Funnel input
Because Pagano can’t sit down with every employee in the company, he has to pack the most punch into the interactions he does have. For him, that means going after the people who can funnel the most input together. So instead of going after each employee individually, he has employees go to other employees who go to other employees. Then he asks them what everyone is saying.
To do this, he arranges frequent lunch meetings with supervisors. He sees them as the midpoint between management and customer-facing employees. He refers to them as “concentrated customer service agents” as well as noncommissioned officers, borrowing lingo from his Army-base upbringing.
“They interface with the front-line employees — who are interfacing with the customers — and they also interface with management,” he says. “So I can tell both what a customer thinks of us through their interaction with the front-line employees and what they think of management: if we are listening, if we’re getting the message, if we’re paying attention.”
Pagano brings together a mix of supervisors from various departments and geographic regions. While he’s trying to learn what’s happening in each corner of the region, he reminds himself that he’s not the only one who’s curious. Everyone else in the room also benefits from a varied chorus of voices.
“Not only can I hear what’s going on, but they can each hear for themselves what’s going on in different parts of our region,” he says. “Everybody gets the benefit of hearing from everybody else.”
Of course, sharing the benefit of feedback also requires sharing the floor with everybody. For Pagano, that’s as simple as telling the supervisors that the agenda is theirs.
Your employees need to understand that meetings are their chance to share what’s happening — not just to keep everyone informed but also to vet ways for running each department more smoothly. If nothing else, reminding employees that the end goals are to make their jobs easier and to make the company more successful should get the ball rolling.
“I want you to tell me what you think I need to know, so that you can do your job better and I can do my job better,” Pagano tells his supervisors in the meetings. “It’s really that straightforward.”
But usually, getting employees to talk isn’t that much of a battle. You simply have to ask.
Generally, the questions stem from one: What’s happening? To make sure his employees bring the extremes to the table, Pagano then asks specifically that supervisors point out areas where their departments are either improving or backsliding.
“That information is kind of what they live with day in and day out,” he says. “When they see a problem … then it sort of gets filed away. So when you do ask these questions, they have a lot of specifics. Oftentimes it’s over my head, but I’ll make a note of it and we’ll make sure that we get an answer or we resolve the problem.”
In the end, the reason employees bring problems to the table is so they can find solutions that will make their jobs easier and their customers happier. Because your employees have the best insight into their problems, they also have the best ideas for solutions. So Pagano asks what tools, specifically, they need in order to progress in the right direction — even if something from another area of the company is affecting them, such as marketing messages or bundled offerings.
While he depends mostly on his supervisors to filter issues up through their departments, Pagano also looks to other groups for more specific feedback channels. He conducts in-house focus groups to bounce around ideas or introduce offerings.
He either pulls people in randomly for general topics or more selectively if he’s looking for niche feedback. In other words, if he wants to test how Hispanic audiences will react to a programming change, he’ll ask Hispanic employees.
“Our front-line employees are like very concentrated customers because they talk to so many customers on a daily basis that they have a really good understanding of the customers’ wants, needs, frustrations,” Pagano says. “That’s not to say that we don’t survey customers, but I do think 90 percent of the answers lie within your front-line employees.”
