Eliminate silos
Fee knew there were a lot of good ideas being discussed between her employees and some good suggestions that were being presented to new Cruise Planners franchisees. But since these nuggets weren’t being shared with everyone, the benefits were not being realized.
“We’d get agents in that would go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know it was like that because so-and-so told me that’s how you handled it,’” Fee says. “I’d say, ‘Oh my gosh, we haven’t done that in a year.’ So it was just trying to get everybody in a room to communicate.”
Fee had to show her people the value of interdepartmental dialogue if they were going to buy in to it. She wanted to demonstrate that the actions of one department really do affect another department and that there is value in getting those departments to talk to each other.
“We’re all intertwined,” Fee says. “If franchise sales brings in a new member and business development drops the ball, franchise sales is definitely going to bring that up at the meeting. Business development isn’t necessarily going to bring up all their faults and issues. But they can say the reason this happened is this and this and this. Nobody is bringing it up to shoot the duck. They’re bringing it up because we have to figure out how we can fix it.”
It’s impractical to gather everyone in a large organization every time you have something to discuss. So you need to stress the importance of having direct reports who can take a message and deliver it to their people to keep them abreast of what is happening throughout the company.
“Sit with each one of your management-level staff and find out what are their challenges,” Fee says. “What is their team feeling? So then they, in turn, go back and summarize it to their staff so that everybody is again on the same page. Obviously you’re not going to have a weekly meeting for every single person that works for you. But you have to make sure it’s funneling down.”
It could be as simple as having someone assigned to take notes at each meeting and distributing the notes to everyone involved. Stress that they take those notes and tell their people about what happened at the meeting.
“Maybe it’s somebody taking notes for the entire company and then typing them out and bringing them to somebody like myself to say, ‘Here’s what you discussed today. Are these the points you want the entire company to know?’” Fee says. “Here’s what we need to make sure is communicated. Send it to everyone in the company so they understand what is happening in franchise sales or marketing or technology or whatever.”
Many companies have weekly newsletters or bulletin boards or some way of communicating with their people. It’s not the medium that you use, but how you use it that will determine whether it helps your people stay informed.
If you don’t keep up with it, people will lose interest and not see it as a way to stay tuned in to company happenings.
“We have to make sure that we’re out at them,” Fee says. “We do a Friday home office newsletter. It’s a synopsis of the week, and we pull all the information together and say, ‘Here’s what we added to the intranet and here’s some other happenings.’ We put it all in one place so Friday at 5:30, they can all read what either happened during the week or what’s going to happen next week.”
Your goal is to create a culture in which employees feel like there are no secrets and that they are all working toward common objectives. By making yourself visible in the office and at meetings, you also present yourself as an option to address concerns.
“Make sure you’re infusing yourself into every department,” Fee says. “We’ve had managers who we might have on the surface thought they were doing a good job, but guess what? To their team, they weren’t.”
The goal isn’t to turn your office into the complaint department. It’s to show you’re serious about your plan.
“You just want to make sure that the people understand that if the company’s vision is not being sought, you have a door to walk in to,” Fee says.
Never underestimate the danger of leaving someone out of the loop.
“Believe it or not, the most powerful person in your company is typically the one answering the phone,” Fee says. “Typically, that’s probably the lowest level of employee you have. They are the one that’s empowered because they are speaking and talking on your behalf and selling your product or whatever it is you are selling. Unless they know and understand your vision and all of the things that are happening, you’re giving that person the ability to give the wrong message.”
