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272: Your Employee Experience Is Showing Up in Your Customer Experience · Customer Service Revolution | Customer Experience & Employee Experience for Business Leaders

• 0:48
  Employee experience has become one of those phrases that every company talks about.
• 0:53
  But too often, Organizations try to improve employee experience by adding benefits,
• 0:58
  recognition programs, surveys,
• 1:00
  or engagement initiatives. And those things can matter,
• 1:04
  but they may not address the real issue because employees don't experience your
• 1:08
  organization through your company's mission statement.
• 1:11
  They experience it through their leaders.
• 1:14
  Welcome back to the Customer Service Revolution Podcast.
• 1:17
  Today I am joined by Dave Murray,
• 1:21
  our Vice President of Consulting here at The DiJulus Group And Dave
• 1:24
  has been working closely with PSECU on employee experience
• 1:29
  and leadership development. So I really wanted to pick his brain about this.
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  And we're going to talk about what he's seen firsthand,
• 1:35
  what leaders get wrong, what actually changes behavior,
• 1:39
  and why employee experience ultimately shows up.
• 1:42
  In the customer experience. How are you doing,
• 1:44
  Dave?
• 1:45
  Denise, I am doing great. Thanks for having me and how are you doing?
• 1:48
  I'm doing well too. Thank you.
• 1:49
  Thank you so much for making time to join us.
• 1:52
  I know you are about to get on a plane.
• 1:53
  So let's get what we can out of you before you hit the road.
• 1:58
  And ironically, I'm headed back to PSECU ~ to spend the day with their leaders
• 2:03
  tomorrow. So the timing couldn't be any better.
• 2:05
  And it's such a great topic. And I'm thrilled to be able to share it because P
• 2:09
  S E C U, which stands for, by the way,
• 2:12
  the Pennsylvania State Employee Credit Union,
• 2:15
  which is a little misleading because they are no longer limited to just employees
• 2:19
  of the state of Pennsylvania. They kind of grown.
• 2:21
  Their member base. As a matter of fact,
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  they're close to 600,000 members today.
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  But they started back in 1934 as a credit union for Pennsylvania State employees.
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  But they are doing such great things with the work that they have done with
• 2:35
  us at the DeJulius Group from both the external member experience,
• 2:39
  but also, and probably more importantly,
• 2:41
  the internal employee experience that we're gonna talk about today.
• 2:45
  So the timing's great.
• 2:45
  Fabulous. and Dave, I know this is something that's near and dear to your heart too,
• 2:50
  as you penned a book with John De Julius on
• 2:55
  the employee experience. So I'm sure there's parts of that that
• 2:58
  are gonna get brought up in here too,
• 2:59
  the ex employee experience revolution.
• 3:02
  And listeners,
• 3:03
  Yes. Sure.
• 3:04
  I'll have a link in the notes for that book for you too.
• 3:07
  When companies tell you, Dave,
• 3:09
  that they want to improve the employee experience,
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  what do they usually think the problem is?
• 3:14
  And what do you often discover the problem actually is?
• 3:17
  Well, what they normally think is,
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  you know, we hear this a lot, maybe they maybe they mismatch people,
• 3:23
  right? They don't have people in the right seats.
• 3:24
  We hear that all the time. Or their onboarding needs to be improved
• 3:29
  or or their overall training needs to be a little bit improved.
• 3:32
  Very rarely do organizations feel that they maybe have they might
• 3:37
  be lacking a little bit when it comes to the actual managers.
• 3:39
  that's usually where the problem lies.
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  And I'm not saying
• 3:42
  That a lot of organizations have lousy managers out there.
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  Not at all, right? There's a lot of great managers.
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  I'm not saying that managers aren't good at what they do,
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  but what we find is managers are usually usually lacking what we refer
• 3:55
  to as the soft skills of leadership.
• 3:58
  And let me give you a quick example.
• 4:00
  And this comes from the book, the research that John and I did for
• 4:03
  for the employee experience revolution.
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  And it it holds true with every organization that I share this statistic with.
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  But there's a statistic that
• 4:10
  That came out about two and a half years ago on something that's called accidental
• 4:14
  managers. Now, what an accidental manager is,
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  someone that got promoted into a supervisory managerial role,
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  and they have the the job skill knowledge.
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  In fact, they might have done the job themselves,
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  they might have got promoted from within the ranks,
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  but they have very little, if any,
• 4:30
  managerial training, which translates to they have very little soft skill knowledge
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  of what it takes to be a leader.
• 4:36
  Right. So it's kind of that old saying that,
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  you know, you're the best salesperson gets promoted into the the
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  the leadership role because we want you to go and lead by example
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  and hopefully through osmosis all your great traits kind of l land
• 4:49
  on everybody else. But that's not always the case.
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  And we find very often that best producers don't even want to have that managerial
• 4:55
  role. They'd rather just go and produce,
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  but they take the role because that's kind of the next step in their career.
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  They almost feel they have to take the role.
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  And they're a really good example of an
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  Accidental manager because they're they're taking the role,
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  still doing what they do and what they love to do,
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  which in this case may be selling,
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  but don't really have the time or the knowledge to manage their team that they
• 5:16
  now have. And so getting back to this term accidental managers and a study that
• 5:20
  was done ~ about two and a half years ago,
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  as I mentioned, by an organization called Achieve Workforce Initiative,
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  here's what they found. They did a study on how many accidental managers
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  are out there in the workforce today.
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  And the number they came back with was 82% of current managers in
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  the workforce fall under this accidental manager category.
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  Now, that's a lot, right? That is a lot.
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  And so that's a problem. And so when we hear we have an employee
• 5:48
  ~ experience problem, we usually already know where it's going to lie because again,
• 5:52
  it doesn't mean that those 82% are bad managers.
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  They're probably really good at a lot of things.
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  But they may not be focused on some of the things that are most important
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  to delivering a great employee experience to their team members.
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  Not everybody comes off the bench being a Ted Lasso.
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  Correct. Yes.
• 6:09
  Yeah, we talk a lot on this podcast about designing a customer journey.
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  Should companies be just as intentional when they're designing an employee journey?
• 6:19
  And where do leaders have the biggest impact on that journey?
• 6:22
  Yeah, so that's a great question.
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  Our answer to that is yes, that that should be just as purposeful
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  as your external experience, right?
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  But a lot of organizations aren't focused on that either,
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  right? A lot of organizations kind of hope that they hire people that have
• 6:37
  a passion for their customer experience and they're gonna go out and deliver it,
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  but we know that's not the case,
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  especially if you have not pr provided them any guardrails to follow,
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  right? And that's why we have so much inconsistency out there when it comes
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  to the customer experience.
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  Well, the same thing happens on the employee experience,
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  right? We actually we actually call it I I like to refer to it as
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  the the manager lottery. And we've all been a part of that at some point or another,
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  right? Where we we had a job, we loved our manager,
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  we would we would go through a brick wall for them.
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  If they asked us to show up early,
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  we'd we'd say of course. All those things,
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  right? Because that we felt cared for.
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  We felt that manager had our back and we would do whatever that manager asked.
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  We also had managers at at some time or another where we felt like a number,
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  we felt like we weren't cared for.
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  We felt like maybe they didn't even know us all that well.
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  We're just kind of like one of a of many.
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  And what happens is your engagement is not as much.
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  Even if you really like the organization,
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  you're gonna become less engaged.
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  Well, here's the thing: that manager themselves has has such ~ an important role
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  in that engagement, right? If I feel that my manager cares for me,
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  is helping me get to where I want to go,
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  has my back, sings my praises every once in a while.
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  I am gonna be more engaged i in my overall role and the organization.
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  And conversely, the other's gonna be true if I feel that I don't have that that
• 7:52
  backing from my manager. So it it's i one of the things that I find kind
• 7:57
  of interesting, Denise, is there's a statistic that we talk about all the time.
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  That when you combine two important factors,
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  how productive a team member is gonna be in their role,
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  plus how long they're gonna stick around.
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  So those are those are two pretty important things for employees,
• 8:12
  right? Because we know
• 8:13
  That when we lose people, th their their length of tenure,
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  if it's shorter, that that costs us a lot of money to replace them.
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  And how pro how productive they're gonna be in their role.
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  So those are two really important things.
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  And we have a study that tells us those two things,
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  when those are combined, so they're more productive and they stick around longer.
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  The biggest impact on those two things being positive is the relationship they have
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  with their immediate manager. Do I have a good relationship?
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  Do I feel that they have my back?
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  And so it really surprises me.
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  that more organizations don't have that as a strategy that they're teaching their
• 8:44
  leaders when they become when they get promoted into management that you know
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  is as as important as driving the results are,
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  hitting those KPIs, whatever they are in your business,
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  having great relationships with your team members and
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  and fostering that relationship is just as important and maybe in some cases more
• 9:00
  important, especially if we're suffering from high turnover right now
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  or lack of productivity. So it it's it's one of those things that is so important
• 9:08
  To organizational growth, but is often either overlooked completely
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  or an assumption is made that everyone's doing that.
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  You know, we got that because we hired great leaders,
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  they're gonna go and do that. But that's not always part of that,
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  you know, managerial one-on-one.
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  A lot of organizations don't talk about those soft skills,
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  they just focus on the hard skills,
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  driving the KPIs, driving results,
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  and don't talk about how to really lead behind the scenes.
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  And that's why we have so many inconsistencies internally as well.
• 9:35
  ~ all right, so you're heading later today to Pennsylvania State Employees Credit
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  Union, right? Did I say that right?
• 9:43
  Yes, correct. Yes, you did. You did.
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  P S E
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  C to work on the employee experience leadership.
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  If you can without getting into anything proprietary,
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  what were they trying to accomplish and what did you see
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  as their biggest opportunity?
• 9:58
  So they've done some great work.
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  We've been working with them for probably about two years now,
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  and we've done some fantastic work with them.
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  It it started all with the member experience,
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  like most of our relationships do when we're working with a with a client of ours.
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  So we created some great content,
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  but then we also spent some time in doing some workshops,
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  really focusing on leadership,
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  making sure that all of our leaders are focused on this as well as internal culture.
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  Things like
• 10:24
  The ~ communication internally from department to department,
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  so we're not dropping the ball and those sorts of things.
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  So here's what happened. We we created all these great member experience focuses
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  and guardrails, if you will, some standards that we want all of their team members
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  to be following, whether they're in one of their branches and they're
• 10:43
  it they're interacting with members face to face,
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  or if they're in one of their many contact centers,
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  they are they are more phone-based and digital-based than they
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  are face-to-face in this day and era.
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  So they have larger contact centers,
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  a larger contact center employee base than they do face-to-face employees.
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  But we create standards for all of those,
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  whether it's digital, a chat conversation,
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  a phone conversation, or a face-to-face.
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  So we create all these standards that we wanted to roll out.
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  Then what they did, which was brilliant,
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  they took the strategy of rather than get all of our frontline team members to say,
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  hey everybody, here's what you wanted to do,
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  here are the standards, go do them.
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  What what we're doing, we're in the midst of doing this right now.
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  We are getting all of their leaders together.
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  When I say leaders for purposes of the day,
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  I mean anyone who supervises anyone else.
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  So we we've had their CEO in one of our sessions,
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  we've had some supervisors that have been on the job for two weeks in some
• 11:32
  of our sessions, right? It's every leader in their organization is coming
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  to these sessions that we've been doing over the course of five days,
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  and we are explaining the playbook to them.
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  We are explaining what we want all of our team members to go and be doing,
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  how that we want them to be interacting with our members.
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  And then we're saying, okay, leader,
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  what we would then want you to do is we're gonna help you create some action plans
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  because you are then the one that is taking this to your team member.
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  Right? It's not us and some big elaborate,
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  hey, we're gonna go do this. We want you to then bring this to your team members,
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  and as part of your ongoing meeting,
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  your ongoing conversations with them,
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  we want you to i introduce these behaviors,
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  introduce these standards, and then reinforce these standards,
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  look for opportunities to ~
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  To recognize someone on these standards,
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  look for opportunities to coach in the moment when needed with these new standards.
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  So we're really asking all of the leaders across the organization
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  to take these tools and understand them backwards and forwards so then they
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  can be the trainer, if you will.
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  And that's really, really important because one of the things that
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  we have found that that makes initiatives fail,
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  quite honestly.
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  is we roll it out or or whatever it is,
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  you go and roll it out and you you think people are excited about it,
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  but then there's no conversation about it after the fact.
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  And so there's a saying that I like to tell our clients that if it's important
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  to my boss, it's going to remain important to me.
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  Right. So if I go to a rollout and I hear these things and they sound good
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  and they sound like they make my job a little more engaging and a little more fun,
• 13:00
  they sounds like it'd be good customer service,
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  I might get excited about it.
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  But if I go back to my department and my boss never brings it up again,
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  right? If I have one of those bosses that just assumes I saw this in
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  the rollout and I'm good to go,
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  then eventually it's going to wear off.
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  I am going to gravitate towards what what my boss is talking about,
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  whether it's hitting KPIs or and those are important things too,
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  but it's not going to help this initiative.
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  So what we know is really important to the the health of any initiative,
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  whether it's customer service or really any initiative,
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  is that
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  The managers out there understand the importance and they are talking about
• 13:34
  it on a regular basis, bringing it up in meetings,
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  bringing it up if they do pre-shift huddles,
• 13:39
  bringing it up in one-on-one sessions.
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  All those things are really important to give it life and make sure
• 13:45
  it really becomes part of our culture.
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  So that's what we're in the midst of right now with PSECU.
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  It's not really a a rollout per se.
• 13:51
  It it's kind of a it's the first step of a cultural change for the better,
• 13:57
  to make sure that all of these member experiences
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  are rolled out to their team members and then managers are
• 14:02
  are managing those behaviors just like they're managing some of the other KPIs
• 14:07
  in the organization.
• 14:08
  That's great. Dave, I know a lot of companies provide leadership training.
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  Not all, but there are a lot that do.
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  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 14:13
  ~
• 14:14
  but attending leadership training doesn't necessarily mean somebody's gonna become
• 14:18
  a better leader. What is it that turns leadership development from something people
• 14:24
  attend into something where they're actually changing behavior?
• 14:28
  So I think I think one of the things that's really important
• 14:30
  is providing leaders with the tools that will make them successful.
• 14:34
  And let me give you a quick example.
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  And PSCCU is doing this as well,
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  right? So a lot of organizations out there ask their leaders
• 14:42
  to conduct one-on-one meetings with their team members,
• 14:47
  right? It probably not enough organizations,
• 14:49
  but a lot have that as a requirement or at least a an ask,
• 14:53
  a suggested ask that they're
• 14:55
  There's some sort of cadence, whether it's weekly or monthly,
• 14:58
  or maybe at least quarterly, you're having some sort of one-on-one.
• 15:01
  And a lot of leadership, ~ leadership trainings will will include that as well.
• 15:05
  But what very often is the missing piece would be the soft skills of a one-on-one,
• 15:10
  right? Because a one-on-one meeting done well and done regularly can have very great
• 15:16
  ~ impact. Right? It could it could be a very useful tool.
• 15:20
  A one-on-one done poorly can
• 15:22
  can literally do just the opposite,
• 15:23
  right? It it could it could deflate the employee.
• 15:26
  And here's what we mean. Most organizations might say,
• 15:29
  hey, starting next Monday, ~ we want everyone to every leader to have
• 15:32
  a one-on-one meeting. So get them scheduled and and have them take place.
• 15:35
  Now if you tell 20 leaders that without any sort of guidance of what that one-on-one
• 15:40
  should look like, you're going to get 20 different iterations
• 15:42
  of that one-on-one meeting based on their own knowledge of what that is.
• 15:46
  Maybe they did have that somewhere in the past and so they they went through it.
• 15:49
  But you're gonna have 20 different versions of that if you're not careful.
• 15:52
  So one of the things that PSCCU did was they created a one-on-one template
• 15:57
  so that their leaders follow the template,
• 15:59
  and if they're following the template,
• 16:00
  we know that they'll be having more successful one-on-one meetings.
• 16:04
  Because the other thing that happens with one-on-one meetings in organizations,
• 16:08
  if I am told as a leader to conduct one-on-one meetings with my team without very
• 16:12
  ~ very much instruction,
• 16:14
  I'm probably going to assume, and very often this happens,
• 16:16
  I assume that my job is to find the things you're doing wrong,
• 16:19
  tell you about it, and correct it.
• 16:21
  Which obviously we do have to address those issues,
• 16:23
  but that should not be the entire one-on-one meeting.
• 16:26
  One-on-one meetings are a great time to build rapport,
• 16:28
  to build that relationship that I have with the team member,
• 16:31
  like we talked about ~ just a few minutes ago,
• 16:33
  how important that overall relationship is to their productivity
• 16:36
  and length of tenure. So it's a great opportunity to start building that
• 16:40
  relationship if you don't have it already.
• 16:42
  It's a great opportunity for that team member to express to the leader some
• 16:45
  of their goals, some of the things they're having issues with.
• 16:47
  We always say it's as much the employees' meeting as it is the leader's meeting,
• 16:52
  right? But leaders typically get that a little backwards and feel it's their
• 16:55
  job to give you some criticism or some to-dos and then send you on your way.
• 17:00
  So a PSCCU template kind of guides them through that meeting.
• 17:05
  Let the employee speak. Build some report first.
• 17:08
  Let the employee go first. What's on their mind?
• 17:10
  What's concerning them? Then give your coaching or praise,
• 17:13
  or hopefully a little bit of both,
• 17:15
  or more praise. And then at the end,
• 17:17
  come up with some action items.
• 17:18
  What does the team member have to do in neck in the next whatever month,
• 17:22
  whatever the cadence is? What do I have to do as the leader?
• 17:24
  So we keep moving in the right direction and keep helping you grow as an employee.
• 17:29
  So again, though that's just little things like that,
• 17:31
  where on paper it says do this,
• 17:34
  but without any sort of guardrails.
• 17:36
  You're gonna get so many different iterations and some of them probably will
• 17:39
  be counterproductive.
• 17:40
  Dave, we talked about this a lot of times within our organization,
• 17:44
  and I know that from stage you and John both talk about this too.
• 17:48
  The idea that people don't leave companies,
• 17:51
  they leave managers. And that might be oversimplified,
• 17:54
  but there's something underneath it.
• 17:56
  in your opinion here, how much influence does a frontline manager have over whether
• 18:02
  somebody loves or hates working for an organization?
• 18:05
  that that impact is huge. It is huge.
• 18:08
  And it may not happen overnight.
• 18:10
  It may not be instantaneous, but it can kind of trickle at like a drip almost.
• 18:15
  And and frontline managers can change behaviors.
• 18:18
  They can change attitudes. And they probably have the most power over that than
• 18:24
  any other managerial positions in the organization.
• 18:27
  Right. So the CEO can have a town hall and get everyone excited and everyone happy.
• 18:31
  But when I go back to my role
• 18:33
  And my manager is saying the opposite things,
• 18:35
  my supervisor is not building engagement.
• 18:38
  No matter what the CEO says or the director of the department or the senior VP,
• 18:42
  whoever it is, what I'm hearing on the front lines,
• 18:45
  what I'm hearing day after day after day,
• 18:47
  is going to become my reality.
• 18:49
  It's going to become part of my culture.
• 18:50
  So I think a lot of organizations ~ don't give that position enough
• 18:57
  credit for the
• 18:58
  impact they have, positive or negative,
• 19:01
  on the overall frontline culture and morale.
• 19:04
  Right? And so and and the natural thing is the the further you go down from from
• 19:09
  the boardroom, the less engaged team members are going to be.
• 19:12
  There's some science that tells us that.
• 19:14
  That's just kind of a natural happening.
• 19:15
  So if you have a if you have a supervisor or a frontline manager who is
• 19:20
  not on board either and and is really not providing engagement,
• 19:24
  pr not pr not providing that support,
• 19:26
  letting
• 19:26
  letting team members really do what they are there to do,
• 19:29
  then that's going to really change people's opinions about the organization.
• 19:33
  Even if I came into the organization loving it and so excited,
• 19:37
  I thought it was my dream job,
• 19:38
  one bad leader can change that.
• 19:40
  And and one of the reasons I was excited about writing the book with John when
• 19:44
  we wrote it, when we started that about I guess four years ago is now when
• 19:47
  we first started the research for the Employee Experience Revolution book
• 19:51
  was coming from
• 19:52
  the the sports world where I was before joining the DeJoyus group,
• 19:55
  I saw that happen all the time,
• 19:56
  unfortunately. I saw some really talented people leave their dream job,
• 20:02
  not because it didn't live up to expectations,
• 20:04
  not because they didn't like it anymore,
• 20:06
  but usually it was because a manager was just leading them down the wrong path
• 20:10
  or being a roadblock and took the joy and took the engagement out of the role.
• 20:14
  So I saw a lot of organizations lose some great people for no other reason
• 20:20
  Then they wound up working for someone that just wasn't leading the
• 20:23
  way they should be leading.
• 20:24
  P S P S E C U also invests a lot in their people,
• 20:29
  not just in having you come in for consulting,
• 20:31
  but I think they've sent people to the academy too,
• 20:34
  haven't they?
• 20:35
  They
• 20:35
  have. They actually sent a whole team of five people at
• 20:40
  one time through CXEA. And they did that on purpose because they wanted
• 20:44
  to make sure that it wasn't just someone from HR,
• 20:47
  it wasn't just someone from training,
• 20:49
  wasn't just someone from the contact center.
• 20:51
  They wanted to make sure that they had leaders from some of their most important
• 20:56
  and impactful divisions going through that class together.
• 20:59
  So they sent they sent five people.
• 21:01
  And they represented all the the largest ~ parts of their business
• 21:06
  to go through CXEA. So and that was so helpful for them because not only were they
• 21:11
  bringing us in for the consulting and doing the workshops,
• 21:14
  then they also had these five team members coming and and learning all
• 21:18
  the ins and outs, all the behind the scenes.
• 21:20
  So when we're done working with them,
• 21:22
  they will have a team of five,
• 21:24
  and that has cascaded to beyond that team because they go back and they share
• 21:27
  and and train others.
• 21:29
  So they have they really have a advisory board,
• 21:32
  if you will, internally that is laser focused on this,
• 21:35
  understands the importance, understands that they are doing this because they want
• 21:39
  to create an external member experience that separates them from their competition
• 21:45
  because that's really important to them in a very competitive industry.
• 21:48
  And they also know that they have a laser focus now on their employee experience
• 21:53
  that will also set them apart from not only their competition,
• 21:55
  but just from
• 21:56
  organizations in general, right?
• 21:58
  Beyond just their competitors.
• 21:59
  And so that that was their goal.
• 22:01
  And so you're right, Denise, they they made an investment of of time
• 22:05
  and dollars with us coming to them and getting some of their best
• 22:08
  and brightest in the room to to create the standards going forward.
• 22:12
  And then sending some of their best and brightest to CXEA to make sure that they
• 22:16
  had everything in place to make sure that that keeps running and it's it's
• 22:20
  on the front burner. It's top of mind,
• 22:22
  not only next year, but for five years,
• 22:24
  ten years to come.
• 22:25
  Yeah, they're very intentional about creating lasting behavioral changes.
• 22:29
  and listeners, if you're interested in learning more about
• 22:33
  the Customer Experience Executive Academy or the DeJulius Group's consulting
• 22:37
  services, you can visit the Julius Group dot com.
• 22:40
  I'll have information in the show notes about it as well.
• 22:44
  Or schedule a call with us, tdg.click forward slash call.
• 22:49
  okay, David, here's where I want to connect this directly
• 22:52
  to the customer experience. What happen
• 22:54
  Happens
• 22:55
  to customer experience when employees don't feel supported,
• 22:58
  trusted, developed, or even valued by their leaders.
• 23:02
  Well, quite frankly, they don't own the customer experience,
• 23:05
  right? They they feel like a cog in the wheel.
• 23:07
  They're not going to go above and beyond for a customer.
• 23:10
  They're they're probably gonna be if that's all happening,
• 23:13
  there's probably a little bit of a a culture of fear where I'm afraid
• 23:17
  to make a mistake. I I don't want my boss to to yell at me or think I don't know
• 23:21
  the answers. So so they're afraid to fail.
• 23:24
  They're afraid to share failure and learn from failure.
• 23:26
  Things get covered up. There there are so many things that happen.
• 23:29
  When leadership is not supportive of the customer experience that we
• 23:33
  are trying to create. And we see it happen all the time,
• 23:35
  right? We see organizations that otherwise,
• 23:38
  you know, have really good, good operational ~ standards in place,
• 23:43
  but are failing at the experiential,
• 23:46
  failing at the the the customer side of things,
• 23:49
  really just because it's not on the manager's radar.
• 23:52
  Maybe they don't feel it's their job.
• 23:53
  Maybe they feel employees should should bring that innately to the role
• 23:56
  and I shouldn't have to worry about it.
• 23:58
  But there's so many things that get in the way.
• 24:00
  And that's why it's important to have a well-defined customer experience plan,
• 24:05
  standards in place that you want your team members to follow,
• 24:08
  and then also make sure that your leaders understand that a big part of their
• 24:11
  job is making sure that their teams are following the standards,
• 24:15
  living up to those, looking for those opportunities to go above and beyond.
• 24:18
  And as part of the leadership's role to make sure that's happening.
• 24:21
  We can't just hope it happens.
• 24:22
  We have to make sure that leaders are looking for it to happen,
• 24:25
  coaching in the moment when we miss an opportunity.
• 24:27
  More importantly, praising and recognizing when we have the opportunity to do that,
• 24:31
  because we know how powerful that is for overall engagement.
• 24:35
  And so that really falls on leaders.
• 24:37
  But again, going back to that accidental manager statistic that we shared
• 24:41
  at the top of our time together,
• 24:43
  most organizations.
• 24:44
  don't have soft skill managerial training,
• 24:46
  right? Most organizations, when you get hired to become a manager
• 24:50
  or promoted into that role, they want you to drive results and they tell
• 24:53
  you about that, but they don't tell you,
• 24:54
  by the way, make sure you're really building great relationships with your team
• 24:57
  members. Or make sure that you're you're reinforcing and you're looking
• 25:01
  to recognize your team members as often as possible.
• 25:03
  We know how powerful that is, especially with employee retention,
• 25:07
  but again, most organizations don't have a strategy for that either.
• 25:10
  I hear all I'll I'll walk I'll go walk into a
• 25:12
  a session on internal culture with say a a new client of ours and I'll
• 25:16
  ask some frontline team members,
• 25:17
  you know, what do you do for recognition?
• 25:19
  A lot of times I'll hear, well,
• 25:20
  you know, we have an employee of the month and I I nominate some team members every
• 25:24
  once in a while or, you know, we have a we have a a monthly newsletter that goes
• 25:29
  out and I try and get, you know,
• 25:29
  one of my team members' pictures in it.
• 25:31
  Those are all great, but those don't replace a manager saying,
• 25:35
  Hey, great job this week or I heard you on that call yesterday and
• 25:38
  you de escalated that so well.
• 25:40
  Right? Just just the the
• 25:41
  the manager taking the time to recognize some of those behaviors,
• 25:44
  especially the behaviors that we're asking them to be consistent with,
• 25:47
  is so powerful. But very often overlooked because no one ever explained to me that,
• 25:52
  you know, this is part of my job too.
• 25:53
  All right, leaders, this next question might make some of you feel uncomfortable.
• 25:58
  Dave, if employee engagement scores are low,
• 26:01
  turnover is high, ~ morale is bad,
• 26:04
  how much responsibility should leadership be willing to
• 26:09
  own before blaming employees?
• 26:11
  Well, all those things you just described are usually the leadership
• 26:15
  is the number one culprit. Right.
• 26:17
  I think in in corporate America,
• 26:19
  a lot of times too often we are focused on blaming our employees,
• 26:23
  right? what are they doing? You know,
• 26:25
  what's going on down there? A lot of times we go to our employees first
• 26:29
  and we don't look at some of the managers' behaviors or how they're leading.
• 26:33
  And so I think everything you just described is is typically
• 26:37
  not the employees' fault. Now
• 26:38
  That's not always the case, right?
• 26:40
  We have some employees that are just just ~ you know bad fits for the role.
• 26:44
  Maybe maybe they don't love working with customers,
• 26:47
  wh whatever the case may be. So that's not a hundred percent all the time.
• 26:50
  But I would say most of the time,
• 26:52
  if you're having issues with morale,
• 26:53
  if you're having turnover, especially turnover,
• 26:56
  I would I would look at the leadership of that department first.
• 26:59
  Not not an accusatory way, because chances are they're not doing anything they're
• 27:04
  not doing anything because
• 27:05
  They want to, they're they're probably missing some opportunities that they should
• 27:10
  be doing. And it's not necessarily their fault they just were never trained
• 27:13
  on that or told to do those things,
• 27:14
  right? So a lot of times it's a little bit of a retraining of some
• 27:18
  of the things that we want to achieve.
• 27:19
  And let me give you quick example.
• 27:20
  ~ PSECU was already really good at internal culture and already really good
• 27:25
  at leadership. Like they're they're using Gallup surveys,
• 27:28
  right? And so if anyone's familiar with Gallup surveys,
• 27:30
  those are amazing because
• 27:32
  They they they talk about things like how often my recognize,
• 27:35
  and and there's a lot of things that promote great behaviors in
• 27:38
  a survey from Gallup. But a lot of what we're rolling out is designed
• 27:42
  to help them get better Gallup survey results,
• 27:46
  right? Because the surveys give you the end result.
• 27:48
  They don't necessarily tell you how to get to that result,
• 27:51
  right? And a lot of the things that we're creating in this training
• 27:53
  are gonna help them get to that result,
• 27:55
  right? And so a lot of those things.
• 27:58
  are based on the manager and the experience.
• 28:00
  So you apologize to some managers,
• 28:02
  Denise, before you asked that question,
• 28:03
  you said you might not want to hear this.
• 28:04
  My argument is everything you mentioned is probably the fault
• 28:08
  of managers before they are ever the fault of employees.
• 28:11
  And the managers above them who didn't take the time or didn't invest
• 28:15
  in them to yeah, to learn those skills.
• 28:18
  Yeah. all right, Dave, for the CEO or senior leader listening right now who says,
• 28:23
  I think we have an employee experience problem,
• 28:26
  what are the first three things you would tell them to examine
• 28:29
  in their organization?
• 28:30
  I would look at turnover and where's that where is that taking place?
• 28:33
  Right? A lot of organizations track turnover,
• 28:35
  the percentage of people they're they're losing any given month or year.
• 28:39
  But very few of them track that by department.
• 28:42
  Right? So if you're tracking it by department,
• 28:44
  then you can see where you might have some leadership gaps.
• 28:46
  And again, I'm not fully blaming managers here.
• 28:48
  I'm not saying that you have to replace managers if that's happening,
• 28:51
  but you may have to make sure that managers are doing the things that
• 28:54
  you want them to do well, or even
• 28:56
  our understanding of that they have to do those things because a
• 28:58
  lot of times they're missing from the equation.
• 29:00
  So I would say I would I would track turnover probably first before
• 29:04
  I did anything else, just to see where those problems may exist.
• 29:07
  And if you think that you have an employee engagement problem,
• 29:11
  I would also look at what teams or what departments are currently active
• 29:16
  in employee engagement, right?
• 29:17
  So you probably have an employee of the month or some other type
• 29:21
  of recognition already in place.
• 29:23
  Are all departments active in that?
• 29:25
  Are you are you getting are you getting recommendations from every department?
• 29:28
  Chances are there's probably some departments you're hearing from pretty often,
• 29:32
  there's probably some departments you never hear from,
• 29:33
  right? So it's it's trying to identify where those issues stand.
• 29:37
  But chances are also very good that all of your leaders,
• 29:40
  even your best leaders, even your best performing departments,
• 29:43
  probably need a refresher on on some of these things,
• 29:46
  right? Because they might be doing some things because it's in their nature.
• 29:49
  Or they've created some great habits over time,
• 29:52
  but we want to make sure that all of our leaders are doing it.
• 29:55
  And sometimes even our best leaders might take their eye off the ball every once
• 29:59
  in a while. So I would say, ~ where are you losing employees,
• 30:03
  right? So where do have tenure issues?
• 30:04
  Where who who's participating currently and who's not?
• 30:08
  Probably the bigger question is who's not,
• 30:09
  and then
• 30:10
  The last thing is, I would I would wonder if you're doing any sort of survey.
• 30:14
  How do you know it's not good right now?
• 30:15
  Are you doing surveys? Are you hearing feedback?
• 30:17
  Are you are you hearing from employees?
• 30:19
  Because the other thing that we hear very often too is a lot
• 30:22
  of organizations are still doing some pretty large annual surveys,
• 30:26
  but then really not doing anything with the results,
• 30:28
  or at least not communicating anything back that's being done with the results.
• 30:32
  So you might be caught in that trap where
• 30:35
  You're trying to move the needle,
• 30:36
  you're trying to to re-engage,
• 30:38
  you're trying to make sure that you're hearing feedback and doing something about
• 30:41
  it. But you also have to report that back,
• 30:42
  right? You have to toot your own whore and say,
• 30:44
  hey, we heard you and we're doing this.
• 30:46
  Or these are great ideas, we're gonna put them in the parking lot
• 30:49
  for next year because we're focused on this,
• 30:51
  right? So so making sure that we're we're sharing that too,
• 30:54
  because we hear that a lot from from organizations that,
• 30:57
  hey, I I spent 20 minutes on this survey,
• 30:59
  said it was mandatory, and then nothing happened.
• 31:02
  Yeah, communication, big
• 31:03
  Mm-hmm.
• 31:04
  that's a a big helper there. all right,
• 31:07
  Dave, finally, five years from now,
• 31:09
  do you think companies will still separate customer experience
• 31:13
  and employee experience? Or is it possible that they become one operating system?
• 31:19
  I I think I think the latter is preferred,
• 31:21
  right? I think that the experience is the experience,
• 31:24
  right? Because one of the things that we always say,
• 31:26
  well, we we don't always separate external and internal.
• 31:31
  A lot of times we call it customer experience.
• 31:34
  And the reality is some of us some of us have more external customers,
• 31:38
  some of us have internal customers,
• 31:40
  right? If I'm a leader, I have internal customers.
• 31:42
  All my team members are my customers.
• 31:44
  I may also have some other internal customers in other departments.
• 31:47
  Right, but are we treating them like customers as well?
• 31:50
  So our our goal as an organization is to really just get that into just
• 31:54
  one experience. Doesn't matter if it's internal or external,
• 31:56
  the experience has to be the focus.
• 31:58
  So I would say that five years from now,
• 32:00
  my hope is that more organizations are just focused on their overall experience,
• 32:04
  but it's not just the external.
• 32:06
  The internal is probably more important,
• 32:08
  it i as important if not more important.
• 32:11
  the employee experience your company creates eventually becomes
• 32:14
  the customer experience your customers receive.
• 32:17
  And as Dave pointed out today,
• 32:19
  much of that experience is created one interaction at a time by leaders.
• 32:24
  If you want to strengthen leadership,
• 32:26
  employee experience, and customer experience inside your organization,
• 32:30
  visit thediuliasgroup.com. And if you found this conversation valuable,
• 32:34
  share it with a leader who needs to hear it.
• 32:37
  You can find the Customer Service Revolution wherever you listen to podcasts
• 32:42
  or at the Juliusgroup.com. Dave,
• 32:45
  thank you so much for taking time before you head out on the road with PSECU.
• 32:50
  I appreciate you.
• 32:52
  course. Thank you, Denise, thanks for having me.
• 32:53
  Have a great day. Thanks,
• 32:55
  You too.
• 32:56
  listeners.