By Eric Sprague C & R Magazine 04/01/2025
I remember years ago we had a restoration company come visit our office to watch how we conducted our morning huddles and how we interacted with our team. The visitors were in the midst of major culture issues in their business and heard we were able to turn our culture from one of fear and frustration, to one of inclusion, teamwork, and happiness.
Our guests arrived one morning and were greeted by our friendly office staff who offered them coffee and a tour of our company. While that was going on, our managers and I sat in my office plotting and planning the day, and our techs were out in the warehouse using their checklists to prep their vans with music blaring in the background. We were one big happy team, and we were all performing the best we ever had. It was a vast difference from just two years earlier for us when we had nothing but drama and hard feelings dominating our culture.
As we began our daily all team huddle, I was at the white board laying out our day and my business partner Larry, as he did every day, cranked up the music interrupting me and drowning out my voice. Everyone on our team cracked up at my expense and I could not have been happier about it. This was one of our little daily rituals that the team loved. Nothing made them happier than to watch Larry annoy me and I was good with it. It was part of our culture.
After the meeting everyone said their good-byes and the techs all drove off to work their respective jobs. As Larry and I stood there waving to our team as they drove off, one of the visitors came up to us and said, “You actually like your people” with a mix of disdain and incredulity. Without hesitation I said, “We do not like our people, we love our people.”
His statement and how he said it was all I needed to know about why they had a culture problem. I knew this because I had once been just like him. Early on in my career I viewed my people only as human capital and my only responsibility to them was a paycheck on Friday. I was never so wrong about anything in my life.
For any of us to build the company we desire, we need to put the employee experience at the forefront of how we run our business. Our people are the ones on the front lines who dictate how a client feels about the company. If our people do not love working at our company, do you really think the client is not going to pick up on that and start to have doubts about who they chose to work for them? I doubt it. Business author Simon Sinek has a great quote about this, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”
This is not hippy-dippy stuff for sensitive types, this is just good business. If we want our team to perform for us at the highest level, we need to make sure we are creating an environment for them where they feel appreciated, accountable, cared for, and they know how to win at work.
So, how do we make sure we are not like the owner who visited my shop? We start looking at our company through the eyes of our current and future employees.
What does it feel like to work here?
How do our team members feel about the experience of working at our company? Do they look forward to coming to work, or do they dread it? Do they feel a general lack of appreciation for the work they do? Do they feel expendable? Do they work all day with purpose, or just do enough to not get fired? I could probably name a hundred issues that most of us get wrong when it comes to employee experience. However, let’s pick three common ones I see in almost every company that has culture problems:
Vague expectations, but harsh accountability
I visit a lot of home service businesses and see far too many that run the operations more on word of mouth than by systems. The owners or managers create an information vacuum, leaving the employees the task of guessing what the “right” way to perform their job is. Only when things go wrong does the owner or manager step in, and the employee is then subjected to harsh criticism for an action they had no real guideline or system to follow. They were left to “read the owner’s mind” and hope it all goes ok. This causes discontent and a lack of trust on the part of the team member.
Production and Efficiency over Care and Concern
We perform the tasks to get the results we desire. That is the nature of our business. Yet, we need to remember that we need people to perform those tasks. Therefore, our team members are our most important clients. We need to make sure they feel important and cared for as well as held accountable for their production. Our people drive our business, and we need to remember they are not robots, but human beings with feelings, frustrations, desires, and lives outside of work. The better we can get at connecting with our team and their needs, the better they will perform for our business and our clients.
Employee Optics
How does it feel to work for you? How are the optics for the team members? Do they see the company as just a vehicle for the owner to buy another house or boat? Are the employees in a transactional relationship with the company and feel disposable? Is turnover high and it makes them sad? Is morale low, and does management not seem to notice or care? Does the owner ever show up and show talk to the team members? How the employees see the company is a strong barometer of how the company will perform in the long term. We as a management team curate an experience for the employee to feel like their work and efforts matter more than just enriching the lives of their owners. They want to work with a sense of real purpose.
If you have a company where you feel the culture is not great, the team does not seem engaged, and you are constantly losing employees or putting out fires all day, how do you fix it?
Fixing it
I had to ask myself this question many years ago because I was doing everything wrong. My culture sucked, and I could not keep employees to stay with us long term. I was the problem. So, I needed to read, to ask for help, to get new ideas. I went on a two-year journey to learn how to fix myself and my attitudes about my employees, and that it was up to me to create an environment where people wanted to come to work and stay (happily) for a long time. Here are a few of the lessons I learned, and hopefully, you can gain a few ideas to implement in your company.
Building a Great Employee Experience
First, you must define what the employee experience should actually look like at your company. Here are a few of the changes we made to increase employee buy-in and also hold us accountable to being better managers:
- Set clear expectations
- Have a supportive leadership team
- Recognize wins
- Create growth plans for all team members
- Have a voice in the process
- Perform regular one-to-one reviews
- Have a professional hiring system
- Implement a solid onboarding during their “honeymoon period” with us
- Rewardeffort,notalways outcomes
- Keep transparent communication (especially in hard times)
- Create time for each team member with a manager to connect
- Take time to huddle as a team each day
- Make the culture a little different than other places of employment
- Implement systems so they don’t have to guess how to win at their jobs
- Put forth more effort than seems reasonable to ensure happy team members
- Have fun…never underestimate what a little fun each day can do to improve culture
Flipping the Script
Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time working on and worrying about client experience. This is great and should be done consistently. However, how much time, energy, and effort is placed to ensuring an amazing employee experience. At most companies that number is ZERO and this is where the problems originate. We need to make sure we are flipping the script and putting the effort into employee experience first, with the understanding that happy employees create satisfied clients.
Give this some thought, and ask yourself how your employees see their experience with you. Do some reflecting on the people you have lost in the past and ask yourself if they really sucked (as many of us are quick to say) or did we create an atmosphere that sucked, and we lost them because working for us did not feel good to them. We need to hold ourselves to full accountability when we are not getting the results we desire from our team. It is more often us than them who are responsible. A good culture full of wonderful team members is not a pipe dream for any of us. It is just our responsibility to create the environment which makes this possible.
