Every month or two I spend a couple days doing the post appraisal meetings with you guys. I honestly sometimes wonder how employees perceive these meetings. Some people are stressed and some are very relaxed. I sometimes wonder if people perceive it as a waste of time. I actually am never really sure what you guys think of these meetings, but I hope you find them valuable, because I know I do.

I’d like to take the opportunity to point out that some meetings last longer than others, but the length of the meeting doesn’t really mean anything. It would be silly to think that the longer I meet with someone, the more important that person is or something like that. Different people have different ways of expressing themselves and sometimes I get interested in a specific aspect of someone’s job or where they are going on vacation or anything and I might ask more questions. I hope that no one pays attention to the length of the meetings. I can feel as good about a person after a 15 minute meeting as I would after a 45 minute meeting.

From my point of view I do find these meetings to be very valuable. Of course I’ll never really get to know each and every one of you very well and probably the company will grow to a size that I won’t be able to carry on doing this at some point. But for the moment, I feel like I really learn a lot in these short meetings.

First of all I get a real sense of the company, I get a sense of the problems and issues that exist at every level of the company. Secondly, every time I do it I am impressed with the fact that we have really high quality people working at Argos. I say this all the time, but I truly believe this is one of our competitive advantages. We simply have better people than our competition.

I was also really happy to hear that a couple people had some really good ideas for improvements in the company. As you may or may not know, I am a true believer in innovation and constantly making improvements. I also believe that these improvements or changes do not have to take place at the highest strategic level, they can be simple things that just make things better.

Just to give you a couple examples of the good ideas that I heard recently. One idea was that we should start separating our garbage so that we can recycle. I think that is a great idea and we’ll try to figure out a way to implement it. Another person is trying to come up with creative ways for us to get trainings considering that we don’t have huge budgets for this right now. She mentioned that we might want to talk to an e-learning company. While there is an initial investment it really pays off in the long run because e-learning trainings are much cheaper and very convenient. We will discuss whether we will be able to implement these ideas. If we do go forward, I hope that the people who came up with these ideas will be leaders in implementing them or will join others in order to implement them.

Now, I don’t want you all to be scratching your heads and racking your brains before your meeting with me to come up with ideas on how to improve things. You don’t have to. All I am saying is that if you have an idea please feel free to share it. If you don’t have an idea, no harm done. I definitely won’t think any less of you. Also you don’t need to wait to meet me to share an idea, feel free to share it with your manager or put a comment on a blog post, or scream and yell and stamp your feet. Whatever works for you.

I think its really great when people are in the mindset of how to make things better. We can really do amazing things as a company if we are constantly trying to get better. There are no insignificant improvements. All improvements are important and ideas for change are always welcome at Argos.