Cultivate Your Employees’ “Extreme Trust”

In a 2001 feature story about him in Fortune magazine, Southwest Airline’s founder and former CEO Herb Kelleher said, “You have to treat your employees like customers. When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”

      I’ve never forgotten that quote and have used it on many occasions because it cuts to the heart of the purpose of effective employee communications. Yet it amazes me how many organizations don’t follow that guidance, some even going the opposite direction by taking their employees for granted.

      A recent article about customer relations in Fast Company caught my eye because it provides an apt parallel with respect to the internal environment. “If Your Customers Are Poised For Revolt, It’s Time For Extreme Trust” makes the case that today’s more open environment created by social media has opened businesses up for closer scrutiny by their customers.

      No longer can businesses operate in secret, expecting that their customers will follow along in blind loyalty. The author, Don Peppers, explains that, “It used to be that a business could generate substantial profits by keeping its customers in the dark. Entire business models are based on charging customers fees they shouldn’t have to pay, or selling them products they don’t really need.”

Proactively Trustworthy

Peppers makes the case for “extreme trust,” which he explains as being “proactively trustworthy, not just by providing a reliable product and competent service, but also by understanding and proactively watching out for your customer’s own interest.”

      The case he makes is valid and worthy of consideration by people focusing on their customers. But I contend that the same case can be made for focusing on one’s own employees in a parallel fashion, actively seeking to gain their extreme trust.

      To help the reader – presumably a businessperson with customers – adjust and respond appropriately by checking her/his own company, Peppers provides a few self-assessment questions. I’ve taken most of Peppers’ questions and substituted the word “employees” wherever he uses the word “customers” – as well as a couple other tweaks so it makes sense.

      See for yourself. How would you answer these questions about your own internal environment and your relationship with your employees?

• Is your company's financial success generally aligned with what's good for your employees? 
• Have you identified conflicts between how your firm succeeds, financially, and how it does what’s good for your employees, individually?
• Overall, would your company make more money with uninformed, unknowledgeable employees, or from well-informed, knowledgeable ones?
• If an employee is well-informed, knowledgeable, and paying attention, would he choose to remain with your company or would he be more likely to leave?
• Do your employees proactively prompt one another to avoid errors or oversights? Whether your answer is yes or no: Is this part of their training? Is it part of your company's culture?
• If your business were a government, would your employees be trying to overthrow you?

Last question (my own): Are you keeping your employees in the dark, whether deliberately or through your own neglect?

      Remember what Herb Kelleher said and take it to heart. If you focus on keeping employees engaged in the business and happy, your customers are the ultimate beneficiaries. And when your customers are happy, they’re loyal, which will show up on your bottom line.

Virtual Communications for Virtual Employees

The time we spend working during our productive years represent the bulk of our waking hours. Consequently, the people we work for and with often become our friends, people we know the best.
     This was especially so in the traditional 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday office routine that, along with lifetime employment that was prevalent in the post-World War 2 years in America, is now a thing of the past. While it lasted, it helped establish numerous deeply embedded corporate cultures based on the relationships that people developed working together day in and day out.
     That’s all changed. Slowly, at first, technological advances made it possible to work away from the office. First came the fax machine and FedEx overnight delivery of important documents. The speed of change ratcheted up considerably in the past 10 to 15 years with the advent and then widespread adoption of the Internet by businesses and its penetration into so much of what we do.
     By the way, it was a mere 12 years ago that corporate leaders like GE’s Jack Welch “discovered” the Internet and urged their peers to do likewise or risk being left behind. And don’t forget that Microsoft was late to the party with its Internet Explorer web browser, long after Netscape was the default Internet browser.

Tech Evolution
The Internet and its myriad technologies, the hardware and software, have now enabled us to be effective workers no matter where we are. First, it was email. Most recently it’s Skype, iChat and website services like GoToMeeting.com where people can work together in real time no matter where they are.
     Twenty or 30 years ago, working from home one or two days a week – if not all the time – would have been unthinkable. Today, it’s what we’re used to it. In fact, it’s expected and often part of the job.
     But paralleling that evolution, we’ve seen the deconstruction of the conventional office routine, where your boss is down the hall in the corner office. I recently consulted for a large multinational firm with headquarters in the Boston area. Its North American sales manager – a member of the senior management team, by the way – worked out of his home in Boulder, CO.
     I asked him whether it impeded his ability to be an effective manager. “Not at all,” he said. “I’m on the road most of the time anyway, so it doesn’t matter where I set up my office. If I’m needed at headquarters, I can be there tomorrow morning.”
     A friend of mine works for an international bank. Due to increased state taxes, the company recently relocated its headquarters across the border to an adjacent state. He had been accustomed to a half-hour commute by train, but it expanded to more than 90 miles by car – one-way. He told me he now works from home three days a week and spends 12 to 14 hours a day in the office the other two days.

Lost Camaraderie
The jarring aspect of this new arrangement, he said, is the radical change it has imposed on his unit’s unique culture and cohesiveness. The office space where the transferred employees now work is vacant of much of the staff most of the time, he said. The camaraderie that he had known for years is now gone. He rarely sees his colleagues face-to-face any more – though they do converse on the phone regularly. But it’s not the same.
     Assuming this is the norm today, we can infer that the dispersion of employees from central offices will likely continue and their nomadic numbers will increase. What effect does this new paradigm have on employee communications and one’s ability to manage people effectively?
     In a nutshell, it means managers and leaders have to work even harder to establish and sustain solid communication links with their employees. Certainly the best communication is face-to-face. And we can assume that the manager-employee relationship is initially established with a face-to-face meeting, supplemented with periodic personal visits.
     But over the long term, it behooves managers and leaders to maintain those critical relationships with a regular flow of two-way information through any and all possible and practical means: email, text messages, telephone, voice mails, Intranet chat rooms, and every other tried-and-true method that works in a given organization.
     Sure, you may miss the opportunities to participate in office betting pools on “March Madness.” And you may miss the chance encounters at the water cooler to catch up on personal news with your employees, and to see photos of their kids growing up.
     Unfortunately, these aspects of our work lives that add meaning to our personal sides are being lost to the surge of technology and the push for greater efficiencies. But we can’t afford to let it also sacrifice the effective working relationships and communications that drive the business and its success.