How to Build a Workplace Where People Want to Stay with Samantha Irwin

Employee turnover is bleeding your business dry. And guess what? That help wanted sign in your window is starting to look like a permanent fixture. If you've ever felt like you're stuck in an endless loop of hiring, training, and watching employees vanish into the abyss of, hey, I'm just going for a better opportunity, then you're not alone. And that's what we're talking about today on Experience Leadership.

Welcome to Experience Leadership, a podcast that challenges small business owners and entrepreneurs just like you to dare to be the exception. Join our host, Customer Experience Expert Marc Haine, as he uncovers relevant and timely content to help you script and direct your business and teams to create jaw-dropping experiences your customers and staff deserve. Here is the host of Experience Leadership, author of Lights! Camera! Action!, customer experience expert Marc Haine.

Welcome to this episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience that your customers and your employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And today, my guest is a leading expert in creating exceptional customer experiences and workplace cultures, Samantha Irwin. And today, we're going to be talking about why so many businesses struggle to attract and keep high-performing employees that drive excellence and that drive them away in the first place. So, Stay with us because this is gonna be the episode you're going to need. You know, personally, I've been there. You finally hire and find a great person to come into your business. You invest time, money, and energy into training them, and they're learning the ropes and you're thinking, this is so good. Customers love them. And just when you think everything is absolutely amazing, you're thinking, yes, this one is the keeper. They end up handing in your 2-week notice or worse, they stop showing up completely. Frustrating? Absolutely. Expensive? Oh my goodness, you have no idea. Fixable? Well, that's what we're here to talk about. And that brings me to our Question of the Day. Have you actually ever stopped to calculate how much time, Money and lost productivity your employee turnover is actually costing you. I'd love to get your experience and your thoughts. Please go ahead and share this episode on your favorite social media platform. Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership and be part of this conversation. I know this is a widespread issue because everybody I talk to says, oh Marc, I don't know how I can keep my employees. Our guest today is someone who understands at a deep level what it takes to build a thriving people-first business. She's not just an expert. She has lived it. But with over 25 years of leadership experience from the front line of middle school classrooms where she managed chaos on a daily basis to the helm of a boutique hotel where, let's face it, service excellence is a non-negotiable. She knows exactly what it takes to create a workplace where employees don't just show up, they stay, they engage, and they drive real business growth. Samantha Irwin is a national speaker, a trainer, and the creator of The Power of People Academy and the creator of creating a Culture Deck, a toolkit designed to help businesses build the kind of workplaces that attract and keep top talent. She's worked with businesses of all sizes to create exceptional customer experiences and positive workplace cultures, proving that no matter where you are, the right people are out there. You just need the right strategy to find and to keep them. Samantha, welcome to the show! It is so great to have you.

It is great to be here. Thank you so much.

So, Let's start off. Tell us a little bit about what kind of clients you serve and what you do for them.

Certainly. I'm very passionate about serving independent business owners. And what I do for them is I help them in different areas regarding their leadership and attracting and training and retaining quality staff. Now, it depends on— well, it doesn't depend on the industry. You and I had talked about this a little bit before. It's across industries. I hear the same kind of complaints like, Oh, I just don't, you know, I'm in an industry where there's high turnover, or, oh, housing is really short here. It's super expensive. It's hard to attract quality people, or, oh, my people, they just don't care. They don't want to learn. They're not going to change. And on the same, like the very same next sentence, they'll say, but I want people that, you know, I can rely on that are more like partners than clock punchers. I want people that, Don't, you know, they're independent thinkers. I want them to stick around. I, I want more time. I don't wanna be at the front desk all the time. And these 2 things can happen. I've lived it. I went from desperate to desirable in the workplace employee attraction and retention bucket. Yep. And, uh, it didn't happen overnight. I had my share of mistakes.

It always does. And the growth is challenging, but why don't we start off with the big picture? Why is employee turnover such a massive and expensive problem? for businesses today?

Well, besides the fact that it's just headache and it's stress-producing, employee churn equals— is directly related to customer churn. Those 2 things are interconnected, 100% interconnected. So, if we go down that vein, then employee churn, customer churn equals less money for the business. It also costs a heck of a lot more than people think to actually attract, train, and retain, and get someone up to full productivity. When I'm doing workshops or speaking engagements, I'll throw this out there and have people guess. Now, it's different for hourly or salary employees or based on industry. But if you take an hourly position, oftentimes I'll ask the audience, like, what do they think? What's the number that they think it would cost them to turn, you know, to turn over a new staff? And pregnant pause so people can guess. And And the average is $1,500. So, I know no business ever that says, yeah, I wouldn't like an extra $3,000 in my pocket. If you have 2 people turning over a year, that's an extra 3 grand, which for small business, for any business, it adds up. So—

And so, when you think, like, I worked at a casino and the labor turnover in the department was 300%. That means in all intents and purposes, the turnover of the staff happened completely 3 times in 1 year. So now, apply the $1,500 to that and you pull out your hair, right? Yeah. But a lot of people— so there's, I mean, there's a lot of misconceptions that leaders have about why employees leave. One of them is, oh, it's the industry. It's the norm. Are there any other misconceptions that leaders have about why their employees leave?

Oh gosh, there's so many. It's the norm. I don't have— people don't want these kinds of jobs like housekeeping or front desk or janitorial. They just don't want them. It's a quality of person that— this is a touchy one, but I've heard it where people think, oh, people who work in those positions just aren't really that reliable, or it's not that desirable of a position. And That thinking, if a leader can change that thinking and help their staff change the thinking about themselves, it empowers that staff to understand, it doesn't matter if I'm in housekeeping or if I'm the manager or whatever, every single person in an organization is vitally important to curating a customer experience that drives repeat business. Every person. And I don't care if it's 3 seconds or 3 hours that the person spends with a guest, it makes a difference. It can make a huge difference.

You know, I was working at a hotel and, and I had a dishwasher who really thought, you know, it's unfortunately like kitchen staff treat dishwashers very badly. They just think they're the lower echelon and, and, and all this. And so we had a lot of uphill battles trying to train the kitchen staff to have full respect for everybody in the room. And I remember the dishwasher coming to me. Now, he was special needs, but that has nothing to do with nothing because at the end, what was happening was he was coming to me because he didn't feel valued. And so, when I sat down with him, we actually had a very deep one-on-one conversation. And when I told him that really the hotel can really do without me for months, but they cannot deal without you for a single second because without him, we couldn't serve customers. And when he realized how important that was, in the scheme of things. And I think all too often, that's what happens to our employees. They get so bogged down in the minutiae of doing every day that they finally lose their purpose.

Yes, yes.

I agree. And so, you know, had I just been another manager to go, oh, there's another dishwasher gone, and not kind of address kind of the cultural challenges I was having, then I would have had to go and look for a new dishwasher. And to your point, That to find somebody who's capable of doing it because there's certain personality types for every job. You can't ask a housekeeper to become a food and beverage server, for instance, right? A person who works well in housekeeping, they love to work by themselves. They're detailed, focused. They like to have routine and kind of understand the minutia of what the day is going to look like. Whereas a food and beverage server kind of likes that chaos. They kind of like that variability dealing with people and so on. And so, let's talk a little bit about some of those habits of what leaders need to do now to recognize that maybe they have people in the wrong positions?

Yeah, maybe they do. It's a relationship. First, I think it starts with a core value of valuing people, all people, not just the ones in the higher position. Because when I— there was a housekeeper that I had, and yeah, let's say housekeeping isn't the most desirable job, or maybe you're a barista and you think, oh, well, this is a temporary job that is going to fund my college or whatever. Those people still interact face-to-face with the customer, and they need to understand how important they are in just a quick moment, a hello, an eye contact, a greeting, and how that changes the trajectory of a customer's day. It can go from here to here or here to here if you feel like you're ignored. And what this means is that if I'm a barista and I'm able to increase the happiness of my customer's day, that translates to my tips. If I'm a housekeeper, it translates to my tips. So, first of all, having, as a leader, having an attitude that every single person is important and leadership is like this, it's uplifting. It's not like this, in my opinion. You're going to get people to stay longer when you are doing this rather than this. That it comes with a core value of helping people understand, first of all, that I value you, and then for them to understand that they're valued. And I saw it. I saw my person, my people transform from, oh, you know, I'm here to, oh my gosh, you want my opinions? You want my input on this book? You want ideas? It's so rewarding as a leader to see that transformation, that physical transformation. into confidence and understanding they're part of a team that has a big mission.

A lot of it, to your point, is that thing about what you were saying with the leaders about this empowerment. About, you know, all too often I've walked into properties where people are like, oh, I'm so frustrated with my staff. Nobody takes initiative. And, you know, they're— if I'm not here to tell them what to do, nothing gets done. And it's like, okay, right there is the problem. Right? My inside voice. My inside voice is saying that, right?

Yeah.

So, what are some of the early warning signs that a business might have a serious problem with not only their culture, but the turnover that is really the symptom of the bigger problem?

Well, I like to frame it for people in 3 buckets. So, if there's high turnover, if a business owner, a leader is having frustration with turnover or apathy, or people not doing the things that they should be doing or taking initiative, I think that that's a problem. It could be Twofold. We want to get curious because we don't know, but we can get curious about a couple things. First is that the person in the right position, they may or they may not be. You touched on this earlier brilliantly when you said that, you know, maybe housekeeper, they might be OCD. They like to have things done the same thing and, or the same way. And they like that routine as opposed to say a front desk person who's dealing with people coming in and the different chaos. So, it's seeing if the job matches the person's personality and passions. And then I like to think, let's check out these 3 buckets. There's the attraction, training, and retaining. These are the 3 buckets that I like to compartmentalize when I'm working with leaders in curating the experience for their potential employees and then their employees, which always translates to increased and improved customer service experiences. Always. So, attraction, training, and retaining. And we look at those 3 buckets and see, okay, are we actually attracting the right person for our company culture? How are we attracting the right person? How are we communicating those company cultures and the values and the expectations? I remember when I first started hiring and I was working in that attraction bucket and I just had a job description. It was pretty generic. And I got a trifecta one day of Terribly qualified people. Late. One was late. One was asking me questions like I was the tour guide. And another one was, she realized how far it was from her home. And I learned far more about her childcare situation than I cared. And I thought, this is not working. This is not the highest and best use of my time. So, after I worked in those 3 buckets, like, okay, what do we need to do to make sure that They're opting in or opting out before they get to the interview process, and that's the attraction. And then the training bucket, how do we get them to do all the things we want them to do the way we want them to do it? And then the retaining bucket is that drip irrigation, the constant reinforcement of values, the meetings, asking their questions or asking them questions and presenting problems for them to solve. Even reflecting on the second bucket, the training, your operations manuals and things, even having them look at those and ask for improvements, that's where we start to train people to be independent thinkers and contributors to the growth of our business, not just like, I'm punching the clock. I don't want to have to— I don't want to push a rope. Who wants to push a rope? No one. We want to be pulled along by the rope.

There are a lot of managers who, like, I see that many times. People are just so ingrained in their businesses that they, they play the blame game over and over and over again. And I've said it on this show, my, probably one of my favorite quotes is that when you're pointing your finger at somebody, you're pointing 3 at yourself. So I, I love that.

Yeah.

But they'll blame the generations, they'll blame people these days are lazy and don't wanna work, or I'm in a small town and there's just not enough of a workforce. The excuses are endless. How can a leader tell the difference between kind of a one-off employee leaving versus a deeper cultural issue that's driving people away.

So, how can they tell between if it's a deeper cultural issue or one-off?

Yeah.

Well, I would— I'm shooting from the hip here. I would— I'm putting myself in my situation when I had the hotel, and I did have some one-off people. And if that was me and I was looking internally to see if, is this a one-off or is this an internal problem? I would have a relationship or develop the relationship with my staff, and I would ask them. I would ask them how we're doing and get their feedback on how they, are they feeling valued? Are they understanding their purpose and their mission? And how are they working together? If possible, it's always nice to have an exit interview with a person who leaves. And yes, it's true that often they won't tell the boss, but if you have a trusted member of the team that maybe they collaborated with, Or a consultant that can come in and do the exit interview so that they feel like they can freely speak. That's another strategy that can be very helpful.

Mm-hmm.

But it's having— it is oftentimes hard, right? As a leader, you think everything's going well, and you might think that you're an open book or your door's open for people to come in and give you input or bring a problem or whatever, tell you they need support. But that's not always the case. So, they're, they're, a leader needs to set up a system where there's a regular check-in, an evaluation, a one-on-one time. And I get it that it takes time, but the rewards are great because when you can extend the productivity, you can extend the amount of time someone stays, you can extend the, or I guess feed into the person so they understand how important they are. Those are the results that people, well, leaders that I'm talking to always want. They want those results, but you have to put in some time. Do you have anything to add to that?

You know, it's right down my philosophy of what I've been preaching for years. This whole idea, like, by the time you get to the exit interview, many employees feel, you didn't listen to me when I worked here. Why would you listen to me when I'm leaving? And of course, the worst time to show that you care about an employee is when they come to you with the resignation notice. That's too little, too late. And the employees feel that, right? And so, I love your theory about this idea of having to sit down regularly with it. And you're absolutely right. The pushback instantly is, I don't have time. Do you know how much work I have to do? I have so many. And it's like, you know what? We need to redefine the roles of managers within organizations because I believe that way too many of them have way too many tasks on their list to be effective leaders. And we need to figure out how to clear that out so that we can prioritize as a leader what they need to do before they become quote unquote a manager. So yeah, you're preaching to the choir.

Preaching to the choir.

Yay!

Here's a choir. Hey Samantha, I'd love to dig into some more actionable strategies to really help our peeps so that if they're tuning in, they can apply some real When the spotlight shines on your business, are customers applauding or yawning? In other words, how is your business performing? Make your business a star with a new book, Lights! Camera! Action!, Business Operational Excellence Through the Lens of Live Theater by Marc Haine. Marc uses his business and acting experience to help you see your business like a live show so you can create a performance your customers won't forget.

Marc Haine.

Will never forget.

Buy Lights!

Camera!

Action!

today at your favorite online retailer or directly at marchaine.com. Welcome back! I am speaking with the fabulous Samantha Irwin. As you can tell, we're really hot and heavy into this whole topic of how do you hire, retain, and engage our people. And you know what I love, Samantha, is that you said right off the get-go about this idea that how much our employees contribute to our customer satisfaction. If we're suffering in one end, the other end is going to be tied in as well. I know that— I don't know if you've had this, but people will come to me all the time and say, well, I thought you were a customer and employee experience strategist. How can you talk so much about leadership? And it's like, it's so tied together that—

Yeah.

What we do with our people is exactly what they're going to do with our customers. But I've seen, I've absolutely seen in a boardroom where Owners and operators and head general managers are talking to the frontline staff saying, we have to have really great customer service. We need to be there. We need to make absolutely sure we're attentive. And then, they completely act differently when it's an employee or a supervisor or whatever. And so, the mixed signals can be really dangerous, can't they?

They sure can. If you're open to a story, one of the things that— a takeaway, something that I learned, I felt on our very first cruise. We took a cruise. Jeff's grandmother had passed away. So, the parents took the 3 boys and their wives on this cruise. I'd been on a handful, like 3 maybe in my whole life. And I remember the first morning on a Saturday walking down the aisle, whatever, the hallway, trying to find our room. We didn't know what the crap we were doing. Where's first? We're green. We're wet behind the ears. We've never been on a cruise before. And there was a gentleman coming towards us. I don't know what his ethnicity was. I don't remember. But he looked at us. He was the housekeeper or porter. He, I didn't realize he was our porter. He looked at us and he greeted us by name. Like he knew my name and my husband's name the very first day. And I was very much taken aback. I was like, whoa, wow, that's very impressive. And time and time and time again, that happened throughout the cruise. And at first it was like, What is going on? It didn't matter if I was walking down the hall and there was a housekeeper that was just walking past. They look— if I looked up, they didn't jump in front of me and say, rah, hello. But if I looked up, because that's a little invasive, different skill, read the room. So if they looked up, if I looked up, they looked at me and they smiled and they greeted me. And many people, this was— English was their second language. And so they just said good morning. Good afternoon or good evening. Whether we were walking from the gym to the deck and there was a person standing there with sanitizer, hand sanitizer, or just standing there, or we were walking through to go get lunch and there's all these different kind of buffet areas that have different types of food and there's a person standing there. Typically, you might have someone looking down at their stuff until you come up and then they help you. Not so, not so. And We finished that cruise and I felt like a VIP. It's our first cruise, but I felt like a VIP. I thought about this, I reflected about it, and I thought, what the heck? We didn't get special captain's dinners, we didn't get special excursions, we didn't get special anything because, you know, we're— it's our first time. But why did I feel so important and valued? And I figured out it was simply because every single person, staff, greeted us as we walked by. We felt so seen and valued, and it was extremely simple. So, I teach this in the Power of People Academy, but I also brought this back and I do trainings on it, but I brought it back to our staff and I said, okay, because how many times has this happened to you, Marc? You're in a hotel and you're a guest and you're walking down the hallway and you see the cart and the housekeepers are there. And they do one of two things. They either like avoid your eye contact like you're a leper, or they like look at you and give you the side eye, the stink eye. Like, are you gonna steal something off my cart? You know, so it doesn't feel good. I just wanna, you know, why? So when Mandy understood that, when we trained it and trained, like, all you need to do is we're not, you don't have to engage in tons of conversation with people, especially if you're a housekeeper, you got so stuff to do, but you greet people as you walk by them. You just simply look at them and greet them. And I'm telling you what, it was a game changer. We had so many guests come in and say how they felt. It's like, this place just feels amazing. Now, it was not extremely hard for that habit to be developed with my staff. And it's this, it's the trifecta is what I call it. Eye contact, smile, and a greeting. The greeting is specific to whatever it is that, you know, is your personality and your business. Ours was good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. We did not say, how are you? Because that's a conversation. We would ask a question because we know our purpose. So, it was eye contact, smile, and greeting. It was pretty easy for staff to learn the habit of doing that with customers. And then the next thing was vendors, right? Any kind of vendor that came in, they are partners too with curating a great experience, whether they're delivering something or cleaning out the grease Or whatever, it was the hardest thing, which was surprising to me, for staff to do it with one another. That surprised me. And I found myself having to exercise this muscle myself. And because I'm in my task, I'm doing the things, I'm doing my most important work, and then here comes a staff member in. And if I didn't stop and greet them, I'm not modeling what I want to have done. So, That staff to staff, myself to staff, and staff to me as well, it took a long time for us to, for us to do that with one another, which I thought very curious and very interesting.

So good. I joke with people because, of course, being 35 years in hospitality, this is something that's ingrained in us, isn't it? And so, I remember walking down in San Francisco, I was visiting my brother, and we were on Market Street. And I'm walking down and I make eye contact with somebody. I go, good morning. And he stops. He goes, oh my God, you talked to me. And I said, oh, I'm terribly sorry. I'm Canadian. But, but, you know, it happens so often. And even then, you know, anybody I'm with is like, man, you'll talk to anybody. No, all I'm saying is good morning. I haven't talked really to anybody. I haven't created a conversation. But we ended up standing on that corner, myself and this gentleman, for like 15 minutes having a conversation. And it was great because I got to find out stuff about him, about the city, about where I should be going. It was fantastic.

Yeah. In this day and age where kids growing up on their phone, right, they don't know how— they freak out. They don't know how to greet someone. And the frontline people have incredible impact and influence when first we as leaders know it and get it. And then we train them because they have an incredible amount of influence and impact on the trajectory of the customer's day, which influences their tips and bonuses, which influences the financial profitability of the company. Like they have, like, if I think about it, like you're my customer and here's the business is behind me. If I'm the barista or the whatever, the front desk or the housekeeping person, whoever, I can make or break the bank. I can help increase sales or not. And I also can change the trajectory of that person's day who's right in front of me, which bridges so many boundaries. Like, if I'm a middle-aged, older-ish middle-aged white lady, right? And if— because I taught middle school, I'm not super intimidated by Say, you know, teenagers. But if there's a teenager and maybe they look scary and they're all goth dressed and they're with, I don't know, face tattoo, whatever, there is an opportunity for us to bridge the gap and see each other as human beings, which my God, we need right now so very much. Whether it's a different race, ethnicity, socioeconomic group, political beliefs, whatever.

Right.

That just humanizing a person is incredibly powerful. If I could, if I was queen for a day and I could make sure everybody understood that, I'd call it a win. I'd call it a win.

It is so interesting because I've trained teams of people in, in all sorts, in customer service and all this sort of stuff. And it was actually really amazing that when I had employees in the room, they would look at me and go, I don't understand. Like you're saying, I have the effect, I can make somebody's days magical and I can make it memorable. I'm just one person. And it's like, isn't that interesting? I said, so what could you do? The very, your very next customer, what can you do and say to absolutely destroy their day?

Oh, so good.

Because, because if you have, if you can do that, then isn't it fair to say that you can do the other thing, right? Because I think what happens, people just figure I'm in my job, I'm just doing my job, I'm just doing what I have to do. It doesn't really matter. And so, this whole idea of being able to create more of a purposeful culture of I'm a contributor to something rather than I'm just a server, I'm just a housekeeper, I'm just a janitor, I'm just whatever. Being able to define that differently is really kind of the magic key here, isn't it?

Yes. Yes, 100%. And it's, you know, I use this as an example. So, I use this training manual, right? Because owners, then leaders, they want people to do things a certain way. You need a consistent product or service experience for your customer. And let's just pick on, not pick on, but let's use a coffee shop as an example, right? If I go in and I have a half-caf mocha, whatever, whatever, something, something, I would like to have it the same every time. I don't want it to be too sweet one day, mediocre, hot the next day, whatever. Those things, how you do the stuff, Typically, business owners, they have it all written down. This is the second, right? Attract, train, and retain. This is the training part. And because business owners and leaders are typically passionate about the thing that they're doing, they get it. They don't have a problem saying, this is how you make the thing. This is how we run the checkout system. This is how we do all the X, Ys, and Zs. What's missing, and this is I'm plugging for us. This is where you need someone, people like you and I, because if we are only training tasks, we're missing a huge profitability part because this right here, this eyeball to eyeball, that is skill. That's people skills. And staff have to be trained both with the tasks, right? And with some people skills, some emotional intelligence skills. And they just start, you know, you start where you start. It's it's fine. Eye contact, smile, and greeting, right? The customer is the per is the reason. Let's see. I have a phrase. Let's see if I can grab it. Customer. Yeah, you know it would fly out of my brain right when I'm telling you.

Da da da da da da. No pressure. Da da da. No pressure.

Oh, I got it. I got it. They're the reason for our work, not an interruption to our work.

Love it. It's amazing because what you're talking about— so, you know, I grew up in culinary arts to start with. Like, I started as a dishwasher and then became a cook and all that. But what you're talking about is handing a recipe book of all the things that go into making a meal, and you'll look at it and go, everything else is common sense. If it says sauté the broccoli, sauté the broccoli. But for some people, they don't know what sauté the broccoli means. And so they need that extra. And it can't be like, it's common sense, because it's not common sense. You know, this is all about value systems and overcoming like our biases, how we grew up, all the little bubbles that we surround ourselves with. And so being able to do that. But yet I talk to employers time and time again, and their only kind of real-world example of anything is I hire people They stay for a while and then they leave. So, what happens if I train people and they leave?

And that's tough.

Yeah.

And honestly, no, whenever I'm speaking and I'll speak to a room of business owners and never has anyone raised their hand when I ask this question. You're so excited about your thing, your, your product, you're passionate about bringing this thing to people. And so, you started a business. Is there anyone in the room who is super passionate about training people and working with staff. And so, you decided, ooh, what kind of business could I create? Because that's my passion. Let's open a coffee shop or what? No one ever says that. No, they're passionate about the thing. But leadership, if the thing that you're passionate about, that business, whether it's a boutique hotel or it's a restaurant or it's a casino or whatever, that thing can only grow to its maximum potential When we step out of that role of curating that thing and train the people to curate the experience.

Yes.

Because those people skills are really important. And so, it's no shade on leaders because it's hard and it's not an original passion, and it takes learning and growth and understanding that I got to step into that leadership position. It's completely different doing the things. And running the business and making the coffee or whatever is a wholly different skill than leading and inspiring people. It is people, you know, you can get a degree in it. You know, it's a lot. So, you know, if there's people out there who are leaders who are like, oh my God, I've got so much to learn. Don't worry. It's fine. Just take the next step. Get the next book. Grab Marc's book. Grab a training. Watch this. Train your staff with the trifecta. Just take the next step and keep moving towards learning how to become a more effective leader in attracting, training, and retaining. Oftentimes, it's the retaining piece that people need to, like, work on because they're not asking and creating, making time to deal with, or listen to, or feed into their staff. So.

And taking that one step further, I'm going to talk to all the leaders in the room now. Because you promote your best performers because they're amazing. And you think to yourself, man, if that person could show at least at a minimum 3 people how they do that, oh, my business would change so much. But then they promote them. And what got them into that leadership role is not what's going to keep them. It's a different set of skill sets. So, we have to train them.

Yeah.

We can't just promote somebody and expect them just through osmosis figure out how to be a really great leader.

It's totally, that's 100% true. Like we have a builder who was a plumber and then he decided he wanted to be a GM and it's like, those skills are very different. Very different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, and it's hard. I mean, people are challenging. I'm not going to lie about it. People managing people was the hardest and most challenging and most growth opportunity-filled part of owning and running the boutique hotel when we had it. It's hard. So, you know, first of all, acknowledge, yeah, it's, it can be tough. It's, they got their own worlds, their self, you know, have their skills or not skills based on what they grow up with. And yes, you are right when you said you can't assume people know.

Yeah, I do like the adage, and I wrote this in my book about occupational health and safety. Like the whole framework of occupational health and safety is we don't know that you know it until we know that we've taught you.

Right.

And so even though it might be common sense how to use a step stool, if we fall into the assumption that it's common sense, then people will— somebody will come along who's never used a step stool before in their whole entire life and not figure it out. And so knowing that we've trained people to use a step stool and they've practiced it and they've proved competency in it, now we can sign off and now we know they know. And so a lot of what we do, I think, as, as owner operators is we have expectations Around one of the things I also talk about in my book was how I created a whole new pub brand in a small town. And we figured we wanted to do a big city pub in a small town because we had about 20,000 people who worked out of it all in trades. And so, I invested 18 man-hours per person to train them in this pub brand, which is quite substantial. That's quite a substantial training thing. And I was really amazed that one day at suppertime, I walked into the pub And the server is standing there with her cell phone. And I said, are you texting? She goes, no, no, no, no, no. A customer gave me a $50 bill. I'm just trying to calculate the change.

Oh!

And that was something in my 18 hours of training I never covered how to do countbacks. How to figure out how to do it, right? And so, we have lots of assumptions and we just assume that people have that capacity. It's counting. How hard can it be? But without being able to teach that skill, we're left with staff members trying to figure it out on their own. Sometimes, they work it out and sometimes, they're really good at it. But sometimes, they crash and burn something horrendous.

Yeah, yeah. 2 points I want to piggyback on what you said. That could be an opportunity for me as a leader to say, oh my gosh, this is great. And then, put that into the training bucket. And give that person in the retaining bucket is a perfect opportunity when you have a staff meeting or whatever staff communication with that person's permission and saying, hey, this is a hole that I didn't create, or I didn't create. This is a hole I didn't realize that we had. And thank you to Marc for showing us that this is what needs to be done. And you know what? It's even more empowering if I ask, say, to Marc, would you Here's my SOP template. Here's my checklist training template. Would you put the steps in here? And then draft it. It depends on the person, but it could be a way for them to take ownership, to really understand. Because man, if you have to teach something, you kind of get how you get it or you don't.

Yeah.

And I've already forgotten the second thing I was going to tell you. So, there you go.

That's okay. It's okay. I mean, we're— yeah, it happens. What's interesting about that is it's no longer a me thing as a leader. It's an us thing as a team. It's going out to people and celebrating mistakes as well is another big thing, right?

Oh, yeah.

We chastise, we chastise, we chastise when people mess up. But every time somebody makes a mistake, that's a headwind into an early warning system, into something that's maybe a bigger liability. If people are flying through the doors in the kitchen and banging into each other and spilling plates over, you could stand there and go, oh my God, those plates. Don't you know those plates are $25 each? You're costing me money. Be more careful. As opposed to, oh, what can we do to make sure that this doesn't happen again? Right? And actually kind of celebrating, you know what, I'm glad you're okay. I'm glad you didn't get hurt. What can— what do you guys think we should do in order to make sure that this doesn't happen?

Yeah, what is our next step to make sure? Yes, I agree with you.

And they're going to have so many ideas.

It's amazing. They are.

They are.

Yeah, and there's skill in eliciting ideas from people In the brainstorming session where you just allow people to brainstorm and you aren't taking the ideas that are coming and throwing them, you know, saying, oh, that one doesn't work, or this one doesn't work. A brainstorm is literally dumping it all on the table.

Yes.

And then you figure it out later. And one of the things that I remember what my other thought was, was very important. I learned this the hard way, but training people what to do when not If mistakes are made, when mistakes are made. So, at the hotel, we had— there's— and I train this in the Power of People Academy, you're going to make mistakes. So, let's just take that off the table. And as a leader, I can model it because I make mistakes and it's important for me to model to my staff, like, here's how I screwed up and here's how I fixed it with customers or with them sometimes. That humanizing allows the staff member to say, oh, okay, I don't have to be perfect. I'm not getting fired. This is a supportive environment for me to grow. But training them to exceed expectations. So, you have the baseline, like, okay, we messed up. So, let's rip off the bandaid. Step 1, we acknowledge it. Like, and let's get past this as quick as possible because it's uncomfortable. The next one is we offer a solution for what it was that was messed up, whether it was me that messed up or my coworker and, or whomever, or the person's just in a bad day. And then the fun part is the third step in fixing your F-ups, and that's exceeding expectations. So this was so much fun to train with staff, and I did, I will take it to my grave with who double booked. I will never tell who double booked a room. And we had this couple coming in, it was room 15, it was a full weekend, it was in the summer. So where we were in this town of 650, there's no other to stay. The next closest place that is similar to ours is a 40-minute drive. So we realize the mistake. It's Friday. We're getting full, room 15. The people come in and I find this, it's a folio. We had a folio, we had a double-check system that just didn't work. And I realized, oh crap, I made this reservation. I won't say who made the mistake of not doing our— system to not make this happen. But I knew these people and they were coming for 2 nights. And so I immediately panicked. I was like, oh crap, what are we going to do? I called the day before cell phones. I called, they'd already left home. So I got on the phone right away and thankfully I didn't even let the person talk. There was a place up the road in Maupin that had a room. And I said, please reserve it. And what treats can we put in there? And I'm paying for it. And people came in. God, this was so painful. This is in the Power People Academies. The story, they came in, they're hot, they're tired, they're road weary, they're hungry. I take them aside and I start to talk to them. And they told me before I get to tell them the problem and how I solved it, that they almost didn't come because their dog died that day. I'm like, oh my gosh. Now I'm literally sweating. I'm like, oh my gosh. I don't have a— there's no room in the inn. And so, I ripped the Band-Aid off. I said, here's what happened. And I could see that they were just like so tired and, oh my God. And I said, but here's the solution. And then the next night, you know, we have a room for you here and we don't want you to love them more than us. So, please come back the second night. And so, what I did is I would expect that people would get me a room for the first night, but we paid for the room. So, we wanted to Exceed their expectations. And then the next night when they came back, we had treats, we exceeded, we paid for it again. So their whole weekend was paid for by us. And then to really seal the deal, we gifted them a 2-night gift certificate for an upgraded room that they could use or they could gift. And my staff was like, oh my gosh, that's like over and above. It's costing you a lot of money. And I didn't think short-term, I thought long-term. It was our mistake and we had to fix it. But that example, the results, those people came back so many times. They brought so many people. They left one of the most heartfelt reviews that to this day gets my husband choked up. So, when we— first of all, people will make mistakes. They'll mess up.

Yeah.

Let's teach them how to fix those mistakes. Maybe it's a pool of money that you say, this is the amount of money that you can, you're allotted every month to exceed customer expectations. Studies show people don't abuse it, but having it there gives staff the mindset of, ooh, I've got resources that I can use. And so, then they start to look for opportunities. Ooh, does this person need a personalized mug because it's their anniversary or an extra piece of cake or? Or whatever.

Yep.

Yeah.

And it's so interesting because again, it's not short— when you were telling your story, I have a, a story that's very, very similar. It turns out that the couple that stayed at the hotel after we satisfied and made absolutely sure we took really good care of them, it turns out that he owns— he's a CEO of an oil rig company, and he made our properties the only properties his people would book. And so it represented millions and millions of dollars over the next 10 years.

Yeah, right. And that's just being kind to people.

That's it. That's it. That's just, just doing, you know, and, and putting ourselves into, you know, if this happened to me, how would I like to be treated?

Yes. Right. Yes. And how would I, how would I be delighted?

Yeah.

How can we turn this, this review from, oh my God, I, I booked this place at this hotel and And they came and I came and they had no room for me and they sent me somewhere else to, oh my God.

Yep.

I booked this room and they didn't have room. And then they did this and then they did this and then they did this. These people are amazing.

Yep.

And it will take the pressure off of you, the owner, the leader, to be the person that solves that problem all the time because who wants to come back into work and have a bunch of problems to solve? And equipping staff to do it on their own.

Yeah.

Then that relationship with the staff and the customer It becomes stronger. So easy.

And then, and yet it's so easy. Why isn't people doing it?

Yeah. The customer's sad when they're not there. They're like, wait, where's, where's Denise? Why isn't she working this weekend?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. That's what I want.

I love that. Hey, I'd like to get into kind of some pitfalls to watch out for and some cautionaries.

Sure.

My fear is always that somebody will tune into this and, and think of some bandaid solutions. Oh, this weekend, this is what we'll do. Um, as opposed to thinking more long-term. So I'd like to get into the cautionaries and we'll do that. Right after this.

Attention meeting and event planners. Is your company or association planning a live or virtual conference, seminar, or staff retreat? Are you looking for a fresh, energetic perspective on what it takes to put on a jaw-dropping experience for your customers or staff? Book customer experience expert Marc Haine for your next group event. Past participants have said, Mark kept us in stitches while teaching us how important and powerful actually designing our customer experience can be. Read more testimonials and find out how Mark can serve you and your group at marchaine.com. That's M-A-R-C-H-A-I-N-E dot com.

Welcome back. I hope you're getting tons from today's episode. As you can tell, Samantha and I are two peas in a pod and are on a mission to support businesses just like yours. So, if you belong to an organization that could use our help, or you or someone you know might be planning a leadership retreat or a conference, drop us a line. We'd love to explore how we can be of service to you and your people. Samantha, you have something called the Creating Culture Deck. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So, what I found that with my staff, they get beat up a lot. Service is selfless. It's a constant giving every single day, hour and hour and hour, because people are needy, right? We've got this great opportunity. We've got customers in front of us. It's great to be curious. They could be our next stepping stone for our investment or our job or whatever, or your oil rig example. That was awesome. People need constant reinforcement. They need constant feeding in, because if I'm always outpouring myself, I, as a leader, need to build into my staff that replenishment. And then, just as a rabbit trail, as a leader, you got to figure out how to pour back into your own self so that you can pour into your staff so that they can pour into your customers. So, in that, the attracting, training, and retaining bucket, I found that there was a need for, I'll call drip irrigation, a tool for leaders that is weekly content that allows them to uplift, educate, and support their staff so that the results are the staff delivers consistently excellent customer service experiences. So because I was a teacher, I created this. So this is called a Creating a Culture deck. And honestly, like, Who wants to come up with all this content on their own? Like, you're busy doing your thing and being a leader. So Creating a Culture Deck is, it's filled with over 52, so weekly cards that inspire, educate, and uplift. And then take that knowledge and you're asking staff to connect it to the business. So for example, this is a first one of the, or second card. It's 70% of buying experiences are based on how. A customer feels they're being treated. Feels, feels. Not about how great the mocha is, but how they feel they're being treated. And then on the back, there's a question that the leader can just use for open— it's an open-ended question. It says, what's one experience outside of our business? You had this last week where you felt you were being treated well. So it uplifts, it educates, and it connects. It takes some information. A quote or a stat connecting to their experience and then connecting to the business.

I love that. So, wow.

Yeah. So that's called creating a culture deck.

It, it's so funny how, you know, great minds think alike because in my book, I, at the end of every chapter, I have a worksheet. And the whole, the whole purpose of the book is for people to share that with their leadership teams and so on. Read one chapter a week, then get together once a week and say, after doing the worksheets and say, let's share how we would apply this lesson to our business so that we could keep moving people forward. And again, yours brings— it's funny because a lot of what we do is we want to bring people back to the foundation of why we do what we do. And so that's a perfect way of kind of reminding people that, you know, as human beings, everybody's had something and we all are ready. Like when we've been burnt by the barista at a coffee shop, or we had to wait in line at the laundromat, or the gas pump didn't work. When we come into work, we're like, oh, I can't believe it. These people are so out of tune with customers. Okay, and then, and then you're looking at, you know, then they're looking up from the cell phone going, do you need anything? And it's like, no, you just had the experience yourself. Why are you playing that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, when we're thinking about this idea, because you had 3, uh, the 3 kind of pillars essentially of hiring, training, and retaining, are there any cautionaries we should be aware of as we kind of try to implement some of this stuff into our businesses?

Yes, definitely. And I will speak, I'll speak to front-facing customer service staff. So frontline staff, people who are facing, interacting face-to-face with customers. I'm not talking about your bookkeeper in the back room. I'm talking about the people who are the face of your business. They're interacting with your customers. Hospitality is a skill. It's actually an innate gift that people have or they don't have. I made the mistake one time. Oh my gosh, it was terrible where I hired this woman's skill. She was organized, she was dependable, she was prompt, she was smart. I hired her for the front desk and thank goodness my staff had the chutzpah to come to me and say, ooh, this is a problem. I thought I could retrain her and she'd get it. When I had a guest that had been a repeat guest who had now become a friend say to me, if I was here the first time and I was interacting with that person, I wouldn't have come back. And that's where I went, oh, oh, hospitality is a skill. Hire personality, then train the skills that they need. Now, how do you identify somebody who naturally has the gift of hospitality? There's a couple of things that you can start to work your muscles, like work your little identification muscles. So think about when you go into, if you have a grocery that has lots of lines, Is there a checkout person that you avoid or a checkout person you go to? Think about the barista when you go in to get your coffee. Is there someone that you always want to have there? Think about if you're at a restaurant, is there a certain table you like to sit at? Is there a person, your aunt or your uncle's home that you love going in because you just feel right away at home? If you start to identify those people, just start to become aware of, oh, Because every time I'm doing this, people are like, oh yeah, there is someone. And oh yep, there's a relative I'd love to go to and one I don't like to go to. Those people probably— let's be curious, but they probably have the natural gift of hospitality. And you can't train it. It can't be faked. It's a natural joy of people. It isn't something that's tested or taught in school. And so oftentimes people, especially people in service positions, like, that maybe aren't, like, seen as super desirable. A lot of those people have the gift of hospitality.

Mm.

And we have to understand that it's just, oh my God, it's so incredibly powerful for so many reasons. And when we help them understand that their natural being is so important, and here's, here's the trifecta. Here's how you step into something that is very valued by me as your leader, not necessarily always valued in society or school. So, yeah, that's a take— that's a trip-up. You don't— I made the mistake of hiring the wrong person for the wrong job. And when you're doing front-facing, like, I think as Michael Hyatt, you tattoo in your eyelid, hire personality, then train them with the skills, other skills.

And again, it goes back to what— how we kicked off the show. We talked about hiring the wrong people for the job. But at the same token, I think one of the things that we can constantly fall back into is that we also contain people within their job descriptions, which can be equally devastating, especially from the retention aspect of it, is that we'll hire people— you're a front desk agent, that's all you do, you're a front desk agent. And then when they show any kind of— it's like, oh, you can do social media as well? And oh my goodness, you're a graphic artist? It's like, oh, maybe we need a marketing manager, you know? But, but all too often we keep people in that box. In fact, I go in my book, I talk about how I promoted a banquet server into becoming my banquet manager because she just had this skill about, about being able to connect with people and everything else. And when I went to the owners, they literally looked at me and go, you're going to promote a server to a manager?

Yeah, right.

And but she was fantastic. Samantha, this has been an absolutely amazing conversation. I know that we could probably go on and make this into a customer service masterclass. But for now, could you remind everybody how they can get a hold of you and how they can get the Culture Creation Deck?

Sure.

Best way is website or LinkedIn. The website is— it's a little different. So, it's kaizen.zone. So, it's K-A-I-Z-E-N dot Lovely. There's no .zone.com. It's just kaizen.zone, and that's my website. Or you can get Samantha Irwin on LinkedIn. And the culture deck, the Creating a Culture deck, you can purchase right off the website. And for your fabulous listeners, if you use the word culture and you put it in, you will get 10% off if you'd like. So, you get one for yourself, one for your team. I have I've working with a couple of bigger boutique-ish hotels and they've gotten one. They got one for their housekeeping, they got one for groundskeeping, they got one for kitchen staff. And so, if you don't have a time, if your organization's big enough so that not everyone can get together, you can still all grow with the same information and just in your compartmentalized departments. But this is where it's— I'm going to say one more geeky thing because I love curating the customer journey. The customer is experiencing each department. Everyone is interconnected, whether or not they think it is. All right, we're serving our customer. They are having an experience with every department. Now, when each department understands their purpose and they are treating their guests great, and they're using things like the Culture Deck and training, to uplevel their skills, the entire experience for the customer is better. Because let's face it, you're guilty or innocent by association. I don't know if the kitchen gets 5-star reviews, but I do go into the bathroom, and that perceives what happens in the bathroom, gives me an inkling or perception of what's coming out of the kitchen.

Right, right.

It matters a lot. It matters so much.

Samantha, thank you so much. This has been absolutely Amazing. I can't— I really appreciate you being here and sharing your knowledge and your passion and living my life. I appreciate you.

Well, I really appreciate you as well. I mean, it's always fun to talk to someone who is extremely geeked out as myself about curating the customer experience and really like, I guess, what's this? Be my Schrader's partner. What is this like investing or Helping grow people.

There you go. Yes, that's what it is. Digging deep. Digging deep to pull out the best out of people.

Yes.

Thank you, Samantha. This has been so great.

Thank you.

If you have any questions about today's episode, or you would like a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session with you and your team, feel free to book yourself on my online calendar. The link is down below. It's the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine.com. As always, I am at your service and I know Samantha's at your service. So, her contact info is there as well. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure that you subscribe to this feed and make sure you follow me on social media. I have all sorts of great content that I put out consistently. So, I'd love to make you part of my peeps on social media. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine.

I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, Thank you for joining us this week on Experience Leadership. Make sure you visit marchaine.com for a full directory of available episodes. While you're at it, if you found today's content invaluable, please share it and tell your friends about the show. Thank you for joining us. As Mark says, knowledge is power, but only if you share it. Be sure to tune in each week for the newest episode. Please stay safe, stay healthy, and dare to be the exception.