Using Customer Service to Beat Out the Great Resignation

I know you are probably really tired of hearing the phrase, the Great Resignation. And you yourself might be struggling to attract and keep your very own strong performers. And if that's the case, stay tuned because that's what I'm talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. I am your host, Service Expert and Master of Experiences Marc Haine. And today, I'd like to discuss with you on how you can use the skills and capabilities you already have to curtail this mass exodus we are seeing in the workplace. This mass exodus that we're calling the Great Resignation. And we will get to that in just a moment. I just wanted to take a quick second to thank you for being here with me. I know that your time is so valuable and you have a ton of choices on how to spend your time. And I hope that I honor your investment with today's content. Just as a quick note, feel free to be part of this conversation. If you're here live with me, drop comments and questions in the comment box. I will try to address it here live. And if you're watching the replay, Go ahead and put your comments and questions in the comment box. I will make a point of addressing it. This is such a stressful time for employers between losing staff and then not being able to find capacity within the labor market. Businesses are suffering through a lack of customer service, higher costs, and lower profits. This is a real challenge. And I'm hoping that you have been able to solve that problem for yourself. But if not, I'd like to know from you Our Question of the Day. So, how are you doing? Are you seeing this mass exodus of some of your most talented people? Maybe some of those people have left during COVID and you are having a hard time replacing all those bodies that you've I'd love to hear your thoughts and your stories. Why don't you share your stories, your comments in the comment box? Feel free to put it on your favorite platform. But please do make sure that you hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership. I'd love to follow along with the conversation and have you part of that conversation. This past weekend, I was speaking with Cynthia. Sorry, Cynthia. I was speaking with Cynthia. Sorry, Cynthia, who runs a hardware store in the city here. And we were having a really good conversation through the uncertainty of government mandates, the layoffs that she had to do. She lost more than half of her staff. That's close to 200 man-hours that she now cannot fill. It's been really tough on her. She and her managers have had to work extra hours and she's having to pay out much more overtime than she ever has, which of course affects her bottom line. People are tired. They're stressed out and they don't seem to have any relief. It really seems like right now, she's hanging her hat that There's going to be an influx of students in a couple of weeks as they get out of high school and as they are coming home from college and university and stuff. But right now, aside from that, she doesn't see a relief for these positions. So today, I'd like to share with you some strategies I shared with her in case you're feeling the same way. Sometimes, just being able to pick out what one person is experiencing and then kind of learning those lessons as we go forward, maybe we can we can use this information to share. And again, I encourage you to share comments, share your stories because I know that if you're experiencing something, other people are as well. And I've always said that as leaders, our biggest power is that we can share what we know as opposed to hoarding it inside of us. What I find really ironic about customer-centric businesses like Cynthia's is that we already have the skill sets to to solve the problem. And no, I don't mean that we can use her hammers from the hardware store to bash people over the head. The magic key is to become more customer-centric with our approach to our employees. Now wait, don't just disconnect just yet. I know that you're looking at me and saying, Marc, I am tired of people telling me I have to treat my employees like customers. They're not customers. But please hear me out on this because as leaders, we do serve our employees.

We do.

If you've reviewed any of my other episodes, and if you haven't, I encourage you to go back to especially my solo shows. If you've watched them, you'll know that I look upon our role as leaders as the guides to help and support our staff on their journey with us. We are the Yodas. to their character. We are there to help guide them through their path, their journey. So on today's show, I'd like to highlight the 4 key elements of customer service that you can leverage with your employees that will make them want to stay. I think this is an important thing. And what's nice about these strategies is none of them have anything to do with hammers. So, we will get to that. Right after this.

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Welcome back! We are talking about what you can do to stem the bleeding of your employees leaving. In a recent labor turnover survey, 1/3 of the people you will hire today will quit within 6 months. So, let me get this straight. You've suffered with being short-staffed. And now, 1 employee out of the last 3 that you hire will quit within 6 months according to the statistic. By the way, that equates to about 4 million people quitting their jobs each and every month in the U.S. The dastardly thing is, and yes, I said the word dastardly. 75% of the reasons people leave their positions can be prevented. I hang my hat on teaching that like customers, our employees are on a journey with us. I go deep into Experience Journey Model that I teach in chapter 18 of my book. So, if you haven't picked it up, it's a good way to get kind of a primer onto what I'm talking about. And so, they are on this journey. And on this journey, they hit several different milestones. How we serve them and meet their experience expectation on each of these milestones will denote if they stay on the journey with us or plunge into the pool of the tainted. But before we can get into the key elements, we need to uncover why is it that people are leaving. You see, like your customers, If employees don't trust the organization, they will not stay. In fact, according to a recent Gallup poll, 1/3 of employees don't trust their employers today. And again, like your customers, if your customers don't trust you, they're not going to do business with you. And your employees are the same way. Likewise, if your customers don't feel that you value them, they won't continue to be part of your business. And it's the same thing with your employees. If your employees don't feel valued at work, 76% of them will look for other job opportunities. This idea of feeling valued is the new commodity in businesses. People want to know that what they do matters and that they make a difference to the organization. If you relegate people to be in pigeonholes where they're just putting grommets on fabric and it's just factory work and people wake up every day and that's going to be their reality, well, you can pretty much bet that they're going to look for something that gives them a reason to get out of bed in the morning. There is a multitude of reasons why people leave. Multitude. Some of them are things like lack of training and development opportunities. Poor communication, unclear job descriptions, inadequate staffing levels, lack of recognition. All these things are coming together to push people and say, you know what? I think there might be something better out there for me. And they're not going to last too long with you. I remember when I was working. So, this would have been now 12 years ago working for a hotel. And I remember that the biggest challenge that we had in retaining staff was that we had competition in this small town. And I remember my cook coming to me and says, Marc, give me 50 cents or I will leave. And I'll go across the street because they're giving me 50 cents more an hour. And my thought process was, if that was what was important to them, then I might as well let them go. Because it'll be 50 cents today. But then, in another couple of months, it'll be another 50 cents and then another 50 cents and so on and so forth. And really, at the end of it, it was all about I wanted a culture where people wanted to work in and that they had fulfillment doing the work that they wanted. So, I invited him to seek his happiness elsewhere. He went across the street for, I had to say, it's about 3 or 4 weeks. And then, he came back saying, oh, can I please have my job back? And at that point, I turned around and I said, no. If you didn't see the value, of what we had to offer at the time. I don't need you to come back in, do your work, and then feel that 50-cent difference will drive you to another place of employment. So right now, these reasons why people leave is if people come to you about money, there's something bigger there. It's because they're not getting the value of working for you That really was what attracted them to you in the first place. It could be that they, just the mere fact of getting a job is what attracted them to you. But then, as you sell them that bill of goods like with your customers, you sell them a bill of goods. And as long as you're delivering on those bills of goods, you keep up to your promises, then we are able to keep them. But the list why people will leave is going to be long. And so, we have a really big uphill battle to understand in our corporate culture, in our businesses, what is it that is holding people and What is driving people away? In our businesses, we should not only be measuring the customer churn, which I hope you're doing. I hope you're being very sensitive to really watching your customer numbers and finding out, are we keeping our customers? Do we have— what's the lifetime value of our customers? What is the lifetime spend of our customers? All these different things. I hope you're measuring these. And if you're not, please do go through the library of videos that I have because I do talk about this. Great detail. But aside from measuring the customer churn, we must measure employee churn. We must have an understanding of what's going on with our employees. So the big question is, how do we do that? Well, back in my day, we used to do exit interviews. That's where we asked the people who quit to come back And be interviewed as to their experience working with us. The funny thing is for some people when they were unhappy and they were unhappy working for us, our employers, the employer themselves when they would do these exit interviews would get their knickers in a twist. Which by the way is an official leadership HR terminology. Getting your knickers in a twist And they'd become defensive. And they'd get this feedback from an employee during the exit interview and going, well, it's just as well that they're going because they are disgruntled. They have nothing positive to say. In fact, it's so interesting that— excuse me— on Glassdoor, you have people who are leaving reviews of the places where they've worked and where they've quit. And it's interesting talking to the business owners who get bad reviews because they're saying things like, well, if they're allowed to leave a bad review on Glassdoor, I should be able to leave a staff evaluation on Glassdoor and tell people how bad they were as employees. And it just doesn't work that way. We are in control of our work environments. And in my experience, exit interviews even with people Even with people who were either leaving for other opportunities or because they were disgruntled, really it's about using that information to create actionable outcomes. And what's unfortunate is most people didn't. Most people would shrug their shoulders and nothing would happen. If they went to, depending on the culture, if they went to their existing staff who didn't quit and say, hey, you know, I just did an exit interview with Steve and Steve says I'm domineering and mean. You don't think that, do you? And of course, what are all the employees going to do? No, sir. No, you're not domineering and bullying at all. But the other thing about exit interviews is that they are an after-the-fact metric. That is, the damage is already done. Interviewing employees after they've quit, that's kind of sort of like, it's like Your house burning down and then wondering if testing fireworks in your family room was a good idea. Ultimately, the damage is done. It's too late to do anything for this one particular employee because you have to understand that people don't wake up in the morning and say, today, I'm going to quit. When people leave you, they go through this whole check and balance thing. They debate with themselves. They do pros and cons lists. They are They are testing things. I remember when I quit one particular position, I had my resignation letter under my computer keyboard for weeks. It was something that I knew it was like, before I resign, I'm just going to— I just, maybe it'll change. And so, I just left it there. And 3 weeks passed. And then finally, I was in another tiff with the with the manager. And I said, obviously, we're not seeing eye to eye. So, I'm going to give you this. And he was absolutely blown away that I had it all. Oh, you've been thinking about this for a while. Every one of your employees who are quitting have thought about it for a while. In fact, the statistics show that you have disengaged employees right now in your business. Do you know who they are? Because they exist. As much as you might turn around and go, no, everybody loves it here. Everybody's fine. You do have people who are hovering in what I call the pit of the tainted. So, it's incumbent upon you to be able to turn around and recognize who those people are so you can really knock it off at the pass before they resign. It might surprise you to think that to become more employee-centric with your employees, you have to become more customer-centric with your employees. That means approaching them when you have an opportunity to fix the problem. If you've been following me for any length of time, you know my background is in hospitality. I love hospitality. I love the service industry. It is At the end, one of the biggest rules, it is so much better to approach a table full of diners, for instance, after they've got their meal and taken the first or second bite. Then, you can go to them and you can say, hey, how's your meal tasting?

Is it good?

It gives you the opportunity to fix it right then and there rather than when they're paying their bill and you go, so, how was everything? Oh, I'm so sorry. And then expecting them to come back. It's the same thing with your employees. Approaching them when you have the ability to fix the issue, address concerns, and adjust to the changing situations in their job, in your culture, in your business, whatever the changing situation is so much better than waiting until they're pissed off and they have their resignation in their hand and saying, I'm so sorry you weren't unhappy. Can you make some time to come in and tell us what went wrong? Please come. I want to know everything because I want to be approachable. Now that you're quitting, I want to show you this person who is so approachable. And I want you to have this heart-to-heart with me and tell me everything we did wrong. The overarching lesson here. And it bears repeating is just like we have customer-centric policies, we must now have employee-centric policies. Policies and procedures that support the needs of our employees, not just policies and procedures that support the needs of our business. We need policies and procedures that support the needs of our employees. And as I've alluded to, At the beginning, these are skills that you already have if you serve customers. You know how to be of service. I really loved how I was trained with, if you're not serving a customer, you damn well better be serving someone who is. That was a philosophy I grew up with. And I always thought that was brilliant because no matter what role I was in, I knew that no matter what, my role was to be of service. I think it was a car manufacturer who had the tagline, our customers are job one. I encourage you to make your employees your customers. The people that you serve, make them job one. In the case of exit interviews, obviously the opposite to that would be stay interviews. Becoming the coaching and mentoring center of your business. These are the components of the first key element. It is no longer adequate to meet your employee once a year for the dreaded performance evaluation. I encourage you to drop that altogether. No, today's employee-centric leaders need to be proactive and engaging with their employees. Like our customers, our employees need to know that we care. This is so imperative if we want to be able to keep people. But this brings us to the second key element. Just like your customers have to trust you to do business with you, your employees need to trust you To work for you. There's a lot in that statement. What does it mean to be trustworthy? At its core, it means delivering on your promises. But it goes so much deeper. I do encourage you to read Stephen Covey's book, The Speed of Trust. It does a great job outlining this idea between trust and competencies and capacity and so on. And I encourage you to read it. I will say though, to be trustworthy and notice I did not say to be perceived as trustworthy or to act trustworthy. I said to be trustworthy. You have to be authentically you with all your flaws and all your imperfections. You have to be you first. That means no personal agendas, no hidden objectives, no carrot and sticking. And for those people who aren't baby boomers, carrot and sticking, if you can imagine the old-timey with the donkey, trying to get the donkey to move, you put a carrot in front of their nose and they try to reach the carrot with their mouths. And because they do that, they walk forward. And that was a way to get them to walk forward. The other carrot and sticking metaphor is that you feed people as a reward or you beat them with the stick when they do bad things. Carrot and sticking no longer works in our work environments anymore. The nice thing about being trustworthy though is you never have to remember what lie— I'm sorry, what mistruth you told to whom. And trustworthiness is a huge factor in our 3rd key element. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I hope you are finding value in today's episode. As you can probably tell, I'm super passionate about this topic. I'd just like to put it out there that if you belong to an association or a company that you feel could use this information and maybe you would like to delve a little bit deeper, maybe you'd like to workshop what this might look like for your business, please drop me a line and let's connect. My contact information is in the show notes. So far, in order to stave off the endless resignations and labor turnover, we've talked about the importance of becoming customer-centric with our employees. So, becoming employee-centric, treating them more like we are being of service to them. And we've outlined the importance of being trustworthy. The 3rd key element we need to talk about is tightly tied to our second key element. And that is walking the talk. I remember a very cute and public service ad where— oh, you know what? Let me just show you. It looks like rain again today. Dark clouds Together and fill the sky. Don't know how to talk to you, just know how to say goodbye. Have you actually got a driver's licence? I am, I don't think so. Go back where you came from. Learn to speak English. Go back where you came from. Now, I'm not saying that children are like your employees or employees are like children. But I do make the argument that as a leader, you set the tone of how people behave in your work environment. You set the tone for what they do and how they do it. That is whatever expectations you have on how your employees are to behave with one another, or on the job, or with customers. You have to model all those traits. Gone are the days of, don't do what I do. Do what I say. In fact, I shared a story. I think it was a couple episodes ago. I shared a story of my son helping me at the hotel that I was working at. We were getting ready for a banquet and he was helping me move a table. And it was really interesting because we were moving the table down the corridor and he goes, You know what, Dad? He says, from the minute you walked in here, you've had a big smile on your face. And I said, well, yeah, you know, as a general manager, I have to set the tone by which I want everybody else to work. I have to. I can't let my stress affect my team. And if you've read any, if you've read my book or read any of my blogs, you know that my theory is as leaders, we're supposed to absorb stress, not create it. Anyway, my son was looking at me. He goes, Dad, that is so great.

Great!

Could you do that at home? There you go, right? People notice the way you behave and how you behave. And so, it's incumbent upon us to make sure that you do what you say. Your customers have high expectations of you and your business. But so does your staff. And this whole idea of familiarity breeds contempt where because they see you every single day, they might see your good days and your bad days. The idea here is that it's imperative to be walking your intention. You have to be the one to set the guiding principles of your culture and of your business. If you've done a good job, you've hired the right people with the same values as you, or even complementary values. Nothing is more important to today's employee than to know that there is an alignment of values. More so today with the Gen Ys and the young Gen Zs. Initiatives that you take the lead in like being socially responsible and socially relevant is essential. Today's workers need this stability in this, well, almost post-pandemic era. Because don't fool yourself, we are in a new era. The way that we used to do things will no longer work. And as Gen Zs are entering the workforce, my daughter's Gen Z. She's 20 years old now. She's in the workforce now. You as a leader must be proactive in setting the culture and walking the talk, making absolutely sure that you are intentional about your expectations. It will not only reaffirm the trust people have put into you, it will get them to follow you to the ends of the earth. I hope this is making sense and that you're finding this information useful. And I hope you're giggling just a little bit as well. This is a really deep subject. But it's okay to look at these elements and have fun. Just like it's okay to have fun with your customers, it's okay to have fun with your employees as well. The 4th key element is to make people the most important aspect of your business. Now, I know, I know the big business mantra that's out there is, if there's no margin, there's no mission. Which means that if you're not pulling a profit, you're not going to be able to run your business for very long. But I guarantee you that putting your people first will get you to that margin. Just like if you invest the time and attention to fulfill the needs of your customers, investing the time and energy to fulfill fill the needs of your employees will reap huge rewards. Your people want to know that they matter. And having well-defined job roles with ways to let people play outside their job description is huge. Whenever I speak in front of a group of leaders, one of the questions I ask them is, do they have people on their team whose capacity and capabilities far exceed the limits of their job description? And almost every hand goes up. It's incredible to see it. So, I encourage you to understand where people's zones of genius are. Where would they like to play? And find ways to make that happen even if it's outside the realm of what you hired them to do. This is where becoming a coach and a mentor rather than their manager plays huge dividends. If you find out where their passions are, you can take steps to support them in it. Again, even if it's outside their job description. 3M and Google became famous for their 20% time that allowed employees to work on their passion projects that ultimately led to the company creating new innovations because of what their staff did because they had an idea and they got to play. Being the coach and mentor will give you insight into your employees' desires for the future. What training do they want? How do they want to be developed? How can you support that? And the last thing I want to mention on this 4th element of being a people-first culture is design work-life integration. Before COVID we were focusing on work-life balance. Today, with remote working, hybrid working, back-to-office policies, we must start looking at work-life integration. Compared to work-life balance, which was a little bit of work, a little bit of— we're looking at how does work and life integrate together. How do we encourage finding that integration so that we have a more holistic view of work and life? There is no doubt that mental health is a huge concern these days. I just lost a really good friend. And I wish there was some way of understanding what mental health concerns he had. But becoming people-centric and creating focus to this work-life integration, I think will be the key. I just heard the news report yesterday or the day before that the province of Ontario was the first Canadian jurisdiction to explore right to disconnect legislation. They're actually going to legislate this idea that employees will have the right to disconnect. But as business leaders, we need to set this as a dominant employee-centric policy. We need to take the lead. We need to— again, if you're talking with your employees, if you're coaching and mentoring with your employees, you're going to find out the ins, the outs, the down, the what's wrong, what's working, what's not working. You're going to find out what are some of the things that are stressing them because you've created this trusting, open culture that is working towards integrating life and work. And you'll be able to define really strong policies about when to work and when not to work. With all our connectivity and all the expectations around, ooh, ooh, I have to check my phone. I have an email to answer. I'm I'm so sorry, honey. Just give me one second. I just have to answer this. We are driving burnout and mental health issues that will drive people out of our doors looking for friendlier work environments. Wouldn't it be great if that was you? You know, I talked about Glassdoor and about the power of Glassdoor and the reviews. I think Indeed also has reviews, employer reviews. And again, I look at any kind of review processes, feedback I don't necessarily want to know what I'm doing right. I want to know what I can do better. And if we could take our ego out of those reviews and actually dig deep into it, we might see that there are some common problems when we see these reviews. And as hurtful as some of the reviews can be when people are upset and posting reviews as keyboard warriors and that sort of thing, I think it gives us a lot of insight. But this idea of being able to be a leader in your industry by turning around and saying, you know what? I'm not going to wait for the government to tell me if there's any kind of right to disconnect legislation. We're just going to do it. We're going to set the box of when we expect people to work and when they can't work. We're going to set a limit. We're going to say, if you get an email after 5:30, you're not allowed to answer it until the next day. We're not going to let you work at home. We're going to insist that you turn off your computer. I think it's really ironic because at the beginning of COVID there was all sorts of control software that were out there that you can install on people's computers so that bosses can sit at their home desk while their employees are sitting at their home desk and monitor what the employee was doing. Because the whole big thing was, well, if they're not in the office, how will I know that they're doing the work? And then, as time progressed very quickly, people realized, well, at the end of it, I can judge people by their output. I don't need to control it. But now, I think we need to be able to turn around and control when people are working. And we have to insist and find ways to create these connections so that people can integrate work into their life and not make part of their life work. I think we have this whole idea that we used to live to work. As a baby boomer, that was my big thing. It was all about the employer. It's all about my job. It's all about my identity was tied to what I did for a living. And so, I lived to work. And now, we need to work to live. And the operative word is to live. We need to have I'd like to wrap up with a couple of cautionaries. And if you've watched any of my episodes, I'm always cautious about this idea of people getting this new idea and then it becomes the flavor of the month. This is something you cannot play lip service. You can't play lip service to becoming employee-centric or people-centric leader. You just can't. You can't all of a sudden come into the office and say, hey, I watched this podcast. So from now on, we're going to be people-centric. Let's sit down, write some policies. This is not something you can band-aid or make the flavor of the month. Becoming employee-centric requires intentionality and it requires you to be strategic. It needs you to be open as a leader. It needs you to have a lot of humility to understand that you yourself are not perfect. If you play your cards right, years from now, Your employees will be sending you messages on Facebook and LinkedIn saying what a difference you made in their lives. I've been privileged and honored that I got to play in different work environments where people 15 years later, 20 years later are going, hey Marc, I remember when we worked together. To me, that was like getting the best customer reviews. That's when you will know for sure that you've done good. I hope that this has been helpful for you. If you have any questions or comments about today's topic, or you'd like to brainstorm some aspect of your business, feel free to click the calendar link in the show notes and book a complimentary 30-minute session with me. I live to serve. And I would absolutely love to have a conversation with you about your business. What is it that you're liking? What are some challenges you're facing? It's completely complimentary. And sometimes, you just have to step out of the bottle to see the label. And please, if you've enjoyed this episode, feel free to subscribe to this podcast. Share this episode with your network. I thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope that you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception.