By Shane Green
For the past twenty years, I have been consulting with hospitality organisations around the world on their guest and customer experience (CX) strategies; implementing the products, sensory elements, and/or processes that make the hotel, restaurant, club, or bar run effectively, while also creating a style and ambiance to fit the brand and market.
Over that time, I have seen on too many occasions a lack of consideration for the people aspect of the business, and as a result, I have seen some of the coolest places and spaces, with some of the best dishes and drinks, fall over because they failed to take care of their people. It is important to consider the cost of turnover or losing talented people, the challenge of finding great people, and why taking care of your people is so important. So, we have been working with hospitality companies to develop a people strategy that ensures the right employee experience and company culture, we call it the Three M’s of EX Strategy.
The three M’s of our EX strategy stand for moments, mechanisms, and managers.
Just as we have done with our customers, the goal of your EX strategy should be to create an emotional bond with your employees so that they will perform at their best, take care of our customers really well, and stick around for a while, especially if they are good at what they do.
We know that if we create positive feelings in key moments through various mechanisms and manager interactions, employees will feel good about what they do and whom they do it for. When most of your employees feel this way, you create a positive workplace culture. Remember, when it comes to people you are working with, they are creatures of emotion not logic, so you need to have emotional intent when it comes to your employees to create a great culture. If a strong brand is the outcome of a good CX strategy, then a strong culture is the outcome of a good EX strategy.
Moments refer to the key moments in an employee’s day, week, month, year, or career. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who has provided tremendous insights into how to deliver great customer experiences, emphasised the importance of these moments. His influential work around peak-end theory and how humans experience the world around them is necessary reading for every business in hospitality. His work suggests that humans relive experiences as snapshots, not videos, so when we work on CX or EX strategies, we first need to understand the key moments that will define the customer’s or employee’s experience.
We have been studying employee moments for the past ten years and have identified over 35 moments fundamental to defining how employees feel about what they do and whom they do it for. Moments, such as the interview arrival, the employee’s first day, a performance review, remembering an anniversary date and birthday, how a manager reacts when they do something well or make a mistake, and whether someone acknowledges their contribution at the end of the day all determine how the employee feels about that day, what they do, whom they do it for, and their career. If you are serious about culture and improving your employee experience, you need to understand and map out the employee journey and the key moments that will impact their experience overall and day-to-day.
We have been specifically focused on the key moments in the employees’ day and we know that when they are welcomed each day, are recognised for something they did well, are made to feel they are a part of a team and are made to feel at the end of their shift that what they did matters, that they will feel good about what they do and whom they do it for. If they feel this every day and most of their co-workers feel the same way, then you go a long way to creating a great team culture.
Once you identify these moments, you need to focus on the mechanisms, the second M of the EX strategy, and how they are impacting the employee’s experience at work. Our team has been refreshing or building mechanisms for organisations for the past ten years, and I wrote about many of these mechanisms in my book, Culture Hacker (Wiley, 2017). Companies need to understand that many mechanisms need an emotional lift to foster more meaning, alignment with the brand, and a better connection with employees. Mechanisms like recruitment, orientation and onboarding, training, recognition, communication, career planning, and how to involve employees in ideation and planning are areas we often see as mere ‘tick-the-box’ activities that do little to excite and engage employees with the business and brand. They are bland, boring, and functional at best. It’s time you thought about having a little more fun and aligning your internal mechanisms with the environment you seek for your customers. By considering the emotional tone and feelings to be generated around each of these mechanisms, they are far more likely to be relevant and meaningful with your employees and help you cultivate a great company culture.
The final M is for managers. While we refer to managers, we are more specifically talking about leadership. Leadership is a manager’s ability to inspire their employees’ hearts and minds to want to do what they want them to do, to do something they may not want to do, and to perform at their best. Leadership is more focused on emotions, which is a crucial aspect of any employee experience and critical to company culture. Leadership can seem like a tiring and endless goal having to be ‘on’ all the time. However, when considered in terms of moments, we coach managers to bring their emotional energy at certain times of the day, week, or month, rather than always having to be on or inspire all the time. Our studies suggest that a manager should spend as little as an hour every day in their leadership role where they walk around teaching, giving feedback, sharing their passions and stories, and work alongside their team to demonstrate how work gets done, getting to know the individuals, helping out as needed, and demonstrating some care.
We have been teaching managers about the skills, habits, and actions that can make a difference in these moments, ultimately creating a legacy of leadership. We would argue this leadership development and understanding are non-negotiable to the culture and business success in hospitality. While some leaders might be born, all managers can be leaders through the proper guidance and coaching.
Remember to always listen to your employees, to have a pulse on how they feel about what they do and whom they do it for.
As a result of their feedback, consider what moments are causing frustration or disengagement and then determine whether they are a manager, mechanism, or both. Focus on fostering more emotional connection with your employees in certain moments so they feel they have a relationship and responsibility towards the manager and organisation. By developing an employee experience strategy that creates awareness around the key moments, has mechanisms that support the style of the brand, and managers who care about and engage with their team, then you create the opportunity to build the type of culture that will take better care of your customers, ultimately generating better bottom-line results.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: World-renowned speaker, author, and television personality, Shane Green is an experienced business entrepreneur who consults with global Fortune 500 leaders on customer experience and organisational culture. From New Zealand, Shane now works internationally with brands such as BMW, Westfield, Footlocker, MGM resorts and the NBA.
