Retail
All in the family
How to make your employees feel like family
By Meredyth McKenzie
Smart Business San Diego | May 2008
Craig Weatherwax
CEO, Oceanside Photo and Telescope Inc.
Craig Weatherwax was
the class clown in high
school, and he continues to use his sense of humor to
create a fun family atmosphere at Oceanside Photo and
Telescope Inc.
“I do a lot of hands-on, on-the-floor experience with my employees,” says the owner, president and CEO of the $17 million, 22-employee retail camera,
telescope, binocular and microscope company. “We try to keep
it on a first-name, friendly basis.
There’s a lot of kidding and joking that goes on. It makes it fun
to go to work.”
Smart Business spoke with
Weatherwax about how to create a feeling of family among
your employees.
Q. How do you create a
fun team environment?
Lead from the top. We try to
evaluate everybody as a group,
reinforce how departments
are doing as a whole and
make employees understand
that we’re all in this together.
It’s the, ‘This is a marathon,
not a sprint’ concept. You can’t
get hung up on the bad days,
but understand that in the long
run, it’s all going to work out.
If your employees see that
you take a personal interest in
the growth of the business and
that you like it and like being
with them, that’s something
you can’t instill in somebody;
it has to come from the heart.
Q. How do you model that
culture?
It’s not contrived; it comes
naturally. You can tell if people
are happy with what they’re
doing, and it’s important that people are happy at work. I try
to express that and let them
make fun of me because you’ve
got to give as well as take.
You can’t belittle employees
or think less of them. They’re
human beings, they have feelings, and you have to be aware
of that. A happy employee is a
good employee.
Q. What are the benefits of
a fun work environment?
Everybody pulls for everybody else. You have your sibling rivalries a little bit like you
do in a family, but it’s all done
in fun. The family relationship
allows people to help others
with product knowledge or
with how to handle a certain
situation as opposed to being
competitive and cutthroat.
Q. What are the keys to
being a hands-on leader?
A lot of what you do as a
leader is to set the tone for the
workday. If you’re having a
bad day, you maintain that
within yourself and exude a
feeling of confidence and
patience. You can make a
good day better or a bad day
worse just by how you handle
situations and problems.
Q. How do you get better at
being confident and patient?
Look at the big picture. Some
people get hung up on the
specifics of a particular event
and fail to look at the big picture. It comes with time.
If you take a step back and
focus on the business as a
whole as opposed to the specific incident that’s happening,
it makes it much simpler to try
to have that patience and
exude that confidence.
Q. How do you balance
being a hands-on leader and
knowing when and how
to delegate?
Experience. Evaluate each
individual situation. Surrounding
yourself with good people is
important; there’s no substitute
for a good staff. Sometimes,
you rely on them more than
you ever know.
Don’t lose sight of the big
picture, and never put yourself too far above the rest of
the people because you’re all
working toward the same end
goal. A lot of people think
that you can go into business,
create a business model, and
that’s as far as it goes, but
being able to be there on a
day-to-day basis allows you to
make the kind of changes that
you need. You can’t sit in a big
office and expect things to
work smoothly.
Communication is the most
important thing you can do to
be able to understand and listen to your employees and the
people in the chain of command. Listening is an under-rated talent. A lot of people
forget that the people down
below have a better understanding of what makes your business grow and be successful.
You have to have an open
mind to be able to understand
and listen to what they have to
say. Having preconceived ideas
might hinder your ability to
listen effectively. If you listen
to them with an open
mind, it makes a huge
difference.
Q. What are the
benefits of listening to
employees and having
open communication?
It helps you understand
the building blocks of
the business and allows
you the ability to
change. Many businesses get static in their growth
potential because they
don’t listen. The employees
then, because they’re working with the customer on a
day-to-day basis, have a better understanding of what
the customer wants, and
what the customer wants is
going to make your company
grow and change in today’s
environment of constant
change.
HOW TO REACH: Oceanside Photo and Telescope Inc., (800) 483-6287 or www.optcorp.com
