#Employee empowerment

Push your people to make their ideas 10x better

CEO Brian Chesky has a saying at Airbnb that when someone proposes a project goal, he says, "Add a zero at the end." The exercise is not to arbitrarily make goals more difficult but instead to force people to reimagine the possibilities of how to make their work 10x bigger, faster, or better.

He explains, "When you push people, they will think about the problem differently. And to think differently about the problem means you have to deeply understand the problem. And to deeply understand the problem, you have to break it into components." As a result, staff begin to start solving problems through first principle thinking where they question every assumption they have about a given problem, then create new groundbreaking solutions from scratch.

Allow staff to use 20% of their time to explore new ideas

A non-formalized and unenforced policy at Google is to give engineers the freedom to spend 20% of their time on ideas that aren't core to their jobs but are still related to Google's work. This policy has resulted in the creation of popular products like Gmail, Google Now, and AdSense. And even though not all projects end up launching, Google believes this is the "best educational program a company can have."

Create weekly status reports

At the end of every week, Google employees take 10 minutes to jot down their accomplishments and challenges of the week and what they plan to achieve the following week. These 'snippets' are then uploaded to Google's intranet for everyone to see. As a result of these updates:

• Staff are able take time to reflect on their accomplishments which has shown to increase happiness and reduce burnout
• Managers can identify challenges before they get out of hand
• Staff are equipped with evidence of their impact come review time when they want to ask for a raise or promotion
• Transparency is increased as all co-workers are aware of their peer's work
• Time is saved by removing long 'status update' meetings from everyone's calendar

Encourage curiosity, focus, and bravery with Missions

To encourage staff to try new things and reduce their fear of failure, LEGO implements a strategy called Missions. Missions are challenges given to staff that focus on LEGO's leadership attributes: Curiosity, focus, and bravery.

Each division and store has its own way of handing out missions—some are handed out before shifts, while others are picked out of a hat. Missions can take as little as an hour or up to two weeks to accomplish, but once completed, team members gather to reflect on their successes and failures and discuss what they have learned.

View Missions examples.

Increase resourcefulness, motivation, and accountability through profit sharing

Through their profit sharing program, Southwest has directly connected the well-being of their employees to the well-being of the company. As each employee's profit sharing account grows with their tenure, their concern for the health and longevity of the company grows as well.

Staff become more resourceful, more motivated to step up and assume ownership, and more aware of how their decisions affect the bottom line:

• When looking to maximize speed and minimize fuel burn rate, pilots request more direct headings and altitudes and learn shortcuts in and out of airpots, as well as, which runways can be safely taxied to on a single engine.
• When 800 new computers were needed, employees bought them in parts and put them together in an assembly line cutting costs by 50%.
• Even when Southwest ticket agents let other airlines borrow office supplies, they will go so far as to follow the borrower until the item is returned.

In 2020, Southwest shared $667 million through their profit sharing program, which equated to more than 6 weeks of pay for each employee or roughly 12% of their salary.

Keep it LEAN to improve customer satisfaction

Starbucks started using LEAN management techniques after seeing how one store manager took it upon herself to implement them and saw great results.

LEAN techniques removed any process that wasted time or took away from the customer experience. This allowed baristas to spend more time talking with customers and less time searching for things that were either in the wrong place or completely missing.

But former CEO, Howard Schultz feared that these practices would make Starbucks feel more like a factory run by a corporation rather than a local coffee shop. To avoid this, he ensured that headquarters would only provide the tools and training for LEAN techniques, and left it to the store managers to implement these techniques in their own unique way.

Some of the ways that Starbucks reduced redundancies and waste was to:

• Create color-coded preparation instructions for quick retention and understanding
• Move whips, drizzles, and chocolates closer to where they were needed to reduce steps behind the counter
• Use acronyms on coffee cups to help partners get every detail of the drink right and make those highly customized orders repeatable when they were ready
• Throw out the corporate manuals on supply room arrangements and customize everything for each specific store
• Take orders before customers get to the cash register

These changes might seem obvious but it wasn't until they started looking at every movement through LEAN that inefficiencies became clear. Within 6 months of implementation Starbucks customer satisfaction and quality scores had improved, productivity and revenue increased, and turnover dropped significantly.

Create a culture of empowerment

On Ray Davis' first day as CEO of Umpqua Bank, he received a call from an associate asking if an upset customer could be reimbursed for fees totaling $20. His response was, "What do you think we should do?" With that one question, Ray began building a culture where every staff member could make customer service decisions without asking for permission.

However, to build an empowered culture, he had to make two additional things very clear:

1. Leaders can never punish or criticize any decision by an associate. Instead, leaders are responsible for defining broad guidelines for associates to operate within. Based on an associate's decision, leaders can either say, "Great job, way to go!" or suggest a better way to do it next time.
2. Associates are to be held accountable for the decisions they make. Every associate is responsible for being able to explain a decision they make. When an associate was asked why she reversed $500 out of $700 in charges, she explained that "the customer was basically broke, and the bank would never collect the $700 anyway. But she wanted to impress upon the customer that the charges were her responsibility, so she didn't wipe them all away."

Inspire staff by sharing WOW stories

Umpqua added a WOW! blog on their intranet for associates to inspire colleagues with stories of how they went above and beyond for customers. Stories were organized into seven "superpower" categories:

• MegaEar: Listening for and fulfilling even the faintest customer needs
• Unbeatable Heart: Displays of care and compassion that shine through no matter what
• Bankability: Helping customers with banking and protecting them from fraud
• Hooray Holler: Loudly and proudly celebrating the great things others do
• Presents of Mind: Thinking of a personalized gift that makes someone's day
• Helping Hand: Jumping in to assist or rescue someone
• Dr. Umpqua: Prescribing the perfect products and services to serve a customer's financial needs.

View WOW story examples.

Create a club of cultural ambassadors

To keep a pulse on the company's culture, former CEO Ray Davis created the President's Club, whose members are cultural ambassadors for Umpqua Bank. Besides acting as cultural role models, members are responsible for recognizing teams for doing a great job and providing Ray with unfiltered constructive feedback on how to improve the organization's culture.

Each month, the club meets for dinner with Umpqua executives, where Ray discloses what's going on from the leadership's perspective, and members talk about how new initiatives are being received and the overall morale of the staff.

To be a club member, associates must first be nominated by their peers and then receive at least a 75% approval rating from club members. Only one or two members are admitted each quarter, and once initiated, members receive company stock, special name tags, and other perks. Associates can be a club members for up to ten years and then be eligible to join the President's Club Advisory Council.