A team directive: in search of a better way, Weyerhaeuser restructures facilities management.

When Ed Reed joined Weyerhaeuser two years ago as corporate region facilities manager, he brought with him a philosophy of consensus management that defined every opinion as equal.

I'll believe it when I see it.

He assembled a core group of company veterans who had performed separate

Reed explained, "Here are the ground rules, gang. We're going to make all of these decisions collectively. Everyone has an equal voice, and my job will be to be the resource provider, the obstacle remover. I'll be the one standing out on the bow trying to interpret the signals from the fleet. That's where we start."

"We had no idea whether this guy meant this or not. Right. Sure," recalls interior manager Clara Roth.

We'll see.

Reed's cause was supported by a company culture that encourages high-performance work teams. The philosophy, says Reed's boss, Judd Haverfield, vice president of Weyerhaeuser Business Services (WBS): "Much higher involvement of the workers. Empowerment. Workers know what their boundaries are and then are free to operate in that, look for improvements, come forward on their own with suggestions on how to improve whatever they're doing, and get a pretty good reception."

Weyerhaeuser employees constantly strive for excellence. If that means making a drastic change, so be it. When the 354,000-square-foot corporate headquarters (HQ) building was built in 1971, for example, its open layout, which included the executive floor, must have seemed radical.

Situated just south of Seattle on a 500-acre campus in Federal Way, WA, Weyerhaeuser (pronounced where-how-zer) is an international producer of forestry products, including paper, pulp, building products, and wood chips. Its real estate arm develops homes and planned communities, while its recycling business processes tons of newspaper, waste paper, and corrugated boxes each year. Total sales in 1997 were $11.2 billion.

Nestled near a forest of lofty sycamores, red alders, oaks, and Douglas firs that majestically stretch to the northern sky, the five-story HQ building humbly resides near the earth, providing as much space in its diminished height as a 35-floor tower. Each expansive floor perimeter is walled by 12- by eight-foot glass panels, allowing natural light to penetrate workstations and providing unobstructed views of a 10-acre lake surrounded by willows.

Just down a winding, tree-canopied road sits the technology center, a sleek, 450,000-square-foot cedar and reflective glass-clad industrial-style building that serves as the focal point for the company's research and development activity. Here is where Reed's staff meets every Thursday morning to discuss day-to-day business, debate issues, and even make decisions - by consensus.

Yes, really.

After forming the leadership team, Reed experimented with the best approach to interaction. "He'd say, for instance, 'Well, how do you think we should do blahdy blah?' There wasn't much coming from us," relates Roth, explaining that such a question was too broad. "But if he said, 'What do you think about this model?' Well, we're free and open. We'll rip it up, no problem. That doesn't bother us at all. He learned that that's a little foible of this group. Other than that, we have no fear of discussing and cussing, as our financial guy says, or arguing or tearing the model apart."

Yet, discussions have never turned into no-holds-barred brawls. In fact, Weyerhaeuser personnel provided training on how to conduct a meeting, how to resolve conflicts, and how to set rules of engagement. When all is said and done, all leadership team members must agree - almost. "The least we will take is that every team member has to get to a position where they are comfortable in saying, 'I can live with this,' " says Reed, a deliberate, soft-spoken manager. "There has not been an instance where I have had to say, 'Enough. We're going to do this.' Initially that new team of mine was waiting for me to do that."

When Reed assembled his core leadership team, responsibilities shifted. Previously, regional facilities operated independently, meaning that each building, or sometimes small groups of facilities, had their own plumbers, electricians, and, worst of all, standards. It resulted in different levels of service in different facilities. Now, Reed's team members oversee staffs that are grouped according to job function, not building. Uniformity of service levels is assured.

The group makes decisions on broad issues that affect the whole region. Take response times, for instance. The staff might decide that it should only take one hour for a custodian to change a light fixture once a report is made. The decision about how to fulfill that directive would be for Clara Roth's technicians to decide.

Roth oversees just about everything within corporate region buildings besides operations and furniture. A range of activities, from cleaning and decor to machines, wood, and instrumentation, is under her domain. In other words, her people are the first to know when an elevator's broken or a toilet's not running right.

Roth, who has worked at Weyerhaeuser 20 years, was in charge of the technology center before the reorganization, and she had mixed feelings about it. Not only would she have to move from her beloved building to HQ and be a part of a new team herself, but she would have to coalesce a group of tradespeople who had never worked together and who did not know the ins and outs of other facilities. Yet, she knew the change would result in more efficient service and cost savings.

Andy Bylin, currently regional operations manager, remained in his technology center workspace but had the same problem with his staff. "There are some clashes. There are some expectations that we're still working through," he says. "It's tough on the team level because ... in any job it's hard to confront an individual that's on an equal with you and tell them, 'Heh, you're not pulling your weight.'"

Both Roth and Bylin respect the work of their highly skilled technicians, seasoned experts used to doing things independently, and they sympathize with the challenge of operating differently. "The way this high-performance work system theory is going, these folks need to be budget analysts now. They need to assume leadership roles. We're all going to take turns running the staff meeting in this team concept," says Bylin. The concept can be difficult to embrace. "It's a mold that they're trying to avoid because it's harder," he says.

To ease the transition, a straightforward, common-sense management style works well. "Everything they ask me I answer. Everything they want to know I find out," says Roth. "They just know that I'm an open book. There's no subterfuge, no company politics, no anything going on here but the facts."

Like the personalities within, each Weyerhaeuser facility has its own character. Bylin has worked in the technology center for 15 years. This two-story structure offers 10 acres of floor space, including pilot plants, heavy-duty work areas, and 115 laboratories. A central mall divides open offices from industrial spaces and reveals a 260-seat cafeteria, a library, and presentation and conference rooms. Fabric panels, an acoustical ceiling, and live plants control acoustical and visual distractions.

Unique to Bylin's staff of electricians, plumbers, and engineers is the range of innovative solutions they must create. "It's not untypical [for a customer] to say, 'Oh, we got this machine in from Finland and we need it hooked up tomorrow and it's 50 hertz power,'" Bylin explains. End-users even demand one-of-a-kind machines for new tests. Adds Reed, "If [customers] can't buy the test mechanism off the shelf, we certainly can build it for them. We do that pretty consistently."

Back at HQ, Weyerhaeuser's commitment to the environment is evident in a heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system that uses heat recovery. Two 30,000-gallon storage tanks capture waste heat that normally would have been rejected through cooling towers and use it instead for hot water. More heat is only necessary when the outside temperature drops below 47 degrees F. Hot water is produced more cost effectively than in a gas-fired heating system. In addition, ivy that covers the main roof and roof terraces minimizes solar heat gain in the summer and maximizes it in the winter.

To confront the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) phaseout, Bylin's staff has replaced 90 percent of the region's R-11 chillers with HCFC-123 chillers. He chose replacement over conversion because the chillers were at the ends of their useful lives and he could gain 10- to 15-percent more operating efficiency.

While the facilities regionalization was a challenge to Bylin and Both, it made life easier for interior designer Carole Converse and Dan Madden, team lead for furniture, space planning, design, and allocation. Organizing moves is one of their main responsibilities - last year they handled 1,600 - and the reallocation simplified the coordination of team members from other departments. Each week, a move team carefully schedules moves, for one worker or a whole department.

Once the group is notified that a relocation is necessary, it handles everything from space design to moving boxes and setting up partitions and telecommunications. Madden's team also manages furniture, space planning, and design for the region. He and Converse are always working on ways to use space more efficiently, especially since the vacancy rate dropped to zero. Part of their strategy has been to convince company executives of the importance of working with the facilities department from the outset of any potential project. "It's very important that facilities is part of the strategic planning for the businesses so that we can support them. We're here to increase their productivity so they can make money for the company," says Madden. Not only that, but Weyerhaeuser can save money by putting more employees in owned facilities. "We have leases expiring and rather than renew we'll see if we can't accommodate [employees] here," adds Converse.

Just as the corporate facilities group was simplified, so, too, have processes and products been standardized. For instance, Madden and Converse are now limiting furniture specification to two systems, down from 11, in four standard sizes. Function, not title, determines who gets what size workstation. "The uniform implementation of space standards allows us to take maximum advantage of the space that's available to us, which in fact is a way of saving money or reducing costs. As business people, most [end-users] understand that that's what's driving the implementation of standards," says Reed.

It helps to explain it to them, and to give them choices. The new furniture systems will have a range of features, such as storage and filing, that employees can customize. "We will not choose stations for people. They'll all be included and be able to decide on what they want in their station and how to accessorize their station so it will become their area," says Converse.

Sensitivity to customer needs is essential in a time of transition in which even end-users must approach facilities differently. In the past, for instance, they could flag down John Facilities in the hallway and tell him their work area was too cool. Now, they must report their problems to a centralized call center and leave John Facilities alone. "We want to be very customer oriented but at the same time we're asking them to play by some different rules," says Bylin.

Sometimes that means saying "no," especially when workers ask for something they prefer but don't need, like purple paper. In the past, however, facilities professionals were not supported when they gave that answer. "If we said, 'No, we don't do that,' they knew darn good and well they could go somewhere else and they could get us to do exactly what we said we wouldn't," says Roth. Things changed when Ed Reed came along. "That's just not happening now. He's established the facts upstairs that you've got to have standards; you've got to hold by these things if you ever want to become efficiently, cost-effectively run. We've all known that all along but it just went against the cultural mores here."

Reed feels supported by a company that knows and appreciates the facilities department. "If that attitude wasn't there or that corporate position wasn't there, no matter how hard we tried we wouldn't be able to keep it to the standards we want," he says.

The attitude starts with CEO Steven R. Rogel's directive to always do things better. "That obviously flows down to us on the facilities side as well," says VP Hayerfield. "We've got to find ways to simplify our processes in dealing with the customers [while] meeting their needs. We've got to do it faster than we've been doing. We think we're doing pretty well now, but we've got to clearly be able to benchmark that against the best-in-class standards. The pressure isn't off us."

Weyerhaeuser's facilities team can handle it. No problem. "They're a conscientious, well trained, well educated, very skilled bunch of folks who are working hard at doing the best job they can do," says Reed with pride. "It's just an absolutely gratifying feeling to be able to go to sleep at night, to take my boat out on the weekend and know that I have a team of folks that are going to keep this thing running."

What a team.

An Environmental Focus

Weyerhaeuser is all about trees: growing them, cutting them down, and growing some more. Its corporate headquarters campus is packed with trees - close to 100 varieties.

In essence, the site is a living laboratory. "We've been experimenting with trees for a long time. We spend a lot of research dollars trying to determine what's the best tree to get the greatest yield. A whole lot of what appears to be just woods ... was planted intentionally as part of the research process," says Ed Reed, corporate region facilities manager.

"We do that because this is representative of the world in which we live and work ... The majority of the people who work for Weyerhaeuser are either planting trees, cutting trees, researching trees, hauling trees, or making it into lumber."

As corporate site forestry and operations manager, a team led by Dave Dickerson oversees outdoor activities at the 500-acre campus, from snow removal to a van pool that transports employees. They even maintain miles of hiking trails that wind through a "natural" forest. "It's a natural wood. It's just maintained a little differently," he says, explaining that trees are pruned so branches don't block walkers.

In addition to trees, lush English ivy in various shades of green - part of the campus masterplan - adds variety to plantings around the headquarters facility, providing a spectacular view up a steeped parking lot. "All the colors are supposed to blend in together as they come up from the woods to the building so everything looks natural and looks like it was there from the beginning," says Dickerson.

A Site Manager is More than Meets the Title ...

At Weyerhaeuser's corporate region facilities, site managers are responsible for more than just property. They also oversee internal services such as food service, reception, and desktop publishing. The list goes on. "It's a long list and our role is to make sure these services are operating for all the customers. We're kind of the last stop gap," says site manager Debra Hansen. Adds her colleague Perry Christensen, "The main reason the site manager role was defined was to work with higher level strategy and communication issues with our key customers in our buildings." Neither is part of Ed Reed's facilities team. Instead, they report directly to Judd Haverfield, vice president of Weyerhaeuser Business Services.

Their work falls into four categories:

* Strategic communications and property management.

* Services management.

* Regional policies and processes.

* Life safety and asset protection.

"We're not meant to day-to-day manage these activities," says Christensen. "When we usually get involved it's service mishaps, customer unhappiness, budget problems."

Formal end-user input is given by customer councils, comprised of key business representatives who help define and measure levels of service needed, work through and implement changes, and distribute the information to the rest of the workforce.

Just like the rest of the company, Hansen and Christensen are always looking for ways to do things better, even if that means outsourcing. "We take two or three [services] a year and validate whether we're the best provider of those services," says Hansen. Adds Christensen, "In order to do that you have to have your metrics. You have to know what it costs you to do the job, what the parameters are, so when you benchmark you can compare apples to apples."

It would not surprise either one of them if the role of site manager is redefined. "We're change agents but we also get changed a lot and it's not a big deal anymore. It doesn't mean we change haphazardly; it just means that if there's a better way to do it we change the organization. it wouldn't bother either one of us." Adds Hansen, "To love this job you need to love change."

Incidentally, one thing neither can change is the vast, airy headquarters facility, but they love it anyway. "This building is like having a Frank Lloyd Wright home. You can't make major changes in it. You can only keep it the way it is," says Hansen. "The owner of the house is still alive and well," says Christensen. Hansen adds, "And cares very much because his name is on this building."

A Goose of a Problem

Weyerhaeuser's corporate campus is home to a variety of animals. Canada geese, loons. blue heron, bald eagles, and 12 different types of ducks have been known to visit. In 1986, the National Wildlife Federation awarded the company a certificate of exceptional merit for providing "habitat for geese, quail, pheasants, porcupines, and other animals."

But these feathered and furry friends leave their mark in a mess that must be cleaned everyday.

That's not the only problem. Each year, many Canada geese build nests on the headquarters building's highest roof, which consists of a series of stepped, ivy-covered terraces. "When the goslings are born, [the mothers] knock them down roof by roof to get to the water," says corporate region facilities manager Ed Reed.

Last year, a complete reroofing waited more than a month for the goslings to hatch, make their way to the water, and, best of all, find a new home.

A Y2K Answer

Corporate region facilities manager Ed Reed serves on a Weyerhaeuser taskforce to find solutions to the Year 2000 computer-crash dilemma.

Reed serves as the facilities expert in a three-pronged approach that also includes manufacturing and information technology. His goal is to ensure that the company's 350 facilities in the United States and almost 600 worldwide are compliant by the end of this year. The issue is a high priority for Weyerhaeuser because it could lose close to $1 million per day if just one plant is shut down, Estimated total cost for fixing the problem for the company is many millions of dollars.

Maureen Patterson (maureen-patterson@stamats.com) is senior associate editor at Buildings magazine.