Handle With Care

The first step, of course, was to understand who she had in her workforce. Soon after she arrived, Shroeger analyzed all of the district workers' information, which produced a deep demographic and psychographic profile. Five distinctive groups emerged, distinguished roughly by the ages of the employees and by the stages of their careers.

In general, though, the defining generational divide fell at age 35. Employees who were older than that often talked differently, listened differently, and even responded to different motivation than their younger counterparts. By understanding what type of workplace promise each group responded to, Shroeger was able to tailor her pitch to bring the right person in the door.

3. Handle with care.

It didn't take long for Shroeger to figure out why so many new workers felt overwhelmed when they first came on the job: They had landed in a noisy, cavernous building with little more than a handshake and a week of training -- and suddenly the boxes were coming at them. "This is a warehouse," Shroeger says. "It's tough. If you're an 18-year-old college student, it's intimidating."

"A lot of it had to do with creating a positive work environment," adds Ray Barczak, a Buffalo business manager who helped Shroeger deliver the turnaround. UPS improved lighting throughout the building and upgraded break rooms to make the place feel more human. It also installed more personal computers on the floor, which gave workers easier access to training materials and human-resources information on the company's intranet.

Barczak turned some of his best part-time shift supervisors into trainers, who spend a week shadowing new workers. Carla Wass, an outgoing young woman who takes classes by day at Buffalo State College and serves as a trainer by night, devotes the first part of each shift to a review of the new hires' performance from the night before. Then she sticks around to supervise package processing. "If I can get them past the first 30 days," Wass says, "they'll be fine."

For each of the 20 operations and shifts across the district, Shroeger initiated an employee-retention committee, which is composed of both managers and hourly workers. The committees track new hires through their first few weeks on the job, offering encouragement when needed and trying to fix small problems before they mushroom. Judy Caveny was a week into her job when she started getting conflicting instructions from competing supervisors. "It got to the point where I wanted to walk out. I was so frustrated," she explains. The employee-retention committee stepped in and talked to both supervisors, quickly clarifying Caveny's reporting relationships.

The employee-retention committees have another important role: They try to make work more fun. There are many after-hours outings to baseball games and bowling alleys, a basketball tournament, and floorwide "super loader" contests. "We know that these are monotonous jobs," says Barczak. "We want to make it less mechanical and more social. People don't want to feel like robots. And if I'm happy, I'll take the missorts seriously. I'll treat other people right, and the quality will go up. Because, hey, I know that guy -- I played volleyball with him."

4. Let the drivers do the driving.

"It's hard for me to know what motivates 18-year-old kids," Shroeger says. "I can't predict what's going to get them going." So she lets her supervisors -- most of whom are part-timers themselves -- figure it out. Since the supervisors are closest to the work and to the workers, they are "critical influencers," as Barczak calls them.

Jaykhell Ghee supervises 15 workers in his area. He's an Army veteran who's been with UPS for nine months. The older guys on his shift, he says, respond well to military-style command and control. But that doesn't fly with college kids: "They always want to know why."

Ultimately, Ghee says, he has to "tell everyone that we're all working for the same thing." At a daily briefing near the team's truck bays, he tells workers how many packages are expected and reviews safety tips. And he has a small budget for rewarding exceptional performance. But Ghee understands that keeping UPS's employees engaged means playing to diverse backgrounds, interests, and needs.

That's why Shroeger has sent every supervisor through training. They have learned how to assess difficult management situations; they have also learned to communicate in different ways and to appreciate the need for flexibility that goes along with people in various career stages. College students and moms, for example, tend to need occasional days off or changes in their schedules -- the sort of flexibility that supervisors in UPS's demanding production system weren't eager to grant. But it turned out to be something that was relatively easy to do. "Instead of just saying, 'We can't do this,' we started looking at ways we could do it," Shroeger says.