Touch base with employees
To keep his company adaptable, Royo starts at the bottom, laying out his vision and then touching base with ground-level
employees to talk industry trends.
“That’s the first step to that process: Laying out that broad vision
and then engaging with people to collect their knowledge,” Royo
says. “The process of including people and collecting their input is
important in being able to get their support.”
Royo isn’t best buds with 3,500 employees, but he starts the
engagement process with quarterly trips to every facility and
keeps in contact with every region’s senior manager via weekly
meetings.
“It gives you a better feel of what’s going on in each individual
facility and the services they provide but also the opportunity for
people to feel like they may know you to sort of provide input and
feedback,” Royo says.
And when Royo makes his visits, he takes time to visit with different levels of employees in a no-agenda setting just to see what
topics are on their minds.
“I ask the head of a given facility to choose 10 or 15 employees,
and I go and have breakfast or lunch with them with no particular agenda,” he says. “It’s just, I’m here to listen and learn, and so
what do you want to talk about — and those tend to be very productive. And there’s a cultural aspect to it, in London what it
usually means is take a bunch of people to the pub.”
Of course, four visits a year and a few pints isn’t enough for you
to say you’re a man or a woman of the people. You need multiple
touch points, including some that regularly engage employees on
current issues. When Royo first came aboard at Ascent Media,
one of the first things he did was create a blog on the company’s
intranet. He posts a few times a week, and his goal is to mix it
with corporate updates and down-to-earth things meant to stir
up ideas.
“The postings can be specific. For example, we had an employee
who was critically injured in the MTA train accident, and I gave
people updates on how things were going after going to visit him
at the hospital,” Royo says. “Or they can be very strategic. (In
October 2008), in the face of all these economic challenges, I wrote
a long note about what I think the implications are for Ascent,
where we are in terms of our financial position and asking people
to think out of the box.”
Similarly, Royo says you have to constantly maintain your e-mail.
He knows that you get inundated with more e-mails than you can
fully respond to in a day. He does, too. In fact, he estimates he gets
nearly 400 a day.
“Everybody is very busy, and we all need to make sure we carve
out some time to actually do some work,” he says. “Sometimes late
at night, after I put the kids to bed, I spend some quality time going
through and making sure I’m being responsive.”
To be clear, Royo is not telling you to stop your life to answer
every e-mail. Being responsive means getting to the issues of the e-mails effectively. When he gets 25 e-mails about the same thing, he
knows there is an opportunity to show he’s on top of it by responding through a public outlet.
“There are times when you’re getting a lot of issues about something, and that’s when the blog or some of the e-mail communication becomes important and/or setting up a specific meeting to
address these concerns that have been raised by a number of people,” he says. “And then there are a lot of things you need to learn
how to delegate, so hit forward, send it to somebody, and tell them,
‘Can you run with this one?’”
