EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
MICHAEL DONALD , CEO OF IMAGENPAY
A
lot of companies that are focused on customers and profits quite often miss the core element which is the employees . The old adage of the service profit chain could be described in less corporate terms as : Happy employees , happy customers and even happier shareholders .
But how do you achieve that especially when more employees than ever have been working from home without the usual support mechanisms around them ?
What we at ImageNPay have learnt over the past 18 months with employees and also interns working in seven different time zones and six countries is that flexibility is key .
By this I mean ensuring that you take time out to understand the environment people are working in , have they had children to home school , do they have a home office or are they working from their kitchen table ?
As a CEO , be available even if this means at weekends or , in the case of some of our calls with Fiji , at midnight on a Sunday to align with a kick-off meeting on a Monday in another part of the world .
against the goals we then set ourselves and also the wider intern team . They trusted us , were there for us and allowed us to really shine to the extent we felt nothing was impossible .”
Now you may think that this is obvious and that creating a happy workplace comes through the right disciplines , process , measurements and all the other pre-pandemic key performance indicators . For me , it ’ s more than that , to be a happy family you need to work at it . To create a happy place to work where people can feel that they have really achieved great things and be acknowledged and also acknowledge themselves takes real emotional investment .
Most of all , it takes trust and the ability to let people really take control of their own destiny while being supportive of the challenges that we have all experienced in the past 18 months .
IT TAKES TRUST AND THE ABILITY TO LET PEOPLE REALLY TAKE CONTROL OF THEIR OWN DESTINY WHILE BEING SUPPORTIVE OF THE CHALLENGES THAT WE HAVE ALL EXPERIENCED IN THE PAST 18 MONTHS .
The trust quotient is also a primary factor , we are used to talking about EQ , IQ but now for me its TQ . Giving the team the latitude to achieve their goals by the means that they see fit , allowing them to control key elements of the company ’ s destiny as responsible and talented human beings creates a very real bond in a period of time that has been almost totally digital .
For us , this approach has paid huge dividends and in the most recent feedback from our intern programme the key comment that came up time and time again was : “ ImageNPay set a direction and then trusted us to formulate and deliver
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