Keep the culture alive
Employee buy-in came quickly at the rank-and-file level once employees realized Parella was serious about reforming the culture. He wanted employees to see that his actions would follow his words, so every year he makes it a priority to visit every Shared Technologies location at least once, review the performance of that branch and sit down with employees in a round-table setting.
“They can ask me any and all questions,” he says. “That’s in addition to my monthly conference calls and e-mail.”
Parella’s e-mail program, called “Talk to Tony,” is his primary vehicle for staying in touch with employees on a daily basis. Through e-mail, Parella allows employees to bring their ideas and concerns all the way to the top of the company without hurdling gatekeepers.
“Ninety-nine percent of the e-mails I get are constructive,” he says. “If you want to make the company better, you should do this. Every once in awhile, you get an e-mail that is personal or they have an agenda, and I just get those to the right people. But the process of them having a direct link with me, having me visit with them
on
ce a year in a full-blown review with a round table, a monthly conference call with me, the core value leaders doing a luncheon with me and the Best Company in America board monitoring everything, we very much understand our issues and can kind of take the temperature of our employees.”
The surest way to keep a culture alive is to give your employees a hand in promoting and improving it. It’s something Parella has seen in action in the past year.
“I got an e-mail a little over a year from one of my employees suggesting that we create an employee relief fund,” he says. “We filed with the IRS, created a nonprofit organization within Shared Tech, and we now have a fund supported by employee donations that can take care of employees who are seriously ill or out on disability.
“This fund compensates for the fact that a person’s income is reduced by a percentage when they go on disability, so they don’t have to worry about paying their mortgage if they’re seriously ill and fighting for their life. And this all came from one employee. We absorbed the legal fees, but this was a grassroots idea.”
Parella also helped promote the culture by investing in employee training, something that had been lacking at Shared Technologies. By committing resources to training and refining the company’s training methods, he made a statement about the value of his employees. By extension, well-trained employees who feel valued will provide better customer service.
“What was happening was we’d send a technician off to school — it would typically cost $5,000 for a one-week course — then they’d come back with their new training, ask for a raise, and if they didn’t get it, they’d probably go to a competitor,” Parella says. “That wasn’t changing the company. What I was really doing was training the competition.
“So we created a new portal for training; we did an assessment of every employee of a technical nature who addresses or touches a customer account. We had to find a skill level for every employee. That was a baseline.”
Parella then went to a technical training school and cut a seven-figure, one-year training deal, which lowered the cost per trainee from $5,000 to about $1,500. After trainees successfully completed a course, they were introduced to a two-tier bonus program — $750 for successfully completing the course and anywhere from $3,500 to $5,000 one year later, depending on job performance.
“So suddenly, you have a work force that is very motivated because their skill set is enhanced and their value to the company is improving,” he says. “The result is our voluntary turnover is now around 6 percent. In our industry, it’s usually north of 20 percent. That strategic investment in training has probably changed us more than any one single thing.”
Four years after bankruptcy, the recovery steps taken by Parella and his managers have produced results. The company is in growth mode, with final 2008 revenue projected at between $350 million and $360 million. The work force has nearly tripled from a little more than 500 to approximately 1,400.
Shared Technologies’ culture has been successfully rebuilt. In 2008, the company ranked 25th on Fortune’s top 100 companies to work for, largely because the employee satisfaction survey that produced a 60 percent approval rating in 2005 produced a 97 percent approval rating last year. The company moved up to 18th on the list for 2009.
“We’re certainly a work in progress and always will be,” Parella says. “I don’t think you’re ever done improving your culture. But I believe fundamentally that a great employee experience will lead to a great customer experience and that’s what we have. If the employees aren’t motivated, the customers are going to have a bad experience.”
How to reach: Shared Technologies Inc., (888) 835-4444 or www.sharedtechnologies.com
