Keep it open
Though making tasks fun will help employees feel more at ease to come forward with ideas, you need to be available to actually hear those ideas.
Santo doesn’t allow closed doors at Avantair unless there is a good reason, like discussing nonpublic information with auditors.
“Closed doors promote a very poor atmosphere, because people think you are talking about bad things,” he says.
However, with that door open, you can be faced with a flood of requests, questions and complaints.
Santo says he does have employees come to him with trivial stuff, but that’s something he is willing to deal with because of the environment he wants.
“You have to just deal with it,” he says. “If you want to have the environment, a free and open environment that really promotes the type of growth that we’ve seen, you’re going to have to deal with some trivial stuff.”
However, you have to make sure other managers have their doors open because that will reduce the number of trivial matters you encounter.
“You really need good people around you to help you weed through that,” he says.
“I’m not talking about an extra layer, but you need everybody kind of doing the same thing in terms of the open-door policy.”
Of course, you have other duties aside from what employees bring to you.
That’s why employees at Avantair have to ask, “Do you have a minute?” before discussing their matter.
If the manager doesn’t have a minute, he or she has to let the employee know when he or she will be free.
“So, everybody understands it’s not insulting if I say, ‘I can’t do it right now, but hey, here’s a time when I can.’ As long as you give them a time when you can, then it’s OK,” he says.
You also want to be careful not to make it a common practice for employees to jump the ranks and come right to the top with an issue.
“You don’t want the manager to hold it against the employee that they came to you over their head,” he says. “You really have to use kid gloves with the manager. You have to just go to the manager and say, ‘Hey, my understanding is that you are aware of this idea. I didn’t hear about it. It was brought to me.’ In those situations, I kind of like to say, ‘This sounds like a pretty good idea that we should look into.’”
Before you come down hard on the manager for not relaying the idea, find out why he or she didn’t say anything to you. Sometimes, Santo finds the manager didn’t want to bother him with the issue or idea, yet something is actually being done about it.
Use those instances as teaching moments, and acknowledge that managers are spreading the open-door policy to their direct reports.
“I use it more as a tool to say, ‘Hey, you are doing a great job in your department; XZY came to me with an idea. So, clearly you are giving the company message to your department,’” Santo says.
“They will usually volunteer, ‘Well, they came to me with it, too. I’m upset that they came to you.’ I said, ‘Well, did you ever get back to them? No. Well, that’s why they came to me.’”
You may also run into employees who go to the manager, get an explanation of why an idea will not be used, and they still come to you.
You have to deal directly with the employee in that case and explain to him or her why the idea is not being used.
“In that case, you really have to go to the employee and not the department head, and just re-explain to the employee why,” he says.
Once you’ve established the open-door policy, you have to give your undivided attention when someone is in your office. Santo used to struggle with not listening when someone was in his office, which would dilute his open-door policy.
“You ca
n
get very full of yourself as a CEO, even of a small company like this,” he says. “And it’s not listening. People would come into my office all the time and I would be doing something else. I wouldn’t be giving them my full attention and they knew it. So, I would be picking up the phone or checking e-mail while they were talking to me instead of devoting my two or three minutes to them. I started to get the feeling that people were seeing that.”
Now, if someone is speaking with Santo, he turns off his computer monitor, holds his calls and takes notes, which his assistant scans into his laptop. He also communicates to the employee that it may take a week to get back to him or her because he is busy, but he will get back to him or her.
“I tell them, ‘Look, straight up. This is something that’s not going to happen tomorrow, but I guarantee you it will get consideration,’” he says.