Communicate
With employees as far away as Perth, Australia, Carrabba spends a fair share of his time trying to communicate with his people. But it’s a twofold reason for doing so: One reason is to get the company’s goals out to people, but it’s also so he can help address problems and issues in their lives.
“The senior team has always taken the temperature check, if you will, on people throughout the organization and how hard they’re working,” he says. “Do they need some time off? What are their stress levels?”
People work really hard, and sometimes certain projects can absorb their time, so you need to have that communication with them to be able to recognize the stress.
“It’s humanistic and knowing your people and knowing what kind of day they’re having or if they have some personal things, that we all go through based on our life,” he says. “We’re pretty passionate about that it’s family first and job second. We’ll work around the job, but you’ve got to take care of the home first.”
Recognizing stresses in people’s lives comes back to communicating with them on an individual level and communicating with your managers, as well.
“Spend time with them,” he says. “Walk around. Have lunch with each individual. Keep your door open. Office hours are for me to talk to people. I’ll do the work side of things after hours.”
You have to make people comfortable talking to and opening up with you.
“A little humor goes a long way,” Carrabba says. “A little lightheartedness — not everything has to be done on a PowerPoint or communicated on a spreadsheet. If you just start with respect of people’s minds and what they can develop and create in an organization, I think that transmits through, and it’s easy to have a two-way conversation.”
Once you get to know someone a little bit, you’ll start to recognize his or her nuances.
“It’s just [like] reading someone who’s close to you or your family members,” he says. “We all know what our routine or normal actions are in a day, and if people are acting a little out of sorts or having a down day, I think they can pick up pretty easy and help take a little load off of them so they can deal with whatever it is they have to deal with.”
But also respect that some employees may want to keep their communication with you strictly professional.
“Some people want to solve their own problems,” Carrabba says. “Some people are closed and personal, and that’s OK. You have to respect that, and some people just sometimes want somebody to lean on, and you’ve just got to have that style of adaptability to do that.”
Beyond personal-level communication, you also need to communicate the high-level corporate happenings that employees should be aware of.
“I keep a running tablet going throughout the period of time [between meetings],” he says. “As we go through the weekly, daily, monthly events, as it leads up to [the next meeting], I don’t sit down and craft a speech or anything like that, but I think the bullet points throughout the quarter are important to ring on.”
Or sometimes he and his team will pick a theme to focus on during a certain meeting. For example, recently they wanted to make sure that people were aware of the company values, so they focused on the core values during that particular period.
No matter how much you communicate, be sure to get feedback from employees, too.
“Answer as many questions as you possibly can, either on a spontaneous basis or on a planned basis, which we do both,” Carrabba says. “You’ve got to spend time with your folks and vice versa. Communication is a two-way street, and people won’t feel comfortable with you, particularly on bad news days. … You can only fix bad news if you hear about it. That’s just a comfort zone people have with you.”
And there’s always going to be questions — even if nobody asks them.
“I get a lot of feedback from individuals who don’t want to speak at the meetings,” Carrabba says. “We’re now asking people in advance by e-mail what questions would you like to ask but you don’t want to stand up and ask a question. We’re encouraging. It can be anonymous questions and usually they’re all on people’s minds, but somebody from the group doesn’t ask, so we’re trying very hard to encourage people to ask what’s on their mind. I can’t address them unless I know what it is.”
Whether it’s corporate objectives or personal problems, there’s one common theme to the communications: You need to work at it.
“You have to really think through a communication plan,” he says. “It can’t be haphazard. It’s nice, and you’ve spent a lot of time with the spontaneous discussions that pop in your head, but you have to have a pretty solid communication plan to make sure you can roll out the vision of the company and the goals and objectives so people know where we’re going and they can align themselves with business goals as they go through with it.
“People want to hear what the business results are for all the work they’ve put in. It’s important that all that feedback is communicated through. Everybody has ideas and suggestions. It’s spending the time explaining to a person as to why you are or aren’t going to do something so at least they feel their voice is heard, and taking that feedback to get the great ideas that are sitting out there.”
