Perform triage
In a dire situation, your first actions aren’t necessarily going to change the game. They’re likely going to prevent the situation from getting any worse or, at the very least, slow the sinking.
Kahn acknowledged right out of the gate that he would have to place supreme emphasis on communication with employees at all of ProQuest’s offices.
Initially, the message wasn’t even the main point of Kahn’s communication. It was simply the fact that he was taking the time to communicate openly with employees.
“I went and spoke to all of the employees in person and basically told them what we were going to do,” Kahn says. “I told them that we were going to carry out a merger, which by definition would result in redundant operations being combined. I told them that we were going to look for operating efficiencies and that, at a minimum, we would try to do that with a great deal of fairness. If it became necessary that jobs would be eliminated, we would do so in a respectful and open fashion. After that, I gave people a sense of when this all might happen.
“We also committed that while we would be looking for cost savings, we were also going to be investing in the future. We weren’t going to be making these changes as kind of a quick flip where we were going to eliminate costs, polish up the bottom line and then sell the company. We told them we were making a commitment that while we would reduce expenses, we would also invest in the company’s future.”
Through his initial visits to the company’s offices, Kahn learned that employees were looking for more than reassurance concerning their job security. Many were dissatisfied with the state of the company’s infrastructure, which included outdated technology and obsolete accounting and customer service systems.
The speeches and office visits established a future direction, but employees were looking for actions, not just words.
“Employees are smart, and many of our employees have been here a long time,” Kahn says. “They can see when we are going after the real problems, not just the appearance of problems. That’s one way we convinced them of our intentions through actions instead of words. We started out not by investing in the fancy stuff upfront, but by investing in the deep infrastructure of the company, our customer service systems and our computer systems. We showed that these were things that we were serious about improving.”
To calm the waters and build trust after a period of turbulence, you need to focus on two things — communicating openly and seeing to it that your actions follow your words.
“I’m 58 years old, and over the course of my business life, the one thing I’ve learned is the need for transparency from management,” Kahn says. “Give information to people straight, and that includes telling them what the problems are. You need to be almost painfully blunt, because you’ll find out that employees know what is going on. Our employees knew we had an aging software infrastructure that was causing all kinds of problems with our customers. They know what the problems are, and you have to explain what you are going to do about it.
“Explain the how, explain how long it’s going to take you to fix the problems, explain why it’s going to take this long and explain how much you’re going to invest in it. And meanwhile, tell them that we’re all in this together, and we’re all going to have to pull together to prevent these problems from causing us all sorts of trouble in the marketplace. In a nutshell, you need to be straight with your employees.”
