Do more than just listen
The best way to empower employees is to be a good listener
and consider their point of view, both when they bring you
problems and when they come with new ideas.
“The employee needs to feel that they are going to be able to
learn and grow and develop and that their decisions and activities are going to enhance their growth,” Mays says. “What I try
to do is empower my senior management and all the employees to say, ‘Hey, if you do your job right and we all do our jobs,
then we’ll continue to grow, and you’ll be able to develop and
grow and have more responsibility.’
“I have people in the warehouse that come in and say, ‘What if
we did this differently?’ or, ‘Why don’t we have trucks that come
at certain times?’” Mays says. “I’ll say, ‘That doesn’t sound too bad. Let’s ask the warehouse supervisor why we don’t do it this
way.’ Maybe there is a good reason. Then again, maybe there
isn’t.”
It seems simple, but the act of taking a walk to get a firsthand
look at the situation your employee is describing can make a
big difference.
“Being sympathetic and willing to take actions like that, they
look at senior management at Mays as being approachable,” he
says. “It’s the interaction with the employee base that makes
the difference. It’s not just coming into my office and shutting
the door, and you don’t see me until I want something or something goes wrong. I walk through the warehouse and look at
what’s going on. I ask them, ‘Why is this?’ or, ‘Can we do this
better? Are you guys up to date? Are we getting loads out?’ It’s
those kinds of things.”
The regular interaction helped clue Mays into the gradual
change in acceptable workplace attire.
“Interacting with them, I know them by name, and I go out and
make comments about what they are wearing today,” Mays says.
“We moved from where we were pretty sticky on coat and tie to
where today’s environment is that just is not what happens.
Today, it’s be neat, be clean. If that means it’s jeans, OK, have the
jeans clean and pressed.”
You also need to be a good listener when your employees bring
you problems that fall outside of company business.
“There are different degrees of problems and situations,”
Mays says. “People go through divorces. People have personal
kinds of tragedies in their lives. It’s not just when you’re dealing with it from a business perspective. But it’s from a human
perspective.”
Mays says his employees are free to take care of personal
issues that come up in the course of a day or week without fear
of being looked at negatively by the company.
“If somebody needs to take a kid to the doctor or needs to
have time off to attend a school conference, we don’t make a
big deal out of that,” Mays says. “We just say, ‘Hey, get the work
done.’ If that means you come in on Saturday or stay later than
normal hours, so be it. We don’t get employees taking undue
advantage of that flexibility.”
When you show your employees you really care about their
well-being, they are likely to return the sentiment.
“We send cards to our employees as they celebrate their
anniversary,” Mays says. “I personally sit down with a group of
them when they complete two years, five years, 10 years. Take
them to dinner; say, ‘This is your time. Talk to me. Whatever you
want to say, it’s just us here.’ They feel like, ‘Hey, he didn’t have
to do that.’ All of that contributes to the atmosphere and sincerity when other senior managers do the same kind of thing.”