Last Tuesday was our annual “Years of Service Luncheon.” We honored Tideworks Technology employees with 5, 10, 15, 20, 25+ years of service. Let that sink in a moment then ask, “How is that kind of quality tenure possible in the high tech hotbed that is the Pacific Northwest?!”
Of course the answer is multi-faceted. We’re talking about real people and business, both of which can be quite messy. You should see our company kitchen after Pizza Thursday.
And yet, I can summarize a response with a single word: change.
Facing and navigating successfully through change together builds trust. Office and product team alliances are formed. Good, true friendships are made. Creative solutions are fostered in even the most uncertain, high stress environments because we want each other, our customers, our partners to succeed while managing change.
We’ve all experienced the kind of change that knocks us on our keister. In those moments we are grateful for leaders and team members who get back up, extend a hand and go, “Whew! That was different. Let’s try to keep that from ever happening again.”
Some change we influence, some happens to us and necessitates detours on our roadmap. When we expect change we can manage it, leverage it and grow.
You never know when a good experience through a changing technology landscape is going to help forge an even stronger bond. Just the other day a new Tideworks colleague reminded me of a specific intermodal project on which we’d had the pleasure of working together before he joined our company. “Intermodal.” Now there’s an interesting mode in the logistics chain. Intermodal isn’t even really its own mode. It is a process or way of offering freight services by two or more modes so that the efficiencies of each are maximized.
I single out intermodal as it is one of Tideworks’ newer areas of innovation and yet one in which we offer clear, solid market leadership; good change. None of that happened overnight. Think intentional, glacier style change.
Although the first commercial application of rail/truck intermodal service occurred in the 1950s, the service did not become a full-blown, thriving industry until the 1980s. Three changes were key to its evolution.
First, in 1980, railroads and motor carriers were partially deregulated from federal economic controls.
Second, carriers were soon allowed even more market freedom to experiment with intermodal service offerings. Today, businesses compete vigorously in this space while supporting mandated change for industry benefits and community health and safety. Think Appointments, PierPass and today’s SOLAS VGM requirements.
Third, in the late 1980s, at the request of American Presidents Lines (now APL Ltd.) the Santa Fe railroad (now Burlington Northern Santa Fe) created double stack train service. Railroads could transport twice the freight with modest increases in the power required to run their locomotives and minimal increases in operating expenses.
The railroad industry continues its leadership creating standardized systems for tracking and monitoring equipment as it moves over the nation’s rail systems. Tideworks sees sustained value in offering creative solutions through which domestic and global terminal operators may capture and visualize such changing data, providing stakeholders innovative ways to historically track and monitor real-time data sets related to operational performance.
Increasing levels of performance under tighter deadlines with slimmer margins for error, these are just some of the forces of change influencing us all.
Being transparent, knowing change is coming helps keep employees engaged. Demonstrating gratitude, acknowledging an employee’s value, that must be consistent and never taken for granted, no matter the years of service.
Be it rail or marine TOS solutions, data warehousing, IT services or innovations still sitting quietly on a team member’s laptop, the embrace of change can result in amazing, long-lasting, personal and professional relationships. Whether this promise is realized depends, in large part, on the ability of the employer and employee to continually develop and revisit a common vision of meaningful success. If you don’t already do that, try it…for a change.
Resources and references for this content include:
U.S Freight: Economy in Motion U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration 1998
Intermodal Freight Transportation, Third Edition, Gerhardt Muller, Intermodal Association of North America and Eno Transportation Foundation, Inc., @ 1995.
JOC Container Weight Mandate January 2015