Could your work environment use an upgrade? What are the main strategies for creating a space of positivity?
Going above and beyond in fulfilling customer desires is vital for any organization striving to provide exceptional service. But savvy leadership also plays a key role in steering the company in a positive direction.
Here’s how to create a positive working environment that’s fully committed to delighting customers.
Strategy #1: Motivate Your Team
Horst Schulze believes that too many managers view their employees as reluctant workers who need to be pushed or coerced into action. Instead, he argues that leaders get better results if they inspire their employees to want to work hard and provide high-quality service. This is the first strategy in Horst’s advice on how to create a positive working environment.
It’s possible to motivate employees to achieve company goals because humans have an innate desire for purpose and meaningful relationships, according to Schulze. The opportunity to provide world-class service to customers is a chance for them to attain both of these desires: Employees feel like they’re accomplishing a worthy purpose by working at an elite level, and they build meaningful relationships by working together and serving customers.
Schulze argues that to effectively motivate your employees, you need to do two things: Grant them the authority to improve the business and establish a clear vision.
Action #1: Grant Employees Authority to Improve the Business
First, Schulze states that if you want motivated employees, they need to feel like they have the authority to personally improve the business on a daily basis. Managers don’t always give this authority to their employees: Often, employees are told they have to follow strict operational procedures or pass problems off to a manager rather than creatively solving problems themselves. In contrast, Schulze gives every one of his employees at the Ritz-Carlton permission to spend up to $2,000 in any way that keeps a hotel guest satisfied with their experience, without pre-approval of any kind.
Giving employees this authority is inherently motivating, says Schulze. When workers feel like management respects and trusts them to judge how best to serve the customer, they’ll want to work hard to live up to their managers’ expectations.
Action #2: Establish a Clear Vision
Schulze contends that if you want to motivate your team, you must set a clear and worthy vision for what you want to accomplish. This vision will be a more effective motivator if it primarily benefits other people rather than just yourself—by accomplishing it, you become a force for good in the world. Additionally, if you want your business to be profitable, part of your vision should involve providing your customers with the best possible experience (as we’ve discussed).
This vision is the purpose that your employees naturally crave. Even if it’s challenging, employees ultimately want to work toward an inspiring vision because it allows them to feel pride and gain admiration for their achievements.
Strategy #2: Reinforce a Purpose-Driven Culture
We’ve discussed two requirements that you need to motivate your employees. Next, to put these motivating forces into action, Schulze contends that you need to establish a purpose-driven culture.
To do this, condense your vision into a concise vision statement that’s easy to remember. Then, weave this vision statement into your communication at work as much as you can: in meetings as well as in personal conversations. In doing so, you ingrain the vision statement in your organization’s culture, nudging employees to think more about how to align their work with the vision.
For example, imagine you manage an art gallery and have developed the vision statement, “We want to build connections in our community through art.” Mentioning this vision statement to your marketing coordinator may encourage them to spend less time building an online presence for the gallery and more time organizing local events.
Schulze recommends reinforcing your purpose-driven culture in two types of meetings: first-time employee orientation meetings and daily refresher meetings.
First-Time Employee Orientation
According to Schulze, an employee’s first day is a valuable opportunity to instill the company’s vision. When someone starts a new job, this big, emotional life change tends to open their mind to fresh perspectives and behaviors. During this time, new employees will more readily embrace your organization’s purpose-driven culture.
Schulze explains that he begins his first-time employee orientations by asserting that no individual, including himself, is superior to others; every employee is equally important in contributing to the company’s success. Then, he unpacks the company’s vision statement, explaining it in detail to help employees understand what they’re working toward and why their efforts matter.
Daily Refresher Meetings
Schulze argues that one-time orientations or training sessions are insufficient for employees to retain the principles of your organizational culture and consistently deliver the desired level of service. Even if you give a very inspiring orientation presentation, employees will forget most of what you talked about if you don’t regularly reinforce these ideas.
To help workers internalize the principles of a purpose-driven culture, Schulze advocates for a brief team meeting at the start of every employee shift. During this meeting, a team leader explains a single principle of your company’s guiding philosophy and allows their team to discuss it. Schulze created a list of 24 principles for teams to review over the course of 24 days that detail exactly how employees in his hotels should work. For instance, one principle states that every employee is responsible for fixing the flaws with the business they identify on the job (as we discussed earlier).
Strategy #3: Measure Your Progress Toward Success
Schulze contends that, in addition to motivating your team and reinforcing a purpose-driven culture to sustain that motivation, leaders need to continually measure their progress toward success and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Rigorous, ongoing measurement helps leaders identify areas in which they think the business is performing well but it isn’t. These blind spots can easily arise if leaders assess their business using anecdotal evidence or gut feelings alone. Instead, if they consistently measure the right evidence, identify issues, and adjust their processes in response, companies can continually elevate the quality of their products or services.
Schulze recommends measuring three vital metrics in particular.
Metric #1: Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
First, Schulze recommends measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. After serving customers, survey them to discover whether they’d want to buy from you again and whether they’d recommend your product or service to someone else. This provides clear data on whether customers are truly having a positive experience that will lead to more business.
Metric #2: Employee Satisfaction
Second, measure your employees’ job satisfaction. According to Schulze, every dip in employee satisfaction signals a greater likelihood of employee turnover—which loses you valuable expertise and forces you to spend on replacements. Staying up-to-date on how engaged and motivated your employees feel will show you when you must take action to keep them satisfied.
Metric #3: Lead Measures
Third, measure lead measures: metrics that accurately predict your business’s future performance. Schulze contends that studying these metrics allows the company to be proactive rather than reactive to worrisome patterns before they become larger problems that impact the core business. For example, if you run a barbershop, one of your lead measures might be the number of fully booked-in-advance days on your calendar. If you notice that you have far fewer reservations than usual, you could respond by increasing your social media presence before taking a major financial hit.
