Donna Cutting: The Celebrity Experience: Insider Secrets to Delivering Red Carpet Customer Service
Susan Friedmann: Riches in Niches: How to Make It Big in a Small Market
Barbara Glanz: Handle With Care: Motivating and Retaining Employees
Listen to me live today at 12:00pm EST until 1:00pm EST being interviewed by Beverly Mahone, host of "Passions," on Blog Talk Radio. We'll be talking about The Celebrity Experience: Insider Secrets to Delivering Red-Carpet Customer Service.
Follow the link to listen online - and feel free to call in with your customer service stories.
Donna Cutting
I was asked today to list five proven, and cost-effective ways, to improve employee retention. There are so many factors that affect employee retention, and they all work together. Here are just a few strategies that come to mind.
Hire Effectively – Retention starts at the hiring process. You’ve got to ensure the person you’re hiring is the right fit for the job, department, company. Hire people who not only have the skills and abilities to do the job, but also have the DESIRE to do the job with enthusiasm. You can use a variety of interview techniques, assessments, and even instinct, but be sure you have a system in place so you are hiring people whose mission is in line with your company’s mission and who will fit in with your company’s culture. Why is it cost-effective? Hiring the right person the first time around will save you the costs of hiring someone new when the “wrong” person leaves. A great book to help you in this effort is Finding and Keeping Great Employees by Joan Brannick and Jim Harris.
Roll Out the Red Carpet – When people leave a company within their first 90 days of employment, it can be for several reasons. For instance, the company/job was the wrong fit for them (see Hiring), they didn’t feel as though they fit in with the group, they had expectations that weren’t met, or they didn’t feel trained well enough to do the job. Set the stage for how you want your new employee to treat your customers by improving your onboarding process. Go out of your way to make new employees feel welcome. Schedule them to come on a day when their immediate supervisor is available to spend time with them. Involve the rest of the team in the welcome. For instance, at Jobing.com team members send welcome email messages to their new co-workers before they ever start the job. This costs absolutely nothing, but it enables the new person to have relationships with co-workers from the very beginning. Considering a Gallup poll found that having a best friend at work increases retention and engagement, why wait to start the relationship-building process? Ensure that your new recruit feels properly trained and has everything he or she needs to jump right in and feel productive.
Train Your Supervisors – Another Gallup study found that a person’s relationship with their immediate supervisor largely determined the length of their stay with the organization. You could spend all kinds of money on perks and recognition fads, but if you have supervisors and managers who don’t know how to inspire their employees and make them feel appreciated on a daily basis, you will still have poor employee retention. Take the time to hire managers who have the ability to lead effectively, and train them continuously on how to reward and recognize their employees. Your money would be better spent here than on the annual “morale building activity.”
Understand that YOU Can’t Motivate Them – People are self-motivated. Trying to “motivate people” will have you spinning your wheels. (I can’t tell you the number of managers that hire me to speak to their employees and say “I just want you to motivate them.) You can, however, tap into what does motivate them and reward and recognize accordingly. The key to retaining employees is to look at them as a group of individuals. Each individual is inspired or motivated by something different. It might be verbal, public recognition. It might be the assignment of a challenging new project. Perhaps it’s flexible hours. Maybe it’s competition. It could be the ability to move up in the company. Smart managers will get to know what motivates each employee to give their all, and will reward accordingly. That kind of “motivation” doesn’t have to cost a cent.
Engage Employees In Your Mission – Develop and constantly communicate clear-cut expectations, values and standards. Create a huge, clear, exciting vision for the direction of your company and involve your employees in the process of making the vision a reality. Celebrate each success and constantly recognize those fully committed to the mission. People want to feel as though they are part of something bigger than themselves. When you give them that kind of purpose, you will not only improve employee retention but your bottom line results as well. For instance, when Maria Motsavage, president and CEO of Ideal Senior Living, engaged her team in a new Red Carpet Program (as featured in The Celebrity Experience), employee turnover dropped from 52% to 24.8%.
Question: What is it specifically that keeps you on the job?
Monica Wofford, author of "Contagious Leadership" has some spot-on thoughts about working WITH your team as a leader. Check it out:
If you had met Oscar when he first came into the adult day care center, you would have seen a very tall man, in his early 70’s, who slumped his shoulders, kept his eyes focused on the floor, and gripped his wife Mary’s hand as she urged him into the building.
His diagnosis was Alzheimer’s disease.
You would have seen that the receptionist of the day center would come out from behind her desk, every morning, and give Oscar a hug – even though his arms would stay by his side and his eyes never strayed from the floor.
You would have noticed that as Oscar got seated, that every single day the kitchen workers would serve him coffee just the way Mary said he liked to drink it, even though he never acknowledged them and barely sipped at the coffee.
You would have seen personal care assistants and volunteers greeting him, smiling at him, hugging him daily – and you would have see that Oscar barely seemed to notice.
You would have heard the activity director invite him to participate in activities – although he not only did he not participate, but he never even responded to her.
After lunch, you would have seen the LPN (the center nurse) escort Oscar into her office, just to keep him company and chat with him while everyone else was involved in the center fun – although he never chatted back with her.
Although Oscar didn’t respond – day after day, week after week, month after month the staff at the adult center showered him with love until slowly Oscar did begin to open up. A word here. Eye contact there. A shadow of a smile.
And as he continued to open up, the nurse and others began to notice that his symptoms were not in line with those of people who have Alzheimer’s disease. Oscar was re-evaluated by his doctor, and it was found that he indeed did NOT have Alzheimer’s disease. He was suffering from clinical depression – the symptoms of which can sometimes look like AD.
His doctor changed Oscar’s medication and began treating his depression, and then Oscar really opened up. He smiled more. He laughed easily. He participated in center activities. And became more of the man his wife Mary had known and loved. Soon it became evident that he really didn’t need to be a participant in an adult day care center.
So the staff at the day center held a graduation ceremony for him – complete with a cap and gown, speeches, pomp and circumstance, and a diploma. Oscar graduated from center participant to center volunteer.
Every Thursday morning he would volunteer to lead the trivia session at the center, and on Thursday afternoons he would accompany me (the activity director at that point) and a few center participants to the fifth grade classroom of a local elementary school. I was amazed as I watched these kids sit mesmerized as he led the other elders in teaching the children what it was like when they were in fifth grade.
As you can imagine, Oscar became a local celebrity. His story was in the paper and on television. He was in local parades. He won volunteer of the year and several other awards. And he was having a ball.
The center began to get calls from people asking if we could “cure their loved one of Alzheimer’s disease as well.” Would that we could have.
About two years went by and then one Saturday afternoon I came home to a voice message from his wife Mary telling me that Oscar had suddenly and quietly passed away.
I will never forget going to that funeral and sobbing in Mary’s arms – and her pulling away from me and telling me “Stop. He had two wonderful vibrant years of his life that he wouldn’t have had without all of you at that day center. And for that I will be forever grateful.”
I watched as the fifth graders piled into the funeral home with pictures they had drawn, and lay them one by one in Oscar’s coffin. I thought to myself, “he is teaching them even now.”
And I have to wonder, if that receptionist had stopped hugging Oscar daily because he never hugged her back, if the day center staff and volunteers stopped giving him coffee and daily greetings, and if the activities director had stopped inviting him to join because he never did anyway, and if that nurse had never brought him into her office – if the story would have turned out the same.
Probably not.
You may not work in healthcare. Perhaps in your profession you do not get to see this kind of visible impact when you interact with your customers, as the day care center staff saw with Oscar.
But make no mistake, with every interaction you have with customers, co-workers, and others you meet in your daily lives – you have an impact. With the very next person in front of you - you have a choice in the kind of difference you will make in that person’s day. You have that choice regardless of how they are behaving.
You can choose to be surly, and make them feel worse about themselves. You can choose to be disengaged, and make them feel as though they aren’t worth your attention. Or…you can choose to smile, look them in the eye, call them by name, and cater to the need we all have to feel important and special and noticed.
While you may never see the difference that you make in their day – understand clearly that the choice you make with the very next customer or co-worker in front of you has an impact! Choose to make the moment extraordinary.
Copyright, 2008, Donna Cutting
Question: What choice will you make today?
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Make the choice to give extraordinary service. Read "The Celebrity Experience: Insider Secrets to Delivering Red-Carpet Customer Service" today. Available on Amazon.com and everywhere books are sold.
Thanks to my Facebook Buddy Mark Carter for passing along this post by Chris Brogan, entitled Be Sexier In Person.
He gives some great advice as to how to be a "magnet" at networking events. My favorite piece of advice:
If you don’t have confidence right off, here are some tips: think about the three things that someone who’s really proud of who you are would say about you. Don’t tell ME these things, but have them in your mind. If you’re worried how the other person might receive you, stop. Instead, believe with all your heart that you deserve to be there, that you’re smart, that you are just as important.
These tips work in a networking setting, at the office holiday party (just don't take sexy too far :-)) or when in discussions with your boss or other VP's.
Often, we're so worried about how others are perceiving us that we forget almost everyone else is worried about the same thing. Sometimes I'll go back to my high school year book and check out the photos of the so-called "popular" girls. I remember thinking they were the prettiest girls in the school and that I could never measure up. Looking back today I realize, while they were all lovely, they weren't heads and tails about everyone else in the looks department. What they had that the rest of us lacked was confidence.
Genuine confidence is attractive and will draw "YOUR people" to you in social situations as well as at work. Remember - the bottom line is we are all in charge of our own morale.
Question: How do you quiet those voices of insecurity so that you radiate genuine confidence?
While at the SOBCon '08, I met a gentleman named John who told me he wrote for the culture blog of Zappos. Zappos?, I asked. Yes.
Zappos is an online retail store that I am just beginning to explore. Shopping - yes! What intrigues me most, though, is their culture. This is a company who knows how to have fun at work. We're talking Hoopla, Pool Parties, and Buffet Club. Woo Hoo! And the write about it all on their culture blog.
You'll hear more about this fascinating company in further posts but, in the meantime, check out their blog and see how when you create an environment where people can have fun and get their work done - they do.
Enjoy photos of a few of the fabulous people I met at the SOBCon '08 Conference, described in an earlier post. Also, since I had issues with some of my links in that post, I'm going to rerun the attendee list. Please check out the blogs of some of the attendees for some fascinating conversations.
Thanks to Phil Gerbyshak, left, for helping me avoid the link problem in the future. Phil, Your generosity of spirit knows no bounds.
The top photo features my new friends Karen Putz and Stephen Hopson. Below I'm with Stephen and there's a lovely photo of Jim and Sandy Renshaw.
Good times and good information! Thanks Liz, Terry and all for a fabulous conference.
To my point of being an inexperienced blogger, my post below lost all photos and links when posted. Arrrggh! I've got to run, but I will fix that later.
This will be a slight departure from topic, as I share about the SOB Conference I attended recently. You read me right - SOB (Successful and Outstanding Bloggers). This was a gathering of people who blog on a variety of topics - including professional bloggers, experienced bloggers, inexperienced bloggers (yours truly) and would-be bloggers. It was a pleasure to meet up with friends that I had made online, like Phil Gerbyshak, Stephen Hopson, Terry Starbucker, Liz Strauss, Steve Sherlock, and Mark Carter (Carter)...and to meet new friends like Karen Putz, John Hong, Michael Snell, Sandy and Jim Renshaw, Karen Hanrahan, and others.
I came home inspired! I was going to re-dedicate myself to my blogs! In fact, I was going to start more blogs! Woo Hoo! Instead, I've let my blogs sit untouched for two weeks. I could give you lots of reasons why - schedule, family time, speaking clients - and all would be true. Except that the real reason is that blogging somehow became a more serious venture. I left the conference with a realization of the responsibility I have as a blogger....to write well, to check the facts, to be on the cutting edge with news....and it felt intimidating. Blogs and bloggers not only report on events and news....but they influence and change events and the news....Wow! What an awesome responsibility.
As for me, I may take some time to rethink my blogs, and make some decisions about where I want to take them.
But you might also be aware of the power of blogs...because they are only going to grow in power. Word about you and your company will spread faster and you want to make sure that word is positive. Don't be like Steak and Shake, who find themselves in the midst of a blogging nightmare because of an incident involving Deaf Mom blogger, Karen Putz. More on this later, but suffice it to say that had they simply said YES to an easy customer request, they would not have this problem. Instead, they are in the middle of a PR nightmare and could easily find themselves in a lawsuit.
On the other hand, you could take a cue from Jobing.com and Zappos and use blogs to engage your employees and invite your customers to be part of your culture. Way to go!
It will be interesting to see, a year from now, how my attendance at SOBCon '08 has affected my blogs. In the meantime, be patient with me, will you?
A shout out and a big thank you to everyone at SOBCon '08 for your warm welcome, generosity and sharing! Can't wait for next year.
Gal Morale, Private Eye
I just found that one of my articles about having fun at work was posted over at Jobing.com in Houston.
And thanks to Jill Shuford, the Community Relations Manager at Jobing.com Houston for posting it.
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