Before he founded Advantica EyeCare, Richard Sanchez spent more than 20 years working at Exxon Corp. He repeatedly filled out multipage documents and questionnaires designed to assess the performance of his employees. But when he retired to start his own company — now Advantica Dental and Vision Benefits, which is based in Clearwater — Sanchez decided that structured performance reviews were not how he wanted to determine whether he could trust an employee to do a good job. As the company’s president and CEO, Sanchez doesn’t use performance reviews and doesn’t ask his managers to either. Instead, he goes out in the field, constantly interacting and talking with his employees to verify their level of trust and commitment to the company.
Smart Business spoke with Sanchez about how to develop trust with employees by being flexible and supporting their needs.
Get face time daily. I try to have lunch every day with a client or somebody that’s touching our business, just to see how things are going. It may be a vendor; it may be a group of employees. I’m constantly in the field. My job is to cheerlead, to cheer them on, to communicate and tell them what I believe we are going to be faced with in the future. I will go to people’s offices, but I won’t intrude on them. I’ll chat a little bit. You really get a two-way conversation going, instead of sending out some e-mail saying, ‘Here’s our strategy for the next six months.’ (That’s) no way to have a conversation.
Reward spontaneously. When we see a champion, we celebrate. We make a big deal of it. We may give some dollars to the person. We may say, ‘Listen, for you and your wife, here’s a weekend. Fly down to Florida and spend the weekend.’ We kind of do it on the spot, so people aren’t trying to change their behavior to match a program. They’re just doing a good job. I’d rather have it more spontaneous. We might have five champions in one month, and the next month we might have zero. And it’s not necessarily a weekend in Florida, it’s just going up to the person and shaking their hand and saying, ‘You know what, you are doing a great job.’
