Our culture: innovation is happy | Chapel Hill Sheena
Building a company that says yes to creative solutions
"Striving for excellence" is one of our core values. This means not only doing our day to day tasks to the best of our ability, it means constantly thinking and looking for new and better ways to do our job and serve our customers. As we continue to move forward, building a culture of innovation becomes more and more important.
Almost two months ago we introduced a new initiative called Innovate Happy Culture. Designed to fuel company-wide innovation, Innovate Happy Culture encourages employees to contribute new ideas and say yes to creative solutions.
Inspired by Stanford University's Design Thinking course, we introduced an innovation roadmap that gives employees a clear picture of the innovation process and motivates us to step out of our comfort zone, which can be especially challenging in the automotive business.
“We want employees to see the path leading to the realization of their ideas,” explains Scott Jones, store manager. “We want them to understand that they will be helped along the way, which gives people more confidence to voice their ideas.”
Innovate Happy Culture quickly proved its worth, with more than 90 new ideas coming from employees in the last 60 days. One of them has already been implemented in our Carrboro store, where we have gone paperless.
The store used to use six to seven sheets of paper per customer visit. During the brainstorming, the employees realized that every detail was not needed. We could do it without paper. Although the transition of all aspects of the business from paper to paperless was a learning curve of sorts, the store figured it out very quickly and is now enjoying the benefits.
“It made us a better store. We have become much more attentive to detail,” said Troy Hamburg, Carrboro store employee. “Customers love it. In addition, it is very environmentally friendly and requires much less paper, ink and toner.”
The reason shoppers love the paperless initiative is because it has improved the connection between the store and the shopper. Employees can now send text messages or email photos about repair or maintenance issues they may want to address, and resolve them easily after visits.
The paperless initiative has been praised by the company and plans are underway to roll it out across all stores. After all, one of our other core values is that we win as a team, and this is also the key to Innovate Happy Culture. “This is a journey that we make together. We work together to succeed and build our team,” said Scott Jones.
Moving forward, Innovate Happy Culture will contribute to solving existing problems by helping to create new ideas. All stores are participating in the grassroots initiative and are committed to learning, growing and appreciating the contributions of every employee. We look forward to seeing how you experience the benefits of this contribution on your future visits.
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