Share the glory
When you’re the leader, you often get a lot of the credit when your company is successful. You need to make sure to share some of those victories with the people who helped you earn them.
“The way to get associates to buy in to your mission is to give them a skin in the game,” Diamond says. “We have always believed that it’s an important ingredient to our success that everybody feels vested in the mission of SafeAuto and that they get a piece of the action. The calculation is not based on the individual’s performance. It’s based on the company’s performance.”
SafeAuto has a profit-sharing program in which employees benefit when the company does well. But that doesn’t mean that individual recognition doesn’t take place.
“We have a phone system that allows me to track every phone call in the company,” Diamond says. “I, at times, will listen to sales calls, service calls and claim calls. If I hear one that I like, I’ll send an e-mail to that associate saying, ‘You’ve been caught by the president doing a great job. Please print this out and give it to a manager and lunch for you and a friend is on me.’ It lets them know that I care how they are performing and I hear how they are performing and I reward those who I feel are setting a good example. That permeates around the call center when something like this happens.”
At the end of the day, you need to make all your employees feel special and valued in carrying out the mission of your organization. They play a crucial part in selling your business to the public.
“All the communication with our clients or customers is done by salespeople, service or claims,” Deshe says. “In essence, every one of those departments is selling and reselling the company. Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, the sales department, they do the sale and it’s done.’ Not so quickly. The way we treat our customers from a service standpoint and especially in our claims department, word-of-mouth is important to us. We get many customers referred from other customers. We have to resell ourselves every time we are in touch with our customers.”
It’s that ability to grow as a team that has enabled SafeAuto to become a well-known brand in the insurance industry.
“Our most important responsibility is to drive the culture of this company,” Diamond says. “It’s to make it the kind of place that somebody wants to have their career. People want to join a company where they believe in its ownership to do the right thing and behave in the right way.”
How to reach: SafeAuto Insurance Co., (800) 723-3288 or www.safeauto.com
