1. Know what's important to your employees. Do you know what is important to your team members personally and professionally? E-NPS is an effective way to uncover what is important to your employees. Ask them if they would recommend you as a great place to work, and why? Then, ask them what would have to happen to get that to a 10.
2. Build digital communities. Have each new team member create a community profile that provides insight into who they are personally. A favorite quote, what they are passionate about, what they are proud of, and what they would like to achieve. Welcome and introduce new team members by sharing these profiles with their peers.
3. Be transparent and share information. Frontline team members represent your brand. They know more about your customers than you do, with daily face-to-face contact. Don't treat them like mushrooms - be transparent as an organization. Share customer feedback, company successes and operational challenges. Enable a flow of information from frontline to HO, and from HO to frontline.
4. Take regular "team pulse checks". Check in with your employees every week or shift to make sure there is nothing that would negatively impact the quality of your employees experience. Positivity, responsivity and support attract A-players that become loyal brand ambassadors and mentors. Unresolved operational issues or conflicts can be "cancerous" to a positive brand culture and cause you to lose valuable team members. Find out about them and resolve them quickly.
5. Harvest the knowledge and talent of the team. Give employees a voice. Take operational challenges to the team. Ask team members how they would improve operations and create amazing brand experiences for both customers and employees. Have forums where team members can share ideas and successes. Give them the opportunity to make your company a better place to work.
6. Acknowledge desirable behaviors. Shout out to scale desirable behaviours. As humans we have a basic need to be seen, heard and valued. Acknowledging team members on a regular basis builds a culture of trust and appreciation. It makes it safe for team members to contribute. It also positively reinforces behaviours you want to scale across the organization.
7. Resolve frustrating or time-consuming tasks. Ask employees what frustrates them. Make administrative tasks easy. Look for ways to simplify business processes with technology. Empower managers to spend less time reporting and more time being productive. Use team intranet communications, e-signature software, and marketing automation to simplify and streamline administrative tasks. Make all operational apps easily accessible from one interface on their phone.
8. Provide ongoing performance feedback. So often employees join teams and don't get meaningful feedback on how they are doing until their first review. In some cases that is 3 to 6 months. A heck of a lot happens in 90 days. Let team members know how they are doing compared to their peers by sharing average performance.
Make it easy to request support from their managers and peers. - especially on the frontlines while they are learning. Share key performance indicators. Send them training modules to help them improve performance . Consider assigning a "team mentor", they can reach out to for help.
9. Expect and Reward Excellence. Empower team members with high levels of accountability for the brand experience . Provide productivity tools that help them prioritize their daily actions. Keep the customer the focal point of everything they do.
Provide digital coaching with recommended actions. Make it easy for them to reach out for personal support. Tie remuneration to key performance indicators.
10. Be patient. Changing human behaviour takes time and can be challenging. As human beings, we prefer the status quo and can be threatened by change. Introduce change gradually- one step at a time. Start with weekly team performance, as opposed to individual performance feedback. Be sure you are building a culture that makes it safe to contribute. Show your teams that all feedback is good feedback and there are no repercussions to being honest about what needs improvement.
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