Fast Lane
Say it again
How to stay in touch with your employees
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Houston | March 2008
Birgit D. Kamps
CEO, HireSynergy
If you plan to stay married,
you know that saying ‘I love
you’ once does not mean you never have to say it again.
The same goes for the business world and the need to
constantly reiterate your company’s vision and values to
your employees, says Birgit D.
Kamps, founder and CEO of
HireSynergy.
“It’s a constant conversation,” Kamps says. “Whenever there is a problem or
conflict or any decision that
needs to be made, I always
say, ‘How does that relate to
our values?’”
This sharp focus on communication helped the 40-employee
company stay intact during its
turbulent early years, which
included a period of severe
hardship followed by rapid
growth, during which revenue
grew to $10.6 million in 2006,
up from $1.4 million in 2003.
Smart Business spoke with
Kamps about the importance
of staying tuned in to your
internal customers — also
known as your employees.
Q. What is the key to really
listening to your employees?
Someone who is a really a
good listener is not making a
commentary in their head and
strategizing what to say next
or pretending to listen when
they are really not.
There is a particular sentence I use: ‘Be in their world,
not in your world.’ Even
though you may have known
that person for 10 years and
you think you have them pegged, unless you’re that person,
you’ll never know where they
are coming from 100 percent
of the time.
They’ve had different experiences. Even a month ago, they
may have had something happen personally that shifted
their view on life. It is truly listening as if you have never
spoken with that person
before and you’ve never
known that person before.
Q. How do you track your
company’s success in sticking
to its core values?
We meet with our team-mates every six months
to see how they are
doing and performing
according to what they
thought and what their
career plans are.
We’ll also say, ‘Which
value do you think the
company has upheld
the best this year, and
which value do you
think the company has
been worst at?’ We’ll
ask what we can do to
improve that.
When you are growing
really fast, you tend to
focus on, ‘Let’s make
sure the customer is
happy.’ In the meantime, your internal customer, your team, is
dying. You haven’t figured out yet how many more
do you need to hire or put
processes in place to adjust to
the fast growth.
How do you expect the customer to get taken care of or
expect people to go above and
beyond if they are not happy
internally?
Don’t wait until you are
growing to address quality of
life for your internal people.
Take care of your internal
customer, and your external
customer will naturally get
taken care of.
Q. How do you ensure new
employees will fit with your
vision and values?
Know how to sell your company and sell your story. Pick
the top two or three reasons
why someone should want to
come to work for you instead
of your competitor. Instead of
saying they should be lucky to
work for us, we actually positioned ourselves and said,
‘Hey, this is who we are and
this is what we can offer.’
At first, we hadn’t defined
our culture and our values.
We had no process. We
assumed everybody was
interested in growing and getting better. Then we realized, ‘Oh, no, not everybody is
interested in that.’
Once we had documented
and expressed our values,
then it became much easier to
know what questions to ask
and how to interview people.
Q. How can the CEO keep
things on track?
I had the illusion before
that I had to be present in
the office, working hard and
showing my values for them
to do their job. Then I had
some health concerns that I
had to take care of and I
realized, ‘No, that’s not really
what it was.’
What was valuable to the
team about me is that they
knew they could count on me
to uphold our values and be a
standard for it. Whether you’re
in the office 10 hours or two
hours, the key is that they
know you are committed to
the company’s vision and values. The worst thing you could
do is to work 15 hours and
say, ‘I value integrity,’ and five
minutes later, do something
that is completely out of
integrity and not let anybody
tell you you’re out of integrity.
It’s really creating a culture
where you, as the CEO, are
someone who is safe to speak
to when the team notices you
are off on an area. They did
that with me. I was withholding communication because I
was dealing with so much personal stuff.
I was not upholding our values. I was definitely not being
open. Practice what you
preach in terms of value and
vision, not necessarily what
you do with your time and
how you produce.
HOW TO REACH: HireSynergy, (713) 222-7667 or www.hiresynergy.com
