The NASPP Blog

Last week I blogged about five possible New Year’s Resolutions for stock plan professionals.  Those resolutions focused primarily on professional development – “investing in you.”  The next set of resolutions I have provided here are more technical.  These are included below, and are in just the nick of time to add to your list before the New Year rolls in tomorrow night.

Resolution six on my list is to focus on providing superior customer service to your employee stock plan participants.  It’s easy to become absorbed in having to meet tight deadlines or juggling 100 projects on a daily basis to forget one of the fundamental reasons you have this job, which is to provide customer service to your employee stock plan participants.  Think about the best service you’ve ever received and work to outdo that service experience time and time again. In addition, take a look at what you can do to strengthen your relationships with your employee stock plan participants – put together an area on your corporate intranet with helpful stock plan content or host monthly or quarterly meetings on various stock related topics.  The NASPP document library has a number of equity compensation related articles you might consider sharing with your employees to further illustrate your commitment to their education and enrich their experience with your department.

An effective way to find out how you might enhance your employee stock plan participants overall experience with your department is to survey your employees.  This is my resolution seven.  Sometimes the biggest dissatisfactions are the easiest things to fix, but you won’t know what these are if you don’t ask.  By surveying your employee stock plan participants, you can better know the changes they would like to see from your department and work to get these implemented.

The New Year is always a good time to review existing service provider relationships, which is why this topic appears as resolution eight on my list.  Are your existing service providers not only meeting, but exceeding your expectations?  Are they providing you and your employee stock plan participants with quality service at competitive price points?  If not, it might be the time to consider an alternative service provider.  Tune in to the NASPP’s webcast on April 30th covering “Best Practices – Changing Service Providers Like a Pro” to learn how to flawlessly plan for a service provider change.  

Resolution nine – develop rock-solid job-related procedures.  I think just about everyone knows that having well-documented procedures can reduce the chance of errors in your job and guarantee your job function runs smoothly when you aren’t available due to planned or unplanned events, but have you actually taken the time to document procedures for every aspect of your job?  If not, now is the time to do so.  If you do have existing documented procedures, you should take this opportunity to review those procedures to be sure they are current and still meaningful.  Unforseen events happen all of the time; being unprepared is not a respectable place to be.

And, finally, it’s time to get away from the belief of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.”  What I mean is, if your company is still issuing stock grants, notice of exercises, confirmation of restricted stock releases, ESPP enrolment forms (you get the idea) in paper form, then resolution ten on your list should be to start thinking about automating these processes.  Leverage your service providers or IT department to find ways to implement this vision.  Automating procedures will offer you new ways of doing old things and will likely free up time for you to devote to more strategic matters facing your department or organization.

Now, don’t start making excuses about why you don’t have the time or inclination to make good on these resolutions.  Get your lists finalized!  One of the best parts of making New Year’s Resolutions is (not breaking them!) knowing when you’ve reached your accomplishments and allowing time to pause and celebrate your milestones.

A happy, healthy and outstanding New Year to you all as you take on these New Year’s Resolutions and more of your own.

 -Robyn