Page 180 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

The Power of “We” to Magnify Engagement C167

sistently high levels of teamwork and overall employee engagement,
even during down cycles in the economy and in the face of the auto
industry crisis that had recently caused numerous dealerships to close
their doors. Here are their answers to the questions we asked.

Q: What are the two or three most important things that you
believe contributed to your high scores on teamwork?
Day: We believe strongly that building trusting relationships and
sharing information among the different managers at our dealer-
ships is a key to our success. If a department head in one of our dealer-
ships has a problem, he or she can quickly call up a counterpart at any
one of our 16 locations for advice or assistance. We make it easier by
releasing trend reports with a range of data about each dealership’s
performance to all other dealerships. So there are no secrets . . . there’s
total transparency. That kind of openness promotes communication
and teamwork. Other auto dealerships may be too defensive or have
too much ego to share this kind of information. We believe the more
everyone sees the scorecard, the better the result. We trust our people
with information that other companies might not, while still cau-
tioning that it is confidential.
Owen: A lot of the teamwork that goes on is not seen by customers,
and shouldn’t be. Car dealerships are very compartmentalized, but
we don’t want the customer to even be aware of any departments.
The departments should be invisible to the client. We call it the Nal-
ley customized service experience. That means the customer is dealing
with one person all the time, and that person is always in the fore-
front. But in the background there is a lot of teamwork going on.
Day: I like to compare it to going to a high-end restaurant, where one
waiter takes care of everything. It ties the customer to an individual
and builds loyalty. At some dealers, the customer ends up at the ca-
shier’s window trying to understand why there were extra charges
after having their car serviced. We have no cashier. Our service ad-
visors call and stay in touch with customers as we diagnose the issues
with their cars and answer all their questions. The service advisor
thoroughly walks the customer through the work that was done before