Value your employees
Shear also uses surveys to focus on his employees as much as hiscustomers — and for similar reasons.
“If we aren’t creating a good work environment and we lose ourvalued teammates, long term, we’re not going to be profitable,” hesays.
Part of retaining employees who fit into a positive culture is thetimeliness in which you respond to those issues.
“If we see areas where we don’t have a good work environmentfor our teammates, we don’t say, ‘Well, we’ll deal with it six monthsfrom now,’” he says. “We deal with it now.”
Shear creates an environment where people are motivated byproviding incentives to employees who do well. The surveys ofemployees give Shear and his team an idea of how the majority ofworkers feel about the GENCO culture.
“We’re asking teammates, ‘Are we creating a good work environment — a place you enjoy coming to work?’” he says. “We askquestions: ‘How are your working conditions? Are you happy withyour benefits? Are you happy with your wages? Are you happywith the overall GENCO culture?’”
Shear doesn’t do an annual survey with his employees becausehe wants a continual look at what’s going on with his culture.
“Most companies, when they do employee surveys, they tend to dothem once a year to once every two years, and they take a snapshot,” he says. “We survey 9 percent of our teammates every monthfor 11 months, so every teammate does a survey. But we’re doinga large enough random sample every month that it gives us anopportunity to see if there is change occurring in the work environment. Our goal is to keep improving the work environment sowe get monthly feedback as to how well we’re doing.
“We have it on an individual facility basis so we can see wherethere might be places where we could do better in providing a better work environment and also monitor the places that are doingwell.”
The survey consists of scoring each question between 1 and 6,with Shear looking to achieve about a 4.8 or higher.
“We feel that rating, overall, we are creating a good work environment,” he says. “Now, is everybody happy in that work environment? Probably not. But, are the majority happy in that work environment? Yes.”