Chapter 15
MAINTAINING RIGHT RELATIONSHIPS WITH EMPLOYEES
FOR THOSE WHO DOUBT the practicality of nurturing right relationships in the workplace, there are many studies connecting such efforts with bottom-line performance. A pleasant, productive workplace is key to employee satisfaction, and employee attitudes are critical to factors such as sales, profitability, customer loyalty, and employee turnover. For example, a Gallup survey of more than 100,000 employees across 12 industries showed the link between communication-related issues—employees knowing their roles, feeling important to the vision and mission of the organization, having a good relationship with their supervisor, being recognized for their work—and organizational success.3
Another study by the same group showed that employees are four times more likely to leave the organization if they have a bad manager; and interpersonal and communication issues have been directly linked with management effectiveness and employee satisfaction.4 The bottom line: pay attention to those operational areas formerly referred to as “soft issues,” or you’ll be in for some hard, expensive lessons. The good news? Because of their compact size, inspiring vision, and high ideals for making a positive impact on the world in some way, big-vision small enterprises have the potential to excel in these areas. How can you maintain right relationships with the people who help you bring your vision to life? By raising the bar for performance in organizational communication and culture, right from the beginning.
Orientation: Getting Off to a Good Start
To help new employees increase their chances for success in a new job, a big-vision small-business owner must make sure that her organization has an agenda for welcoming, orienting, and mentoring new members of the group. An orientation program doesn’t need to be overly complex, expensive, time-consuming, or bureaucratic, but it does need to exist. The approach we’ve evolved at Ivy Sea, for example, includes a checklist for an orientation process that comprises the predominant share of a new recruit’s agenda on his first day at our company. We give him a packet of information that contains concise but information-rich items already reviewed by our attorney, such as: a letter briefly reviewing the position and compensation, accounting paperwork, a job description, a confidentiality agreement, and a “Life at Ivy Sea” handbook.
An Ivy Sea delegate, usually the person to whom the newcomer will report, reviews the contents of the orientation packet, provides necessary instructions, and answers questions and allows the candidate to begin filling out any necessary paperwork and reviewing the other documents. That person also meets with the new team member to review in more detail his job description and initial assignments and takes the newcomer out to lunch to begin the process of welcoming him into our group. His afternoon and subsequent week are spent working on his initial assignments, negotiating more specific performance expectations, and most likely listening in on any project meetings taking place that week—another opportunity to learn how we work and where he might build and contribute other skills.
This minimum level of orientation activity helps ensure that a new staff member—whether part-time or full-time, an industry veteran or entry-level employee—has the building blocks she needs to understand how we work and what we expect. She has the assignments and tools to get right to work contributing her skills.
Following right-relationship tenets, we foresee that the first few weeks at a new job can be very stressful. To the extent that we can think ahead and help someone contribute earlier rather than later allows him to become a part of our group that much sooner. In any group, particularly a small one, feeling like the outsider is not fun. An orientation program helps people become insiders as quickly as possible, and I find that a very organized orientation week supports that goal. We adapt the process for partners and vendors with whom we collaborate, as well.
An orientation program also helps to create clarity from the start and can serve to minimize legal issues that might arise from misinterpretations and differing expectations. But mindfulness about assignments, expectations, and growth opportunities doesn’t stop at the orientation. In a big-vision small business that pursues right relationship for qualitative growth, depth is both a priority and an area of distinction—depth in communication, listening, observing, and finding ways to identify, develop, and apply an individual’s strengths to the benefit of the organization and its customers. One aspect of depth in right-relationship practice is looking beneath the surface of the job description to find shared understanding, identify areas of high potential, and set the stage for shared responsibility and the cocreation of a positive partnership.
For Great Performance, Get Clear on Roles
Good performance is a shared responsibility that starts with the employer providing an accurate description of the company, work environment, and job and the employee being honest regarding her skills and capacity to do the job. For Carol Conway, president of CRS Technology in Fort Myers, Florida, matching an employee’s aptitude with job requirements is crucial to creating a successful work relationship. Given her organization’s smaller size, Conway is better able to make such determinations based on personal connection with the employees rather than reliance on tenure or being restricted by hiring policies that exclude otherwise capable employees for lack of certain formal credentials.
I won’t put a round peg into a square hole. I don’t put field engineers into sales if they prefer to be technical people. And I don’t assume all administrative staff members are interested in learning the details about technology systems. It’s very important to me, and to the quality of the work environment here, that I let people do what they do best and allow them a lot of latitude within their job responsibilities to create an environment in which they can excel. I think this is just a requirement in a small business rather than some blueprint I create for self-actualization, but it helps when I give employees the parameters of the job and let them create their own performance plans. As a result, the atmosphere here is energized, and my turnover is low.
Too often in a small enterprise, an employee starts a job without any job description other than a verbal summary or vague outline, makes a few assumptions about what her boss wants of her, and finds out what her employer’s expectations and preferences are through trial and error. By contrast, in a big-vision small business, everyone is on the lookout for how to best develop, increase and apply individual and group strengths.
To help create the foundation for more successful employment relationships, a big-vision small-business owner can start by meeting with the employee for a more in-depth discussion about the vision, roles within the organization, and expectations of both the owner and the employee. In many companies, what passes for a clear delineation of roles and expectations is anything but, resulting in frustration and unfulfilled potential for both employer and employee. But there are other options to ensure that both you and your employees share a common understanding about goals, expectations, and roles.
Communication and Company Goals
What happens if employers don’t provide employees with the information they need to meet the very goals that will determine their own and the company’s success? At one organization, employee representatives claimed employees weren’t told what the company’s goals were, nor did they receive a single progress report. When bonus time arrived and no one received bonuses, employees fought back by voting in a union.
Company expansion also has an effect on communication and culture, primarily because organizational culture becomes more dependent on formal hierarchy, processes, and policies as a company grows in size. This is a reality that Kevin Owens of Select Design, Ltd., in Burlington, Vermont, knows all too well:
For the first three years, we were a typical startup, with two people doing everything from sales and finance to cleaning up. At about eight people, we decided to take a leap of faith, take on more debt and hire salespeople—the biggest commitment period. We devised a more defined management structure when we got to 20 people, with managers for sales, creative work, and production. Now, at 50 people, we’re struggling with creating some distance between ourselves as owners from the day-today operations, so we can concentrate on strategic issues such as space needs, new markets, and how we give back to the community. Between us partners, we handle nearly 70 percent of the sales in terms of gross dollars, and it’s time to let go.
Al Lovata of the 70-plus employee company Be Our Guest agrees that quantitative expansion creates new problems in communication. “Our key questions are about how we structure the organization, how we use technology to help us run more efficiently, and how we communicate the vision and foster the culture as we grow. Three years ago these issues didn’t exist, because we could be on top of everything. Now our challenge is how to communicate.”
“Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Yet even in smaller organizations, unclear goals, roles, and expectations foster higher levels of stress that affect both the employee’s performance and the quality of the work relationships and atmosphere. In the worst cases, employee morale and retention sink, and dismissed employees may opt to take legal action. Discord affects teams in all types of organizations, but the negative side effects are all the more evident, and damaging, in a smaller enterprise.
To help alleviate such problems, here are several right relationship-aligned ideas for how you might communicate your big-vision small-enterprise goals more clearly—allowing more productive, better-prepared employees—and come closer to realizing positive results:
• Relate each goal to employees’ jobs and provide tactical action items. Rather than dictating tactics, engage employees in defining clear, measurable action steps for achieving the goals and contributing their talents.
• Get goal-achieving ideas from employees. Use employees’ in-depth knowledge of their own jobs to help determine how they can meet or surpass specific goals. For example, you could start by asking, “We want to reduce costs in this area by 12 percent. Where do you see opportunities to do this?”
• Link company goals to employees’ motivators. If employees have said that bonuses are an important benefit of working at the company, show them how achieving the goals helps them to obtain the bonuses. Ways to do this include sharing individual stories of how someone met a personal goal by working toward company goals. Likewise, since vision, meaningful work, and learning opportunities are significant motivators—even more than financial compensation—engage employees in a dialogue about how their activities connect to the vision and provide opportunities for them to develop deeper skillfulness, experience, and knowledge.
• Connect goals with activities. Don’t communicate the goals in a vacuum; relate them to everything else going on in the company. For instance, you could include a regular feature in the newsletter or on a bulletin board, share information related to skill development and organizational vision, make links between new projects and the goals, or connect activities with goals at regular staff meetings. This isn’t a one-way street—the more you engage members of the team in a discussion, the less the organization resembles a “command and control” hierarchy where everyone awaits orders (and often criticism) from his or her supervisor.
• Encourage employees to ask questions. The responsibility for clear understanding of goals rests with both employers and employees, and in a big-vision small business, the group’s small size permits more-inclusive, organic communication. If an employer hasn’t explained exactly what “achieving world-class service” looks and sounds like, foster an environment where employees own responsibility for asking for clarification—thus applying the golden rule for checking assumptions, for example. Foster an environment where everyone respectfully challenges empty jargon, opting instead for clear communication and mutual understanding. For example, an employee might ask, “Since my performance review requires ‘good customer service,’ what kind of examples will you look for to determine whether I’ve met that goal?” or, “What does ‘being reliable’ or ‘supporting the sales goals’ look and sound like to you?” Make such inquiries part of an employee’s job description and a requirement for successful performance.
As the firm’s leader, take responsibility for providing specific examples of what goal-supportive performance is, just as you lead the way in modeling the behaviors you’re looking to encourage in your group.
While these tips cover just a fraction of the organizational and interpersonal communication skills required when discussing goals, they do shine a light on everyone’s responsibility in adopting right-relationship practices to help the big-vision small business achieve its goals.
Performance Evaluation and Recognition
While most employees certainly expect fair financial compensation, nonfinancial forms of recognition often prove more motivating. Surveys show that employees value worthwhile work, learning opportunities, clear roles, feedback about progress, and good old-fashioned appreciation for a job well done, as well as fair pay.5
Recognition can take many forms in a big-vision small business, from increased responsibility and special assignments to fun gifts or public kudos. Some firms reward mission-supportive performance with on-the-spot gift certificates for movies, videos, books, restaurants, groceries, or the local coffeehouse or spa. Other companies invite employees to assess and reward their peers with “all hands” e-mails or other communications touting their fellow employee’s positive behavior. According to employees, the peer approval is highly valued. Also, by recognizing peers, employees are underscoring for themselves and others what the goals are—and how on a daily basis they can achieve them. Other culture-promoting recognition options include tuition for professional development courses or workshops, an unexpected day off or team outing to the baseball park. While enterprises of all sizes can offer most of these perks, a big-vision small business—given its personal connections and lack of bureaucracy—can better fulfill what is for many employees a key need: to feel like they’re an integral part of an organization that is doing meaningful work in the world in a way that makes everyone associated feel proud and offers many opportunities for growth.
These kinds of recognition don’t negate the option of providing financial rewards, such as annual merit or profit-sharing bonuses. While pay-for-performance programs are ubiquitous in management discussion circles, they are not universally revered.6 Not everyone thinks that such plans promote productivity or build loyalty—a belief reinforced in California’s Silicon Valley, where financial reward was the sole focus of many fast-growth, wealth-focused dot-com and high-tech recruitment efforts—and employee turnover was reported to hover as high as an astounding 75 percent.7 The more the companies made their recruitment campaigns about “be fast, get rich,” the less loyalty they engendered among their employees, who were in turn stung and demoralized when the companies collapsed as funding ran out and there was no real vision or mission to propel it onward.
While not wanting to create a company culture obsessed with individual interests and “get rich quick” wealth accumulation, most big-vision small-business owners do want to share some portion of the profit with employees. The difference? Choosing a reward system that reinforces qualitative growth, vision alignment, organization culture norms, and performance goals over individual self-interest.
Regardless of the goals you establish together or the forms of recognition you adopt, provide frequent updates to employees on their progress toward achieving mutually established goals, and provide clear feedback regarding required improvements. In most big-vision small businesses, performance discussions occur much more frequently than the annual evaluations common to most large corporations. One option is to meet with each employee on a monthly basis to identify progress toward his goals and opportunities for continued improvement. Because you’re communicating about performance expectations and progress regularly, employees are more aware of how they’re doing, and you can link recognition to those efforts that support individual and company goals.
Ending Relationships That Are No Longer Mutually Beneficial
According to the tenets of right relationship, true compassion requires that you take the appropriate action to change a relationship when it becomes evident that an employee is not a good fit in your company culture or for the needs of the business. This might include a recent hire, a vendor, or someone who has been with your company for a longer time but no longer has the interests, skills, or preferences that are compatible with your business.
“The difficult thing for small business, and for myself as a solo practitioner, is that by working in isolation we can be operating with our patterns getting the best of us because it’s hard to correct one’s self,” says Lawrence Ellis, founding principal of Lawrence Ellis & Associates and founding convener of the Paths to Change network. “In smaller or solo enterprises, you can very easily get locked into routines that reinforce your shortcomings. In large organizations there is a different kind of learning disability, though, where the system continues to reward you for not learning how to learn from your mistakes.”
A big-vision small-business owner develops a network and process to ensure her own continuous learning so that she expands beyond limiting patterns—her life and business are, in this way, a work in progress. Where someone else’s learning is concerned, she realizes that sometimes the best and kindest decision is to let someone go elsewhere to find a new environment in which he or she can grow and flourish. Such people can more easily linger on in a large organization with a dysfunctional culture, where an ill-matched employee might simply be worked around or transferred into another department as a way to avoid conflict or confrontation. In a small business that is operating according to big-vision priorities and right-relationship principles, mismatches are evident more immediately and approached honestly and respectfully.
Sometimes the best and kindest decision is to let someone go elsewhere to find a new environment in which he or she can grow and flourish.
“I don’t mind firing someone if we’re moving in different directions,” says Bill Myers, of Ithaca, New York-based Alternatives Federal Credit Union. “I see other organizations where people let mismatches hang on for years, to the detriment of everyone involved. We try to give people as generous a severance package as is justifiable and wish them well on their way, but we don’t delay for sentimental reasons. It doesn’t serve anyone to be in the wrong position.” Myers says his years as a manager have given him the confidence to identify and take action in those situations where an individual is clearly no longer suited to the organization. “Less experienced managers often feel like it’s their failure if they can’t make it work out,” he says. “That’s just not how I see it anymore. I want to validate an individual as a person and not repudiate the time they’ve been with us. I’m more comfortable talking about what our future will be and what their future will be and emphasizing that we just won’t be moving into those futures together.”
Part of validating an individual—and a requirement for right relationship—is to try to identify a mutually respectful conclusion to the employment relationship so that the circumstances might make a foundation for positive momentum. Ideally, if there is no other option but to terminate the employment relationship, a big-vision small-business owner would revisit the golden rules and right-relationship tenets and engage the employee in a dialogue about the situation, including concerns and potential opportunities or next steps. As a result, he would have improved the likelihood of a continued relationship, potential future collaboration, or at the very least, the employee’s being positive ambassadors for the business.