What doesn’t happen with the workforce can often be just as important as what does, according to APM Terminals'' Hartmut Goeritz.
He believes that this mantra is the reason why APMT TangerMed faired better than other nearby operators when it came to strike action earlier this year.
“This time we didn’t attempt to negotiate our agreement through a third party, that process is adversarial and often doesn’t lead to a proper conclusion,” he says. He does, however, add it took place alongside “quite a lot of management changes on our side of the table”. The approach has helped productivity gain by a third: “It’s a win-win-win all round,” says Mr Goeritz.
This strategy of closing of the communication loop has morphed into other areas too. Like many others, APMT had an operations team charged with organising the moves and a technical team which looked after equipment. Mr Goeritz says: “The problem was a ping pong of claims; the ops men would say, ‘these technical guys aren’t giving us what we need’ while the tech team kept saying ‘they keep overloading and breaking the equipment’.”
So, the two teams were brought together into one production team. “As you can imagine, initially everyone was very sceptical. Luckily, we got this moving while we had that bit of downtime, so people had a chance to get used to it,” says Mr Goeritz.
