Northend Creative Print Solutions
Vital statistics
Location Sheffield
Inspection host Nigel Stubley, managing director
Size The 1,672sqm plant turns over around £4m and has 41 staff
Established 1889 as JW Northend, becoming De Lisle Communications in 1997 a year after being bought by current managing director Nigel Stubley. (He has a background of working for high-profile food and beverage brands such as Mars and Unilever.)
Products Marketing collateral, a large proportion of this ordered from Northend’s online marketing portal; short-run books; B2C posters
Kit Five-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 75 with inline coater, four-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 74 with inline coater, Ricoh Pro C901 Graphic Arts Edition (a second installation imminent), Polar 115XT guillotine with inline cutting system, Polar 92 EMC Monitor guillotine, Muller Martini Presto trimmer-stitcher, MBO K52/4KTL folder, Heidelberg Stahl TH 66 folder, Morgana DigiFold folder-creaser
Key dates 1996 Stubley acquires JW Northend 1997 becomes De Lisle Communications, along with three other sites acquired through venture capital backing 2004 branches into digital print By 2006 has sold additional three sites to concentrate on original Sheffield plant 2007 an online marketing portal is set up and the company is renamed Northend Creative Print Solutions
Inspection focus Implementing a new culture of taking ownership and creativity in an already-established business
The challenge…
What greeted Nigel Stubley when he acquired Sheffield-based JW Northend back in 1996 may sound all too familiar to those well acquainted with print. And to this end, many would perhaps not have felt there was too much wrong. Staff turned up to work. Jobs went out of the door. Enough money came in to keep the business afloat.
But Stubley, like many other more forward-thinking print bosses before and after him, realised that such a skilled job and such a potentially creative sector as printing needed an engaged workforce to flourish. This was very much not the kind of workforce at Northend.
"It was a very paternalistic culture, with a board of directors who made edicts to managers. They implemented those edicts and the people who actually could make the difference just did what they were told," reports Stubley. "The way I described it to them was ‘you walk through the door and put your brain into neutral’.
"People were just going through the motions and keeping their heads down, and as long as they were doing what they were told, largely they were left alone," Stubley elaborates. "Like a lot of people in the printing industry, those I inherited were trained on the job and were trained by someone who had been doing that job for 20 years and they’d only ever worked at Northend. So new people were trained the way everyone else did it. And if you were smart enough to have a few shortcuts, you didn’t share them."
The result, reports Stubley, was an overall culture of doing just enough to get by. Improvements to processes were never strived for, and there was certainly no leeway for the majority of employees to contribute bright new business ideas. In short, Northend was stagnating.
The method…
This approach was clearly, to Stubley’s mind, never going to work in an ever-more competitive print environment. The best way for Northend to start actually generating a profit, he decided, was to implement an ethos of exceeding customer expectations rather than just satisfying them. To achieve this, he needed the whole team on board.
"In most organisations, you have to ask ‘who, internally, is looking out for the customer?’ And the answer is, probably the one or two people who are customer-facing. But the customer-facing one only has a very small impact on the final product," explains Stubley.
So one of the first things Stubley did to turn things around was get everyone thinking from the customer’s point of view. "When we initially started out on our journey, the first thing to do was to have some awesome customer training, not just for the customer service team but for every single person within the factory. They can all have an input, they just didn’t realise they could," explains Stubley.
Now finally fully informed about what exactly it was they were working towards, no matter how far down the line they might be, staff could start to take more responsibility for their own individual areas, explains Stubley. The overly specific and paternalistic dictates of old could now be relaxed and people trusted to know how best to do things. In fact, the real boon was that, finally, experts in their own areas could start to use their expertise to do things better.
Key to encouraging people to take ownership, explains Stubley, is not being overly critical. "If they get it wrong, they’re still patted on the back and told ‘well done for taking the initiative, now let’s analyse it and see what we could have done to get a better outcome’," he says.
Also crucial is that employees never feel as though this new culture amounts to just being lumbered with increased responsibility. For employees to feel empowered rather than put-upon, strong support from management is needed.
For Northend, this comes in the form of celebrating all successes in striving for continuous improvement, and in a carefully structured 360° review system.
"When somebody’s gone over and above the call of duty, I‘ll highlight that at our monthly team briefings and in newsletters," says Stubley. "Underpinning all of this is our job review system. There are one-to-ones during the year too. This isn’t about having a cosy chat, but supporting people to know what they are aiming for with targets and KPIs."
Also crucial to Northend’s success in implementing a more engaged and motivated culture, has been to allow staff to shape this culture of ownership. The best way to do this, feels Stubley, is through a ‘culture card’ system. All staff get together annually to write down a set of agreed pointers on how to push for continuous improvement.
"This is things such as: they all want to work to the same rules and regulations, they want communication in between shifts, they want to see people taking the initiative, they want to look for opportunities, they want to be challenged, they want to celebrate success," reports Stubley. He points out that this tool is useful for any company wanting to get staff to really buy in to a new way of working, no matter what that new way might entail. For Northend, staff actually liking the idea of "people taking the intuitive", has of course been key.
The result…
And take the initiative Northend employees certainly have. Stubley cites one example of someone in his finishing department coming up with the simple improvement of putting labels on the top right-hand corner of boxes. This way, customers can see what’s in each box when they are stacked at their premises.
"Another recent example has been one of the pre-press team coming up with the idea of using Facebook images to make posters," reports Stubley. "This has led to us pairing with Poster Friends and we’re now printing around 100 of these a week. We’re in the process of installing specialist poster presses."
As the above example shows, the new culture has been critical to the business moving with the times. Stubley explains that since he joined in 1996 the business has gone through many iterations, not least because of the purchase and then timely selling of three further companies, which formed the De Lisle Communications group from the late 1990s to 2006.
Critical to Northend’s survival, reports Stubley, has been its ability to embrace digital print in the early 2000s, and then web to print soon after. And critical to this is having a workforce that understands why change has to happen, and that isn’t stuck in its ways.
"Generally, human beings don’t necessarily go looking for change; there is a natural reluctance to it," says Stubley. "So it’s having a culture where you can embrace the changes that are required. We’ve had to change as a business, like every other printing business."
He adds: "This has been very successful to the point where now 70% of jobs are digital and more than half are being generated by our online marketing platform."
The result of greater employee enthusiasm and engagement can be traced right through to Northend’s overall financial performance, believes Stubley. Northend has gone from just breaking even back in 1996, to making an average net profit of 6%-7%. "We’re making a profit when the average profit margin is 2.5%," reiterates Stubley.
But it’s not only boosted profit margins that give Stubley a kick. These are the ultimate proof of a healthy business, but more subtly gratifying is the knowledge that Northend’s 41 staff –half of whom were there when Stubley took the reins and have loyally stuck around – on the whole now love what they do.
"People don’t want to come to work and do a bad job, they want to do a good job," says Stubley. "Now when people walk through the door, they don’t switch into neutral. They start revving up the gears."
DO IT YOURSELF
Following suit
"Anyone not making a profit would benefit from having a good look at themselves and their culture," says Stubley of those who might benefit from a workplace culture overhaul. He adds: "Many large corporations should consider this, because large companies are very good, in my experience, at coming up with the platitudes you’ll see on the reception wall, but they don’t implement them because of blockages in the system."
Potential pitfalls
The biggest pitfall is management not having clear enough objectives, says Stubley: "Can any culture change? Of course it can, but you need to have a clear idea of what you want it to change to."
Top tips for success
- Don’t assume change can happen overnight. "It was certainly more than a year before we started to see any changes at Northend," reports Stubley.
- Implement the new culture right across board and make sure this is thoroughly backed up by appraisals, KPIs and tools like culture cards. "You can’t do this piecemeal," advises Stubley.
- Be aware that not everyone will necessarily embrace change. Stubley says: "There may have to be performance management for those you can’t get on board. And if they’re really not going to get on the bus, you need to let them off as soon as possible."
Stubley’s top tip
"My boss at Mars used to say: ‘if you don’t know where you’re going anywhere will do’," says Stubley, reiterating the importance of knowing what you want to achieve as a company before deciding what sort of workplace culture to enforce.
