Jim Coats understands what
his employees want
because he does something radical — he asks them.
“We expect our employees to
go above and beyond, and we
should go above and beyond for
them,” says the co-founder and
managing director of Brockman,
Coats, Gedelian & Co.
Coats says it’s your responsibility to exceed your employees’
expectations, and to do that,
you need to ask for feedback.
Through casual discussions
and formal surveys, getting
input has helped Coats grow
the 100-employee accounting
and consulting firm nearly
every year since it was founded
in 1986. Last year’s revenue
exceeded $12 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Coats about how he keeps the
lines of communication open
and why if you’re going to survey your employees, you’d better follow up on what they say.
Q. How do you effectively
communicate with employees?
Seven or eight years ago, we
did our first major employee
survey, and the one area that the
survey determined we needed
to improve was communication.
We were taken aback at first,
but after thinking about it, we
later appreciated it.
When you grow your firm, it
really changes the way that information flows into a business.
When you’re a small, 10-person
firm, you can just yell down the
hall, but we can’t do that anymore.
I present a ‘State of the Firm’
every January, with a 90-minute
presentation of everything of
significance that has happened
at our company in the past year and what our plans are for the
coming year. This meeting is off-site, and we provide food and
drinks afterward so there’s
socializing.
Technology has changed the
way we communicate, too. Now,
in addition to the regular e-mails
on current company news, our
employees produce an online
newsletter that is kind of the
social network of the firm.
Most recently, I’m coming to
each desktop every other week
via a three- to five-minute video
that I tape in my office. I keep
everyone informed and share
the company’s philosophies and
my philosophies. It’s a much
better communication
tool — more personal
and more nuanced —
than something in writing
or e-mail, particularly
when you’re talking
about business philosophies and your approach.
Q. Why did you decide
to start doing employee
surveys?
As we grew, we were
trying to get a handle of
how everybody perceived
things. We had our own
thoughts on it, but the
only way to be sure was
to ask people. It was done
by an outside consultant.
The survey asked a lot
of pertinent questions, and it
gave us a lot of insight in the
communication area that we
needed to address.
Q. How do you respond to
survey results?
We formed a task force that
was responsible for reacting and
responding to the results of the
survey. When we saw there was
a weakness in communication, we formed a communications
task force of members throughout the firm to come up with
ways to improve communication.
Many of our communication
tools — the online newsletter
and the ‘State of the Firm’ —
came from that dialogue.
Q. What happens if you don’t
follow up?
If you don’t follow up on a survey, you’ve done more harm
than good. If a company’s leaders have done a survey and
haven’t responded to it, if I were
an employee, I would think that
there’s no substance in what they were trying to do. It would
reflect poorly on management if
they did not follow up.
Once you make the commitment to do a survey, it’s
extremely important that you
follow up. It serves to your
benefit if the whole goal is to
improve your organization.
It’s all about improvement.
Status quo is not the place
you want to be.
Q. How do you benefit from
having good communication
with employees?
You don’t know anything about
people or their problems without
asking and listening. Listening is
underrated. I’ve never learned
anything with my mouth open.
You have to understand
what people’s issues and problems are for you to be able to
respond to those issues and
problems. You only gain that
through listening.
Q. How do you make sure
you’re listening?
It’s a matter of experience and
training. Always try to keep the
questions focused on whoever
you’re talking to. It’s a matter of
basic human psychology that if
you listen to people and learn
about them and their issues and
problems, they’re going to like
you.
People prefer to talk about
themselves and what’s relevant
to them. And that’s how you
learn, by listening. Hopefully,
from all that listening, you can
offer a brilliant, if not a practical, solution to their issues.
There are no tricks; you have
to be very sincere. Just be
yourself, be caring, listen and
pay attention. Then you can
interpret that and see what
you can offer in terms of a
good outcome.
HOW TO REACH: Brockman, Coats, Gedelian & Co., (330) 864-6661 or www.bcgcompany.com