Get employee feedback
You might think you’re doing a good job in your culture-strengthening endeavors, but it’s best to go straight to the source to find
out.
Start by building relationships with employees so they feel comfortable talking to you.
“You can’t have relationships if you don’t have any time with people …” Siegal says.
“If you make the statement that people are our most important
asset, then you can’t say that people are my most important asset
but never go visit your physical facilities. ‘Oh, I’ve got to go see the
customer. Oh, I’ve got to go see the shareholder. Oh, I never have
time for my employee — but my people are my most important
asset.’ I have to be visible to them.”
Some leaders may say they spend time with employees because
they have every fancy teleconference gizmo there is, but Siegal
says you can’t rely on virtual communication.
“It’s not how fast the Internet can go — there are no relationships
there,” he says. “Relationships are spending time, building a personal relationship, so that when you have to pick up the phone, the other
guy on the other end of the phone actually picks it up.”
Siegal’s also realistic about how much information he can gather
in those conversations.
“You can’t get to everybody when you have 15 or 16 locations, so [a
survey] is a great tool to use to essentially communicate and let the
employees communicate back.”
Olympic Steel administers surveys electronically and in person
to all of its employees.
“We do opinion surveys with the employees every year, regardless of the market, because we want the feedback from the
employees,” Siegal says. “The employee opinion survey is predicated around the value system. We get feedback from all of the
employees, and you get the good, the bad and the ugly.”
When you administer surveys, it’s important that the feedback is
received anonymously.
“If you ask people, they generally will tell you if they feel there is
value to and respect to their opinion, and that’s why we do it blind
so they don’t feel threatened if they have something negative to
say,” he says.
Once the surveys are complete, that feedback goes to an external
source for processing, and it’s important that it’s external as opposed
to someone internally. Siegal has seen firsthand situations where
internal people try to hide information.
“Sometimes, you have an individual who may sanitize the information if they think there may be something negative about them,”
he says.
When you get the survey results back, keep in mind that the goal
isn’t to get mad at requests or to find people to tattle on.
“You get the constant, ‘I want more money,’ the constant sort of
stuff that you expect, but there’s lots of valuable information, and it’s
not a witch hunt,” Siegal says. “The purpose is to find out, are we
being competitive in our universe. Are we doing things the way
we’re suppose to all the way down the line?”
Armed with information, you then have to gauge what is and isn’t doable.
“You sort of absorb between the ‘need to haves,’ the ‘want to
haves,’ to the ‘Boy, we better because it really is telling us something we’re doing wrong,’” he says.
To make those decisions, Siegal says to view each suggestion and
decision as if it were part of a three-legged stool.
“You really serve three different constituencies,” he says. “You
serve your shareholder — that’s true in a public company, but it’s
also true in a private company because you serve yourself if you’re
100 percent owner — but you serve the shareholder. You serve
your employee, and you serve your customer. That three-legged
stool can never be out of balance.”
For example, your employees may want you to double their
vacation time, which would be a great perk for them, but then you
wouldn’t produce as much product, so you may not be able to fill
customer orders and you won’t make as much money, so both the
customers and the shareholders would be hurt. Weigh suggestions
against all three constituencies to make sound decisions about
what to move and hold on.
“If you see the elastic band pulling too far in one direction, it will
snap back, whether you like it or not, and if you pull it too far, it
breaks.”
