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Firm focuses on improving communication in the workplace
By Anne Straub

While Sherry Acanfora was working for a medical devices company in California, she found her mind gravitating toward issues outside her sphere. Though her job was technical in nature, she started asking more organizational questions: How can people be more productive? How can they work together better?

Acanfora pursued the interest by earning a master’s degree in industrial organizational psychology at Florida Institute of Technology, and today helps companies answer those questions as a consultant.

Her company, Facets Consulting Group, specializes in promoting organizational health, largely through communication skills. The approach addresses an area she finds lacking in corporate America and in society in general. That dearth of communication often becomes manifest in tension in the workplace, a cycle Acanfora observed many times. Companies often weren’t even aware of the conflict their employees were experiencing.

“Everyone communicates differently. We’re never taught how to communicate. We teach students reading and writing,” she said, but not how to talk through problems. “In fact, we teach them how to avoid conflict,” she said.

The result is that companies don’t get the most out of their biggest asset: their employees.

The migratory nature of the culture exacerbates the problem. As workers move from company to company, they bring their own style and personality. “Companies don’t really form their cultures anymore,” Acanfora said.

Instead, they’re made up of people of diverse backgrounds who do things their own way. Human resources, logically the place to solve workplace issues, often is too overworked to address conflict. Or, they’re seen as a policing organization, Acanfora said, and employees hesitate to take their concerns there lest they be labeled a complainer or see negative information recorded in their permanent file.

That’s one place where Facets comes in. Acanfora offers mediation services between employees, teaching them to resolve their differences without involving human resources and starting a paper trail. She also offers evaluation and training to help companies prevent misunderstandings.

“We don’t train our managers to be managers,” Acanfora said. “We promote them and expect them to know what to do.”

One of her techniques is to teach people to use visual cues – such as a “thumbs up” sign when they have something important to discuss – to cut through the cross-communication that different styles can create. For example, she once mediated a disagreement between a woman raised in the South, with a social approach to communication, and a woman from the Bronx, whose style was more clipped and direct.

The Southern woman found the other to be rude, while the New Yorker thought the other was wasting time asking about her day at work. They were experiencing the fruit of misperceptions, what Acanfora calls the number one cause of conflict at work.

The Southerner learned to use the thumbs-up sign to let the New Yorker know when she had something to discuss, and the New Yorker learned that a brief, friendly exchange is valued by some as simple politeness.

Often, companies need to institute a way for people to voice their concerns, such as by dropping a note in a box or being able to send a confidential email, Acanfora said. In all cases, companies need to decide how they want to be run, such as by emphasizing teams or individual achievement, and employees need to know how to learn about the organization. Is there a dress code? How can someone advance in the company?

“People need to know how to find this information,” Acanofora said.

Acanfora, 39, started on her career path by attending a technology-oriented high school in her native Bridgeport, Conn. The emphasis included automotive courses, setting the stage for Acanfora’s foray into drag racing. To handicap the extracurricular races, girls would take turns behind the wheel of a car. The hobby turned into a full-time job for Acanfora, who toured the country for a time as a crew member and raced non-professionally. She still takes her car, a 1981 Camaro Z28, to car shows.

A desire to work in the space program drew her to FIT in Melbourne. “I didn’t want to be in the shuttle, but I wanted to be the one who pushed the button to send the shuttle into space,” she said.

But the timing wasn’t on her side. When she graduated with bachelor’s degrees in computer and electrical engineering in the early 1990s, the space center wasn’t hiring. So she followed the jobs to booming Silicon Valley in California.

She started Facets there as a side business, and then accepted an offer to return to Florida for a position with a Sebastian firm in 1998. That led to being a co-founder and director of business development for a time for XL TechGroup in Melbourne. The company works to identify needs and create companies to meet them.

“She follows through,” said Fred Derwitsch, who evaluates business combinations for XL TechGroup and worked with Acanfora there. She understands business, he said, and her strong technical background enables her to work with engineers and other technology-oriented people.

“In the business world, that’s not always an easy thing to do,” Derwitsch said.
Acanfora earned an executive master’s of business administration at the University of Central Florida in 2000. There, she met her husband, Davin Ruohomaki, who also was pursuing an MBA.

For more information, please visit www.facetscg.com