Get employees involved

Joseph C. Guyaux, president, The PNC Financial Services Group Inc.

In order to keep everyone excited and on
the same page, Joseph C. Guyaux, president
of The PNC Financial Services Group Inc.,
says you need to involve employees in
decisions at the company.

The company had an initiative called ‘One
PNC,’ which was focused on how to make
the company more efficient and effective.

In order to get the best results, company
leaders asked employees for ideas.

“We basically went out to the company
and said, ‘We’d like your thoughts and ideas
on this,’” he says. “We even organized cross-functional teams, and we had a process
where all these ideas bubbled forward and
were then decisions. There were decisions
of yes, no, not now, let’s take this one, but
every employee’s thought or advice … was
at least considered.”

PNC had both paper and an online format for people to submit ideas into those
groups.

There were also no incentives for an
employee if the company used an idea.
“This was really just inviting them in
and saying, ‘Listen, we need to do better
at these things,” he says. “Rather than
management sitting off by itself and trying to figure it out, we’re going to open
this process up to the whole company,
and that way, we’ll get the best ideas and
the best way to get to our destination.”