"If any industry presents difficult conditions for being a high-performance organization, food service is surely one of them. Pay is low, turnover is high, and profit margins are slim, so theres not a lot of room in the budget for fancy perks to keep people happy. In spite of that, Tasty Catering has employee turnover below 2%, compared with the industry average of 50%. And employees take the initiative to boost performance. For example, one of them pointed out that gasoline prices tend to be lowest on Tuesdays and highest on Thursdays and Fridays, so Tasty developed a schedule to buy lower-priced gas for its delivery vehicles. The change reduced fuel costs by $35,000 a yearsmall change for a big corporation, perhaps, but significant for the local enterprise. To get to that point, Tastys ownersTom, Kevin, and Larry Walterdetermined that they needed to build a culture employees could care about. The brothers had started the company as the Tasty Dawg chain of hot-dog restaurants, based in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. The food was so popular that requests for catering flowed in, and the Walters created Tasty Catering, eventually closing the Tasty Dawg outlets. Their management style originally focused on controlling, but some of the best people were unhappy. To prevent such employees from leaving, the brothers created teams of employees to identify core values. The teams settled on a set of seven, emphasizing ethics, high quality, and personal responsibility. Having agreed on the values themselves, employees were committed to making them work. One employee observed that her main hurdle to being productive was frequent interruptions, so her working conditions were adjusted to minimize interruptionsand her productivity soared. Similarly, individuals are empowered to improve service quality. If truck drivers, for example, hear that an order contains an error, they can choose to waive payment. Tasty Caterings leaders also opted to share knowledge about the companys finances with employees. The company follows a process of teaching all employees how to understand basic measures of business performance and then sharing the performance data with them in frequent updates throughout each month. Employees understand howpage 299 their personal and group actions contribute to the success of the business, and they receive bonuses from profits earned above a targeted level. Along with knowledge and rewards, they receive encouragement to share ideas that will help the company increase profits. In the first quarter of using this approach, Tasty saw its profits more than double.

Questions Which elements of a high-performance work system (Figure 9.1) does Tasty Catering seem to have? Drawing from the principles in this chapter, briefly recommend one other way that Tasty Catering could maintain a high-performance work system."