Business Services
A message that moves
How to align employees with your vision
By Brooke Bates
Smart Business Pittsburgh | January 2009
Bryan Putt
president and CEO, AIReS
For Bryan Putt, growth is not
a goal but the result of action. And his company,
American International
Relocation Solutions, is anything but stagnant.
“Growth is absolutely vital,
but it’s a result of doing the
right things as opposed to
being the goal in and of itself,”
says Putt, president and CEO of
AIReS, a provider of relocation
services for corporate clients.
And the right thing for him is
focusing on clients’ needs.
“Everything else will follow
behind that,” he says.
So Putt attacks the hiring
process with intensity to make
sure his employees will be
committed to serving. Then he
drills the company goals into
his 190 employees with repetition and consistency.
But he realizes that his words
aren’t worth much if he doesn’t
act to back them up. So from
an employee’s first day
through his or her retirement,
and with all the client interactions in between, Putt maintains a consistent message at
AIReS, which increased revenue
from $50.6 million in 2004 to
$82.5 million in 2007.
Smart Business spoke with
Putt about how to live the message you’re giving employees.
Interview extensively. The first
thing we look for is a can-do,
customer-centric attitude. You
can have the greatest skills in
the world, but if you don’t have
the right mentality, you won’t
succeed.
The standard interview questions don’t get you there. It
becomes a function of digging,
asking people how they would
deal with specific situations.
Don’t accept that first level of
answer. It goes to, ‘Oh, really?
Tell me more about that.’
An interview process is a twoway street. As much as we’re
looking at the candidate, the
candidate is also looking at us.
If people know what they’re
stepping in to, they’re much
more likely to engage than if
they come in with illusions.
They’ll talk to three or four of
our staff. For front-line people,
have them do shadowing, spend
an hour or two on the floor seeing what the staff is doing and
how they do it. For the mid- to
high-end staff, we’ll do dinners.
Try to get them in a social environment, because people interact differently in that social environment than when you have
them sitting in an office.
Bring people back around;
don’t hire with a battery of three
or four interviews in a day, and
bang, you’re done. We’ll have
them in here at least twice.
Keep delivering the vision. We
will bring them to Pittsburgh
from any of our offices for a
two-week orientation after
they’ve been in their job for
three to six weeks. We talk
about the culture of the company. They’re introduced to the
departments of the organization,
and everybody learns a little bit
about all the various jobs and
aspects of the business.
Part of that orientation is a presentation I do called, ‘The
AIReS Way.’ We’ve boiled down
key traits that make an organization hum, [such as] recognizing it takes a great team to be a
great company. We start to drill
that language into people
through the orientation, and
then it never goes away. It’s a
consistent message.
One of the most gratifying
things I hear is when that verbiage is being used by other
folks on the team. There’s key
phraseology in that presentation,
and people make fun of me for
it. One of the things I tell people
is: ‘You have to have a passion
about what you do.’ They always
give me a hard time: ‘Oh, are
you passionate about this?’ They
give you a hard time, but in
doing that, they’re acknowledging that they get it. There’s none of that, ‘This guy’s too important
to be able to joke with.’
People don’t buy in to a vision
having heard it once. It has to
become part of the day-to-day
communication. It becomes
part of the vocabulary to the
point where you don’t even
want to hear it yourself.
When you get to the point
where you can’t stand to hear
yourself say it again, you’re
probably just getting to the
point where it’s registering and
sinking in and becoming part of
that day-to-day vocabulary for
everybody else. Taking that
message from the day people
are hired through their entire
lifetime as part of the organization. It’s consistency in the message, it’s repeating that message,
it’s living the message.
At all levels of the organization, create that mentality: We’re
all in this together. If we can create that common language and
get everybody saying it, it’s a
heck of a lot more effective than
me saying it.
Practice what you preach. We tell
our people, ‘Don’t send an e-mail and just assume you’ve
communicated. You pick up
that phone, talk to those people,
hear what their needs are.’
Once you have the phone conversation, follow up with the e-mail. Document what you’ve
discussed.’
When you build that from the
front line all the way up through
the organization, that’s part of
creating that mentality.
A good example: We’re changing our organizational structure to accommodate [recent growth].
We’ve communicated all the
way through this process. ‘We’re
looking at the organization.
We’ve polled our midlevel management and heard from them.’
Part of reorganizing was listening to the staff, taking their
input. Then we’re going take this
out to the field and do that face-to-face explanation. That will all
be followed up with the documentation to help people understand exactly what that verbal
communication means. They
can look at it, see it, touch it.
You can tell people all the
time, ‘Pick up the phone. Talk to
people.’ But if we then sent out
a memo and didn’t get out in
front of people, you’ve got that
disconnect of what you say versus what you do.
HOW TO REACH: AIReS, (800) 245-1176 or www.aires.com
