Communicate
When the crisis began, Heyman remembers listening to Jack Welch speak.
“He mentioned there were three things that leaders had to do, and the last thing he said was, ‘Communicate, communicate, communicate,’” Heyman says. “I love being out in front of our employees, but this gave me — even though some of the messages were tough — a platform to get people focused on the long term. The long term for us was and is very bright. It gave me a platform to get out there and triple up on my communication.”
With about 1,300 people in the company, he started communicating the decisions that had been made and the reasons for those choices with the 90 people comprising his leadership team.
“The first thing was to get buy-in from our leadership team,” Heyman says. “They knew we were going through this decision process, and so we laid out the principles for why we made the decisions we made and positioned them as leaders to be able to explain it to their people.”
Then Heyman conducted a series of conference calls and visits to each office to explain the changes and the reasons behind them. He also took questions from them so they fully understood how the decisions fit into the long-term plan. After those communications, he did a number of town halls and followed up with more conference calls and smaller group meetings. He built on those by continuously talking about the state of the business so people felt like they had a transparent management team and an opportunity to dialogue.
“I forget who said it, but don’t let a crisis go to waste,” Heyman says. “It’s a great time — your people are very attentive. Their ears are clear, and they want to hear from you. They want to hear from you face to face, and they want to hear from you in conference calls, in small groups. Take every opportunity. They are looking to you for leadership in these times, and if you’re not providing it, you’re in a very dangerous spot as a leader.
“The messages aren’t always going to be positive ones. A lot of times, we, as leaders, like to get out there and we like to speak about all the positive things that are happening in our businesses. Every single company has problems, and in times like this, everybody has t
he same problem — it’s called the economy. The people are looking to their leaders for strength and what that instability means to them, and they want to be working for leaders who understand that and are planning accordingly, and they will be able to take comfort from that and be inspired by that and focus on the job at hand.”
But while he communicates all of these things, he doesn’t just trust that they understand it. Heyman conducts quarterly company surveys and measures what he calls employee engagement.
“In those surveys we test how well they feel like they understand [what] their role is inside the company and how it impacts our strategy and operations and things like customer satisfaction, and we report back on those things quarterly to them,” he says.
Radiant’s employee engagement scores hover in the 70 percent range, which is high, as the typical benchmark in the industry is in the 40 percent range.
“In our business, our people are our most important asset by far, so any organization that feels that way about their people really needs to not just have a strategy, but make sure that their people understand their strategy and then take it to the next level,” Heyman says. “ … Test it — you understand if you’re not doing a good job.”
