The journey starts with the way we treat our employees.
The first day I stepped into a call center, I remember being surprised by how you could sense the culture of the environment. It was intangible, yet somehow you could feel it flow through the air around you, almost like the call center version of “the Force”!
As I started working on the phones, it became obvious that the electricity of a thriving environment wasn’t something that could be purchased or instructed to exist by the boss. It had to be earned and influenced every single day through the actions of each employee—from the CEO to the newest rep and everyone in between.
Over the years, I’ve spent time in a lot of different call centers and corporate environments, each one with a different culture. I’ve always found that, if you take the time to tune in and speak with employees, particularly those on the front line, you will begin to feel and understand the culture they work in each day. This culture is a key driver in how they feel about their business, which often translates into how they represent it when dealing with customers.
At HomeServe, we are proud that one of our core values is to put the customer at the heart of everything we do. This is something that we live and breathe across our business every single day. As leaders, we understand that to truly live up to our values, we have to epitomize not dictate them. This journey starts with the way we treat our employees.
From the first day that someone joins our contact center team in Chattanooga, Tenn., they are welcomed by every member of the leadership team—not just as a manager or director, but as a colleague who truly cares about them and the career they are embarking upon with us. I also spend time with every new-hire class reminiscing about my time on the phones and sharing the career opportunities and life-changing/continent-moving experiences that I gained from working with such a great company. There is no set script or PowerPoint presentation for this kind of thing, just being genuine and honestly caring about the people who have joined your team is all that’s needed.
Each day on the call center floor, we stop and say hello to every employee. We genuinely want to know how people’s families are doing, about their kids’ first day back at school, or how someone’s sports team did over the weekend. We know how important these things are to us personally and we also know that, when you engage in conversation with people about things that really matter, you are building real relationships and developing trust, and that is the most precious component of cultural development.
Even after five years in our current site and growing to almost 350 full-time employees, we still do the small things like recognize every employee’s birthday with cupcakes, cards, balloons and a HomeServe Happy Birthday song from leadership—and on special occasions, even a little dance. Needless to say, the team (and the cupcake shop nearby) absolutely love it!
Equally as important as the personal engagement is our ability to listen to our teams on how we can improve and then actually do something about it. We encourage employee feedback at every opportunity, whether informally at the water cooler (where the best conversations really happen), with our open-door policy (which applies to every leader all the way up to our CEO Tom Rusin), in our monthly Happiness Surveys, or in our bi-monthly “All Hands” sessions. The most important voices that we hear are the ones that challenge us to be the best version of ourselves that we can possibly be.
Another part of what makes our culture unique is that we have a lot of fun—and I don’t just mean pizza and balloons once a month. I mean doing things that make your team say WOW… this is ridiculous and incredible at the same time. Things like arriving at work on a random Tuesday to see the leadership team wearing “Free Hugs” T-shirts and handing out breakfast and hugs to anyone who wants them. Or holding our own “HomeServe Olympics” and flying the winning call center team to New York on an all-expenses-paid trip to play (and defeat) the corporate winning team. It’s about making silly hats at your desks because it’s Thursday, or playing human table foosball in the parking lot, or bringing our families closer together with picnics at local theme parks and holiday parties.
Of course, none of this is the specific answer to creating a culture, nor does it necessarily improve efficiency—in some cases, it probably reduces it. But when it’s combined and underpinned by the right leadership values and behaviors, and your employees genuinely trust and believe in you, that’s when culture really begins to thrive.
Our employees know that we don’t always get it right and they also know that no matter how hard we try, we will sometimes make mistakes. But as long as we are in it together and they truly believe that we care about doing the right thing for them and our customers, there is no challenge or issue that we won’t be able to surpass.
To work with a team that shares a vision, believes in your products and services and passionately strives to be the best they can be—for me, that is the most inspirational part of leadership. I’m immensely proud of the leadership and teamwork that I see in our business every single day.