Business Services
Employee involvement
How to keep workers energized
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Detroit | August 2008
Page 1 of 2
Greg Humes
President, NLM Inc.
Leaders don’t always communicate the necessary information to employees, and that
can result in a negative work
environment, says Greg Humes.
“Some people don’t even
share where they are going on
an overall basis because they
think it’s very confidential,”
says the president of NLM Inc.,
a third-party logistics provider.
“You ask organizations to cut
costs and to do certain things,
but you don’t share where you
are at on the profitability
side.”
Humes stays in touch and
communicates with his approximately 240 employees through
meetings and by walking
around, but he also has his
assistant update the company’s
intranet daily.
“(It) might be a simple one-line sentence that says, ‘Had a
great meeting with such and
such customer, and we’re going
to strategically discuss in the
next two weeks maybe this
additional service.’”
Keeping employees in the
loop helps generate and maintain excitement, and as Humes
says, “Excited people do great
things.”
Smart Business spoke with
Humes about how he keeps
employees involved and excited
at NLM Inc.
Delegate to the right people. It’s
going into the organization and
putting cross-functional teams
— the right team with the
right knowledge — together
to solve a problem or come
up with some new idea or
what you are trying to do as
far as what the objective is.
We’ll get those people to get
engaged, and we’ll ask them
to be a part of that, and we
come away with some great
products and the execution of
the products.
I want people to play off their
strengths and weaknesses, and
that’s a typical cross-functional
team. You’ve got to have the
representation there if you are
solving a problem, from whatever that problem is.
Like in the classroom, there
are people that are always
raising their hand and answering the questions, but then
there are others that know
the answer but are a little on
the shy side and don’t engage.
So, my objective is to keep
people motivated and get
them engaged.
Some of them work better
in small functional areas.
They don’t work in big intimidating groups. So we define
what is it we are trying to do,
and then we also know who
we’re trying to develop and
where we’re trying to develop
them.
Don’t point the finger. You stick
with the facts. At the end of
the day, you use it and turn it
into an educational process.
What are the facts, what did
we do, what didn’t we do and
then ... teaching people and
going back through what we
want to accomplish and
change, and remove that
defect and/or failure for a full
resolution.
That’s really the measurement. ‘OK, we didn’t do that
right. We missed something.
The customer took us down a
path, and we should have said
no, and we said yes, and we
learned from that.’
Let’s communicate it. Let’s
make sure everybody is
aware of it. Let’s not keep that
in the box, but don’t personalize it. Don’t say, ‘So and so did
this,’ because, at the end of
the day, everything is an organizational issue.
You survive as an organization, you thrive as an organization, and the people support the organization. When
you try to divide and conquer,
there are no heroes. Then,
people will definitely put the
walls up and become more of
their own rather than a piece
of the entire.
Let’s put the issues on the
table; let’s keep the names and
the personalities out of it. I
don’t care about titles. I want
to know what we did that we
can do better. What can we
learn from this, and who’s
going to take the responsibility
to go back and fix it. Then we
move down the road. Then we
celebrate and we know what
we changed either in the
process or a tactical move.
If somebody comes in and
they think it’s a point-the-finger
session like that or a grievance
type of thing, then I’ll stop
them immediately and say,
‘That’s not what we’re here for.’
