partners incl. customers and sales & distribution partners from outside Brazil to our company during the whole year 2021. But if the situation - we are crossing firmly our fingers that this will happen - changes, we will re-assess all these scenarios and take new decisions.
There is definitely no other song, which could describe our philosophy better than this classical one, which in the meantime has also become the hymn of my favorite British soccer team Liverpool and their home stadium Anfield:
Hope You found this post interesting and I am once again looking forward to all Your comments and sharing of Your own experiences with the Covid-19 challenge.
See You again here in my blog upon publication of my next post.
Enjow the rest of this wonderful - at least here in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo, Brazil - sunday.
Take care! Stay healthy, happy and continue successful !
Comments
Post a Comment