Keep reaching out
So what’s the best way to reach out to your people and get useful feedback? How do you make everyone feel as though they’re part of the process when you have 3,000 employees?
MuruzÁbal wanted all of his employees to feel like they were part of the plan to bring Neoris to the United States, but he clearly couldn’t set up a one-on-one conversation with each of them.
He suggests setting up smaller forums of 10 to 15 people to talk about important aspects of your plan. The key to making them work is to keep them as informal as possible.
“If you bring more structure to the model, you start losing some of the freshness that you need,” MuruzÁbal says. “You want to make it very informal, to the risk of using a term that is used a lot, like coffee with the leader. You want to feel that the person you are talking to is somebody that you can relate to, for the employees to relate to their leader.”
Don’t handpick people to take part in these forums. Make it known that you’re going to be available for a small-group discussion at a certain time, but stay away from making specific invitations to participate.
“You need to make sure there are random nominations,” MuruzÁbal says. “You need to make sure they are either people who want to be there or that they are participating on a random basis. It’s not people that their managers believe should be there. That’s the first element that would make the whole program not work. Then you need to set up the rules very quickly saying that this is a conversation. Every comment is acceptable. The only request is that you don’t monopolize the conversation.”
The key is to keep the conversations informal while making it clear that you really value the feedback that is generated from them. It’s valuable to you to know what they are thinking and it’s valuable to them since they’ll be out there representing your company to your clients.
It was valuable to MuruzÁbal to keep everyone apprised with the launch of the U.S. market.
“You need to spend time listening to what your peo
pl
e are telling you about what they are doing and what is important to them,” MuruzÁbal says. “You need to be empathetic. You need to put yourself in their shoes instead of asking them to put themselves in your shoes.”
