Communicate with employees
While a lot of the focus was on improving customer service and retention rates, a lot also affected employees, so Reid had to be completely honest with them and communicate openly.
“First of all, you have to explain it, and you have to explain it plausibly and credibly,” he says.
Reid didn’t change their health insurance or 401(k), but he did suspend the tuition assistance program.
“401(k) and a co-pay on a health plan are an output that everybody has for an income, and if you change those, you change the income,” Reid says. “Tuition assistance is not a pay reduction. It’s that simple.”
These decisions are crucial to communicating with employees.
“People want to believe in something,” he says. “They want to believe in their product, which is very key at Flexjet, and they want to believe in the integrity of their company and the integrity of the management. If you don’t have a true compassion for the people that are delivering your results, they’re going to figure it out real fast.”
Reid also had to explain that not every employee would have a job moving forward.
In some situations, it just came down to more traditional methods of reducing numbers while being as fair as possible. With flight crews, seniority had trump, so the last ones in were the first let go. In some areas, like administration, it was a matter of eliminating people in the places where the work had disappeared.
“Well, new business is down 40 percent, but existing business is they’re flying 90 percent of their usual hours,” Reid says. “Well, you’re going to take more out of the areas that are dealing with processing new business, because you’re actually taking out where the work is. There’s a science to it.”
In other cases, he had employees, in a way, try out for their jobs. The new con
cierge program required rolling four or five departments into one, so he developed competencies based on guidance from those high-performing customer service companies.
“Everybody in those four or five departments had to interview to get into the new job,” he says. “To be honest with you, about 20 percent didn’t make it because I wanted very much to adhere to ‘Hire for attitude and train for skill.’ Many companies go for technical skills, and you need to in some areas, but in the service business, the attitude comes first and the skill training comes second. So that was a big deal — we couldn’t just switch the switch overnight.
“The most difficult part was taking people that were part of the company, making them interview for a job, and telling them they didn’t make it,” Reid says. “It didn’t happen much, but we laid down the marker — this is service, attitude counts, and you can be the best technical person in the world, but if you finish a transaction and the person on the other end doesn’t feel good about it, you have failed.”
While he explained everything he was doing and why he was doing it, he also had to explain it in multiple ways — walking around, at the watercooler, issuing memos, conference calls. He gave people opportunities to ask questions and get answers and have a direct dialogue, as well.
“Then I take the senior management team — the top four people and then the top eight, and then the top 20 — and I meet with them in different environments and say, ‘What are you hearing? What do we need to focus on, and here’s why I’m doing what I’m doing — how’s it playing out on the street?’” he says. “Those are two things (you need to be doing) — explaining things in terms that people can understand and secondly communicating by a multitiered platform.”
Sometimes you may think you’re too busy to go through these kinds of communication efforts with employees — especially when we know they’re upset and we’re busy — but Reid urges you to think otherwise.
“I tell the leadership of the company, ‘Look, I have deadlines to meet with my boss. You have deadlines you have to meet. You’re busy. You have a stack full of e-mails. Communication, at the time, feels like a distraction. It doesn’t, in the immediate sense, pay off. You don’t see the benefit of communicating well, but if you take time out and roll a few of the deadlines and prioritize your work, believe me, whether it’s 15 minutes a day or an hour a day, taking time out of your work to communicate plausibly, calmly and in a noncondescending way, it pays off,’” he says. “It’s one of the things that I show people is, ‘Look at these top 10 companies in the best places to work — they have very robust communications.’”
Reid also stays engaged with his employees to make sure they understand everything and gauge their concerns and ideas. He does a 75-question employee satisfaction survey with them each year about communication, leadership, benefits and other topics of that sort. He gives them results and chooses three or four initiatives to work on from that survey.
“We measure it by the return that we think it will give us in terms of credibility and respect of leadership,” he says. “Some aren’t affordable, so we say no.”
For example, some employees wanted gym equipment, which seems like a good, inexpensive idea, but once you factor in the cost of the equipment itself as well as the insurance policy in case anyone got hurt and the cost for reinforced flooring to not disturb the office below them, it gets too expensive.
“So sometimes people ask for things I can’t afford, and [I say,] ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that, but here’s why,’ or, ‘Yes, we can do this, and here’s our plan,’” Reid says.
Taking this kind of initiative and circling back is critical.
“If we expect our employees to serve customers, then we must serve them,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you give them everything you want because it’s not affordable, but it does mean communicating with them what we can do and what we can’t, and it does mean caring a lot about their welfare.”
And Reid actually gets a response rate of about 75 percent to these surveys, which is partially because he incentivizes them by letting them do things like wear jeans on a certain day if they’ve responded. Of course that’s on the honor system though because the survey is anonymous, but beyond initiatives like that, he gets a response because he actually responds to them and they feel heard.
“We’ve gained some credibility because in the last three years, we’ve been very open about our high points and equally open about our low points, and we’ve been able to initiate certain things to address some of their points,” he says.
Despite the changes and the challenges, Reid is optimistic about the future for him and his employees.
“In the worst year of the company’s history in terms of the business downturn, our employee engagement ratings went up,” he says. “They rose last year. It tells me we did something right.”
How to reach: Flexjet, (800) 353-9538 or www.flexjet.com
