This Is What Makes Employees Happy At Work | Cameron Herold (Podcast 401)

We don't have an obligation to take care of our people, but we have an opportunity to take care of our people. Right? If we really, really care about our employees, if we care about their skills, if we care about their confidence, if we care about their home life, if we care about their careers, if we really help them, they'll go through brick walls for us to build the company. Like they'll work harder, they'll be more focused, they'll live the core values, they'll be more determined because they know that we really care. When you show up caring about them more than anybody else in their life, they're going to care about your business. If you're trying to get them to care about your business, they feel like you don't care about them. I believe in Dan Pink's in the science of motivation, that for good senior seasoned people, bonuses become more of a demotivator than a motivator. That if you hire real like Nick can say this for sure. Like Laci is never going to work any harder than she does today with a bonus or out of bonus. Like she might like to have the bonus, but she's just going to grind it out. Because she just grinds it out. It's who she is. That unless you're in an eat what you kill role, like a salesperson kind of role, often the bonuses are performance based. Pay tend to demotivate people because they feel like they're kind of getting taken advantage of versus paying them fairly. Kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it all goes into paying people really fairly as the base layer. You know, you kind of have to make sure that you have the base couple of layers nailed already. But if they're always chasing a bonus, then they're not actually feeling fulfilled on a day to day basis. They also feel like you're kind of taking advantage of them on that day to day basis. Next thing that happens is more often than not we're hoping that the person, regardless of their role, that their salary and their bonuses equal enough money for them to be happy over the course of a year. But then we want to pay them out that bonus once at the end of the year, which means they're unhappy for 51 out of the 52 weeks for the CEOs. CEOs are never unhappy because they got enough money to freaking like Nick's closet is. I've never been in his closet, but I know his closet's disgusting because he just buys this one guy's clothing and it's God awful expensive and he's got as much shit as he wants to and like if dirt even looks at his shoes, he gets rid of them. But, but Nick's got employees out there that are still wearing the same pair of the one like one pair of shoes that they had. They have black, a black pair and a brown pair. Like they have two pair of shoes and they like they alternate. They're waiting for that year end bonus. So employers think we're trying to share the wealth, but we're only sharing it in one week of the 51 weeks. And if we try to pay out the bonus weekly, then we lose all the incentive value that we're trying to drive. So what I prefer to do is pay people really fairly, fire all the C players, hire really accountable people and then I try to find out what are the one or two things that really, really reward that person. Maybe it's a bonus once in a while that's indiscriminate. Maybe it's stock options, maybe it's phantom stock. Maybe it's five weeks vacation. Maybe it's more free time, maybe it's more flex time. Maybe it's the ability to work from home when they want to. Maybe it's more visibility with the press. Maybe it's throwing them into. I had a member of our CEO alliance the other day who paid to be a member by himself. That is wrong. Go. As a CEO, you want to handcuff that person, say hey, I got your back. I'm paying the 9,300 bucks we got you. You want to go to the session in September two go to that as well. You want to handcuff a really good person for this guy wants training. Why is the company not paying for that? Instead of putting a bonus in place, come up and like reward them indiscriminately and they're like, you love me this much? Like, yeah, I love you this much. Because you love on them so much, they're going to go through brick walls for you. We were the number two company in Canada to work for out of 1.46 million companies. We ranked number two. We beat out, we like, we beat out everybody except this one back company still pisses me off. So because we obsessed about our employees being super happy, that's where we got the results from. That's where we got them working harder. That's when we had them working longer hours. We had. And somebody wants to talk about going on vacation. Kate we used to have to take our laptops away from employees before they went on vacation. And we gave all our employees five weeks paid vacation, including their sick time. Day one, the day they started, they all got five, five weeks. No one quit. Nobody called in sick. The retention went up, training cost went down. People were picketing outside of our office saying, please interview me for real. We had the media writing about us because we were giving five weeks paid vacation like no one did that 20 years ago. So what we did is instead of paying or putting bonuses in place, we kind of flipped it so that we took care of people so well, and we cared about them so much, and we knew so much about them that they went through brick walls for us. So we got the results by caring for people, not by using the kind of carrot and certainly not by using the stick. Now, let me talk about. Let me talk about profit sharing for a second. So we actually had a profit sharing program for a few years. Profit sharing is really good when there's profits to share. But when the 0809 financial crisis hit, all of a sudden there weren't like, this was the year after I left. Brian didn't have any profit sharing. People were pissed off and they felt entitled because they got it for so many years before. And he's like, we had to unwind or he had to unwind a program. The other part was he didn't really care about profit. He cared about growth. So if you care about growth, that means you want to invest in people, you want to invest in hiring more people, you want to invest in sales, invest in marketing, open more locations, buy more inventory, there's less profit to share. So why do you have a profit sharing program when you should be rewarding people for growth? The other thing I loved was one of my coaching clients. I coached this guy one on one for about a year. He sold his company for over 100 million. He went back and took 50 of his employees to Mexico. But they weren't 50 employees that were working with him on the day of the sale. They were the 50 people that he hand selected over the last 15 years that had helped him at some point build a company that he was able to sell for 100 million. So one of them was like a woman that worked for him in the first three years, didn't work for them for the last 12. But he was like, without her, we wouldn't have got here. He took 5 million bucks of his, over 100 million that he sold for and gave it to those 50 people, gave them each a hundred grand. He took them all down to Mexico. None of them knew it was coming. Some were employees on the day he sold, some were employees in the last couple years he'd been there. And some were like executive assistants, some were VPs, didn't matter. Handed everybody $100,000 check and said, thank you. It kind of goes back to a comment I've said for years, which is, we don't have an obligation to take care of our people, but we have an opportunity to take care of our people, right? If we really, really care about our employees, if we care about their skills, if we care about their confidence, if we care about their home life, if we care about their careers, if we really help them, they'll go through brick walls for us to build the company. Like, they'll work harder, they'll be more focused, they'll live the core values, they'll be more determined because they know that we really care. When you show up caring about them more than anybody else in their life, they're going to care about your business. If you're trying to get them to care about your business, they feel like you don't care about them. If it's always business, business, business, they feel like you don't care about them. So when you flip the tables on them, it kind of messes with their head and they can't help it, but want to help you. It's kind of the law of reciprocity at Wennington or got junk. We probably have a lot of our former employees now run their own companies. Some are pretty big companies, like 150 employee companies. Brian used to hate it when they would quit and go run their own company. I used to celebrate it. I thought it was great. Like, I. I would have rather kept the stake in the outcome too. I'm like, you want to start your own business? Let me help you with that. Give me 10%, I'll give you some money to get it started. Do it on the sideline. As you're running your job, let's figure out an exit strategy for you over the next 18 months so that you can get it up and running. You can exit gracefully. I get 10% of your company and we'll help train the person who's going to replace you. Isn't that way better than the person doing it and hiding it and feel guilty and, you know, they're kind of doing. You don't want to have the tough discussion and then they all of a sudden leave you high and dry and they give you one week's notice at the end of the day. It's kind of like baby boomers started working for a company and they stayed in the company for 25 years. Gen X started in a company and they'd stay in a company for five to 10 years. Gen Y would join a company that stay in a company for two to five years. Baby boomers and Gen Xs are telling their kids, don't work for that company for more than six months to a year. I remember when my son, when he was 16, started working at Safeway grocery store in Vancouver. His first job, he was six months in. And I'm like, where are you going to start applying for? He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, time to look for another job. You got to go, like, go to another job. You'll get paid like 20% more and kind of leverage off that one. He's like, no, I like this. I'm like, yeah, but you're not going to work at Safeway forever, so quit now. Go work at a restaurant. You can make a little bit more. Like, I was coaching my son to quit a job that he just started. You're not going to keep your employees forever unless you really care about them. And if your employees are going to leave to go to another company at some point, like, your kids are going to move out of the house and go to college or move away or just move away and become adults and have their own families, wouldn't you like them to be happy and love you still versus moving out or going away and being bitter? Right. So it's. How do you build that stuff in? We took Brian's laptop away one time. He was going away for a month and we actually took his laptop and we said we needed to do something. We changed his password and. And then we kind of handed it to him and we were like, you can't even log in for the next three weeks anyway, so get the hell out of here. Set expectations with your team that you're going. And you know the old phrase of like, don't call me unless the business is burning. Don't call me if the business is burning. I'm not in town. Like, call the fire department. Like, you got this. Like, don't call me. Set them up with clear roles and responsibilities, clear metrics, clear project plans that they all know what they're working on. And whether you give them the plans or they give you the plans and you sign off on the plans, whatever it is, doesn't matter. As long as you know that everybody has a clear set of outputs, clear plans, that they're working on clear metrics that they're accountable for and that, you know, that they have the skills and the confidence to do that. And then go, they don't want you there anyway. Like, they don't like you as, like they like you as much as you think they like you, but they don't like all the work that you give them, all the checking in that you're doing, all the emails and messages that you're getting, and they actually want you to go away and decompress. So going on vacation means not checking email, not checking slack, not getting weekly updates or daily updates, not reading business books, not reading business periodicals, not reading business newsletters. Like literally it means going on vacation from that. So I went and did a one week detox in a spa and we did like a full cleanse and all this like health stuff. And then I had no laptop and no iPhone for seven days, like zero. I literally just turned them off. It was amazing. So that's how you do it. I also want you to put a plan in place so that when your employees go away on vacation, they take a vacation too. And I think you want to think about it that way is what kind of a system could you put in place so that every employee, when they go away for the weekend or when they go away on vacation, or when they go away for a week or whatever it is, they actually decompress. And if you create a system with them so that they decompress there, you're going to be the first boss in history that they've ever worked for that cares enough about the fact that, like, I don't want you to check in. So I said earlier that we used to give all of our employees five weeks paid vacation, including their sick time. Two points on that. Brian just told me two weeks ago, Brian's the CEO that they've now given every employee for June, July and August every Friday off as well. I'm like, are you freaking. You've given them 13 days off in addition to the five weeks. I'm like, how do you. He goes, because they're super happy. Nobody wants to work on a Friday over the summer anyway. They're all freaking unproductive over that period of time. We know that they're going to just work harder in the first four weeks of the first four days of the week anyway. And they think that we're the best company on the planet to work for right now. So what we did with our five weeks paid vacation, every employee the day they started would get Five weeks that year. And we said it's use it or lose it. So on December 31, if there's any days that you haven't, haven't used, they're gone. And every month we would coach them and make sure that they were putting their days on their calendar. So at one point in October, I took the call center over as one of my direct reports from Brian. And I sat down with Jackie, who is the head of the call center, and she had 17 unused vacation days accrued that she was going to lose December 31st. And it was like, I think it was October 17th. And I sat her down and I said, if you don't, if you have any days unused on December 31st, I fire you. And I'm not kidding because you can't lead a team of 120 people being stressed out. You can't lead a team of 120 people and them worried about taking vacation because you're not taking yours and you're not growing your people because you're not delegating them and you're not like you're too hands on with them. I need you out of here. So we sat down and we booked her 17 days vacation. And on December 31, she used them all. And because she took the time, she trained people more, she delegated to them more, she grew them more, she gave them the confidence, she decompressed, she felt better about her job. All of the stuff worked. So taking the vacation time for you is really good because it's going to build a stronger company and then making sure that your people take the time off too. The more responsibility we give people, I think all the pluses that happen are going to outweigh any of the potential negatives. So don't just prepare your mind for all the stuff that might happen, prepare your mind for all the stuff that will happen that's going to be amazing too, so that you're not away thinking of all the things that'll probably happen and it's okay, I'll worry about those later. Yeah, but those are all outweighed by the 74 great things that are going to happen. It's kind of, you're preparing for the worst, which is smart, but you're not allowing your brain to relax and realize that so much good is coming out of this. Like your team is going to grow, their confidence is going to grow. They're going to, their communication is going to get better. They're going to solve problems on their own. More like, holy, there's some good stuff. That's going to come out of this. Prepare your mind for that stuff too, and I think you'll be really successful with it. Unlimited never works. No one means it. So don't. Don't call it unlimited because you don't mean it. Mean what you say and say what you mean. I've never seen a company yet that successfully has unlimited PTO because nobody freaking means it. Some of it, as well as expectation setting with clients, and clients all understand vacations because they take vacations. It's kind of like the, you know, everyone who gets divorced, like, oh my God, how are my friends going to think about divorce? They're done with it in three seconds because they. Everybody knows people got divorced. It's like, oh, what are we doing for the weekend? It's like, I'm firing somebody. Well, what's going to happen? Well, everyone's heard of somebody getting fired. Everybody understands the need for vacations. So it's about expectation setting and then putting systems in place. I've doubted so many times not to do things. I've questioned things. I've failed probably six, seven businesses by now. And I wouldn't change a thing looking back. And so I'm really grateful for all the failures because they were stepping stones in the end. And so I think that we're often so afraid.