Let's follow Henderson down to the service techs' lounge. He knows every scuff mark on the linoleum; he was a technician not long ago and, before that, a lot jockey -- the attendant who drives customers' cars to and from the service bays. These days, when he's not clinching a big sale, he's thinking about how "his" new team can at the very least begin to put positive spins on all those rumors and at the very best get everyone knowing everything about everything. Henderson is irrepressible, talking a million miles a minute. First he's showing off a Suggestion Connection white board; then he's waving at the red suggestion box. But they're old news! Here's something very unusual for a techs' lounge -- gray mailboxes, just installed, that will be used to get management-meeting summaries out to the troops. Henderson is really proud of those mailboxes; they're his team's firstborn. Now all he's got to do is make them work.
We're sitting in on one of the weekly communication-team meetings. On the wall is a calendar. The message for July reads, "The power of communications begins with the art of listening." As usual, Henderson is the energizer; sales rep John Fabiano is the facilitator, the voice of reason, the meeting's avuncular pacemaker. Everybody gets a say. The team is talking about installing the mailboxes. Margie Williams, an executive secretary, says Mr. C doesn't want one. "He said, 'What's wrong with my desk?' I said, 'Nothing!" Lots of laughter. Rose Seals, title clerk, wants to know how employees will know they have mailboxes. "We'll do our meeting summary," says Fabiano.
Or so he thinks. Later he tells a story about a delicious irony. "I got Marcus good!" he says, beaming. "I told him we'd forgotten to do something, and I could see his mind going a thousand miles an hour. Then he says it: ' Meeting summary!' So I ask him who's going to do one, and he says, 'I guess I am."
Henderson does do his summary, and receptionist Cheryl Pierson, a teammate, distributes it. They know it'll be the first of many, that communication will be an ongoing program. One of the next big moves will be to turn the town-hall meetings -- now under team management -- into dialogues, not addresses from a podium or slide shows. There are gains already. As a member of the team, Pierson felt she could do something about the times when she couldn't find the salesperson a customer was asking for. "I had one caller who said, 'Well, I'll just take my business elsewhere," she says. So last fall Pierson felt free to tell a meeting of the sales managers that the reps had to -- absolutely had to -- let her know if they were going to slip out to the post office for a minute. The reps could use a light board (flipping a switch when they leave the dealership). "Or they could just tell me; either way works for me," she says. Nowadays no one forgets that the front desk is the nerve center of Childress Buick/Kia.
* *
Employees throughout the dealership are beginning to reflect the spirit of internal communication. Last fall, after customer-service rep Karleene Petruk had solved the problem of a slow service job for an agitated customer (a doctor), she took two more steps -- two internal steps -- to ward off repercussions. First she saw to it that all the service advisers' terminals would flag the doctor's sensitivity to waiting time. Then she told her supervisor, just in case he got a call from the doctor (who might have gotten to fuming again on the way home).
By now, the collective time spent studying how to keep everyone informed is huge. Marketer Christa Hartley, another facilitator on the communication team, figures she spends as much as an eighth of her workweek on internal communication. Is it all worth it? You'd be hard-pressed to find a Childress employee who doesn't buy into the idea. Aside from the standard grumbling about too many meetings, there's nothing to suggest that anyone perceives the communication push as just another "to do." Folks like Brad Majercin will give you examples of how it's working, not how it isn't. He no longer does formal performance appraisals for employees; communication works well enough to make them unnecessary, he feels. Nor is there any doubt about the market-driven reasons for it all. Everybody has a business card that reads, "Ninety-one percent of unhappy customers will never purchase services from you again."
But it's too late for an about-face, even if it was called for. Information sharing gets deeper into the company's bloodstream by the day. Tom Anderson is badly infected. It's not in the job description of a service manager, but he ponders how to improve things over a beer in his backyard. He has this crazy plan -- he's stealing it from the restaurant trade -- to improve new-car delivery. You know those goofy happy-birthday choruses, when the entire wait staff gathers around your table to sing? Anderson plans to have all available employees -- from the body shop or wherever -- come up to the forecourt on cue to applaud new buyers. The odds of the plan's succeeding are good; so many internal channels reinforce the importance of delighting the customer. The other communication element -- the audible signal that will call employees to the front -- hey, that's the easy bit. And Anderson is promising that the next time we visit, there will be a town crier, tricorn hat and all, singing out the latest company lore.
Childress loves it. "That's the greatest thing, to care about something other than just what you're responsible for. If you can get everyone like that, it's absolutely amazing. So what do you do with a guy like that? You just encourage the hell out of him."
With more than a Round of Applause, we hope.
