Communicating your cooperative's message--lessons learned.

• Author: Kuntz, Kyle
• Position: Business communications

How do you build a relationship with 50,000 members? At the onset, it may seem a daunting task. And for an engineer like me, it's a skill that doesn't come naturally. But in my three years as CEO of Sam Houston Electric Cooperative, I've come to understand and truly value the importance of communication. It is the fundamental building block of relationships. And it's the employees of Sam Houston Electric who make those relationships happen.

In my early years as Assistant General Manager of Sam Houston Electric Cooperative, we often took a top-down, need-to-know approach to communication. Rarely was input solicited from employees about their job satisfaction, skills they might need to enhance their performance, suggestions for improving internal processes or ideas for improving customer service. In those days, our focus was more on how the business worked, not who made it work. After taking the reins as CEO in 2002, I had one of those "outside the box" moments. Looking back, it was a significant turning point. I realized that to succeed in building relationships with our members, our employees needed to be connected. In order for them to be satisfied, employees needed to effectively communicate with each other. To start the process, I reorganized our management team into three areas: Operations (accounting and operations), Technology (engineering and information technology) and Communications (member services and communications). The new structure gave as much importance to communications as to technology and operations.

To open the internal lines of communication, the Chief Officers from these three departments conducted focus groups, They invited all 160 employees to share their ideas about how to make Sam Houston Electric Cooperative the very best it can be. More than 300 ideas were compiled. They had many good ideas, everything from ways to educate members about how to help our outage restoration efforts, to improvements in our mobile data services. And to date, many of them have been implemented. Today, our focus is on timely, open and company-wide communication. Our employees know that their ideas and concerns are important to management and that the flow of information goes in both directions. Sam TV, our Intranet, provides employees pertinent information about important issues in an easy to use and entertaining format. And there's a printed newsletter version for employees who don't sit at a desk with a computer. When major...