Build rapport
In addition to addressing the concerns that employees had about layoffs and the benefits cuts, Monson also started working to build a strong rapport with her 100 corporate employees and the approximately 1,800 people across more than 450 franchise locations.
She set out on a 28-city town-hall tour where every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday she was at a different franchise location trying to get in front of as many of her franchisees as possible. During those tours, she did a seminar to show them how to increase sales and how to decrease expenses and improve cash flow.
Internally, she worked to educate employees about costs and the revenue structure. So instead of simply saying things like, “Take the paperclips off before you throw pages away,” or, “Turn the lights off when you leave instead of waiting until the cleaning crew comes in at 11 p.m. and does it,” she explained why.
“Unless you educate employees about the financial structure of your company, they assume that 98 percent of revenue flows down to the bottom and is profit,” Monson says. “It’s important to educate them about what are the cost of goods — what’s our overhead, what does it cost to turn on the lights here.”
She also met with both groups individually to ask them questions and to learn more and better understand the business and them as individuals.
“If it’s franchisees, I’m asking them, what are their biggest challenges in the business, what keeps them up at night, what can we do to assist them?” Monson says. “If it’s staff, it’s going to be, ‘Tell me about yourself, what are your dreams, what would you like to be doing five years from now, tell me about your family, how do you spend time on the weekends?’ In addition to that, it’s things like, ‘What do you like best about working here, what are the things that drive you crazy about working here, what are the two things that we could do that would give you the tools or the time or the ability to be more productive, and if you could change one or two things about the company, what would it be?’”
From there, she implemented things that could easily be changed to show she listened. For example, common complaints from staff members were that they didn’t like having to punch in a series of codes every time they wanted to use the copy machine or make a long-distance phone call. So she eliminated the codes so that people can walk up to the copier and just hit copy or pick up the phone and dial.
“Are some people making personal calls they shouldn’t? Maybe they are, but I’d rather take away those barriers to productivity,” she says. … “They might seem like little things, but to the employees, they were big things.”
In addition to listening and implementing easy changes, she also took notes on employees and franchises so she could relate to them on a personal level. So if, for example, Oren loved golf and Jason was a big hunter and Jimmy is a huge Cowboys fan, she made those notes. Then, as she interacted with those people, she had something aside from business to talk to them about. She also sent birthday cards and company anniversary cards home to the employees, complimenting them, thanking them and adding a personal reference from her interactions with them when possible.
“It’s important for the CEO to keep in touch with the personal side in addition to the business side,” she says. “It’s very easy as a leader to get very busy during the days and focused on business issues and challenges and perhaps not spend as much focus on the person side, so I try to make sure that I do that.”
