Tim: I can imagine; it’s hard to shift
course as fast as our world is changing.
And these changes make it harder for us
to not only continue to serve our customers and stakeholders effectively, but
to also keep our employees engaged and
moving forward. In fact, studies by Gallup
over the last three or four decades have
demonstrated that employee engagement is down, with only 30 percent of
employees feeling actively engaged, 18
percent actively disengaged and the rest
not engaged at all. With this in mind, the
notion of empowering our employees
becomes even more critical. So how
would you define empowerment?
Dave: Before joining the team at Orvis,
I held several leadership roles at Build-ABear Workshop, right when it was morphing from a fledgling startup to budding
enterprise. One of the things Founder
Maxine Clark did early on was tell employees that when it comes to working
with customers, there was one simple
policy, “Just say yes.” Whether a customer
wants to use a store phone to make a call
or use a restroom, just say “yes.”
And that approach was so liberating.
Instead of creating a manual with a list of
policies or having someone stand in front
of the retail team and review procedures
one-by-one, we were empowered to do
anything we needed to give a customer
an amazing experience.