Your Culture Survey responses last summer said that you really like many things about Wolverine’s culture – especially our mission for our members and our willingness to help each other. You also highlighted three things you wanted Wolverine to improve upon. You asked for better communication, improved processes to make your day-to-day job more efficient, and more support for, and from, your supervisors. So we assigned improvement teams to address each of these, and I’m really pleased with their progress.

First, our Communication team, James and Brittany, developed two important additions. Wolverine Weekly and Wolverine Wired offer regular communication about you! Its focus is on daily work, articles of interest, and small celebrations of your many successes that we felt weren’t getting enough recognition. In addition, they just sent out the second edition of Wolverine’s Board Report. This is a great collection of important information the Senior Team and the Board pay attention to. Keep in mind that these are still works in progress. If you have any ideas to improve them, or feedback of any kind, share them with James or Brittany.

Second, Wolverine’s IT Team has launched an ambitious project to make your daily work lives more efficient. This program (often referred to as ERP, or Enterprise software) represents much more than a new software package. When complete, the ERP will organize data, processes, and information across the organization. After an 18-month evaluation, our team selected a software vendor. Most of this year will focus on getting ready – defining what Wolverine processes should be, and getting many silos of data organized and cleaned up. Many of you will be called into meetings this year to get this hammered out. The effort requires your determination and support to be successful, and I am confident Kim Manuel’s team can lead us through this essential work.

Third, Wolverine launched a new and customized Supervisor Training Program. We designed it in house to tailor our message to our needs. We will graduate our first class by the end of this year, and I’m confident you will see the results of hours of work by the Culture Team and many dedicated Wolverine trainers.

Each of these three areas for improvement require considerable effort, and they come with a high commitment of time and resources. I’m proud of the efforts of Wolverine employees who are trying to make your day-to-day work more efficient, more informed and better organized. These small steps provide the humble building blocks of a strong Wolverine foundation.