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...

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