Charlotte A. Martin hates
excuses. The president
and chief operating officer of Gateway EDI Inc. says
there is no reason that your
employees shouldn’t have the
tools they need to do their
jobs, and to make sure they
do, she scours the results of
the annual employee survey.
“When I see silly foolishness in there like, ‘We don’t
have enough printers,’ it just
upsets me, and we buy printers,” she says.
If you give your employees
the resources they need, they’ll
pay you back by going above
and beyond with customers —
which is easily worth the cost
of a few printers.
Gateway EDI, which does
electronic claims processing
for the health care industry,
is in demand: The company
posted $28.7 million in revenue last year and is on
track for $38 million in 2008.
Smart Business spoke with
Martin about how to let your
employees take on more
responsibility but why you
shouldn’t rush them either.
Q. How do you motivate
employees to go above and
beyond?
We’re growing so fast; we
need people to step up. So
we encourage people.
We have a process
improvement team that’s
called the PIT crew. We
encourage people by giving
them financial rewards and
recognition for coming up
with ideas that help our
process be more efficient.
During that process, people
will come up with neat ideas
and neat projects if you just give them a little encouragement and support — and I’m
talking support. I’m not talking, ‘That’s a good idea; that’s
a bad idea.’ I’m not talking
about the idea judges.
This group’s whole deal is to
scour and beat the bushes for
people who have great ideas
but are too afraid to speak up.
Once we get them to speak
up, we can encourage them
and show them how to bring
a project forward. And you
should see how they blossom when we do that. They
feel like, ‘Oh my gosh,
we can do something.’
Q. How do you develop
employees into leaders?
Every time somebody
comes up with a neat
idea and helps put it
into play and watches
it be successful, it’s just
more and more reinforcement on developing their abilities.
When a person does
that repeatedly and
becomes sort of a natural leader, we give them
a title called team leader.
It lets them practice it.
They don’t really write
reviews or do all the
things the supervisor
does yet. But it gives them a
chance to practice it in a
totally risk-free way. So they
can say, ‘You know, I like this,’
or they can stay as a team
leader and just be a go-to person who knows the answers.
Everybody has those people in their companies. If
they decide, ‘I want to do
more, I want to learn more
about managing, I want to
take on that responsibility,’
we move them up to group
leader, and we give them that training. It’s a supervisory certificate program, and
they go to it eight to 12
hours every week. It’s on our
dime. We want them to learn
the skills that they need.
