Overcommunicate

One morning, I was strolling through our lobby when I spotted a woman in her thirties. She was sitting in a chair, checking her phone. From her badge, I could tell that she was a Kronite, but I hadn’t met her before. Since I was passing right by her, I stopped and started a conversation. “Having a good morning?” I asked. “What do you think of our new offices? What’s your favorite part?” I lobbed more friendly questions at her, and we chatted for a few minutes before I said goodbye and headed toward the elevators. I never identified myself as the CEO, and I don’t think she knew. My goal was simply to learn a little bit from her, find out what was on her mind, what she wanted out of her job, and how she saw the company.

I have encounters like this all the time—while I’m riding the elevator, while I’m standing in line at the cafeteria, as I’m walking to my car. I chat with everyone: employees, customers, prospective employees, vendors who happen to be visiting our offices. There’s a Yiddish word for this behavior: kibitzing. During my childhood, my mother joked that my father’s plumbing business was really a community center, all these customers coming in and hanging around. She used to chide my father, saying, “I don’t know how you make a living, because all you do is kibitz.” She was right. My father sold his share of PVC pipe, but he was also constantly bantering with his customers, learning about their struggles and concerns, helping if he
could.

Source: American Heritage Dictionary¹

At Kronos, I think of myself as the kibitzer-in-chief, and I recommend kibitzing to you as a powerful means of building a more engaged and inspired team or workforce. Like expressions of humility on the part of leaders and managers, short, personal conversations with employees are seemingly inconsequential acts that over time pay huge dividends. CEOs of billion-dollar companies tend to converse primarily with their carefully chosen leadership team, and nobody else. They satisfy themselves with getting up on a stage and lecturing employees about the company, its strategies, its values, delegating most other communications with employees to the public relations or human resources departments. To inspire people and create a workplace they cherish, I believe you must build personal relationships with them and establish a culture throughout the company of open and honest communication. Communicating frequently with employees and other stakeholders, preferably face-to-face, can help you accomplish both objectives. In fact, don’t just communicate—over communicate. You really can’t do it
enough!

THE FINE ART OF KIBITZING

Kibitzing might sound funny to your ear, but it has long had its place in organizations, encapsulated in the well-known practice of “management by walking around.” Yet not everybody does such informal chatting correctly. As a leader or manager, you can’t just spend time mingling with frontline employees and talking with them about their work. For the best results, you have to ask plenty of questions, and really listen to employees’ responses.

As I go about my day, I ask employees a variety of open-ended questions about their work and personal lives, simple queries like, “What are you working on?” “How was your weekend?” “How is your family?” I pose these questions to most Kronites I meet, whether at our headquarters or when traveling to other locations because I truly care about them and what they’re doing. These employees in turn are sometimes shocked that their CEO would take a minute or two to acknowledge them as human beings because relatively few leaders or managers do. Likewise, when I attend industry or customer events, I seek out people at all levels with whom to chat, not identifying my title and asking them about their families, hobbies, and so on. When they later discover that they were speaking to the CEO of Kronos, they gain a new appreciation for our company as a friendly, engaging, and humble partner with whom to do business.

The practices I’ve described so far are entry-level kibitzing. Let’s take it to the next level. I’m not perfect, but I try very hard to remember details. After meeting someone for the first time and then seeing them again months or years later, I try to recall something about them, perhaps asking a question such as, “Is your father feeling better?” or “How did your son’s twelfth birthday party go?” or “How is your daughter enjoying college?” I’ve realized that these follow-up queries mean a lot to people. It helps that I happen to have a good memory for names and details, in part because as an extrovert I enjoy these encounters so much. If you’re more introverted, or if you have a bad memory, no worries. Try jotting down quick notes to keep track of the employees you meet. It might take a bit more effort, but it’s worth it.

Speaking of “worth it,” the benefits of frequent, casual conversation go well beyond creating a culture of engagement or helping to build our brand as a people-friendly company. When chatting with employees, I gain new insights into our business that I never would have learned otherwise—details about struggles teams are having, new opportunities that are cropping up in various corners of our company, big victories that teams have notched, and so on. Just as valuable, I gain an intuitive sense for the personalities, needs, and desires of our employees. Over time, I forge personal relationships, creating a general atmosphere of free-flowing communication. Employees feel more comfortable coming to me with their problems or concerns, which affords me new opportunities to help drive our business forward. I can’t tell you how often employees consult me for help with a customer or for a quick e-mail introduction to a member of my personal network and so on. I respond to all of these requests and help whenever I can.

Some might view these requests as distractions that prevent me from doing other work. I agree, they absolutely are—but they’re good distractions. Why should everyone else but me take responsibility for driving our business forward day-to-day? If I can help smooth the path to a new business deal by sending an e-mail, or if I can inspire a team by recording a five-minute video, I’m happy to do that. In general, casual conversation doesn’t add much time to your daily routine. Right now, all those moments when you’re walking to your car or riding the elevator are wasted, from a business standpoint. They’re not producing anything. If you use those moments to help engage employees, then you’re helping to build, sustain, and mobilize your business’s greatest asset: your people.

As managers of people, we can derive even more value from casual conversations, using them proactively to overcome issues as they arise. When I’m mulling over a business problem, I often stroll the hallways, asking the opinion of several employees whom I happen to encounter. These impromptu “focus groups” give me valuable insight into what our workforce is thinking and real-time access to our employees’ creative talents. I also perform what I call “micro-communication” throughout the day, popping in on employees for brief, two- or three-minute conversations. I might ask their input on an issue I’m working on or bounce new ideas off of them. At the end of the day, I’ll mentally review multiple conversations, noticing patterns in what I’ve heard and using that information to help make decisions. This process has become a regular and indispensable part of my daily work routine.

You might wonder: can the tactic of casual conversations work in a global culture? Absolutely. When I visit our facilities in locations around the world, I always tour the space and shake hands with employees, sometimes spending several hours with them. During my visits, I’ll go with our local leadership to visit customers, prospects, and partners, seeing what our employees are seeing. I might not speak the language of the people I meet, but by asking open-ended questions, I usually manage to forge a personal connection. At the end of each day, I’ll write short notes to customers or prospects whom I met. These notes incorporate details I learned during my meetings or refer to topics we discussed. When I’m in China, I’ll send notes I write in English to a member of our team there, who translates them into Mandarin and sends them back to me to send from my own e-mail account. Customers and prospects really appreciate the personal touch, all the more so because they’re reading it in their own language.

Casual conversations need not include actual personal interactions to feel meaningful to people. You can conduct these conversations virtually, using tools such as e-mail and social media. The head of one of our international offices recently sent a picture with a caption reading, “Cheers from London.” He noted that the Kronite in the photo was about to be recognized for the fifteenth time at our annual “Legend Makers” sales recognition getaway. In the 30 seconds it took me to respond, I cemented in a small way my relationship with this leader. By reading this message, I also learned a bit about what these leaders were up to, and I learned some information about our longtime salesperson. The next time I encountered this salesperson, I could surprise him by congratulating him on his Legend Makers achievement. Holy cow, he might think, how did Aron know that? Thanks to this 30-second interaction, I could touch two people, one of whom—the salesperson—might well mention our encounter to other employees, magnifying the impact. Forget that “forward” button—let’s click “reply” instead! It may not work for every people manager, but I’ve found it helpful to show my appreciation, one “trivial” interaction at a time.

TAKING CONVERSATION TO THE MASSES

No matter how communicative you might be one-on-one, you can’t forge a personal connection with everyone if you run a large team or organization. What do you do, especially if you lead a global organization? One solution is to lean on other leaders and managers to help you make connections with employees. Members of our leadership team have become more proactive about getting out there and talking to people in their own organizations. A number of midlevel Kronite managers have told me that they’ve begun to spend more time conversing casually with their team members because they’ve seen me do it. Hold casual conversations with employees often enough, and it becomes embedded in the culture, with masses of frontline employees touched by it.

You can move along this process of culture building, and also build surprisingly personal connections with masses of employees all at once, by turning to mass communications. I strive to overcommunicate using every digital medium at my disposal. Frequently during the year, I send out companywide e-mails with personal messages from me. I also create “aron@work” videos, short, low-budget blogs that capture me speaking impromptu about company performance, year-end objectives, product launches—whatever is on my mind. When I say low budget, I mean I use an iPad, recording the blogs in one take. If I stumble on my words, that’s OK. The lack of polish doesn’t hurt. On the contrary, it gives employees the sense of an authentic, rough-cut message from me. The point of these videos is to help Kronites feel engaged and give them a window into my thinking. Our employees in locales around the world tell me how much they appreciate these messages as a way to feel part of the Kronos family.

Social media is another important tool in the overcommunicator’s toolbox. So many CEOs I meet grimace when I ask them about their social media activity. “Ugh, no,” they say. “Why would I do that?” I think, and sometimes respond, “Social media is such a useful way to project a personal presence across distances.” In addition to well-known external social media platforms, we use an internal collaboration platform that enables Kronites to share information, ask and answer questions, congratulate one another on personal milestones, and work together to solve customer challenges. I frequently hop on threads of conversation. In 2018, one of our leaders was named to a prestigious “Forty Under 40” list in a regional publication. Our public relations team posted a message about it, congratulating him. The following day, I posted a comment, tagging the Kronite who won that distinction. “Holy Macaroni!” I said. “Congratulations. So proud of you . . . big hug.” I wanted to recognize this stellar Kronite and show other Kronites that we’re engaged with their work, and that we’re listening and responding in a direct and authentic way.

We deploy a range of other tactics to help managers throughout our organization listen to employees. We closely monitor comments on social media channels, looking at how people rate us and the comments they leave. Watching and listening to what is posted on social media helps us understand better what people want out of the companies they work for, and how our employees perceive Kronos.

We also rely on our employee engagement surveys to gauge employees’ perspectives on how our organization is run. We conduct a full employee engagement survey once each year, following that up six months later with a “pulse” survey (a shorter version of the engagement survey). Many companies field these surveys, but not all of them take them as seriously as we do. Our survey, which over 90 percent of Kronites globally fill out, yields tremendous insights into our organization’s strengths and weaknesses. In addition to their responses to quantitative questions, employees can also leave qualitative comments about their team and departments, including changes they’d like to see. Leaders and managers throughout the organization process the feedback, implementing meaningful improvements, including enhancements to our products, ideas for strengthening our employee experience, and much more.

In 2016, for instance, the head of our finance department addressed a few “problem” areas identified by survey participants, including IT tools that some felt were difficult to use, inadequate recognition of employees, and the need for more information about career advancement in the department. For each area, this leader assigned someone to champion the initiative and required managers to submit action plans and quarterly progress updates. Within 12 months, there was “notable progress” in the department’s recognition of employees, and the programs implemented to address these issues were well received and highly utilized. We have found that when employees see their leaders taking action, and when they spot evidence of real change, they feel valued and listened to. The sense of a meaningful and ongoing organizational conversation deepens.

To help foster two-way conversations and listening throughout the organization, we offer employees optional training on an array of communication skills. One course we offer, “Courageous Conversations,” shows Kronites how to stay calm and communicate effectively when broaching difficult issues, even when they’re anxious or upset. Other courses train Kronites in how to deliver feedback in helpful ways, how to persuade others to take action even when you don’t wield formal authority over them, and how to get results in high-stakes situations through communication.

In addition to training, we mobilize an array of formal venues at the team and department levels to encourage active communication, including all-employee meetings, internal blogs, roundtables, question-and-answer sessions, and the like. These venues aren’t meaningless schedule-cloggers—they make a real difference. In 2012, one of our sales leaders created a Sales Management Council (SMC), composed of 12 of our top sales managers, which would allow them to offer members of our executive committee direct feedback on what was and wasn’t working in the field. With confidentiality assured, members could speak openly without fear of retribution. In 2016, the SMC spent two days outlining how leadership could better support sales reps in the field and empower them to impact deals and exceed customer demands. For instance, our cloud customers had been asking for exceptions to the usual terms and conditions in our contracts, and members of our leadership team were routinely making the same changes. Our sales reps wanted the latitude to make these common contract adjustments on their own, without having to undergo the cumbersome process of obtaining approval.

During the two-day session, SMC members challenged and debated with leaders, distinguishing between customer requests that were very common and shouldn’t require leadership approval and those that weren’t so common and did. The SMC described the kinds of customer negotiations in which having the ability to make a quick decision without approval would not only facilitate a deal but enhance customers’ impressions of us as a company. Our leaders spent time helping the SMC understand the reasons why a requested change might require special approval, and what might happen if a sales rep made the wrong decision with a customer. After this session, our SMC presented the resulting recommendations to our chief revenue officer. He in turn presented them to our executive team, which wound up approving every recommendation. The field sales team gained the authority to offer more options to customers than they previously had, as well as the ability to make quick decisions during the sales process as they saw fit. These changes signaled to the field that our leadership was behind them, listening to their feedback and looking for opportunities to support them.

You might think that all of this communication is excessive. Don’t I have more important things to do? I really don’t. Our people matter most, and they want us to communicate, more than they want just about anything else. I’ll never forget a study I encountered decades ago. Researchers surveyed a large group of managers, asking them to list the topics that they believed employees regarded as most important. Most managers cited factors like compensation or job security. When researchers queried employees, pay was pretty far down their list. The most important factor for them was, you guessed it, good communication. That stuck with me, and I believe it holds true today. In the 2017 Great Places to Work Trust Index survey, 96 percent of Kronites surveyed found that we “often” or “almost always” delivered “great communication.”² That’s a big deal. Employees value when you share information with them, especially information that they’re surprised to receive. I don’t recall if employees in that older study indicated how they felt about managers who listened, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t heartily approve of that, too. Don’t underestimate the value of communication. Chances are, you don’t do it nearly enough.

THEY CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH

Several years ago, I hired a new leader to run one of our company’s largest departments staffed by hundreds of Kronites. We had performed our usual screening process, including seven months of interviews, “backdoor” reference checks, and other strict vetting. I oversaw the process, and most leaders on our executive committee had interviewed the hire. Yet after only six weeks on the job, it was clear—our new hire was not working out. I had to let him go, so I did. Afterward, I swallowed my pride and called our board members individually to deliver the news and take responsibility. Many of them were surprised, yet strangely, quite complimentary. “You rock,” they
told me.

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Really,” I said, “I rock?”

They told me they had never seen a CEO fess up so readily upon making a significant hiring mistake, and they commended me for the swiftness of my decision. When I told Kronites in this department that we had made a hiring error, they, too, expressed gratitude that we moved swiftly to make things right. I didn’t understand this reaction. Why was I getting so much credit here? How could I not have openly admitted my mistake and taken steps to remedy it?

There’s little point in overcommunicating with employees and other stakeholders if you aren’t prepared to communicate truthfully and transparently. I don’t know what life is like at other companies—I’ve spent my whole career at Kronos—but I hear that leaders sometimes aren’t so truthful or transparent. Really? Are you kidding me? That’s incredible. How can leaders hope to build personal relationships with employees and inspire them if they’re constantly evading, downplaying, hiding, manipulating, or distorting the truth?

It’s easy to communicate honestly when business is going well, much harder when it’s not. But leaders and organizations must strive for transparency at all times. Perhaps the greatest test of my commitment to open communication came in 2009, when we had to let go more than 250 Kronites. We had just experienced our first year-on-year decline in quarterly revenues, and in a weak and highly uncertain economy, we anticipated further tightening in demand for our products. To weather these tough times, we had to realign our expenses with our revenues. We considered options such as furloughs, pay cuts, or benefit adjustments, but concluded that none of these would solve our financial problems without also causing our business significant long-term harm. Although layoffs would hurt in the short term, we would try to do them in as humane a way as possible, giving affected Kronites generous severance and assistance finding new jobs.

Once we decided upon this course of action, I knew what I needed to do: go before our remaining Kronites in person and take them blow-by-blow through our decision-making process. January 7, 2009, the day after our layoffs took place, was the hardest day so far in my career as a leader. I stood before hundreds of our employees at a time and offered them my unscripted thoughts. “It’s nobody’s fault we’re in the position we’re in,” I told them. “To lead the company responsibly and to protect the jobs of the vast majority of Kronites, we simply have to resize our workforce to our business.” As I spoke, and later as I responded to numerous questions from Kronites, I watched people crying, and I myself became teary-eyed. It was excruciating to face these people who had given so much to our company, who had seen their colleagues laid off, and who worried that they might be next. But I pulled myself together and did it. I’m glad I did. Kronites seemed to appreciate my honesty with them. It didn’t erase their suffering, but it at least inspired them to see that their leadership respected them enough to tell them the truth. The bonds of affection between Kronites and the company didn’t break. On the contrary, they became stronger, powering us ahead as the economic crisis passed and our growth resumed.

As vital as it is at peak emotional moments, open and honest communication is just as important day in and day out—and with customers as well as employees. In 2017, I attended a summit held by one of our large global customers. Addressing the group, I acknowledged problems that had cropped up in our handling of the account. I didn’t make a big deal about it, but I allowed that yes, there had been some slipups, we were taking full responsibility, and we were addressing it. Wow, did that have an impact. The next day, a Kronite thanked me for that gesture and told me what a difference it had made. She said that she loved watching the expressions on customers’ faces when they heard the CEO admit that the company wasn’t perfect and that it had made mistakes. “It’s so unusual,” she said. Really? It shouldn’t be! If you’re used to putting up a veneer of perfection, try owning up to your shortfalls. Your ego might take a hit at first, but it won’t crumble. And customers will respect you more.

It’s equally important as leaders and managers to own our failings in front of employees. During the software glitch debacle I mentioned earlier, senior leaders stood before groups of our employees and took personal responsibility for the problems we were having, apologizing to Kronites for what we had put them through and affirming that it wouldn’t happen again. I personally got on the phone with our sales support team and apologized for how much work they had to do to keep our customers happy. I held multiple conference calls to make sure that everyone on the team had a chance to hear the words straight from my mouth. And I repeated the message at our annual sales kickoff, with over 1,200 Kronites in attendance. As one of our executives told me, these gestures were huge because it wasn’t an outside consultant standing up and speaking honestly about a tough subject. It was the CEO.

Our leadership team takes honesty and transparency so seriously that we go to great lengths to embed it throughout the organization. Although we’re a privately held company, we share our financial performance on a quarterly basis, distributing our press releases to all employees and including detailed information about revenue, earnings, and other critical measures, as well as key business developments. As I’ll describe later, all Kronites receive a clear overview of the company’s business strategy. We also train our managers to be honest and transparent, explicitly identifying “honest dialogue” and “sharing information openly and consistently” as core elements of our corporate leadership model. We want honest, transparent, and frequent communications to be the rule at Kronos, and that means making it a clear responsibility of middle managers, not just leaders.

CREATE A MORE WELCOMING WORKPLACE

Early in the writing of this book, our head of corporate communications proposed doing some interviews with others in the company. She thought it would help jog my memory of events, and that it might allow us to uncover inspiring stories within the company. At the very least, it would allow us to inject a variety of Kronite perspectives into the book. Why should it all be about me? And wouldn’t it be cool if we could use this project as yet another opportunity to foster dialogue and build relationships? Our communications department wound up holding many interviews and focus groups, and although I did not participate directly, I did receive regular updates about what transpired.

At one of the focus groups, a young Kronite whom I’ll call Charlotte participated. She had started at Kronos two years earlier as an intern, and we’d hired her on a permanent basis during her senior year of college. At the time of the focus group, she worked as a member of our industry marketing team. During the session, she recalled standing outside the elevator a few months earlier, waiting for the doors to open. I walked by, accompanied, in her words, by “a bunch of people in suits.” Apparently, when I saw her, I paused, said a friendly hello, and chatted with her for a minute or two. That surprised her. As she related, “I remember thinking, OK, I’m 22 and I’m pretty sure most 22-year-olds won’t meet the CEO of their company, let alone have them walk out of a group to just say, ‘Hi, how are you doing? Is everything OK?’”

Think about this for a moment. Months later, a simple, friendly gesture on my part stood out in this young employee’s mind. And it made a difference to her. Moreover, as she revealed later in the session, she perceived the entire company and its culture to be equally friendly, open, and welcoming. “It’s a big company,” she said, “and from the outside, it might seem scary, but within a day I thought, ‘OK, I want to be here for a long time’ . . . it’s a very calm and welcoming environment . . . consistently a very positive experience all the time.”

Here’s a talented millennial, the kind of employee that many companies have difficulty attracting and keeping. Two years into her job, she probably couldn’t be more engaged. Not because she earns a competitive salary, which she does, but because people treat her like a human being, up to and including her CEO. They communicate with her person to person, welcoming her in. They take the time to build a relationship with her.

No matter what size company or team you lead or manage, making personal connections with your employees is vital. Really talk to people, and enable them to have a voice as well. Walk around and chat with employees informally. Use mass communications to ensure that you connect in some way with every employee at all of your locations. Make frequent, two-way communications an organizational imperative. See to the quality of communications throughout the company, setting norms of honesty and transparency. Don’t just act like you or the organization cares what employees or prospects are saying. Ask deeper, more meaningful questions about their work, family, and outside interests, and really listen, taking action when appropriate. An engaged workforce is one that communicates, in the richest, most fulfilling sense of the word. And hey, it’s fun! So, before you read any further, put down this book and start kibitzing.