Sports/Entertainment
Tough screening
How to engage employees by asking a lot of questions
By Mark Scott
Smart Business | December 2008
Page 1 of 2
Tim Belton
president and CEO, The New Release|moviecube
Tim Belton likes to ask a lot
of questions. And he says
that the dumber he thinks an idea is, the more questions
he’ll ask. But that doesn’t mean
the president and CEO of The
New Release|moviecube has a
problem with new ideas or that
he’s married to his own.
“I might be wrong,” says
Belton, whose company
increased revenue 300 percent
from 2006 to 2007.
This approach has helped the
150-employee company grow to
become the second-largest
movie kiosk operator in the
nation, with 2,200 kiosks in
place and more than 400 new
ones on the way.
Smart Business spoke with
Belton about how to get your
employees excited about your
company’s growth.
Q. How do you get
employees excited about
what your company is doing?
Be engaged in the business
and with the people. We have
frequent employee meetings.
Some people have the brown-bag lunch, but since we’re in the
movie business, we have what’s
called the ‘pop and talk.’
We get everybody together
and we have a big movie-theater-size popcorn popper.
I didn’t come up with either
the name ‘pop and talk’ or the
format. I said, ‘Look, we’re
going to start having these
brown-bag lunches. But that’s
not very creative. You guys
come up with the format and
the name, and you guys are
going to be doing the presentation.’
You don’t have to be overly
cute about it and overly design
it. Just ask the employees how
they want to package it. Validate
that it’s important. Be present
when they happen.
Be relevantly connected to
those types of activities for it to
really stick in the culture of the
organization.
We pulled everybody out of
the work environment, including people from our call center,
which was a big deal. We pulled
them all together and had each
one of the executives tell them
what they were doing but also
explain why they are passionate
about it.
Q. How do you
encourage input?
Listen when people
give suggestions. Adults
are usually predisposed
to improving their environment and doing a
good job. What frustrates
them the most is when
they feel like they aren’t
being given that opportunity at work.
When they make a suggestion, even if it’s totally
inappropriate to implement, listen to them and
dialogue with them about
it and make them feel
welcome to take the risk
of putting their idea out
there on the floor.
It doesn’t matter whether
you’re a janitor or CEO, you are
probably a brother or sister or
son or daughter or parent or
running a household outside of
work. If a bank is going to
entrust you with a car loan or a
house loan or whatever, you
probably have enough responsibility to make a contribution on
how to better run at least your
corner of the company.
