Get out and about. Part of engaging employees is just traveling, witnessing and seeing and communicating in face-to-face conversations. In a multi-unit business like ours, you have to. You can’t do it all in an office in the middle of Dallas. The second part is to make opportunities available for your employees or your franchisees to voice their point of view. Nobody has a bad idea, so make sure you’ve set up those opportunities for them to communicate. And once you’ve set up those channels, listen intently to what they are saying. Anyone and everyone has to be welcome to come in and give their point of view. That’s a really big deal for us.
You have to be sure that you’re consistently making the time for that interaction with your employees. I make sure that I have time to walk the building and talk with people. I could very easily just sit in my office, talk on the phone and be consumed with e-mail. But you have to walk around the building, stop and talk to people. You never know what kind of information you’re going to get, but aside from that, it also makes people feel empowered to provide information. It makes them feel comfortable in that environment.
If you don’t have the opportunity to get out and walk the halls, there are other ways you can still get out and have that interaction with people. We have conference calls once a month, made available to any franchisee who wants to dial in. In that meeting, we talk about our progress against the strategy. We identify any issues that we are aware of that they might have concerns about. We look for resolutions to those problems and quickly communicate it back so that our franchisees continue to have the confidence that those of us in corporate are doing our jobs.
Listen and react. You have to listen with an open mind and you can’t walk in with preconceived assumptions or notions about the business. Then you have to develop that comfort level where everyone feels enabled to communicate. Once you have all of that in place and you give that open forum for that, then you have to be willing to accept their feedback and look for ways to change the business that could be productive for them.
Second to that is once you’ve identified those challenges that have come to the table, you have to formulate an action plan, communicate that plan and follow up on that plan. If you say you’re going to do something, either do it or give good reason as to why you didn’t and what you intend to do otherwise. That is critical, because people are looking at you and want to make sure that you’re true to your word. There is a lot of work in that. A lot of times, leaders promise to do something and then fail to deliver. So you need to make it a focal point that every step of the way, you know what you need to do, communicate often what you are doing, follow up and demonstrate results, which creates credibility and confidence among your employees and franchisees.