Put programs into action
To Griffith, his connection with employees reiterated one key thing about the mushrooming Gen Y work force.
“You’ve got to give people some flexibility,” he says. “You’ve got to develop a culture of flexibility to allow them to team together. And so we redefined how our people work. We provide all of our [employees who directly serve clients] with laptops and with 24-7 access to technology assistance anywhere in the world. And we have provided resources for our people to have flexibility in their professional and their personal lives.”
Flexibility is about making your people’s lives easier by adjusting their work-life balance, which Griffith says clears their mind and allows them to spend more time at work worrying about, well, work. Among other things Ernst & Young did, beyond giving flexible hours, was create a concierge service for traveling employees, help employees handle personal financial planning, and create backup child and elder care programs.
But Ernst & Young is careful not to just give people such freedom without taking into consideration how it benefits the business. Griffith says you have to know where your core success is and tie accountability to flexibility.
“The most important thing we do is we assess our client service satisfaction,” he says. “We have a client service quality program with our clients, and we ask them how happy they are with our team and the relationship and how much time our team is spending on it, are they responsive and so on and so forth, and our people would be held accountable for that. So if there was an issue there relative to somebody maybe using flexibility to the point that it might disadvantage our service to a client, then we’re going to hear about that really quickly.”
If and when something like that does come through, Griffith cautions that it’s not cause for an instant suspension of flexibility. Instead, he says you need to do a sit-down with those involved to reiterate that flexibility has to go around the vision. Ernst & Young also pre-empts that by doing what is called acceleration sessions.
“Before we even start serving the clients, we’ll get the team together,” he says. “We’ll run a big calendar on what everybody has going on during that project, so let’s say we have a six-month project that has 30 people working on it, we’ll sit down and create a master calendar.”
During that session, employees are asked to think about their upcoming schedule. While you have to realize there will still be emergency situations, mapping out people’s personal lives in conjunction with a fair and accountable work session can keep everything on track.
“Maybe we’re coming up on graduation season, so maybe somebody has their child graduating from school. … We can’t expect them to work that day,” Griffith says. “But if we plan that all out for all 30 of those people, and be thoughtful about it, we will accelerate our success as a team delivering service to that client. So there’s a loop there that we’re very careful about to make sure flexibility is working and clients are getting passionately served.”
