Hello again everybody. It feels really good, not to be alone here in my blog this morning. In my today`s post I will count You the story of the “Wall of Fame”, which we have erected in our factory in Itatiba one and a half years ago. But at first let`s have a look at wikipedia`s explanation of the term “Wall of Fame”.
A hall, wall, or walk of fame is a list of individuals, achievements, or animals, usually chosen by a group of electors, to mark their fame in their field. In some cases, these halls of fame consist of actual halls or museums that enshrine the honorees with sculptures, plaques, and displays of memorabilia and general information regarding the inducted recipients. Sometimes, the honorees’ plaques may instead be posted on a wall (hence a “wall of fame”) or inscribed on a sidewalk (as in a “walk of fame”, “walk of stars”, or “avenue of fame”). In other cases, the hall of fame is more figurative and consists of a list of names of noteworthy people and their achievements and contributions. The lists are maintained by an organization or community, and may be national, state, local, or private.
Great. Now we that know this perfectly, I can tell You, that for exactly these reasons and purposes we at Vulkan do Brasil decided at the beginning of last year, to install our own “Wall of Fame” inside our factory. We wanted to expose all our trophies, prizes won, awards and praise received from customers and other business partners for all our employees at an adequate place and in a nice and beautiful manner.
Before we erected our “Wall of Fame”, all such beautiful moments and achievements had always been verbally or in written form communicated to our employees, but afterwards these trophies, prizes, award medals and other beautiful items were just hung on the walls or put onto furnitures in the corners of meeting rooms – and, with the natural reduction of the human capacity for remembering – became quite soon afterwards forgotten and sometimes even dusty.
I always – and in all the companies where I have been working so far – found this terrible, if not unjust and even sad. The way in which these originally so beautiful and important success stories of lots of people and often whole companies involved ended up on “wall cemeteries” in meeting rooms and on office floors, was definitely not helpful for my opinion for the creation of the highly inspiring and motivating, open team culture inside of our company, which we want and need so much.
One morning, when I was running as usual around the small lake in my housing area, the idea to create a beautiful “Wall of Fame” at a prominent place within one of our operations areas was born. During my drive to our factory I called my friend and colleague Marco Santos, HR & Special Projects Director of Vulkan do Brasil, on his mobile and shared my spantaneous idea with him. It was no surprise for me, that Marco liked this idea immediately very much and that he jumped on it actively directly. From this moment on, I was exempt from this subject and Marco and his team took over, to put the idea into action and to erect our “Wall of Fame”.
A few days later Marco showed me his design proposal and he took me to the place in our factory, which he proposed for the installation of our future “Wall of Fame”. Both were perfect – as You can see on the beautiful picture of Marco and myself (taken last week during my short factory visit) below.
We have finally installed our “Wall of Fame” vis-à-vis to the meeting place of the daily “level 4” shopfloor management meetings of our factory management team, where also all our “level 4” KPI exposition boards are hung out publicly and where all our employees normally pass by several times every day.
Our employees like our “Wall of Fame” very much and every time when we expose there new success trophies etc., we inform all Vulkan do Brasil employees in advance during our internal weekly routine communication – I will explain this in more detailed in one of my future posts – and many of them take the opportunity to have a look at these with their own eyes or even take a picture of themselfes or their group of colleagues in front of our “Wall of Fame”. It makes a lot of fun, to see our employees feeling proud about our success.
Thus our trophies, prizes, awards and praises by customers stay alive and amidst us instead of beeing burried in such unfortunately still quite common “cemeteries” on floor or meeting room walls and furnitures in the corners.
This small detail is just another sign, for how we at Vulkan do Brasil understand the importance and develop our own modern, colaborative and open minded business and company culture. Because for us, to do business successfully means much more than just to manufacture products and to sell them to customers.
Our mother company Vulkan, as a more than 130 years old, in the 4th generation familly held and globally acting highly successful German company, is clearly long term oriented. And we know very well, how important our internal company culture is for our short, mid and long term success.
2 Responses
That is amazing, Klaus! Congrats for you, Marco and the great Vulkan team!
Thanks You so much for Your hughly appreciated nice comment, my friend Lídia. I wish You a great and successful day !