By Anthony Ferry, PriceSpider
When innovation dies and a product
line atrophies, it is because we are not engaging innovation. In today’s rapidly
changing landscape, forward-thinking companies interested in long-term
retention, increased profits and overall growth must encourage employee
engagement
— this drives employees to truly care
about their work, which leads to thoughtfulness and ideas that advance
businesses and even spark ideas for new ones.
Take PriceSpider, the retail data and
technology company that I helped found more than 14 years ago , for example. In
the early days of PriceSpider, I was serving as the executive vice president of
the business and tech company Neudesic. One of my then-employees, Jon Pfortmiller,
came to me with an idea that he had been developing as something of side project.
He showed me some of his results, and I thought the concept was so intriguing
that I immediately proposed a partnership. Jon and I soon embarked on the
exciting journey of developing our new company. PriceSpider got up and running
under an incubator arm of Neudesic, but soon the concept proved its worth
beyond any doubt, and PriceSpider began to quickly grow into the company it is
today.
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I must stress that none of this would
have been possible if not for the environment of ego-less communication that
existed between Jon and myself. If not for Jon’s confidence that I would listen
to his ideas, he might never have brought the concept forward in the first
place. Without our ability to talk on terms of equality and mutual respect (the
only conditions in which ideas like Jon’s can truly be nurtured) PriceSpider
might never have existed. In a real sense, our company owes its very existence
to strong employee engagement.
The big lesson here is that really
listening to your employees can pay off in unexpected and amazing ways. After
all, we go to great lengths to hire the best and brightest people we can find
to fill positions in our companies, right? We trust them with trade secrets and
key strategies, and they become, if all goes well, experts in our operations.
Who better than these people to identify needed improvements, and who better to
innovate new solutions and advancements? Your employees should be doing more
than just working for you. They should be your trusted advisers, and the
drivers of intellectual growth for your brand.
Furthermore, it bears mentioning that
these concepts should not be limited to employees alone. At PriceSpider, we
have found that listening to client ideas contributes growth in much the same
way. In one instance, clients approached the company with a request for deeper
insights into specific areas of their business. Listening carefully to this
valuable feedback gave us a new direction in our thinking about brand
monitoring, eventually resulting in the addition of a new tool that has
increased the company’s efficacy measurably.
These are quantifiable outcomes. You
can probably guess what I’m going to say about that — none of that continuing
growth would be possible without effective communication from top to bottom,
and inside-out. Change comes from within, and as business leaders, we must
start with ourselves first. It is vitally important to lead by example, and show
an infectious, innovative spirit to our employees and clients. This begins with
listening.
We must:
1. Never be content; even if our
solutions are the best, we must constantly ask questions.
2. Encourage employees to speak up, and
we must engage fully with the things they tell us.
3. Ask how we can make their jobs
better, how we can make the company better.
4. Ask how to make a problem easier or
faster to solve.
5. Develop the good habit of looking at
a problem again and again, with the understanding that you never know when, or
how, a better solution may emerge. The problem set might not change, but the
solution certainly could. And if the problem set does change, it should be up
to the whole team to tackle the new challenge, and innovate past it.
In the simplest possible terms, it
makes no sense to treat your people — whether the ones who work for you, or the
ones you work for — as anything other than the great resource that they are. It
falls to us to build our company cultures around an atmosphere of encouragement
and empowerment, out of which we will reap the rewards of efficient operation
and dynamic growth.
Anthony Ferry
is CEO and founder of PriceSpider, an advanced retail
data technology company that provides insights about consumer purchasing
behavior for the world’s largest brand manufacturers. Powered by proprietary
“spidering” technology that collects immense data sets from thousands of e-Commerce
sites, PriceSpider helps brands discover — with precision — what, where, when
and how people purchase. From enabling brand manufacturers to maintain brand
consistency across online channels to giving shoppers easy access to authorized
retailers, PriceSpider connects the dots between brands, retailers and shoppers
— delivering the ultimate conversion optimization platform and helping
manufacturers know more to sell more. Connect with PriceSpider on Facebook,
LinkedIn and Twitter.
