I'm a CEO who called my 600-plus employees — and found out what we were getting wrong

• Smart Technologies CEO Nicholas Svensson calls employees worldwide to gather direct feedback.
• Employees have told him where they think management needs to shift direction.
• Svensson said calls with the company's 600-plus workers help him understand what messages are working.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nicholas Svensson, CEO of Smart Technologies. The company in Calgary, Alberta, and makes Smart Board interactive displays and software used in education and business. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

One day, I decided I needed to call everybody. It was during COVID. Maybe it was just because I was sitting at home going, "I wonder what they're up to, what they're thinking, what they're worried about."

It turned into this really interesting collection of perspectives because we have employees in 27 countries. You get a view of how they're seeing the economy, their work — what's working for them, what's not working.

It's unconventional to call your employees, but that's how I used to run my groups before I became CEO. Every individual has some of the most interesting insights and some of the darndest ideas.

Part of the discussion is also reinforcing that, "Hey, we really appreciate what you're doing." I usually have details on what they're working on, and I can tie those things in, hopefully, to make a connection with them.

If they're new, I always want to talk about, "Where did you come from? What's your background?" The downside of all of this, of course, is that when I meet people, they expect me to know their names. That gets a bit tricky, but everybody has been pretty polite.

'Transmit mode' to 'receive mode'

Let's say we just had a town hall. I might ask an employee, "What were the things that we talked about?" "Oh, I don't know." Then you go, "Clearly the town hall wasn't grabbing your attention."

It was astonishing to me that you could do that much work, and it had almost zero impact with respect to communicating some of the key things you wanted to communicate. We backed off on the town halls. It was monthly. Now, we're down to once a quarter.

The other thing that it highlighted to me is that, as a company, we were on "transmit mode." We never were on "receive mode" for, "Did the message sink in? Do you understand what I just told you?" It's a basic leadership thing that we were just missing.

Employee engagement is so important. By the definition of my job, I'm pretty engaged in what I'm doing, but not everybody has the benefit of knowing what I know and getting motivated by it.

How we address mistakes

We made a couple of changes to our organization last year. We said, "We're investing too heavily in this area. Let's take the money out of there and park it over here."Based on the data, it was the right decision. Based on the feedback from employees, that was the wrong decision. It was like, "I can't believe we did that. We were just turning the corner."

Talking to the people doing the work, you're going, "You're emotionally attached to it, but you're making a lot of sense, and you're giving me a lot of facts that didn't show up in the summary reports."

Then you just have to say, "We made a mistake." So I had to go back to the organization and say, "We're going to have to fix that." That was directly based on feedback from employees that I talked to.

One piece of feedback I got from talking to the product development group was "Man, we're always jumping around from project to project," and "You guys are changing your minds all the time." So, we said, "OK, once we start, we're going to finish a project."

As a management team, we appreciate that it's very frustrating for engineers to be jumping around. That's something we change based directly on individual conversations because you can feel their passion.

Engineers are now willing to start new projects more quickly. They're less cagey about, "Is this going to happen?" So they're much more apt to engage themselves fully, which is what you need.

Like an audit

There were two things that happened when I started calling people. One was, "Hey, why did you call him and you didn't call me?" It was a bit of a fairness thing. Then I found that in doing that, I was getting a much broader sense of feedback.

After I had a one-on-one with somebody, I could ping their management saying, "Hey, where are we with this?" — already knowing the answer. So it's kind of like an audit. That's where the managers go, "Do you really have to do this?" Well, there should be nothing that you don't know that they know.

Calling employees has become more of an annual thing — about 10% of the job. The calls are 30 minutes a person. It gives me a sense that I have a finger on the pulse, and so there's a certain level of kind of calm that comes with that. You have a feel for what's going on — what's up, what's down.

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