Page 206 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

Job Enrichment and Professional Growth C193

Q: You work hard not to put Rackers into a position where they
have to play “gotcha” with customers, which you believe hurts
their job satisfaction. Tell us about that.
Weston: I see so many businesses out there that have what I call a
gotcha approach to their customers. They make customers pay for
many additional, trivial things—they play gotcha in the hope of
maximizing profits at the expense of the customer. They then put
their employees in positions where they have to enforce these poli-
cies, which can be embarrassing and reduce job satisfaction. We never
want our Rackers to be embarrassed about representing our company.
Rather, we want them to feel empowered to serve.
Jackson: We don’t have a rule book. If a customer has a problem, we
don’t say, “Sorry, I’ve never heard of that problem.” Rackers are em-
powered to solve problems.

Q: How do you find out what embarrasses Rackers?
Weston: As our company grows it gets harder to get rid of “insti-
tutional gotchas.” But we regularly ask them what puts them in a
position where they feel embarrassed. We recently made a significant
change in our approach to customers when we found out we were
putting Rackers in a place where they were embarrassed to help. Al-
though the policy seemed reasonable at first, every time a customer
called about this particular matter they were embarrassed because
they had to defend the policy.

Q: Having incentives that align Rackers with customers is also
important in building employee satisfaction. Has that been a
challenge?
Weston: We follow an approach where we want our customers to be
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“promoters” instead of “detractors,” and have policies and a scorecard
that creates promoters. We recently realized that one of our policies
was creating a conflict between how Rackers were paid and what
was in the best interests of our customers. There was an additional
challenge that to do the right thing for the company meant that one
group may need to refer a prospective customer to another group.