Connect your people
You provide opportunities for teamwork by providing your employees with opportunities to work with each other. If you can put your people in positions where they regularly interact with each other, they will begin to develop a higher level of familiarity with each other and each other’s jobs.
The interaction opportunities can occur in a formal work setting, but you should also take the time to build more informal opportunities into the work calendar, where socialization is the objective, not necessarily work.
“You engage individuals in your processes by providing the opportunity for them to interact with each other and with you,” Cronin says. “You can provide those opportunities through meetings, cross-training programs or social functions outside of the normal scope of work. Company picnics and other types of events like that can bring people together so they can get to know each other.
“We hold a monthly companywide meeting. An individual in each department is responsible for providing content for the meeting, for sharing things that are going on in their departments. That also helps the whole company gain a better appreciation for what that department does.”
Cronin encourages each department to take the monthly presentation and get creative with it, which has turned the meetings into a kind of loose competition. No prizes are handed out for the best presentation, but the creativity factor creates an added level of engagement for both the department giving the presentation and those in the audience.
“We used to have meetings where just one person would speak,” Cronin says. “But it really became kind of boring and unproductive. However, once we started to put more responsibility on each of the individual departments, it became more of a collaborative effort, to the point that now there is almost some competition as to who can do the best job of making a presentation, which improves the content.
“It has gotten to the point where some presentations utilize sound. If they’re talking about wind, you might hear wind in the background. So our employees go out of their way to spend time on these presentations, and it keeps everyone interested and engaged.”
The presentations at monthly meetings are among the most visible examples of Cronin’s desire to have employees speak up and come forward with ideas and feedback. If you want employees to behave as a team and put aside personal and departmental agendas to work toward larger goals, you need to provide input and feedback channels.
If employees feel like management is too enamored with its own vision to pay attention to what is happening in the trenches, they’ll stop trying to communicate. Which means that, over time, they’ll stop listening to you.
At United Insurance, all employee input and ideas are addressed. It doesn’t mean that management spends hours and days carefully considering each idea, but each nugget of input from within the company is acknowledged and management at least responds to it.
Even if your answer is a flat-out no, it’s better than no response at all, as long as you are willing to explain to the person the reasoning behind your rejection.
“It may be a situation where the problem is simply the idea’s cost,” Cronin says. “You explain that you value the idea, but the cost makes it unrealistic right now. In the insurance business, we’re so controlled by regulations, that alone might make the idea a bad fit. But as long as you’re making sure that you’re communicating to the person that not every suggestion can be acted upon, you still give them a sense that you and your managers are listening to them and their idea is important. What you need to make sure of is that you’re not just dismissing ideas right off the bat.”
On the management levels of the company, Cronin sees to it that every manager and executive knows it is obligatory to listen to employees and offer feedback on suggestions and ideas that are submitted.
“Every manager has the responsibility to listen,” he says. “Every manager needs to offer feedback on ideas. And if an idea isn’t being implemented, we want to know why. There will be no repercussions for coming forth and speaking your mind on a relevant topic. That is a set-up that has worked well for us.”
If an employee is proposing a small change that might improve the work environment, those are the suggestions you should pay close attention to. Sometimes the smallest adjustments can make the biggest difference when it comes to employee engagement and confidence in management.
“In the majority of cases, it’s typically very small, minor things that can impact your business,” Cronin says. “Making small changes that will satisfy people; not necessarily reinventing the wheel. We’re very high on technology, so we’ve streamlined the process that allows access to our systems, so they work faster and are more responsive. Those types of changes can make a huge difference.”
