Chart a path
Shared Technologies went into bankruptcy in June 2004. Six months later, with a recovery under way, Parella and his leadership team held a companywide kickoff meeting to mark the launch of the new culture.
“In that meeting, we really laid out three strategic initiatives,” he says. “We were going to revolutionize the way Shared Tech treated its employees, treated its customers, and we were going to revolutionize the industry by doing the first two things. All of that would lead to unprecedented growth in our sector.”
As part of that, Parella wanted to give the entire organization a morale booster shot by applying for inclusion on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. The application process included circulating surveys to employees and gauging their opinions on the type of work environment provided by Shared Technologies.
When the results came back, Parella received a splash of cold reality.
“The good news was I had a road map for what we needed to fix,” he says. “The bad news was I realized just how far we needed to go to before we could realize our accomplishment of making it to the 100 Best Companies list.”
Seventy percent of the company’s overall grade in the Fortune rankings came from the employee survey. The questions covered topics including trust of management and trust of corporate leadership.
In the end, employees gave Shared Technologies a 60 percent approval rating. If it had been a high school math test graded on a standard scale, it would have been one percentage point above a failing grade.
“Needless to say, when I got the results back, I was severely disappointed in how the employees viewed management,” Parella says. “But I also knew exactly what areas we needed to work on.”
Parella decided to start with the company’s raw cultural material: its core values. The values themselves — expressed in the acronym “FIRE UP” — aren’t much different from those of most other companies. “FIRE UP” stands for what Parella wanted in a culture: fun, integrity, respect, ethics, unparalleled performance and passion. But in order to get skeptical employees to take hold of the values, he needed to keep the acronym in front of them.
Subtlety was out. Every employee was given a wallet-sized card with the values listed on it. The values were posted prominently in every office. The values were posted on the company’s intranet, so every employee saw them when they booted up their computers in the morning. Even the mouse pads on every desk became billboards for Shared Technologies’ core values.
It quickly became apparent to everyone at Shared Technologies that those who weren’t on board with Parella’s plan weren’t on board with the company’s future.
“It is constant, consistent reinforcement,” Parella says. “That is what employees believe. If I had a leader who didn’t subscribe to our core values, they’re not here anymore. All it takes is a couple of those (terminations), and suddenly they know you’re not kidding, that you’re serious.”
Parella and his management team put core value leaders in place at each of the company’s 41 locations nationwide. The core value leader is voted on by employees at that location, serving a one-year term. The core value leader serves as that location’s advocate for the core values, holding people accountable for working with uniform objectives.
“It sounds pretty basic that you’re going to write down things like having integrity, having fun and some of these other things,” Parella says. “But on top of that, we established a benchmark in measuring all of our leaders in how they stack up with our core values. We have our core value leaders, who bubble up ideas and issues that are going on in each specific city.”
The core value leaders report to Shared Technologies’ “Best Company in America” board, which consists of one leader from each of the company’s operational areas. One of the board’s jobs is to take best cultural practices occurring at the field level and spread it throughout the nationwide organization.
“The core value leaders hold quarterly meetings at each branch to lay out what is going on with the company,” he says. “Monthly, they attend a best company in America board meeting to suggest things. The ideas roll up from there.”
When keeping a message in front of employees, an organized approach is key.
“Whenever possible, put a quantifiable agenda together, tell your employees what you’re going to do and then be sure you do it,” Parella says. “Be consistent in your messages. Don’t have an objective of the month and then change it. Changing a culture doesn’t happen overnight.”
