Set the parameters
During the infant stages of the EAC, Mancini sat in on the meetings to make sure the group was working within Molina’s vision. Once she saw they were acting in the best interest of the company culture, she made herself scarce.
“After the first three to four months of really getting it off the ground, I’ve never been to another meeting,” she says.
In fact, there are no executives — or managers, for that matter — on the committee at all.
“It’s not supervisors, managers, anyone in any sort of leadership position,” she says. “It’s really the folks that maybe from their role they don’t see on a daily basis how they’re fulfilling the mission, so they really want to contribute in other ways.”
The key is creating a feeling that employees own the group. You do that by letting them share the lead.
“The key is finding the passionate, organized people and what they do is say, ‘OK, we’re going to do X events for the year,’ and then they make a captain for each event so that not one person is doing everything. They really share the role of leading different events or drives that we do.”
As Molina has grown to more than 280 people, Mancini has let the group expand on its own, and it now has about 15 people. Along the way, though, Molina has asked that employees share that captain’s role — the EAC representative for a certain event — and keep a democratic view on representatives and programs.
“They do an annual survey through the staff here and say, ‘What events do you like and not like, are there suggestions you’d like to make, and is anybody interested?’ Then they pick a representative from each department so everyone is equally represented (along with) a couple extra people that have been volunteering for events during the year.”
Apart from the annual survey, the leadership team at Molina also gives some geographical requests to help equalize external efforts.
“We make sure it’s allocated equitably across all of our territory, so we’re not doing too many things in Columbus,” she says. “We need to do things in Cincinnati or Dayton or the Appalachia area. So sometimes we have to help with that, but once we have the parameters, they come up with everything.”
The EAC is also charged with spacing its events out to maximize interest and productivity. They can do one smaller staff event per month — such as an ice cream social — one thing for the quarterly all-employee meeting and one charity event every two months. With the charity events, Molina asks that as many as possible are about giving time so people don’t always feel like they have to donate financially.
“We try to mix that up so they can give things like their time, so it’s not just financial contribution,” she says.
The last touch point for management at Molina is the company’s human resources manager. Though the HR manager is not formally on the committee, Mancini says you want to have someone who understands company policy sit in and make notes of things that will affect people’s work just to keep things running smoothly.
