These days with so much power put in the hands of people and their relationship with your staff due to social media, it is undeniably important that your staff leave your customers in a better place than when they came into contact with them.
Imagine the 2 following scenarios and how they will have a significant impact on the customers and any possible flow on effect
SCENARIO 1:
Your staff are just as they have always been. They are there to tick off the boxes and just basically to get through the day and get their paycheque at the end of the week. They don't have any desire to go above and beyond the least that is expected and they feel like their bosses don't notice what they have done even if they did, and they don't feel at all as if they are a part of the team. This is a classic situation that people are going through on a daily basis, and I feel George Carlin says it the best “People work just hard enough to not get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit”.
When your customers come into contact with your employees like this they don't go away with a positive attitude towards your company or business. These days they are also quick to publish anything negative on social media to get a few more likes on their pages, and this can potentially reach hundreds if not thousands of people, as a result they will not become raving fans and give positive word of mouth reviews
SCENARIO 2:
Your staff are happy and playful. They really care for the experience that the customer is having and more than that they care about their fellow employees. These staff feel like they are appreciated by their bosses and they are playing a role in a thriving team as well as really enjoying the fact that their team is doing really well
The staff in Scenario 2 will do more for their fellow teammates as well as the entire team as they feel appreciated and when you are working with people you care about you tend to be willing to do more for them than you would do if that was just another work colleague. It has been shown time and time again that people will do much more for people they care about than for themselves. This reaches out to the workplace as well.
A simple way we can change this is to follow the footsteps of great sporting teams out there, and my background as an athlete and coach makes this easy for me, but I will explain this for you.
In sporting teams it all starts even before the pre-season. We select people that will play in certain positions amongst our team according to their skill set and their previous playing background. In the work environment this is obviously the hiring process. If our team was in search for a Front Rower that has great hit-ups, is ok defensively and we will need him for 2x 20 minute stints that is what we would go looking for. Having this level of detail going into the hiring process cuts down a lot of time.
But how do I go about it if the team is already set?
This is more difficult, particularly if the people have been there for years, and they have established routines, habits and the culture of the place is a little dodgy. You cant expect to go in swinging a sledge hammer making instant massive changes, but what you can do is go in a subtly see who is the “Team Captain” and slowly make inroads with them. As a coach in this situation you can really work it 2 ways.
1) Swing that hammer and potentially have it backfire and have mutiny
2) Create an open forum just as we would after a football match or a fight, and have a breakdown of what worked and what didn't work. In this format make it known that we need problems, and problems from ground zero. It is also essential that along with the problems we need solutions, and not personal problems, but problems that as a team we can fix. Anything personal should be left to the coach and trainers (Boss and Managers) to deal with. We have to ensure that every team member knows the direction we are headed and know their role in the team and have them playing to their strengths for the benefit of the team. The players also have to be heard. There is nothing more frustrating than having a meeting, be it in work or sports, where you have left your heart out there only for it to be ignored. Many times it isn't actually ignored, but the opinion of the player is that it was, and that can cut deep to the particular player. You will see them gradually get further and further away from the discussions and potentially become “cancer” within the team.
By Cancer I mean someone that is continually undermining the direction headed by the leadership team, and someone that has nothing positive to say at all, and is continually making negative narky comments to anyone that will listen. Unfortunately if these type of employees go unchecked, as does a cancer, they spread. I have seen this happen before, and it was with quite a positive person who felt tired of not being listened to, turned their back on what was going on and became negative. If they don’t get reined in quick the damage by these people can cause untold damage, and they may even need to be cut out, as needs to be done with real cancers.
If you can’t act on peoples comments, the worst thing you can do is to just leave it. Even in private acknowledge their comment and that you did hear and understand their issue, then you need to explain the process from there.
Remember the most important thing is that happy staff leave a happy customer. You want staff that will feel part of the team and play their position above and beyond.
If you want to learn more about my “5 Steps Towards Improved Vitality” Feel free to email me at david@davidlindsay.com.au
