Stores with Scanlon Plans on average received a more favorable response on all customer satisfaction measures of performance than found for control stores. In some cases the difference in scores between stores with and without the Scanlon Plan were substantial. Customers expressed significantly higher levels of satisfaction with their shopping experience and were more likely to have their expectations met in stores with Scanlon Plans than the control stores. Customers indicated that Scanlon stores provided friendlier service and they were more loyal to Scanlon stores than control stores.

Scanlon stores had consistently higher sales performance to sales goals than the control stores....Turnover was lower in Scanlon stores (49 percent than in control stores (63 percent) by a rather substantial amount (14 percent).

Finally, employees willingness to make suggestions is higher in Scanlon stores (53.2 percent) than control stores (48.3 percent)....

Dr. Dow Scott
Loyola University Chicago

Jane Floyd
Information Profit Group

Dr. Phillip Benson
Dr. James Bishop
New Mexico Saab University

World at Work Journal Third Quarter 2002

"The adoption of the Scanlon Plan was the most important business decision made in over 50 active years. I'm totally convinced that the money spent, as a result of the plan was a fraction of the money saved. Furthermore, the total reorientation of all employees was profound. All employees participated in trying to improve the success of the company. Instead of viewing management as the enemy, the company employees were able to work together with management towards the goal of outperforming the competition."

Seth G. Atwood
Founder of Atwood Vacuum Machine Company
August 13, 2002

"Missed Mission"

Your mission statement is more than a page in your employee handbook; it's your best tool for holding your company accountable to employees, customers, and investors, says Paul Davis, president of the Scanlon Leadership Network, a nonprofit leadership organization in East Lansing, Michigan. But many of today's mission statements are too vague to make them useful as a benchmark. "Right now, [entrepreneurs] can do better than just saying "We're going to produce high-quality goods and satisfy our customers, and we consider our employees our greatest asset," he says. "It's so innocuous that it doesn't mean anything."

Chris Penttila
Entrepreneur 25th. Anniversary Issue, May 2002

"A Salute to the the Best and so Bright Ideas of the Last 100 Years"

The 20th Century has been a hothouse of management fads...In the meantime one truly big idea has bubbled along since the 1940's, never receiving the accolades we regularly bestow on more modest insights. And it's surprising considering this one has all the elements of a blockbuster. Its watchwords read like an abstract of 50 years' worth of business hot buttons: Employee Participation, management-labor cooperation, collaborative problem-solving, teamwork, trust, gainsharing, open-book management and servant leadership. But you probably won't recognize one of the best-kept secrets in the management world: The Scanlon Plan."

Training Magazine
December 1999

"Employee Involvement Doesn't have to be a Fad"

"Many Company executives spend a great deal of time looking for the next new management concept and very little time making the last one they learned work. Such is the case with popular management concepts including participatory management, quality circles, and others that in some companies, are no longer considered to be 'hot enough" to emphasize in training related programs.

It's refreshing to find companies that are truly committed to programs for employee involvement, quality and service over the long haul. And it's not surprising to find that such companies are more likely to be successful.

A case in point is Atwood Industries located in Rockford, Ill. Atwood practices participatory management, employee involvement, and open communication. It also has quality circles, productivity plans, and a suggestion program--all wrapped into one program known as the Scanlon Plan. While the Scanlon Plan is not a recent management innovation, it is one that has worked well for Atwood, in large part because the company stuck with it. It wasn't started on a whim or the wave of a fad, but instead on the solid belief that people could work together in greater harmony and in doing so be more productive.

Most officers of the company agree that the Scanlon Plan is the major reason for the company's past and continuing success."

Dr. Ken Blanchard
Author of 'The One Minute Manager"
Convene
October 1998

"We actively experiment with goalsharing ( a version of the Scanlon Plan) in many units of the company so that, from a team-based perspective, both the hourly staff as well as the salaried associate can profit or benefit from results achieved at a certain targeting level that they help set. What we have done has been extremely energizing."

"We've experienced tremendous growth and change over the years. We've brought in many new ideas and put them to use, and we've discarded quite a few, too. Through it all Scanlon has consistently helped us understand and focus on what's truly important in an organization. We do better because we do Scanlon."

"It took us two years to select, test, and fine-tune the Scanlon Process before it was fully implemented. But we're convinced that we wouldn't be here today if we hadn't changed."

"Scanlon takes employee involvement one step further. It involves more employee education, and participation, more decision-making responsibility and most importantly, it provides employees with the opportunity to gain more experience and develop a broader skill set."

"Participative management is fundamental to the Scanlon Process...it has the potential of using all of our minds, imaginations, and talents rather than just those of a few."

Richard Ruch
Retired Chairman of the Board-Herman Miller
Author of Leaders and Followers

"The Scanlon Plan or philosophy is not something to only give lip service to. It must be a dedicated belief by the company founders, owners, and the management people that this is the way to operate a company. It will not function in a dictatorship style operation."

Charles Conrad
Founder of Thermatron

"The Scanlon Plan is a fabric that becomes interwoven into the organization. It's not a book. It's not a bonus plan. It's more than the Principles. Perhaps the essence of it is the Equity triangle: a fair and balanced return for customers, employees, and owners."

Rob Sligh
President
Sligh Furniture

"Since implementing Scanlon in 1985, it has given Lorin a new found awareness of the enormous potential of its human resources to meet the needs of customers, employees and owners."

Buzz Kersman
CEO
Lorin Industries

"The Scanlon Plan has helped us succeed. It has helped us accumulate ideas, from all of the people who work here. It has helped us reduce our costs and increase the value of the products we produce for our customers. I think it helped us form a very loyal and solid employee base."

Pat Thompson
Founder
Trans-Matic Inc.

"100 percent of all firms with Scanlon Plans report they are having a positive or very positive impact on productivity. Scanlon Plans produce the most consistent pattern of high ratings."

"We were warmed as a family is warmed by good news, when we embraced the Scanlon Plan as the way to manage the company."

"We are deeply committed to the Scanlon idea...It enables the expression of the diverse gifts of persons with an emphasis on creativity and on the quality of the process. It fuels the generation of ideas, the solving of problems, and the managing of change and conflict."

"The Scanlon Plan is a process that enables a growing number of people in an organization to serve customers, to serve employees, to serve owners, to serve the public. It's built on the assumption that the great majority of people are well motivated, come to work as adults, need the opportunity to meet their personal potential at the same time the organization meets its potential."

Max DePree
Member-Business Hall of Fame and author of Leadership is an Art and Leadership Jazz

"The Scanlon Plan is one of the best kept secrets in American business. Every company using it properly has had dramatic, measurable improvement in productivity and profitability. We highly recommend it."

"If you really want to partner with your employees ... one such model is the Scanlon Plan and it is one of the best kept organizational secrets for successful employee involvement, through equity and responsibility sharing."

"The Japanese took Joe Scanlon's ideas concerning worker involvement... and the ideas of W. Edwards Deming... now people are adopting Japanese management techniques without knowing that many of them were Scanlon's ideas."

"I see the Scanlon Principles as allowing us to unleash the tremendous energy within the company through participation... to direct the beam toward the desired target through Principles of identity, to constantly keep the powerful beam in tune through equity, and to continually strengthen the beam through competence."

"While many individual companies are now taking the values-and-vision approach, one group of companies is worth mentioning because they have maintained....open-book management for many years. The Scanlon companies are a federation of organizations that pioneered employee involvement processes long before it dawned on the rest of the business world."

"Participation and Consultative Management...I need only mention the Scanlon Plan as the outstanding embodiment of these ideas in practice."

"Management by integration and self-control can take many forms. One of the most unusual of these is the Scanlon Plan. Out of his deep interest in union-management cooperation, the late Joseph Scanlon evolved a collaborative strategy which has achieved solid results, in both economic and human terms, in a number of industrial companies."

"Scanlon...represents a social intervention of considerable significance."

"Scanlon Plans have a 66% retention rate. This is almost twice as high as for TQM!"

" All too often the Scanlon Plan--like all profit-sharing plans--is thought of only as a device for increasing the motivational forces arising from the economic needs of the members of an organization. As Scanlon emphasized, however, the plan requires the development of an interaction-influence system in which ideas for developing better products and processes and for reducing costs and waste can flow readily, be assessed, improved, and expeditiously applied. Such an interaction-influence system is appreciably more characteristic of System 4 than of the other management systems.

" Curiously, the principle of group decision making has had few full fledged applications. Various bastardized "participation plans" do exist. Often they attempt to get without giving and must take their place in the storehouse of gimmicks that might or (might not) work in the short run and are likely to fail in the longer run. The Scanlon Plan, in contrast, attempts to exploit the possibilities of participation AND distribute the benefits among all. It does not pussyfoot."

"The characteristics of programs based upon the Scanlon Plan may be outlined briefly. Basically, the Plan's purpose is to heighten cooperation between labor and management, to sustain it by mutual participation in decision-making, and to nourish it by mutual sharing of the fruits of that cooperation. The underlying assumption may be phrased in such terms: there is a wealth of imagination and inventiveness in most organizations that remains untapped (if not turned against the organization) when the individual has inadequate incentive to make suggestions and appropriate adaptations on his own."

"Scanlon... boldest attempt at employee participation in the United States. Its leadership model approaches the democratic values held by non-industry institutions."

Katz and Kahn, 1966

"The most spectacular and certainly the best publicized plant-wide incentive plan is that which goes under the name of the Scanlon Plan ."

Whyte, 1955

"The most sought-after labor-relations advisor in the U.S. today is Joe Scanlon."
"As far as I am concerned, Joe has the answer to the future for American free-enterprise capitalism"

Business: The Scanlon Plan
Sept 26,1955
Time

".....the "Scanlon Plan" which, while no panacea, is one of the most hopeful developments in recent labor-management relations.

"...when Scanlon plans are no longer news, we shall have licked the great problems of the industrial age, how to tame the machine for liberty and democracy."

Editorial
Life, 1952