Getting ready for change also involved scoping out emergent forms of work organization at sites as diverse as automaker Saturn, furniture manufacturer Steelcase and software developer Microsoft.

"When we were reorganizing, we looked for ways on how to do it effectively, and especially how to use teams effectively. We didn't find role models in our own industry," said Kent Gardner, administrative editor.

The paper also worked for a short time with a consultant to "sit alongside and tweak and challenge people," said Bernie Lundzer, who was the local Guild's executive secretary until six months ago, when he moved to Washington, D.C., as its national executive secretary.

"But it wasn't the standard thing where the guy is a 'music man.' That fails," Lundzer said, referring to the fabled con man who suckered the fictitious burg of River City, Iowa, into creating a town band. "Instead, the process relied much more for its success on the vision of the people in the newsroom."

Staff feedback was instrumental in shaping the process. Needless to say, there were meetings.

All 340 newsroom employees met at various times to provide a range of viewpoints, to talk about what the restructuring could accomplish, and to solve problems that arose as the process moved along.

The new strategy, implemented in September 1995, anticipated that people would do their work in new ways, and look at and practice their skills differently, Gardner said. Twin goals were set: improve story telling in the paper, and improve job satisfaction by arranging people in ways that enabled them to do their best work.

The implemented plan envisioned "a lot more people working in teams that include a full set of disciplines," he said. "In other words, photographer, reporter, assignment editor, graphics designer and copy editor are all working together in a team to put together a news report."

The restructuring also has served to leverage employee skills as information gatherers for use in other businesses, such as on-line products. "That's why we needed to restructure -- to get ourselves put together to do that more effectively," said Gardner.

To accomplish these goals, the paper wrote job descriptions that fit the schema of the new newsroom.

"But to minimize some of the furor over that," Gardner said, "if one of the new job descriptions looked like a job someone already had, we let them go ahead and claim it."

Only those jobs that were clearly new were posted. For those jobs that weren't claimed, employees went through a "normal" application and review process, Gardner said.

Restructuring didn't mean downsizing.

"There were very few people who didn't get a new job. No one was laid off," he said. "The people who left were people who chose to leave. Nobody had to leave."

Some contract language was changed to deal with the new, flexible arrangements. For example, if a redefined job involved working at less than half of the time within a higher pay scale, then the company did not have to change the employee's pay.

"That enabled us to gain some efficiencies," said Gardner. "But we've done a lot of talking with people. You don't push a button one day and have it all working differently and well."

To minimize the number of skirmishes, which the Star Tribune has faced (although no formal grievance has been filed), "you work on the idea that you look for ways to trust, to work collaboratively," Gardner said. "Most people want to do a good job and want to be as effective as they can. They don't want to stand in the way of making things better."

"The importance of the joint union-management effort," he continued, "is that you get a better result -- in terms of ultimate design and in terms of getting people involved who actually do the work instead of managers handing decisions down from on high.

"People who are doing the work have absolutely got to have a strong voice in the outcome for this to work effectively. Our ultimate success will rest upon this being a joint endeavor. We're all pulling together toward the same end."

Lundzer agreed there was no real loss of jobs -- "we had a contract agreement that there would be no layoffs, if the restructuring took place in a cooperative environment" -- but he questioned some of the philosophy on which team work is based.

"What's wrong with teams is that they are used by 'music men' to tell employers that they will get more quality, more efficiency, more productivity, with fewer people," he said. "The union can help make things more efficient, but the other side is that they do so with no layoffs.

"The Star Tribune made that commitment, but few employers would. Employers treat people like they are commodities, and then are surprised that loyalty flies out the window. The culture has to figure out what it values."

Lundzer also reported that while the paper has sought through these structural and staff changes to become more responsive to its customers and the people with whom it wants to connect, some newsroom workers are concerned that new procedures may be leading to softer news and a weakened commitment to journalism.

Some, he said, fear a conflict with journalistic ethics which dictate that you don't try to become better friends with people you're trying to cover.

Worker par and a long lead time have not kept the restructuring from severely jarring the newsroom.

Lundzer, who noted that it is unusual for journalists to be trained as "journalists" rather than as "reporters" or "editors," said that about the only thing the paper didn't do was "close the streets into the place."

"So much changed in one year -- physical surroundings, social relationships, the product. There was a sensory overload effect," he said, that peaked about six months ago. "There was so much work in getting the new process running, so much chaos with people moving into new job functions, that people were pretty burned out, creating a lot of tensions."

Gardner acknowledged that the constant change has produced stress and tension with the Newspaper Guild.

"It varies," he said. "There are some people who adapt to what I call a small daily newspaper model, where lots of people do lots of things. That kind of thinking is what we're trying to do."

When there's change, he pointed out, a newsroom -- like anywhere else -- experiences anxiety that eases over time.

"Like anything of such magnitude," he said, "fairness would call for me to say that people are still waiting to see how it goes. Things have changed pretty dramatically. We're seeing a lot of good things, but still struggling to get it to fall into place for everybody."

While the plan called for decentralizing power and "flattening hierarchy" -- mostly middle management -- it hasn't eliminated it.

There is now a new, imported-from-the-outside news leader (who, in another time and place, would be known as the managing editor) and seven team leaders (formerly known by more familiar names such as assistant managing editor) instead of 13. Three of those people moved up from newsroom ranks; four were already managers in other capacities.

Not surprisingly, the job of team leader piqued much interest. Prospective team leaders were interviewed by news leadership. If the teams had already been formed, team members also conducted interviews, a process now institutionalized.

Team leaders oversee 13 topic teams and two general assignment teams, a structure that replaced the traditional metro desk. There are also two teams in business and three in sports, where Gardner said, "section leaders are in charge of geography, but they're not looked at as sports or business editors in the traditional sense."

Each team is a group of people -- reporters, copy editors, photographers and graphic designers -- assigned to particular coverage areas, sitting together in the newsroom.

The team leader assigns all work that needs to be done within the teams to put a story package together, rather than going on an assembly line the way it used to, said Gardner.

"We've blown up the copy desk," he said.

The shift to teams has enhanced staff access to technology while posing new issues, said Bruce Adomeit, longtime Star Tribune news technology coordinator.

The dispersal of the photo lab and graphic designers to teams has required additional terminals and Macintoshes in the newsroom -- the Mac count has risen from 13 to 30.

"A lot of that equipment sits unused a lot of the time," Adomeit said. "This is not the most effective use of equipment if your goal is to have the equipment used 16 hours a day."

Change also meant setting up 450 new work queues in the legacy Atex system. The worst part was coming up with 450 new queue names from scratch, said Adomeit.

Newsroom work flow has changed, he said, because the redesigned newspaper requires that a story's presentation be part of the initial discussion of how a story is handled by the reporter.

So, the team discusses from the start what kind of graphics might be appropriate for that story, and what information will be needed for the graphics, rather than generating graphics as an afterthought after stories are written.

Decisions need to be made before people go home, rather than at 8:30 or 9 p.m., Adomeit said. Ideally, that improves the copy flow and moves it up earlier in the day, since the teams put the story packages together themselves.

That means that the biggest peak of system activity is no longer in the evening close to deadlines, but in the afternoons.

"For those of us worrying about technology, that means that we have to adjust our thinking and our balancing of the system load to match this new reality. We've had to try and take the load off in the afternoon," Adomeit said.

Early assumptions were that deadlines would be different because of shared tasks and that stories would be in earlier, providing editors with a chance to write and writers with a chance to edit.

The latter has been more the norm than the former at this juncture, with reporters frequently pitching in at the end of the day to help with editing.

Ultimately, Lundzer reported, the changes have created a speed-up for people at the end of the production cycle.

"The finishing team has to complete the work, and those people are the ones who were really tested," Lundzer noted. "There was overtime, and sometimes no lunch hours."

At heart, teams control their own destinies.

"The teams make decisions about their work," Gardner said. "Things don't just come down from the mountain. We have the people most involved with work making decisions -- decisions about a certain level of day-to-day travel, about what to cover, establishing coverage priority without being told by an upper editor how to do that.

"That's not to say that there aren't priorities being set by news leadership, too. There are, but usually done in a collaborative way."

Gardner sounded a little bit like a traditional manager when he reported that the performance assessment process used by Microsoft is "a real driver for developing people and helping move the organization to better and better places through performance expectations and that sort of activity."

The result was "a continual feedback process where they learn how they're doing, how other people perceive what they're doing, and have goals to stretch them to get better and better, getting good feedback on what they're accomplishing and what they aren't.

"Failure to achieve expectations resulted in loss of reputation," Gardner said. "It was a pretty highly charged place," and for the time being, the Star Tribune is a little highly charged as well.

The paper is incorporating its own performance expectations for all team leaders, who will write them for each team member, and for the teams themselves, based on member input. The logic is that when things move fast, the more voices you hear from, the more experience you bring into the process, the better off you are.

Worker participation may be something you'd like to take on in your newsroom, but Gardner warns that the process will never end.

"That is a concept that is hard for people to take. What we wanted to create was a changing organization, not a changed one. When people talk about just the latest new things and this will pass, that's what distinguishes this from most things.

"We are truly here to set something into motion that requires us to constantly be modifying and changing to suit the circumstances, and to be willing to take on new initiatives and drop what doesn't work."

Just confining yourself to being a good newspaper will not be sufficient, he maintained.

"You have to broaden your horizons. In a changing competitive environment, you have to be fast and flexible; more conventional systems are not too attuned to that. Each paper has to look at what it wants to accomplish and have its own vision.

"I wouldn't advise anybody to take the Minneapolis plan and apply it to themselves unless their goals were the same."

-- L. Carol Christopher

Star Tribune,
(612) 673-4000.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.