MEETINGS: WHAT GOES ON Hate meetings? Better learn to love ’em. Regular meetings are a necessity for any effective bottom-up quality program. This is where salespeople, installers, production managers, and office staff review the performance of all other team members, job by job.

In addition to job costing, Scott Lemons, director of member services for Certified Contractors Network, a peer organization for contractors, recommends a daily job activity log; job evaluation forms for installers, salesmen, and production managers that enable a “360” evaluation; and customer-satisfaction ratings.

But even if job costs are all you have, get meetings started anyway — and add more documentation later — because this is where the dynamic of identifying and solving problems and creating efficiencies takes place. “It’s not mistakes that drive contractors insane, it’s the same mistakes being repeated all the time,” Lemons adds. “And [with TQM] all that goes away.”

Contractors cite scores of problems uncovered and solved in TQM meetings. For example, Capizzi Home Improvement’s staff discussed and agreed on how to vent a roof before installing shingles and determined a best practice for bending dental molding from aluminum trim. The Fick Bros. Roofing & Exterior Remodeling Co. has developed best practices for installing valleys and hanging gutters in different situations, and has honed many other procedures. “Every month we make adjustments to the estimating system as a result of TQM meetings,” Fick says.

ONE GROUP, ONE TARGET Getting TQM meetings up and running right can be tricky. “You’re always going to get some unhappy campers,” Capizzi notes. Hold the meetings at the same time, on the same day of the week. And don’t cancel them for any reason. “For the first three months [employees] are expecting you to stop,” Feurer says. “They think it won’t last. That’s why consistency is so important.” Make attendance mandatory — no exceptions. “Most production guys don’t want to leave a job and they don’t want to sit in a meeting,” Lemons says. “That’s why meetings should always be at the same time, same day. There’s never an excuse for missing one.”

Make the meetings inclusive. “When they start the process, most replacement contractors exclude the production people, so it turns into a glorified sales meeting,” Lemons says. Some contractors have all sales, field, and administrative employees at the quality meeting. Others have each group meet separately, but with representatives from other departments attending. Either way, meetings must be even-handed. “Everybody who sits at that table is on an even playing field. We’re now one group striving to go after one target,” Lemons says.

That means the person who chairs the meetings — typically, a production manager — must be top-notch. He has to keep the meeting moving, be impartial, and keep comments within agreed-upon, professional bounds — especially in a program’s early days. “It can be a bit of a slug-fest because everyone is adjusting to a new process,” says Gary Gustafson, Capizzi Home Improvement’s senior production manager, who conducts most of the company’s TQM meetings.

MEETING DO’S AND DON’TS Here are four other things to think about. First, however tempted you may be, don’t get up and pontificate. If you do, you’re right back to the top-down management system you’re trying to change. In fact, Lemons recommends that the owner or general manager not attend the meetings at all. If they attend in some other capacity, for example, as sales manager, they should wear that hat and that hat only, he says.

Second, clearly communicate what this is about and why you’re implementing it. “The toughest part was getting everyone to understand that the purpose was to seek improvement and to understand that when we talked about something that didn’t go well, it wasn’t an attack on that person but our way of improving,” Fick explains.

Third, recognize achievements, don’t just focus on problems. Frazier makes sure employees understand the point of the program by teaching all of them certain business fundamentals. To make his incentive program more effective, Frazier, like some of the other contractors interviewed for this article, opens his books to employees. “It wakes them up when they see the cost of gasoline, phones, insurance, advertising.” Now, he says, installers “know the cost of all the things that positively and negatively affect them.” Finally, make a point to follow up on what happens in a meeting. According to Gustafson, “The worst thing you can do is to talk about solutions and not take any action. That will really kill morale.”