Heath Clarke is meeting
the challenge of a faltering economy by soliciting employee input on how his
company should adjust.
Clarke, chairman and CEO
of Local.com Corp., is connecting with employees on the
subject of change, gathering
their ideas on how the local
search engine company —
which generated $38 million in
2008 revenue — can meet the
faltering economy head on.
“The biggest challenge we’ve
had is managing our people
through change,” Clarke says.
“At a technology company in
particular, you have to be very
agile.”
Smart Business spoke with
Clarke about how to use communication to keep your company adaptable in an uncertain
business climate.
Q. How do you use
communication to keep your
employees adaptable?
You can have both structured and nonstructured communication. There needs to be
structure because the opportunity to have stakeholders in
the room for decisions is very
important.
But when things come up,
you can’t wait for the next
scheduled meeting, and you
don’t want to always call a
meeting since everyone’s calendars are pretty full. So it’s
OK to stop someone in the
hallway and tell them something, if you’re having a problem with something and
maybe you get a subcommittee formed. Not on a formal
basis, but maybe you get a
couple of your people into a
room to talk and come to a
decision on something, which
you then report on in the next
formal meeting.
Our meetings are a way to
ensure that everybody who
should be involved in an idea
is involved. What we have are
round-table meetings — we
have quite a few people in our
meetings talk about the status
of the organization and things
that we’re working on. But it’s
really an opportunity for us to
ask questions.
We meet weekly, sometimes
twice a week, on projects that
we have. This communication comes from the
top down, but also the
bottom up. That’s part of
how we get input and
make sure that everybody at every level
understands what we’re
trying to do. It’s constant
communication.
Q. What advice would
you give other business
leaders about managing
people through change?
Basically, communicate
frequently and clearly.
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made was to
presume that when you
first communicate an
idea that everybody got the
idea, understood it and
processed it. You have to continue to sell and effect the difference that you are doing and
why you are doing it.
The core things stay constant. In our case, we’ve been
focused on three key areas for
the last four years, and that’s
not going to change. But how
we execute in those key areas
might change depending on
the market conditions.
So we set forth the key
things we want to do in the
coming months. We spend
time as a business trying to
see what the next 12 months
will look like, to make sure
our people have that kind of
visibility. That’s about communicating where we’re headed.
You need to communicate
that frequently and freely, and
have an open dialogue about
it. People need to fully understand it and understand what
they’re doing on a daily basis.
People become reserved
about the things they tend not
to understand. What we try to
do is communicate regularly
to everybody in the company
about what we’re doing. You
have to go in and remind people what you’re doing and why
you’re doing it.
