Mackie Monday: Culture
This month, in light of our recent Leadership Conference, I want to reflect upon our company culture.
Like Grandpop always said, if you do something you love doing, it’s not really work anyway.
I’ve never forgotten that and when I look at our internal culture here at City Electric Supply, I see it. Our branches really do operate like small businesses; the pride and accountability coursing through each location isn’t something you can train your new employees to do and feel – you have to hire the right people with the right attitudes and priorities.
You can look at industry turnover and say we’re doing well, you can compare us to competitors and say we excel, but frankly, do those numbers matter at all? If we lose one good person, that’s one too many.
The key to our success moving forward is maintaining engagement with our current employees and continuing to keep them motivated. I do think overall we do this very well given the long tenure of many of our employees. We currently have more than 115 employees that have been with the company for 15+ years.
We all know this business is about the people.
We are revamping our listening capabilities digitally to better hear the feedback from our frontlines regarding areas of success as well as (and likely more importantly) areas of potential improvement.
One aspect of this improvement is the start of Mackie Monday. Each month, this message from me isn’t meant to serve as one-way communication. I want to hear from you, respond to you, support you in struggles, and celebrate with you in our successes.
We are also beginning to heavily push our presence on Glassdoor, using this as a tool not only for acquisition of new employees, but also retention of current employees.
We are working to build a more engaged employee-only LinkedIn Group where we can have open dialogue regarding best practices and process improvement. Connecting each of the branches not only with one another, but also with senior management will improve our listening capabilities as well as our responses.
We are currently working to put in place more standardized employee engagement programs, which will allow direct access and feedback between the top of the organization and frontline.
Our people, you, make this company and the reality is, we have to have happy employees. Unhappy employees aren’t representing this brand well or sticking around too long.
At the end of the day, we realize our success all boils down to the people and making sure they’re happy, motivated, and heading in the right direction as a business.
I enjoy hearing from you and want to make sure everyone knows that A. they can contact me and B. how to do so! Compliments, success, concerns, praises – I would love to hear from you: Thomas@ces-us.net