Find the right people
Another element of communication and engagement is finding the right players for your team. You need to find employees who will embrace your culture and your vision and work to make it happen. You also need some people on staff who will speak up when they feel you’ve made a wrong turn in your strategic plan.
Finding the right people is far more of an art than a science, but Romero has refined his recruiting process at Century 21 Award to try and ensure that he comes up with many more hits than misses on his hires.
To find innovative recruiting ideas, Romero had to look outside the real estate industry, which he says is an industry that has historically resisted large-scale innovation. He started focusing on the practices of online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos.com, including a stint in their core values training program.
“I went out and visited them and got to know how they handle culture,” he says. “They have something called a ‘smog check,’ which is something they do at interviews, and it’s really aimed at protecting the culture.”
The Zappos.com smog check is a corporate version of a real smog alert: warning signs that your culture might be in danger of pollution from hazardous material in the atmosphere. The corporate smog check is a series of criteria that indicates how well an individual or a team is aligned with the company’s culture.
“They have a big poster in their office that kind of looks like a smog check poster that you’d see in a gas station or wherever, and it lets people know what the culture is,” Romero says. “Once people kind of get grounded in the concept, you start to get people that are self-policing on it. They want to be around people who are like-minded.”
If someone is a bad fit culturally or is having a difficult time getting on board with management’s vision for the future, you need to identify the source of the problem and whether it can be fixed short of terminating the person.
Romero says it is a case-by-case situation. If the person is simply a bad fit and needs to go, it often becomes apparent early on. If the person needs some new training or redirection, Romero tries to put the person in a mentoring situation.
“There is a lot of training at the beginning of employment,” he says. “In the training process, you can kind of see if it’s going to be a good fit. Right away, you can see if people are going to do what they say they’re going to do or if they’re going to make excuses. If they’re making excuses in the training program, you can probably get an idea that it’s not going to work with them.”
