Listen to employees
With so much on your plate, it’s tempting to look for the simple way out on some responsibilities. Don’t let that be the case when it comes to listening to employees.
“With employees, sometimes it’s easy to go out and just tell them what to do,” he says. “But I think the smarter thing is to go out and listen to them and understand what their challenges are. Make sure you communicate what the organization is about, wh
er
e are you trying to take the organization and what’s really important to the organization, but make sure you listen, too.”
Because employees interact with customers and your products all of the time, you need to spend time with your workers.
“Definitely coming on board, we spent a lot of time with employees and now we’ve got a regular rhythm around, whether it’s town-hall meetings, whether it’s round tables, whether we do what we call skip-level meetings,” he says.
With thousands of employees, Seavers has to travel a lot. He travels to different locations and meets with groups of about 10 people made up of employees from a couple of levels below him. The groups comprise a good cross-section of employees from different departments.
“So that way you’re not just talking about engineering, but you’ve got engineering, you’ve got product management, you’ve got tech support, you’ve got everybody at the table so you can have a pretty rich dialogue,” he says.
Since Seavers doesn’t come to the meetings with an agenda and managers aren’t present, he and the employees can talk about any number of topics that come up.
Group members quickly go around the table, including Seavers, and introduce or reintroduce themselves and give a quick snippet of who they are and what they do at the company.
“That takes a few minutes to do that,” he says. “Typically, when people are introducing themselves, telling where they work, that sort of thing, it may spur something. I may just ask them a question to get to know them a little bit better. Once we finish with that, what I like to do is say, ‘Listen, there is no agenda here. The whole point of doing a round table is so we can have communication, so I can tell you what’s going on in the business. You can ask me questions that might be on your mind. I can learn a little bit more about what you are doing.’ So, I spend a few minutes sort of letting them know there is no agenda, letting them know that it is an open environment and they can ask me anything.
“Whether it has to do with GE Security, whether it has to do with GE, if they are concerned about the economy, whatever they want to talk about is fair game.”
Stressing that any topic is fair game will get the ball rolling in the right direction.
“Typically, what happens is you get one or two softball questions, but if you give a rich enough answer, I think it opens up the door for people to really dig into the things that are on their mind,” he says.
The back and forth conversation will give both you and the employees something to think about after the meeting. Employees get their questions answered and Seavers gets two or three ideas he can take back to his senior team.
“I find those meetings to be incredibly beneficial,” he says. “One, I’d say at a simple level you get a chance to sort of talk about the strategy, the message for the organization. But, I think sometimes at a deep level with the employees, they get a chance to tell you what’s on their mind, what they’ve heard, any concerns that they have, ideas that they have.
“I think what it also fosters is you can say you have an open door, but when you do those kinds of meetings, when you do the round tables, it really demonstrates that you mean it. I think you get great ideas when you do that.”
Those ideas couldn’t have come up without you speaking with customers and employees.
“While there are always things that can take you away from spending time with employees, don’t let it,” he says. “Make sure you get out there with employees; make sure you get out there with customers. So, if you are going to see employees, make sure you schedule a customer visit. If you are going to see customers, try and make sure you schedule a little bit of time with employees, because I think it’s easy to get separated from that.”
How to reach: GE Security Inc., (888) 437-3287 or www.gesecurity.com
