Mary Barra was a keynote speaker at Forbes Media’s “Reinventing America: The Workforce Summit” in Detroit recently, where she discussed at length, ranging from dress codes to her belief that the youth should be encouraged to pursue careers in technical fields.
Amongst the several aspects that were discussed, there were two that we found particularly interesting. One would be GM’s growing and improving workforce, which is about 30 percent new since 2009. Part of this includes a change in the safety and engineering departments following the ignition switch defect recall.
It seems that GM aims to make sure its workers are content, and will be asking all 220,000 global employees to provide feedback via a survey every 18 to 24 months. The purpose of these surveys brings up the second point we found most interesting, which is the direction Barra is leading the company towards. It is what she refers to as, “the right environment,” and is what she hopes to offer to her employees.
“You can’t fake culture,” she said. “You’ve got to have an environment where people feel engaged, where they’re working on things that are important and they have an opportunity to have career development.”
From our perspective, Barra is continuing to improve GM on all ends. To read more about Barra’s interview, click here to see an article by the Detroit News.
Comments
Dress codes , why that’s a biggie , isn’t it ? also , GM has to hire a lot of new employees just to replace retiring ones or those who quit every year . So , it isn’t obvious to those looking for career paths , to focus on big companies like GM and others to explore what these industries are hiring/ offering ? If hired , do they not get the benefit of working for a long standing corporate giant , like GM , which would have a great reputation as the Company to work for and whose high standards are admired throughout the industry ?? If GM’s new mantra has to ask its’ employees for feedback , it appears to me that all is definitely not right with its reputation , in order to attract enthusiastic new blood to the company , or perhaps not having built a solid promote from within philosophy ?
Why is it that we don’t get the same message from Ford or Toyota ??