Burn the Box - Surprise and Delight Your Employees

If you've been to the Ritz Carlton hotel, you know their one thing is about surprising and delighting their customers. How can you take surprise and delight and move it to the employee experience? Everyone, it's Eth Ernesto, and this is my quick burn the box drop for this week. We're talking about surprise and delight, of course, when it comes to the employee experience. So Ritz Carlton is legendary about their customer experience. They even actually have training. You can go onto their site. They have specific training around customer service and even leadership. Because when you are a customer of Ritz Carlton, what happens is they listen intently. So the minute you check in, and even when you're waiting to check in to the point where you leave, they are constantly looking for ways to surprise and delight you. So there is a story, not a rumor, I heard it firsthand, of a customer that was waiting online to check in. And they were on a cell phone conversation, and they were talking to the other person on the phone call about the fact that they'd forgotten their toothbrush. And they were distraught about it, as we all would be, especially on trips, of course. And so someone at Ritz Carlton, one of the employees was intently listening, and instead of asking the individual, hey, do you need a toothbrush? They took it upon themselves to go out, get a toothbrush, and leave it in the room for the individual with a card. When that person went up into their room, they found a toothbrush with a little card saying, hey, heard you misplaced your toothbrush. Here's one on us. Surprise and delight. So how do we think about surprise and delight from an employee experience perspective? Now, in the shadow of COVID 19, focus on employee experience has really intensifies. Now. We are absolutely. And organizations in a lot of cases are fully distributed, remote. It's very rare that you're coming together. So how do you build this surprise and delay kind of culture? Well, before we even talk about that, let's look at the numbers first. Harvard Business Review highlights that companies at the top tier of employee experience actually enjoy revenues that are 50% higher than their bottom tier counterparts. Temkin Group's findings reveal that companies excelling in employee experience boost customer satisfaction scores of 12 above those lagging in this area. And even our friends At SHRM underscore 12. 22% surge in innovation rates in organizations invested in employee engagement. So these things are really, really important when it comes to business metrics, which are why they are really, really important to focus on. But I'm not just talking about looking at the employee experience Putting a journey map together. I'm also talking about how do you install surprise and delight into your employee experience? So it starts, first off, with Curio teaching your teams in HR anywhere within the organization to be curious about other individuals, asking questions about them. Because what will happen is you'll unearth certain things about the individual that you'll learn about them, and opportunities to surprise and delight. It also connects you emotionally to your employees. So whether you're a leader, you're in hr, you're doing onboarding, make sure you're curious, ask questions. Those conversations can't be scripted. They have to be genuine conversations. And what happens is we uncover these seemingly minor details. So in a. In a similar case, we were having conversations with a couple of employees here at Suzy, and in that, we learned that one of our employees was becoming a new parent again. So the sibling was worried about this new baby coming on board and having three kids of my own. I know that you really have to think about the kids that are there when you have a newborn. What we did is we sent a gift congratulating the sibling being a big brother or sister. And so that without the parent even knowing, you know, that we were going to do this, they get a package at home. It's from the Suzy team to their. To their kid's name, and it's a gift to congratulate them about being a big brother or big sister. Surprise and delight. Or we have another story of an employee who was just talking about during a move that he recently had because he was changing his address, he had lost or thrown out his barbecue tools and utensils. And so he's in this new house, he has a beautiful new barbecue, but no utensils. Next thing you know, he gets a package from Susie. So these, these. And it. It doesn't have to be gifts. It's just this idea and these conversations. Being curious and listening really opens up the door for folks to do opportunities for surprise and delight. And they don't have to be grand gestures, personalized note. Hey, I hear you're going through some stuff, or, hey, heard you have surgery recently or whatever. It is, like, you can train your HR team to listen intently to have these genuine conversations. You can have your leaderships do it and build a culture where you could then scale that out. And then, I mean, the real opportunity here is giving surprise and delight. Budgets out, democratizing it. So anytime a leader is like, hey, I want to surprise and delight one of my employees, they can do that. But until then, you can actually have everything. Flow to the through the people team or the HR team. So, and it's funny because you do these things and often you don't think there's an impact, but there is. And people reminisce about these things. And we had an employee who's been here for a couple of years, remember a supply, surprise and delight event that we had provided to that. To that person. And they reminisce it in a very positive way. And it really created a great experience for that individual. So for this quick drop, and my finale here is think about surprise and delayed. And how can you integrate this into your employee experiences in this new remote and digital landscape? That's my quick drop for this week. We'll see you next time.