Engage your people
If you want to get the most out of your employees, they have to know that you are committed to giving them the resources and information that they need to succeed to their fullest potential.
It boils down to one word: trust. And trust starts with what cascades downward from the top of the organization.
“There are two keys to trust,” Rose says. “The first is ongoing communication. We did some benchmarking with some world-class companies, and one of the common things we saw is they have daily meetings — even if it’s just kind of a daily huddle in the morning — and it’s focused on whatever they think is important for that day or week. In our industry, it’s things like customers and safety.
“We implemented those types of meetings here, and I attend those meetings along with our managers. We have employee committees that give us direct feedback, and then I try to ensure everyone is in the loop with the communication that is going on in our corporate office. I also include front-line leaders and future leaders in meetings and conference calls. So that communication aspect is critical.”
The second element to creating a trust factor is empowerment. You have to drive decisions down the organizational ladder as far as you’re able, while still ensuring that the person making a decision is qualified to do so.
“You have to empower your front-line employees to make the right decisions for customers, and you have to ask them for their input,” Rose says. “Some of our best safety ideas and customer ideas have come from our front line. When employees see their ideas valued by management, implemented and put into action, it helps to solidify a culture where there is open and honest communication.”
At Waste Management, engagement is a two-way street. Rose and his direct reports set the tone with their communication from the top, focusing on getting employees involved in the wide-ranging thought process of the company. With those seeds sowed, Rose then relies on his employees at the customer interface point to report from the field on customers’ wants and needs and to formulate ideas on how to better serve customers.
“That is the key to sustainable, long-term success,” Rose says. “If you don’t involve those front-line employees, what you’ll probably find is the initiative or program doesn’t last long because it’s coming from the top down. You don’t have the opportunity to engage your front-line employees if ideas are coming from the top down, because the decisions have already been made.”
When ideas come from the bottom up, the people closest to the customers are being empowered to make, or at least suggest, the decisions that will affect how your company serves your customers.
“The people closest to the customers know what your customers want,” he says. “They have ideas, and if you let them be involved in the decision-making process, you’ll benefit from it. When decisions are made, your front-line people are involved in a very real way, and they are going to have ownership (of) the idea and help see it through to a successful outcome.”
As the head of the company, your job is still to handle the big-picture concepts and long-range strategic planning. That’s not your employees’ job. They still need to focus on their daily tasks. However, you want to give your employees enough of a sense of the big picture to understand how the decisions they make affect the company as a whole.
Essentially, you want employees and midlevel managers to execute their narrowly focused job with an eye toward how it ramps onto the bigger plan of the organization.
It’s a balance to create a big-picture mindset in your people without taking them completely out of their particular job within the organization. Rose achieves that balance by opening the door for employees to figure out new ways to improve the efficiency of their daily duties. If the idea is a good one, it could become a companywide policy.
“In our company meetings, we’ll take employees up to our level of management and ask them outright, ‘Help us. Here is the direction we’re headed, so please help us to get there,’” Rose says.
“One of our employees came up with an idea that works well here in San Diego. Since we’re right on the waterfront, there is not a lot of space for containers. So we developed a split bin where customers can put trash on one side and recyclables on the other. For customers around beaches and on the waterfront, that was a great way to show them another solution. That whole idea came from our driver ranks. It shows how important it is to be open to things like that, how you can help your customers in any way that makes sense.”
Of course, every employee idea can’t be used. So in order to reject ideas while still keeping a high level of connection and engagement intact with your employees, you need to explain why you can’t use the idea and repeatedly express appreciation that the employee came forward in the first place.
“We always say, ‘Explain the why,’” Rose says. “They need to understand why we’re not implementing their idea or solution, so it’s not just, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ It needs to be more like, ‘We appreciate the idea, thanks very much, but we decided not to do it, and here is why.’
“That type of feedback is critical, because if you don’t do that, you’re not going to keep getting those ideas. You’re going to stop getting that honest communication.”
Rose believes employee engagement is a leading indicator to everything else in a business. If employees are engaged with management, they’re going to actively engage customers and clients with a positive attitude, which helps drive sales and revenue.
“I’m a firm believer in that whole idea,” he says. “If I treat my employees in the same way I treat our best customers, that is going to reciprocate. They’re going to treat our customers the same way. That is why feedback and dialogue is so critical. If you have that, it will help build that trust and communication that is essential to a business.”
How to reach: Waste Management Inc. of San Diego, (619) 596-5100 or www.wastemanagementsd.com
