Episode 506: Stop Telling Employees to Smile

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Paul: All right, everybody, we’re here for another episode of What the Hell Just Happened in HR?! Today, I’m going to be joined by CeCe. As you all know, CeCe is HR for the HR people over at CEDR HR Solutions. CeCe, I know today’s topic was really a hot topic there for a while. Employee engagement.

CeCe: Yeah.

Paul: And I think it’s still a really important topic. Like, we get all these things, ‘quiet quitting,” and that goes away. And then we get “we can’t find any applicants,” and that gets better. So cyclically, there’s all kinds of things that come up in the world of being a small business owner. By the way, for all the small business owners out there listening, which is just about everybody, I just want to say something before we start in on this podcast, because I think this helps support you in this. What I’m not sure that the world gets or even you who are listening is that we as small business owners, whether or not we employ two people, ten people, 20 people, 40 people, 100 people even, you know, in the in the greater scheme of things, even 200 people, is a small business. I don’t think the world or we realize just how, how much we make of the backbone of the economy.

CeCe: Oh absolutely. I was waiting where you were going with that, but yeah, I totally agree.

Paul: I mean, in the United States, small business…I mean, Google – great. You know, all these larger companies. I mean, I’m thankful for Amazon. I appreciate that. You know, the 8000 people –

CeCe: [laughing] The convenience?

Paul: Yeah, the convenience and everything else, but when I really think about what gets me going in the morning and what keeps us going over at CEDR and what makes me want to do this podcast is we’re trying to give things to people who are running their own business, and I am trying to impart ideas that larger companies have to adapt to if they want to be successful and grow and have good people and and give it to someone who only has one employee, so far. One day you’re going to have five and then you’re going to have ten and I believe that it’s better to get this education kind of sitting there and in the back of your head even years before you grow to that. So that it just kind of feels familiar to you when you see the problem. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, I remember reading about that. I need to go back and kind of take a look at it.” So I believe that employee engagement is one of these things.

CeCe: I agree with you. I would also actually argue that it is more important in a small business to have highly engaged employees than it is in a really large business, because one person who is unengaged and is not being productive and is maybe spreading some feelings of animosity around? That’s going to affect so much more of your employee pool than it is in a company of 200 or 2000.

Paul: We don’t use this analogy as much as we used to. It was the bad apple. You put one bad apple in a basket of good apples and before long the bad apple infects the other good apples. It’s not the bad apple’s fault all the time. I don’t want to place fault on that on that human being. It’s just wrong person, wrong time. Maybe not the right leadership, maybe not the right manager. I mean, it is a panacea of different things that cause that apple, that proverbial apple, to not be working out. Starting with something that we’re not going to talk about today, but you hired the damn wrong person and put them in a position that they’re not supposed to be in or you didn’t ask the right questions or you didn’t think about your culture. These are all little keywords I’m throwing in here right now because this is what this podcast is about a lot of times. It’s coming in and talking about these things. So employee engagement. When people go, “How can I stop losing folks? I keep losing folks.” The first answer we usually get, the first couple of answers, have to do something with establishing some culture and then making sure the employee is engaged and then what is. So the next question is, well, what does “engage” mean? [heavy sigh] It means a lot of things.

CeCe: It does. I think a generally accepted definition is when people feel involved and they feel enthusiastic to be at your workplace and one of your employees.

Paul: So if I take that another step for everybody listening, involved, and then what was the other one?

CeCe: Enthusiastic.

Paul: Okay. So involved and enthusiasm generally come from understanding what your role in the company actually accomplishes for the company.

CeCe: Right.

Paul: And that in some way fits into the reasons why you get out of bed in the morning, why that employee gets out of bed in the morning. They don’t have to be enthusiastically crazy about doing it every day, but they do understand what it is and I think being clear about that includes communicating it, course corrections which are done properly and also lots of celebrating the little and the big wins.

CeCe: That is a big one. Appreciation, recognition, celebration of what they’ve contributed. That’s huge in employee engagement.

Paul: Even the little things. I tell folks, “You’ve had an employee who’s just habitually late,” and the member at CEDR is like, “They’re habitually late, but I really like them, but it’s kind of infecting things that’s causing all kinds of problems.” And then you talk to them, you’ve talked to them. Then finally you go to them and you say something like, “I can’t make you be on time. I just can’t. Here’s the way this is impacting your fellow employees.” You’ve gone through all those things and as my mom would say, “I’ve talked to you until I’m blue in the face,” and you finally say to them, “I’m not going to try and punish you into doing this. I’m just going to tell you that I’m going to make a different choice where you’re concerned and where everyone’s concerned. I’m going to choose to not work with people who are habitually seven and eight and 20 minutes behind all the time due to their own decision making process.” I think that at some point you might have to have that conversation with someone. But to my other point of celebrating the wins, you may think, “Well, they should be on time and now they’ve been on time every day for 14 days, which is a miracle.” You need to go celebrate that with them.

CeCe: Absolutely.

Paul: “I see the effort you’re putting into it. I really appreciate it. Please keep it up.” So it’s a little celebration and there’s an underlying threat, right?

CeCe: [laughing]

Paul: Right in that last statement: “Please, please keep it up.” That is a form of engagement.

CeCe: It is. Absolutely. Well, and that is one of the ways that you see engagement either show up or not. That’s one of the metrics that you look at is what does your absenteeism look like? But it can be hard, right? Because that is a pretty baseline expectation is that people are here when they’re supposed to be here and they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So it can be really hard to –

Paul: Want to celebrate that.

CeCe: Get into the headspace to go…But if you can frame it the way you did, where you’re talking about the effort that they’re putting in and how they’re trying to show you that they are committed?

Paul: And how it impacted that week.

CeCe: Absolutely and that can really lead to a greater connection between you and that employee and that is also one of the drivers of engagement is connection with the employer.

Paul: So on the other end: or with the manager and by the way, you have to teach managers and managers who are listening, you have to teach yourself to be able to do these things and I hope you picked up on that thing. I said, “I can’t punish somebody into doing anything.” That parental thing there. I can offer consequences. I can and I will sometimes. But it’s getting the person to choose to be enthusiastic, to choose to be involved, but you can’t just tell everybody you need to…We used to, when I owned a bar, we used to have in the break area where they would store their stuff in and drop off their coats and stuff. We had a big sign above the door that said, “Smile explicative Damn it.”

CeCe: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: I got to tell you, that doesn’t work. Telling people to smile, be enthusiastic, be better, enjoy your job. But there was context for that, for that sign that was above. It was kind of like, I know you don’t love sport ball, but almost all teams have some saying that they’re all adopted to when they’re running they tap it on the way out to the field. We use that, but again, you can’t just tell people to smile. They either have it in them but is it even important that they smile if they’re in the back all the time and they’re not really a smiler, or do you really care? They’re not working with customers. CeCe is looking at me like, “I want them to smile, dammit. All the time.”

CeCe: [laughing] Oh no. I was actually flashing back to when I danced Folklorico and you had to put Vaseline on your teeth if you couldn’t remember to smile, and it’s funny because the end result of that is kind of what you’re talking about. You don’t actually look happy when you’re performing. Yeah, you can see their teeth and it’s uncomfortable and stuff, but you read all that on their face. So if you can’t breed that like as an internal motivator it shows up externally.

Paul: Yeah. And so if you want to help people to be better and to make these adjustments, then I think that, you know, part of it is, is everything that we just talked about. Well, I believe another great way to get people to engage is to be strategic in setting goals for the company, for the team, and even for the individual. Like if you can do this, this will happen and these good things will come from it. And that can lead to an even larger conversation, which is, “Everybody, it’s been tough. Rents are going up. All these things can go up. Everything that I’ve been talking about here with you helps me address these things with you because I know we all would like to make a little bit more money here. I’d like to make more money as the owner. You’d like to make more money as employees. If we can begin to start hitting these goals, I think I can do better for all of you. Maybe this year we’ll contribute more to your 401k. Maybe this year we’ll add some extra paid days off. Or maybe we’ve grown enough. We’ve gone from two employees, we’ve got six. It’s time for us to start paying some vacation time around here. You have to help me be able to pay for it. That money just doesn’t appear. We’re not Google. We literally don’t have 18 personal jets here. The money comes from somewhere.” And again, this engagement thing begins to connect people back to things like the money, like the profit margin, like, “Hey everybody, we could add one more person to the team or we could all absorb these and I could take the money that we would pay that other person, and then I could put it into the bonus program or I could put it into 7% raises instead of 3% raises,” or you know, whatever that might look like.

CeCe: Yeah. The key there is that you’ve got to commit to it once you put it out there.

Paul: Oh yeah.

CeCe: People are going to remember and they’re going to really hold you accountable then, in one way or another, to the extent that they can, right? They’re going to bring it back up to you or they will leave if they get nothing and that’s their method of being able to hold you accountable.

Paul: everybody. So this is CeCe’s way of reminding me that every now and then I’ll do an all hands meeting and I’ll say something in the meeting and CeCe is sitting there listening and going, “That’s the first I’ve heard of that. We don’t have a plan. I don’t even know how to get all of these people free lunch twice a week,” or whatever it is, whatever thing that I said.

CeCe: [laughing] That rarely happens anymore.

Paul: Well, that’s because I get corrective actions, y’all. I get that, “This is the issue. This is the impact of what you did and here’s the correction. You better not do that again.” Very good point, by the way. Don’t pontificate. If you’re going to do this, have some kind of a plan there, and the other thing is, is if this is new to you and new to your team, make it something that you really feel like you guys can accomplish because if you stick with me over time, you’re going to begin to, I’m saying literally as a listener, if you stick with me over time, you’re going to hear me talk more and more about creating the kind of strategy and the goals that are big that you almost can’t reach and that there’s a reason for doing that. But this isn’t the time, when you first start setting little goals and stuff for people trying to get people to engage.

CeCe: Yeah. There’s a double edged sword tactic that some people take, and that’s like sending out surveys or things like that, to hear what the employees have to say.

Paul: [heavy sigh] I’m not a big fan of surveys.

CeCe: Yeah, we’ve talked about that offline.

Paul: I mean we’ve done it before and we’ve gotten mixed stuff from it, but what we find is, is that the angry people, the people who are having troubles or whatever? Stick out like a sore thumb and bless their hearts, they’re just expressing themselves, but I’m just not a fan of these surveys.

CeCe: I think the biggest risk with them is, especially in a smaller business where you don’t have the sorts of resources Google or something does, is: you’re going to get answers, almost 100% guaranteed, you will get answers that you can not give them what they are asking for.

Paul: Can’t do anything about it.

CeCe: And then you have now appeared as though you are not listening.

Paul: Right.

CeCe: And that is the real danger. So you have to either be prepared to very directly address, “I hear that all of you want daycare benefits (or whatever it is). I cannot provide that to you,” and have an honest conversation. I think a better alternative is maybe to outline a couple of things that you are willing to do and have a conversation with them about what would be most valuable to the majority.

Paul: Another approach, CeCe, to expand on that most valuable to the team, is in your one on ones (if you’re having them or your managers are having them or if it’s just you and you’re one or two or five employees) in your one on ones or in your conversation with them, part of the reason why you’re listening to them and you’re actually talking about some of the challenges that a person might be having in life, is that you may be able to pick up a theme amongst all your employees and you may be able to identify three or four things of which you can only afford to do one and say to the team, “I have three or four things,” and they feel more relevant because you’ve been listening, they’ve been talking and you say, “You know, guys, we could do a gym membership, I could contribute this, I could do that, or I could do this other thing. Which of these do you guys find the most valuable?” And even then we get to what I’m going to close this out with in this conversation, you’re not just listening, but you’re hearing. In engagement, it’s a two way street. So in order for you to pick, first of all, the right things that are more what I would call benefits that help to engage and keep people, you really have to be in a constant process of getting feedback from your employees and wanting to do something with it. By the way, you may get a lot of feedback and think about this over a year and still not figure out what it is that they want. Or you’re like, “Okay, I got it figured out. Everybody said they want gym memberships,” and then two months later you hear from everybody that that was a stupid idea and that they didn’t really want the gym memberships. They now realize that. Well, part of the listening is to say, “Look, I hear you. Let’s get rid of the gym memberships, or whatever that might look like, let’s get rid of that and let’s do this other thing.” And then always for the evil purposes of the manager and the owner, all of this can be tied back into the way that we can pay for this or the way that we can make the space for this or, you know, the thing that we need to do. These are the things that we need to accomplish within the practice. “You remember when we all committed to getting more referrals and we were going to bump the numbers up and we got stagnant? Well, here’s where that comes into play. We have to get that program back on track.”

CeCe: Right?

Paul: That’s the only way that we’re going to be able to pay for this and for this other thing to be sustainable. So employee engagement isn’t about giving them things.

CeCe: No, it’s not.

Paul: That’s a tiny little piece and part of it, but it doesn’t cure anything.

CeCe: No, I think the bigger issue is the connection. Kind of a genuine back and forth communication and some transparency is usually important.

Paul: CeCe asked me this question: What happens when I’m trying to engage with someone and they’re just not happy. It’s not pleasant. I don’t ever get anything positive out of them. They just don’t…I mean, you don’t have to re-ask me that question.

CeCe: Sure, but what do you do?

Paul: You get them out of there.

CeCe: Yeah.

Paul: They’re not going to be…They may be good at their job, but culturally, they’re never going to be a part of what makes you grow as a human being and makes you joy and everything else. You don’t need to be mean to them or anything. You have the wrong person in the wrong position because you choose to work with people who are as happy as they can be, not all the time, who are engaged in the work when they love it, who will actually do the part of the job that they hate when it sucks and we all have that part of it, but who’s still come out whole in the end.

CeCe: Absolutely. Yeah. For some people that is just always going to be a barrier. Maybe they just don’t have a passion and so there isn’t something that they want to do, but they have to work to survive.

Paul: Have to work to pay their bills.

CeCe: And those are always the people we try not to bring in here because they’re just never going to buy in to what it is that we do and add value in their own way.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. It’s not their fault. It hasn’t been modeled for them yet. You’re looking for people who have had great modeling and had some good leadership and that’s kind of what you’re looking for.

CeCe: Yeah.

Paul: Okay. All right. CeCe, as always, I think this is a really good topic. Employee engagement. I don’t have any secrets here. It’s an overall program. It’s a mindset. It involves all sorts of components, but you can start small and work your way up.

CeCe: Yeah, and it will look different everywhere, depending on who your team is.

Paul: Oh, yeah, definitely. You get to make it your own and it’s built around the personalities of the people and who you are as a leader and even your patients and I mean it all like…Okay, I said we were ending –

CeCe: [laughing]

Paul: But I want to recognize that we, I don’t know if we still work with them or not. We used to work with a kind of a mega practice down in Atlanta and the kind of the joke of the practice was, was that they would give you nitrous in the waiting room in order to relieve your being –

CeCe: Your anxiety.

Paul: I mean, they wouldn’t do that. Of course they wouldn’t do that. But their advertising was, “Want to be knocked out for this?” You know, we do all these things. It’s pain free and when you walked in, the Grateful Dead was playing. There was incense burning sometimes and there were like, you know, Grateful Dead memorabilia and tie dyes and stuff. That was their culture. They hired for that culture. The right people had to fit into it. And then on the other end, we have the far end of the spectrum, which is a Boston doctor who’s in downtown Boston, and the man shows up in a $4,000 suit because his clients are wearing $4,000 suits. It’s a no nonsense kind of practice. They’re there to do business and you can have just as great of a business team in the Boston office, as you have in the Atlanta office where everybody’s got tattoos.

CeCe: Absolutely.

Paul: Okay, Everybody go get out there and get some tattoos.

CeCe: [laughing]

Paul: All right, CeCe, thanks for bringing this to us.

CeCe: Thanks Paul.

Paul: Bye.

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