Make sure you’re seen and accessible. The biggest key is making sure you’re visible and available to your customers and your employees. If they see this come out and they have questions and they want to get answers, make sure you’re available to take care of those questions.
In other words, if our employees have questions, we let them know that I have an open-door policy. [If] you have a question, you can get in to see me, and I’m going to answer your question to the best of my ability, and so will the other people in the organization, as far as our vice presidents and anybody who is in a supervisory capacity. And, of course, when our customers call, we’re going to make ourselves available, and we’re going to make sure that they get the answers that they want.
The quicker you do that, the more communication you have with all of those people, the smoother it goes and the quicker the transition is.
Ask for feedback. There are people that said, ‘Oh jeez, how is this going to happen, how is that going to happen?’ And they may have some feedback to help you change things that maybe you just didn’t realize in your process.
But you’ve got to be open with that, especially with your customers but also with your employees. They, oftentimes, after they’ve seen something, come up with some really good ideas that help to make that transition a lot easier.
We gather feedback from just talking to the employees: ‘Hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about the new logo? What do you think about the whole merger?’ and getting their impression of it.
In the group setting, we did ask them if there were any questions or concerns that they had and had a question-and-answer period for them. As time has gone on here, as we see different employees, we just ask them, ‘OK, it’s been awhile, it’s been two or three months now, what do you think about what we did? Are you seeing any feedback from the customers? Is there anything that concerns you about what we did?’ It’s an ongoing thing.
Go to your customers, and when you present it to them and when you talk about it with them, just ask them. When you’re done presenting everything, you have to ask the questions: ‘What do you think? How does this strike you?’
If you don’t ask the question, sometimes you’re not going to get the feedback. We ask the questions. We want to get the feedback, so if there’s something we’re not seeing, we can see what they’re thinking and hopefully take actions to make sure whatever we need to do to make that clearer to our customers or our employees, we do it.
