Harry Reinhart has 90 years of legacy to rely on. But that doesn’t mean Buck Consultants LLC is still the same company — at least not in Pittsburgh, where Reinhart serves as market leader for the human resource and employee benefits consulting firm.
To keep his approach current, he needs employees who can connect with clients — which also requires connecting with each other.
“You have to give them an environment that allows them to deliver those solutions,” says Reinhart, who supports his 90 employees by reducing administrative burdens and providing a network of teammates to rely on.
Smart Business spoke with Reinhart about building a team environment.
Q. How do you determine whether an employee will fit in at Buck?
You want to try to find people that exhibit the traits that would tell you that they can contribute and also get satisfaction from working in a group, not just alone.
This is pretty simple — people that have been exposed to sports at some time in their life is usually a good indication. You look at people that are educated [where] they work a lot in teams, so you start to understand some of the universities that they’ve gone to.
And you ask that question: ‘Tell me how you work in a group.’ It can be as simple as that.
Q. How do you create an environment conducive to teamwork?
We have a very strong peer review system in place. When they do some work for a client, nothing goes out the door without someone more senior reviewing it, including even e-mails as well as day-to-day conversation. Anything that goes to a client is reviewed through a team.
A lot of the goals and values that we set down for individuals involve actually keeping track of how often they’ve conducted team meetings. So if someone says, ‘I had a great year this year, and I did all of this work for a client,’ you say, ‘OK, but you didn’t peer review any of your work.’ Then you know you didn’t have a great year.
