ROSENBLUTH: Frankly, we don't believe our customers can come first unless our associates come first. If we have happy people here, then they're free to concentrate only on our clients.
INC.: The magic word again. Forgive our skepticism, but no one is happy all the time, least of all in a company with 2,350 people. How do you know when something's beginning to go awry?
ROSENBLUTH: Six months ago I sent white construction paper and a pack of crayons to 100 associates and asked them to draw a picture of what the company meant to them. I got back 54. About 5 of them weren't too pleasing -- one in particular.
INC.: Can you tell us the story?
ROSENBLUTH: Someone drew us a nice picture of a family in their living room. It was the holiday season, with the fire glowing and a Christmas tree with ornaments, and children playing with jacks. That was marked "before." On the next page was the same scene in pencil. Now the fire was out; the person was shivering, the jacks were gone.
When I got it, I picked up the phone and called the person and said, "Can we discuss this?" It turned out that a function was being moved from one office to another, and a couple of people thought they were going to lose their positions. In fact, they were going to be retrained to do something else, but we hadn't communicated that. So the person went from feeling warm, cozy, I love the company, to Hey, I'm scared. The picture was a good way for me to elicit feelings that weren't going to come out in a survey.
INC.: Do you test how people are feeling by any more systematic methods?
ROSENBLUTH: We do use surveys extensively -- in fact, we just instituted a 401(k) contribution program in response to what we learned from a survey. And I meet regularly with a group I call my Happiness Barometer group. It's 18 associates chosen at random from different offices. Also we do what I call Up Interviewing, even though somebody told me that sounds stupid.
INC.: Up Interviewing?
ROSENBLUTH: We have quality-assurance teams that travel around the country visiting our offices. They'll go to reservations agents and ask them to review with us the performance of their leaders, then go to those people and ask them to review the performance of their leaders, and so on. Incidentally, this is done by people who are not themselves in leadership positions.
INC.: In some companies that would be perceived as Big Brother snooping around. It would strike fear in people, not happiness.
ROSENBLUTH: It seems to me that people want to be observed doing great things. If you were a student in a class and felt confident of what you were doing, you'd want the teacher to call on you.
INC.: And if you didn't feel confident?
ROSENBLUTH: Then we want to help you. This whole thing started several years ago with me. I asked a bunch of people who reported to me to tell me how I could do a better job. It kind of grew from that.
INC.: How do you know they were being honest? You're the boss, after all.
ROSENBLUTH: I'd say that most of them couched their remarks. But then, as the years went by, they didn't bother to couch everything. They let me have it between the eyes. I became a better leader because of that, and was able to focus on things I hadn't focused on but should have.
INC.: Back to that notion of putting your people first. Surely in case of a conflict between the customer and an associate, the customer has to come first.
ROSENBLUTH: Not necessarily. If an associate has a bad attitude, is constantly in a bad mood, then maybe he doesn't belong here. But there have been rare instances where we've had to say to a client, We'd like to help you make the transition to another agency. Usually these are companies that mistreat their own people, so they mistreat ours over the phone. I think it's terrible to ask one of our associates to talk with someone who's rude to them every 15 minutes.
INC.: You run a company that prides itself on being employee centered. Yet you have no employee stock ownership -- not even a formal profit-sharing plan.
ROSENBLUTH: Employee stock ownership hasn't seemed appropriate yet; maybe it will someday. And there's an understanding that if the company does well, the associates will do well, too.
INC.: What about going public? Do you think about that?
ROSENBLUTH: I've thought about it a number of times and dismissed it very quickly. Quite a few people have said to us, Boy, you ought to take this company public. But it would go against our culture. We do a lot of things that don't necessarily make sense if you're a publicly owned company, and I think we're successful because of those things. We make a lot of long-term decisions, such as the investments we've made in technology. And we spend our money in unusual ways. A stockholder might say, Why are you bringing 2,000 people to Philadelphia for a weekend? Things like that.
But it's our attitude toward people that makes us successful. We're looking to hire people when others get rid of people. We look at human resources the way others look at financial assets. In the travel business the profit margins are low, and there are no patents on our product. All our growth is client driven, and all our success hinges on people.
INC.: Which is why they'd better be happy.
ROSENBLUTH: Which is why they'd better be happy.
