Fast Lane
The art of communication
How to keep everyone informed during rapid growth
By Patrick Mayock
Smart Business Chicago | August 2008
Clint Jones
Co-founder and CEO, Norvax Inc.
Clint Jones says it’s easy to
keep everyone on the
same page when your payroll is only 30 employees
deep. That was certainly the
case at Norvax Inc., an online
health insurance technology
provider he co-founded in 2001.
But when he doubled his team
to facilitate revenue growth
from $700,069 to $11 million
between 2003 and 2006, the task
became a tad more difficult.
“Once we passed that 30-person head count, we weren’t
doing the best job of informing
everybody in the company what
was going on all the time,” says
Jones, who also serves as CEO.
To re-establish those faltering
lines of communication, he
began to hold monthly company-wide meetings, resulting in a
team of 70 employees who are
informed, focused and contributing to the company’s continued success.
Smart Business spoke with
Jones about how to encourage
internal communication.
Q. What are two things an
executive can do to prompt
growth?
Innovation and listening to
your clients. We get a lot of
product ideas and solution ideas
around requests and needs from
our clients.
Usually, what we find is if we
do a survey or we go out in the
field and spend time with key
clients, we’re going to uncover
areas of growth and new, innovative ideas that we can develop
into revenue-generating opportunities.
Just keeping your eyes open
and your ears listening to customer needs can be very beneficial.
Q. How do you foster
innovation?
If every idea that came across
my desk I shot down, ultimately
our employees are going to
become less innovative, less creative, and the company is going
to lose some spice there. I’d
rather see somebody come to
me and potentially even make a
mistake by trying to be innovative as opposed to being not
innovative and not creative.
Q. What is one of the
biggest challenges
associated with growth?
Outside of the market
itself, one of the biggest
challenges is understanding how important internal communication is.
The more you can inform
your employees, the more
you can inform your management team, the better
off you are and the better
decision-making that’s
going to happen.
People are very open to
information. They’re really excited hearing about
what we’re doing and
how we’ve been doing
the past month and what
our big initiatives are this
month.
The best information is the
upfront and honest information.
If there’s an issue we’ve got to
tell people, we’re going to be
the first to let them know. It
shows integrity and that we’re
looking out to do the right
thing, no matter what it is.
Q. How else can you
encourage internal
communication?
Once you get over the 30-person mark, you tend to lose touch with every single employee. It’s a challenge for the leadership to have a relationship
with every single employee.
One thing we’ve started doing
more often is having company
meetings where a lot of their
voices are heard. We’re talking
about our strategic direction,
challenges we’re seeing on the
marketplace, opportunities we’re
seeing on the marketplace, and
just giving employees a lot of
information to help foster the
environment and culture we
want to create. Even if they’re 15 minutes and it’s an update about
what happened in prior months
and what you’re focused on this
month, you’d be surprised how
employees react to that.
Have an open forum and
allow questions and have the
understanding that no question
is a stupid question. Chances
are if you have that question,
nine other people in the room
do, as well. We try to encourage
that behavior and let them ask
the questions they want to ask.
It really helps certain employees that are maybe outside of
certain situations understand
what other members of the
company are going through.
Maybe they have good ideas
about a solution around an
issue that we’re facing or one of
our departments is facing.
A lot of employee interaction
and great ideas come out of
those sessions.
Q. How do you encourage
everyone to participate?
That’s been a challenge. We’ve
set up a suggestion box where
an employee that may be more
introverted and doesn’t want to
speak up can write a question or
write a suggestion that goes to
the upper level in management.
A lot of those have been great.
We do understand that certain
people aren’t comfortable speaking in front of a large audience.
We definitely value their input,
as well, and want to hear what
they have to say. That’s been
more of a confidential way to
do so.
What we’ve done is we’ve
kind of set up a more confidential suggestions box. An employee does not have to put their
name on the question or the
suggestion or the issue.
HOW TO REACH: Norvax Inc., (866) 466-7829 or www.norvax.com
