Never Lose an Employee Again w/ Joey Coleman

Joey Coleman, one of the world's leading experts on employee experience, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to recruit top talent, bring them onboard successfully, and keep them engaged while they produce remarkable results for years to come.

Finding and keeping quality employees is one of the greatest challenges facing businesses today. With more people quitting their jobs each month than ever before and employees demanding flexibility, freedom, and advancement, companies are struggling to build a foundation with new hires that leads to long-term commitment. To effectively combat the hiring crisis and remain competitive, business owners and managers must design an employee experience program that begins on day one.

In this long-form interview, host David Millay and guest Joey unpack Joey's frameworks for retaining employees. Together, they highlight stories and principles in Joey's new book, Never Lose an Employee Again.

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00:00  Introduction
6:00    Link between Customer Experience and Employee Experience
10:30   Joey's Framework for Employee Retention
13:20   All Seven Phases Overview
20:30   Phase 1: Assess
17:40   Phase 2: Accept
35:40   Phase 3: Affirm
42:20   Phase 4: Activate
47:40   Phase 5: Acclimate
55:00   Phase 6: Accomplish
1:00:00   Phase 7: Adopt
1:11:00   Phase 8: Advocate
1:14:00 Follow Joey, Get in Touch, Buy the Book

Buy "Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention" Here:
https://a.co/d/2NJ3pcD
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Follow David Millay on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/DavidMillay

Transcript

0:00

Today's episode is all about retaining your employees.

David Millay: 0:08

From EngageMint, I'm David Millay, and this is Flip The Switch. Y'all welcome back to another episode of Flip the Switch, where we sit down with leaders in customer experience and employee experience, and we try to figure out what are the trends that they're paying attention to? What are the experiments that they're running? What are the principles that have driven them to success throughout their career? Then we take all those things and we apply them to the world of sports and entertainment. God, it felt good to say that it has been a long time, maybe three or four months since I've said that. And if you're a loyal listener to this show, thank you for listening to this episode, cuz this is like the first episode that we've done in three or four months. Not to elaborate too much, but if you're watching this on YouTube, which I highly suggest you do, that's what we're putting a lot of focus going forward. I got married, I'm showing off my ring. And it's been a really busy last three to four months where we've made a lot of changes in our business. We've really focused on the core business of engagement. For those of you that don't know, we do training and workshops on customer experience and employee experience fandom. And the podcast is just a part of that. The podcast is really a discovery tool for people to listen in and hear what we're doing and get some ideas around customer experience and employee experience. So we'll talk all about what I've been up to in later episodes. I don't want to distract from today's episode, which is all about how to never lose an employee again. My friend Joey Coleman, his brand new book just dropped. We had him on the show. Maybe a year ago, two years ago and he really talked about his first book on that, which was all about how to never lose a customer again. But it was so successful that he got a ton of messages from readers saying, Hey, this is great for how to teach me to never lose a customer again. Can these be applied to how to never lose an employee again? So we dropped a new book. It's out today. We recorded this again three months ago, maybe back in March. Today is June 27th, so maybe it's been like four months. I don't know. But the episode is incredible. Joey goes into so many details and frameworks around how to retain your top employees, which is so key for everyone listening today. It doesn't matter what type of business you have, big or small, your employees are. Looking at their options and deciding, is this a place where my values align? Is this a place where I want to stay for another year, for another two years, for another five years? And as a leader, it's your job to create an environment that encourages them to want to stay. Joey's gonna give you all the tools that you need in this new book, which you should go get on Amazon. Today. It's called Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman. And go check out the book. We're gonna unpack some of the insights here. If you really like it, listen to the episode, dig deep and then go check out the book afterwards. Let's jump in with my friend Joey Coleman into how to never lose a customer again. Joey, welcome back to the show. Excited to have you

Joey Coleman: 3:14

David, I am absolutely thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me back. Thanks to everybody who's listening in for round two, another conversation, so appreciate it.

David Millay: 3:23

Alright, let's jump in. Joey, catch us up on what the heck you've been up to since the last time we talked. Obviously you've got an incredible book here where we're talking about never losing a customer again. But I want to talk about what you've been up to now, because you're not only focusing on customers, now we're talking about employees

Joey Coleman: 3:41

I am David. Yeah, it's interesting. I about, I don't know, four or five months after my first book, never Lose a Customer again, came out, I got an email from a reader and the email just said this, dear Joey, if you wrote a book called Never Lose an Employee Again, I would buy it. And then it was signed by their name. I thought that's interesting, okay. Woo-hoo. Pre-orders on a book I haven't even written. This is interesting, but I, to be candid, I didn't think a whole lot about it, and I didn't think a lot about it for two reasons. Number one, I'd been so deeply immersed in customer experience for so long that I understood the power and the importance of employee experience, but I saw them as two important things, but maybe separate things. Number two, I was deep in the mix of the first book coming out and was all focused on that. Over the course of the next year, I received almost a dozen emails that were exactly the same. One sentence email. Dear Joey, if you wrote a book called Never Lose an Employee Again, I would buy it now. David, as my wife will happily attest, I am not the smartest crayon in the box or the brightest crayon in the box, as it may be. And the practical reality is it took several interactions for me to say. The market is asking for something that I maybe am not as personally attached to. Because in the interest of full disclosure, it's been about 20 years since I've had more than one or two employees. I've been running really lean for a while, but I decided to start investigating and diving deeper into the conversation. And I quickly realized that this is a huge pain point for organizations of all sizes globally. And by the way, this was pre Covid and then Covid came along and it's suddenly like everyone, regardless of what industry, regardless of where you live, was suddenly like, oh my gosh, we can't find talent. We can't keep talent, we can't engage our talent. Our talent wants more than we have. Our talent doesn't do the things we need them to do. Whatever it may be. And I just got really curious and dove into it. And what I realized is that all along customer experience and employee experience are two sides of the same coin. As you polish one, the other side necessarily gets brighter as one side goes down, the other side necessarily goes down with it. And this led me to open up a whole new area of research, a whole new area of research and discussion and exploration, and super excited that it's evolved its way into a new book and keynote.

David Millay: 6:01

And today's episode, we are going to dive into kind of the framework for that book and tactics and case studies and stories that listeners can apply to their business. But I think you're spot on with it being two sides of the same coin. Back when I worked at Disney and Disney Institute, one of our key things that we always would come back to is this insight of the extent to which you genuinely care for your employees is the extent to which they're going to care for your customers. And that was a huge thing because people would always come to us saying, help us with customer experience. Help us with customer experience, train my employees to be nicer, train my employees to help them treat customers better. And I'm like, I can do that. But the reality is, if you are not focusing on employee experience first, the training only goes so far. And that is where oftentimes what would start as a customer experience, change management process would end up being an employee experience, change management process. And only until we nailed that foundational part, could we then start to tackle the customer side of things.

Joey Coleman: 7:08

David, I so agree. in, in fact, I, if I may, one of the things that I came to realize, and I've, this has been an evolving awareness over time, is that you can't ask your employees to. You can't ask your employees to deliver a remarkable customer experience if they don't know what one is. And at the end of the day, your employees are customers of your business. They are your most important customers. They're there, they're with you all day, every day. This is where they, come in the morning. This is where they leave in the evening. This is where their focus is. And if we dive deep into enhancing the employee experience, they now have a context for delivering a customer experience that is also remarkable.

David Millay: 7:56

Yeah. And again, before we jump into the framework, to me it is really similar to I look like I look at a brand like a Lululemon, right? It's a retail store that offers clothing and experiences those employees should be wearing and Lululemon outside of work all the time. Because not only do they have a discount, but they love the brand, right? And they do because they've created an experience where their employees are evangelists. For the biggest evangelists for the brand are the people that work in it and live it 24 7. If the people that work, if the people that work in it and live in it 24 7 aren't gonna go be evangelist for the brand, who the hell is.

Joey Coleman: 8:35

Exactly. And David, I'm gonna, I'll lean into this further, and in the interest of full disclosure, I don't know what Lululemon's policy is on discounts or clothing for their employees, so I'm not familiar with that. But here's the thing, if you have a brand and you offer your employees a discounted price on whatever it is you offer, so you're a restaurant and you offer'em a discounted meal on their dinner for your wait staff or your retail store, and you offer'em a discounted price on your clothing, my question is, why do they have to pay anything? Why are you making'em pay anything? Could that be a loss leader? Could you just say, Hey, we're gonna take zero income from our employees to give them a practical, personal experience of using our product, of being a customer of our service. So when they interact with our actual prospects and customers, they are speaking from a place of contextual relevance. They are speaking from a place of personal experience. I think it would be really revolutionary for a company to come in and say, Hey, if you work for us, you get whatever that is that we sell free period for as long as you are an employee of us. I think it would flip the script.

David Millay: 9:46

I, I think with a brand like Lulu, like if you, if I worked at Lululemon, I got stuff for free, my wardrobe would purely be Lululemon and I would definitely be working there on the side right now. So I don't know that they could always give us stuff for free, but certainly come to work there and here's a free fit. And it's the same thing with Disney, right? Like when I worked at Disney, we got to go into the parks for free and I could let three people in for free every single day. And my family would come, friends, family, everybody would come to visit and we'd go let'em in after a while, gets annoying. Cuz they know you have the perk and they're coming down just because you have the perk. But nonetheless, we were the biggest proponents of the parks and we were the best guides because we went there all the time. We experienced it. And to your point, there is a way that you can definitely do that depending on what your brand, product service is. I

Joey Coleman: 10:32

I love it.

David Millay: 10:33

Alright, let's get into it. Obviously you've been traveling the world now and you're starting to talk about employee experiences. It's a pretty similar framework to the customer experience side of thing, right? Walk us

Joey Coleman: 10:45

similar. Yeah.

David Millay: 10:46

walk us through that tie.

Joey Coleman: 10:48

So David, here's the interesting thing. Some people so if you're listening and you already read, never Lose a Customer again. Let me give you the quick ten second overview of Never Lose an Employee again. The new book Everywhere in the book, the first book where I mentioned the word customer, do a find and replace in your mind and insert the word employee ta-da. Second book, ready to go. Because here's the thing. Humans are humans, whether they're our customers, whether they're our employees, whether it's our spouse, our children, humans are humans. And what I realized when I started to dive into this is as many organizations are horrible at customer onboarding, There are just as many that are horrible at employee onboarding and the practical reality is an employee goes through the same emotional rollercoaster that a new customer goes through in that, in the beginning they're super excited, but then they begin to doubt the feeling they just had, and then we show up on the first day and we're like, oh, another little quick hit maybe of positive experience, or maybe it's a negative experience. It either affirms or denies the feeling we already had going into it, and then we're usually just thrown to the wolves and said, fend for yourself and figure this out until later. If you stay around long enough, we might actually promote you or we might do something more with you. When I realized that the overlap of the two was so similar and when I realized how many organizations were missing the opportunity to use the six communication tools that deepen a relationship with a customer to deepen that same relationship with the employee, I thought, wait a second. Number one, this is gonna be easier for me to remember on stage. Okay? So let's have a practical conversation there. But number two, if we can embed this type of philosophy in how we treat our customers and embed this type of philosophy in how we treat our employees, they will feed on each other. And to that point earlier, both sides of the coin will be polished.

David Millay: 12:44

I love it. All right, so let's recap the eight phases then of never lose a customer and how we've slightly adapted that to be never lose an employee again.

Joey Coleman: 12:55

Absolutely. So here's what I'd like to do. Each of the eight phases starts with the letter A. Alright? And the idea behind this is it's like getting straight A's on your report card. If you're delivering on each of the phases, your people love you, whether those are your customers or whether those are your employees. Maybe if it makes sense, I'll give a quick overview of how it shows up in the customer setting, and then we'll speed over and do a quick overview of how it shows up in the employee setting, and we can see how they overlap. So this is the customer journey in eight phases. The first phase is the assess phase. When a prospective customer is considering whether or not they wanna do business with you, checking out your marketing materials, having sales conversations, et cetera, they then move to phase two. The admit phase where they admit that they have a problem or a need they believe you can help them with. They sign on the dotted line, they hand over their hard earned cash. They then go to phase three, the Affirm phase. Where they begin to doubt the decision they just made. In common parlance, we call this buyer's remorse. Okay, what are we gonna do to reaffirm their decision? We then come to phase four, the activate stage, the first real moment of truth where they receive your product, they start getting the service, whatever it may be. What are we doing to energize the relationship and kick it off? Now most businesses do a pretty good job on that, which is ironic because the next phase five is where all the wheels fall off. The acclimate phase where you have to get your customer used to your way of doing business so that hopefully they reach phase six, the accomplished phase when they achieve the goal they had when they originally decided to do business with you. And if and only if they've done that, you have the right, the privilege to move them to phase seven, the adopt phase where they become loyal to you and only you. And if they're an adopter, it means it might be possible for them to reach phase eight. And turn into an advocate where they're referring new business to you. They become your raving fans singing praises far and wide. So that's the customer journey. And we could spend days, and I know in our last conversation we did diving into any of those eight phases, but how does this apply in the employee world? I will tell you, same eight phases all start with the letter A with one minor exception, first phase, the assess phase where a prospective employee is considering whether or not they wanna work for you. They're looking at your job description. They might be talking to other people that you work with. They're going through your hiring and interviewing process. They're getting a feel, which by the way, you're hiring an interviewing process is like sales calls, right? It's very similar. We're identifying objections. We're figuring out if it's a good fit. We're trying to express our value. We're trying to see what value we might get out of the interaction with them. That's the assess phase. We then come to phase two, and this is the only one that the name changed. But what happens in the phase didn't change at all. The second phase in the employee experience is the accept phase as opposed to the admit phase. In the accept phase, you make a job offer and hopefully that candidate accepts your offer. We then go to phase three. The Affirm phase, before we refer to it as buyer's remorse, I refer to it as new hire's, remorse. The research is the same. It shows that a new hire begins to doubt the decision they just made to accept your job offer. They think, oh, should I have negotiated for more? Or, oh, I accepted this job offer, but I ha I was interviewing with a couple of companies and I hadn't heard from this other one. What if I should have waited for that one? If we don't get in and address the emotional fear, doubt, and uncertainty that they have, they are showing up on their first day in the hole. Even though we're excited thinking this is the beginning of a new journey, they're showing up on the first day thinking, ah, did I make the right call? Which brings us to phase four, the activate phase, the first day on the job, it's the one day in this journey that literally lasts only one day. And the question I often ask CEOs is when your employee, after their first day on the job goes home and they talk to their spouse, their kids, their significant other, their roommate, whoever it is that lives with them, or they're on their way home, they live by themselves, and they call mom and dad, or they call the significant other, they call their friend and they're asked, how was your first day on the job? Are they ready to tell a remarkable story? Or instead, are they gonna tell a story? Something along the lines of I showed up my manager actually was on vacation, so they didn't really seem to know that it was my day there. I was met by somebody from HR who took me into a boardroom and said, we wanna watch, sit down and have you watch these videos that were filmed in the 1970s that are all about sexual harassment in the workplace. After you've watched a bunch of those fill out this paperwork about your withholding on your 401k, what you're gonna do for your taxes, which of the dental plans you wanna opt into, et cetera, et cetera. And then I'll be back to collect you in about two hours to have you go to lunch with someone that just found out an hour ago that they're taking you to lunch, which they're excited about the fact that they don't have to pay for lunch, but they have no idea who you are and you're never gonna see them again. And then after lunch, we'll come back here, we'll take you to a desk, which by the way, your computer isn't set up yet, nor your phone. Nor do we have business cards for you, and you can just fumble around on Google and or our website until it's time to go home. That's how most businesses start. The first day when you get home and you get asked, how was your first day on the job? It is not activated or engaged you in any way, shape or form. We then come to phase five, the acclimate phase. This is the getting used to the job phase. In the typical job, this is gonna be two months, three months. You're learning the ropes, you're figuring out who people are. So hopefully you reach stage six, the accomplished stage. When you achieve the goal you had as an employee when you originally decided to accept the job offer For every employee, this is different. For some it might be a promotion. For some, it might be a feeling of appreciation. For some it might feel a sense of completion on a project or a different type of thing. We gotta track that for each employee cuz if we do and we do a good job and we help them accomplish, they moves to phase seven, the adopt phase where they become loyal to us and only us, they're not gonna take the call from the recruiter. They're committed. And last but not least, again, phase eight, that advocate phase, the Holy Grail nirvana, where they become a referral source, bringing all the great, amazing people they've ever known or worked with to come be part of our team as well because they get that we're building something different.

David Millay: 18:57

Amazing. I'll give you a second to take some water after that.

Joey Coleman: 19:01

I know.

David Millay: 19:01

I

Joey Coleman: 19:02

Appreciate it.

David Millay: 19:03

But it's great cuz it gives a, an overarching view of how the two concepts. Are very similar and the same intentionality that you approach your customer experience. You can easily take a lot of those things and apply it to your employee experience. Context is slightly different, but a lot of the core principles behind it remain the same. So let's let's jump into this. Maybe one of the best ways to do it is to just go step by step and we can go into kind of some of the stories. Cuz one of the things I love about your book, and you always do this, is you are filled with case studies and practical applications of insights. I'd love for us to go through kind of step by step, give some stories and maybe some idea starters. I don't like the idea of like best practices, but I like idea starters because it might, what works for one organization might not work for another, but it might give you an idea to go try something. Does that work for you?

Joey Coleman: 19:56

David not only does it work for me, you have hit onto with that question two key things. Number one, how I approach every speech I've ever given, every book I've ever written, which is humans love stories and the stories aren't designed to have you copy them. Exactly. You can, you're not prohibited from doing that. The story is designed to shift your thinking, to shift your perspective that hopefully will compel you to shift your action into a different way of interacting with your employees.

David Millay: 20:27

Huge. All right, let's hit it. Let's start with accept. I will probably share some things from our worlds as well, from some of what we've seen from the sports and entertainment space. But let's go and let's talk about accepting first, right?

Joey Coleman: 20:39

love it. Do we wanna go to accepting or do we want to pit stop

David Millay: 20:42

oh sorry. Let's start with start

Joey Coleman: 20:43

I'm excited that you're ready to hire'em already, David, but let's decide if it's the right person in the interview first. I

David Millay: 20:49

start with, let's start with

Joey Coleman: 20:50

Totally cool. All right, so one of my favorite stories from the assess part of the conversation leads into that idea of the interview. So many folks when they're thinking about finding the right talent are like, oh my gosh, what do we do in the interview? How do we ask questions? What are the type of things? Cuz let's be honest, interviews are a lot like first dates. Everyone's showing up, pretending to be the best version of themself, not the true version of themself, right? Everybody's cleaned up, they've done a little extra work they're got an idea of what they wanna talk about. And what our job is as prospective employers is to try to quickly get into the conversations that are gonna allow us to discern what this human is like as a person. I'm not a big fan of hiring for skillset. I'm not a big fan for hiring. For What experience have you had? I'm a big fan of looking and saying, are you the kind of person that I wanna spend the majority of my day with every day for the next year, two years, five years, 10 years? Okay. So what do we do in the assess phase? And the example I wanna give you is from Antarctica. One of my goals in writing the book was to have case studies from all seven continents. And we achieved it all seven continents, including Antarctica. So there's this guy named Shackleton, right? You may have heard of him. Shackleton has this ship, the endurance that goes to Antarctica. It gets stuck in the ice for two years and they finally find their way back to civilization. Get out. What's fascinating is how Shackleton decided who should come on the trip. Now, this is an important thing to figure out. you're gonna be in the hostile environment of Antarctica. It's cold. We're only able to bring a certain amount of food with us. We're gonna have to figure out other ways to get food while we go. We might get stuck in the ice. They thought they might get stuck in the ice for a couple days, maybe a couple of weeks. It was two years, folks, two years stuck in the ice to the point where the ship broke apart and sunk and they had to live on the ice and then hike their way out. Absolutely. Insane story. Amazing story. But where it relates to businesses is there a question you can ask in the interview process? A single question that will give you the insight you need that based on a single answer, what it'll be like to work with that person. So here's what would happen. Shack with him would have his team do the interviews, and then he'd come in for the final interview and he'd sit down and he'd say, I have just one question. Do you sing? And the person he was interviewing, whether a semen or a scientist or a sailor would be like, what do I sing? What does that have to do with anything? Is what they would think. And Shackleton would say, no, I don't mean any of that opera Caruso stuff. I just mean if you're sitting around the campfire with the boys, are you willing to humma tune? What Shackleton had learned in his previous voyages is in the cold inhospitable, dark Antarctic night. The ability to sit around a fire and sing a song is what allowed his men to keep fighting for another day. That allowed his men to survive. It kept morale high. In fact, when the ship was sinking into the ice, he said to his team, we gotta decide what we're gonna get off the ship to keep, we're gonna have to abandon a lot of stuff. And one of his folks said, yeah we're gonna leave the banjo on the ship. And he's no. I'd rather leave food. Then leave the banjo because that's gonna help us sing around the fire at night. So the question becomes to employers listening. Is there a question you could ask, a single question that would give you insight as to the type of person you're about to invite into your organization?

David Millay: 24:21

I I love that. Part of that to me also highlights on the question was built around the darkest times, and I think it is, there are a lot of employees who, in peace time, let's call it, when things are going well. They're good. But there are a lot more employees that are like that than like, when things are really hitting the fan, who's who can, what are the skillsets needed to pull you out of there? And then how do you ask a question to identify that skillset? Is that part of the lesson as well? or is that something I just made up on that

Joey Coleman: 24:54

O on only a hundred percent. Only a hundred percent. Is that part of it as well? Yeah, and here's the thing. I'm a recover. I'm a recovering attorney. The first steps admitting you have a problem. There are 11 steps after that. But when I was working in the legal field, one of the things people talk about is summer associate programs where between your second and third year of law school, they invite law students to come work at the law firm. They pay'em a boatload of money, they take'em to ball games, they have lobster and steak dinners. They're doing all these fancy things. You accept the job offer, and then you show up for the first day of work and they're like, great. You're gonna sit in this room in the basement for the next four months reviewing printouts of emails from one of our clients that's going through an antitrust merger to see if the word blue diamond appears in any of the emails. And if it does, you take that piece of paper and put it in this box instead of in the original box it was in. I'm not making this up. This happens. All the time. The point of the story here is the courting, the dating, the experience of what you were held to believe it would be like was, to your point, a peacetime experience. Here's the best of all worlds. But then you show up for the job and you immediately get thrown into one of the worst of all worlds scenarios. I'm not saying that you want to have your people run a gauntlet as part of the interview process. What I am saying is, if you are bringing people on, the more you can give them an accurate representation of what the best day on the job and what the worst day on the job is gonna look and feel like, the better you will be served should they decide to accept your offer.

David Millay: 26:27

Yeah, it's interesting too, not to go too deep on this topic, cuz I know we got a bunch but I think like activity based hiring as well. I don't know if you guys got into this like for me, we're, we were looking at podcast clip editors, right? I. Could, could our team, could Katie and I go through and edit podcast clips? Yes. Does that bring us joy? Not really. Does it take us, does it take us more time than we need to? That takes away from our clients. Yes. So can we outsource that? And so what I did was we took six people. I hired'em all for the same task, gave'em all the same assignment, and said, Hey, your job is to go through and edit the same clip. So I had six different, six versions of the same clip. And then we cut, and I told them, I said, Hey, six other people are gonna have the same task. And then we're gonna go, that's gonna cut down to three people, and then we're gonna pick one out of that. And because for me it's like speed and the ability to hit a deadline and turn those clips around quickly was the one thing, the primary thing I was measuring. And everybody can tell you, oh yeah, I can hit deadlines. But until you see them in action, in part of that, I realized that one person that I really liked in the interview process and I thought was gonna be the front runner, just couldn't hit the deadline. Got it to me like four days late. I'm like, that's not gonna work for me. so anyway I think

Joey Coleman: 27:38

David. I love

David Millay: 27:39

that you could go in this,

Joey Coleman: 27:40

Yeah, I love that. And I wanna call out two beautiful things you did there. Number one, you were clear about what your criteria, your driving criteria for the hire was. Speed. How can you turn this around quickly? And me deadline right speed and living up to deadlines. And you made that very clear to the people. You didn't hide the ball, you didn't say actually this was a test on speed and deadlines. No, you said at the outset, Hey, I'm gonna be very clear. I'm gonna be a grownup. Tell you the metrics you're being measured on, and that's what you're being evaluated on. But more importantly, you did something which so many businesses failed to do. You actually hired and paid the people. So many businesses are like, Hey, we're going to, this was like a spec assignment to see if you can do it and do. And it's like that. I wanna take a shower after that conversation, let alone after that project. It just doesn't even feel fun if you are going to value your people. And if you're going to claim on your website, in your marketing materials, in your interviews that you value, your people, value them from the beginning. I sat in on a call recently with one of my consulting clients where they were doing the first day training for some new hires and about an hour into the eight hour Zoom virtual training session. So just let that sink in for a second, folks. Okay. Some of you just threw up. I'm sorry for not warning you in advance. You know that the Obama inducing scenario was approaching, one of the new hires said, just outta curiosity, are we being paid for today?

David Millay: 29:14

Great

Joey Coleman: 29:14

The fact that person didn't know. Told me everything I needed to know about the hiring process. They've been asked to come to an eight hour Zoom training session, and they're not sure if they're getting paid. Oh my goodness. What other things have fallen through the cracks?

David Millay: 29:30

yeah, that's a great point. We could go a hundred percent deeper. We could do a whole podcast just on, on each one of these topics, but for the sake of time let's keep rolling. Let's talk about accept the job acceptance process and what that looks like.

Joey Coleman: 29:45

Yeah, so accept has two aspects, the offer that you make, and hopefully the acceptance that they give when they transition from being a prospective employee to an actual employee. I'd love to talk about wedding invitations. Okay, so here's the interesting thing. When you get a wedding invitation, think as you're listening, David, and you might have one that comes to mind, think about the greatest wedding invitation you ever received. It probably came in an oversized envelope. Maybe it had a wax seal. It had calligraphy writing on the front. It was beautiful printed paper. You opened it up inside was another envelope. You were like, oh my gosh. There's another envelope that maybe had your name and a significant other's name or children's name on it. You flipped that over. You opened it up, and the inside were lots of little inserts. There might have even been crepe paper. It was raised in. It was beautiful. There was a design. It had a whole aesthetic feel. It previewed not only the experience of attending the wedding, but it brought to the level of the interaction a solemnity, a significance and importance that marked this invitation to come join for a special moment that would begin, ideally, a lifelong journey, counterbalance that experience to the typical job offer letter. That usually reads something like this. Dear David, we are pleased to offer you the position of Chief Marketing Officer. You will be an at-will employee in the state of Florida. That means we can fire you for any reason that we want at any time. Your salary will be$62,738, and we will be withholding tax, which means you, that will not be your take home money. You'll also be entitled to any of our benefits and packages offers we want. If you are willing to accept this offer, sign here and mail this back to us. Now, let's just juxtapose those two emotional feelings. One is an experience, one is a pathetic transaction. How are you inviting people in to your vision, your journey, their future? What happens when we think of our job offer letters as being invitations to join us on this epic journey. We're about to start.

David Millay: 32:07

So much more powerful, obviously. One, one thing I have a question on as it relates to this and this comes from actually some of our work with Notre Dame and

Joey Coleman: 32:17

Oh boy. We just got excited there. David. Just trigger folks, for those of you that can't see me or you're just listening in, you just saw a whole different level of experience here cuz we're about to talk about the Notre Dame fighting Irish.

David Millay: 32:27

With both of us being Notre Dame alums, this project is near and dear to my heart. I worked on working with Notre Dame for 10 years and finally last year, one of my friends, Tim Wise, made it happen. And so one of the things we were working on with them is, The project overall was around making game days better, specifically focusing on their legendary usher staff and how can we, how might we help that group continue to get better and stay at this legendary position that they're known around the world for? And one of the things that we looked at was job descriptions, right? So I would say that's probably more in the assess phase, but I think what you described around the acceptance piece is really interesting because we wrote, we rewrote all the job descriptions and we made them much more welcoming and inviting and like descriptive of what the Notre Dame Usher position would do, the importance of the role, the emotional connection you're gonna be able to have with customers, and how that's gonna make the team play better. And some of the initial pushback that came back was around, That's great. We do think that's gonna help, but there are compliance things that we've gotta get in here. So when you think about a job acceptance thing, it's great to be able to do this fun, awesome thing, but there are some compliance things in there. So how do you make it an emotional experience while still getting the things that we need to have legally from a compliance perspective.

Joey Coleman: 33:47

David, I love this question, and as a recovering attorney, let me be clear, I'm not offering legal advice, but this is his advice from someone who spent three years in law school practiced for five, and check with your local lawyer in jurisdiction to make sure that this works for you. But let me give you some business advice from somebody with a legal hat for many years that he wore. Just because it needs to meet legal requirements doesn't mean it needs to feel like it was written by a lawyer. I say that with respect to the lawyers out there, okay? I understand you were taught in law school and in your job as a lawyer, how to write things in a way that were binding, that protected everyone that made sure everything was good. But in the process, you were also taught to suck the humanity out of the words you use to make it about. Blocking and tackling and stopping people from being able to actually have an experience. I have seen plenty of documents written by lawyers. I've been proud to create some of these documents for myself that cover the key points that need to be covered, but do it in a fun and playful way. There's even parts of my book where I actually say, by the way, we're gonna need you to do X, Y, Z, and if you do this, the lawyers will be so much happier. Thanks for helping me to make their miserable lives feel better. Okay, here's the thing. You can have fun with it. You can be playful with it. Everyone understands that there are compliance and legal aspects of what need to be done. It doesn't mean that you need to use boilerplate language with 78 subparts on a three page document, that you're halfway into the first paragraph and you're lost and don't understand what's happening.

David Millay: 35:30

I love it. It's, there's a way to make it fun and introduce the humanity back into it. And if you don't, that acceptance process is gonna be a lot tougher. You're gonna lose them. Let's talk about the next stage. Affirm, right? We wanna overcome hire's, remorse, very similar to buyer's remorse. W what do you consider like the bare minimum that employers should do to affirm an employee's decision that yes, you made the right decision by accepting this job offer?

Joey Coleman: 35:56

I love that you ask about the bare minimum, David, because the bare minimum of acknowledging that your newly accepted. Candidate is doubting the decision they just made is by far a huge step in the right direction. Most businesses don't even think about a concept like new hire's, remorse. They've never heard of it, they've never even considered it. So even just being aware that your new clients are going through that, or feeling that is often enough to shift the feeling and shift the conversation. I think one of the best and easiest things we can do in the Affirm stage is to let the person know who's just accepted the job offer, how excited we are that they accepted it. Lots of times when a job offer goes out, there's some negotiation back and forth on salary, on benefits, et cetera. And what's interesting is it starts the relationship out in this little bit of an adversarial feeling of, oh, I gotta, I had to fight for more money, I had to fight for more benefits. Oh and it leaves everyone in the interaction with a little bit of a sour taste in their mouth, right? The employer was like, oh, why are you fighting me so much? In the beginning, the employee's I'm doing everything that every website ever told me to do, not accept the first offer. This is the one that blows my mind. How often do we train our salespeople not to accept the first, no. And yet when our candidates for the same company that trains their sales team to do that, when our candidates don't accept the first job offer, we're like, Ugh, high maintenance millennials. Here we go. What are we into now? It's stop. They are doing the thing that you would do, that you probably did do, but before you accepted your job. Why don't we just see that as part of the natural part of the evolution and conversation? So how do we counter this? In the Affirm stage, it's the opportunity to kinda reset the deck a little and to let'em know that, Hey, the fact that you're part of our team now, we couldn't be happier. We are thrilled. We are excited. So the question becomes, what are you sending to your people between the time they accept the offer and their first day on the job? Now, in the typical business, that's a good two week gap. For some executives, it might be a six month gap. The typical business isn't sending anything. They're not sending any gifts, they're not even having any communications. One of the tools I love to use in this phase is a video cuz it doesn't take that much time to create and it's hugely impactful. And it can be as simple as a selfie video. Doesn't need to be high production value. Something that Trish shows, Hey, I heard you accepted the offer. I am thrilled. It was amazing meeting you in the interview process. I loved your answer. X, Y, Z. And you refer to something that really stood out that made them the candidate that got the gig. Cuz lots of times we get the offer and we're like, was it because the other people you interviewed were idiots? Or did you actually like me? Where are we at you? You relay back to them the parts of their personality, their skillset, their experience that you valued the most, and you memorialize that in a digital artifact that I promise you they will save. And they will save it and they will play it again. When times are tough or when they're in the kind of war or difficult times that you mentioned earlier, David, they will know that you actually were excited to bring them on the team and they will have proof that you actually felt that way.

David Millay: 39:21

A, as a, I'm gonna go off on a slight tangent here, but for the sake of time, not gonna make it too deep. Little video, things like that. Selfie videos are so easy and so powerful that, I remember this is like back in September and I still talk about this, where our mutual friend Jesse Cole dropped, just sent me a video message just out of the blue saying Thank you for all we're doing on the podcast and in the sports industry. And I still talk about that. And it wasn't even part of this employee process, but it took him literally three minutes, the length of the video, he was clearly riffing. And it takes nothing, it doesn't need to be a high production value thing to show your employees that you value them and you're excited for them to join the team. It can be something as powerful as a little selfie video. I don't know why people don't use that pla that, that more often

Joey Coleman: 40:08

Yeah. Two thoughts on that. David. Number one, Jesse Cole, rockstar human being owns and leads the Savannah Bananas. If you're not familiar with the Savannah Bananas, I don't know what rock you've been hiding under the Savannah Bananas, have more followers on TikTok, then the top eight major league baseball teams have on TikTok combined. Okay. This is a team that you know, is, they're the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, right? As Jesse describes it, you go to a baseball game and it's are going to a baseball game, isn't going to a baseball game. It's like going to a circus and a baseball game breaks out. they're actually a case study in the book,

David Millay: 40:43

As they should be.

Joey Coleman: 40:44

to Oh, as they should be. They're just rock stars across the board. But the other thing I'll say about videos is we are at a unique time in human history. Most of the videos you receive via text message, Come from siblings. Parents, kids, grandkids, college roommates, your best friend. They're joking, they're little, they're playful messages. They're, someone singing Happy Birthday to you and sending the video. I don't understand why more businesses that claim that their customers are family don't use the mode of communication. That right now is primarily being used by families. Short, little, quick, thoughtful videos. It doesn't require that much effort. And for all of you that are like, oh, Joey, but I don't have a studio and I don't have the proper lighting and sound, doesn't matter. The research actually shows in a sales context that a video that is sent as a selfie video converts higher than a full production studio video. The same applies to our emotional feeling by it. An off-the-cuff, random, unscripted, two minute 32nd video is going to do more than whatever your grand marketing strategy of going into this studio to create custom videos for all your customers. No, pull out your phone and start shooting them.

David Millay: 41:56

One, one of the best spots to do it, honestly. And you can, the way you cant validate this is just go on TikTok. The amount of people that take those videos from their car, from the front seat of their car, cuz you actually, and when you're in your car, you get great lighting cuz it's coming in from all, it's all natural lighting, but it also shows that, hey, This is not, this is authentic. This is who I am. I'm in my car. I'm not showing you all the glitz and glamor, like I'm giving you the real anyway, we could go off on tangents on all this stuff for forever. Why don't we move into the next phase, activate. So let's talk a little bit about activating. How do we, once somebody's there, they've accepted it they're past, that hire's remorse. Now they're actually starting to work, and we got one shot to activate them in the right way. Let's talk about this phase a little bit.

Joey Coleman: 42:40

So the activate phase, coming back to it just as a refresh, is that first day on the job, it's only that first day on the job. And what are you doing to create the kind of story that at the end of that first day on the job, they've got a powerful story to tell. So David, I'm gonna give you a choice here cuz they're 50 plus case studies in the book from all seven continents. I love all of them. Do you want the Canadian sports example or the Canadian tech example? We're going to Canada, we're going north of the border. Sports are tech. Which one are you feeling?

David Millay: 43:10

let you know what we just got done with another podcast where we talked about outside of industry and taking inspiration from outside of industry. So I'm gonna go Canadian tech, gimme that example.

Joey Coleman: 43:18

Canadian Tech. Okay. This company is called Hootsuite. You may have heard of'em. They create a platform that allows you to manage all of your social media interactions in a single platform. Hootsuite hires a number of software developers and coders. And the interesting thing about a software developer and coders when they come onto the job, and the thing that all software developers and coders wonder is, when will I actually get the chance to push code? What that means is change the code in the software that operates our whole business. When will they trust me enough to do that? Hootsuite decided day one. Every Hootsuite employee pushes code on day one of their job. Now, a couple people that are in the tech space right now listening in probably just fell over. I'll give you a second to hop back up. But here's the thing. Hootsuite decided if we trust you enough to hire you, we should trust you enough to push code on day one. And because this is such a thing that is pervasive across all developers and coders, they will want to tell their friends that they pushed code on day one and great software developers, no other great software developers. And this is a great way, right out of the blocks to say, we trust you, you value, you matter. So what does the pushing code look like? There is a section of the Hootsuite website that if you get into the source code, You see the names of all the engineers who work for Hootsuite, that's not something on a main webpage. You have to know how to do this. And I am not a technical person by nature, okay? But in the book, I give you the link where you can go and find it, but you dive into this code and it's like seeing your name in lights because you see your name. It's like in the credit scene of a movie, right? So as part of your first day on the job, in the afternoon, they have you push code to put your name in lights on the website. And when you do that, two interesting things happen. Number one, all the people around you in the office start clapping and cheering the moment it goes live. So you get that physical kinesthetic experience of the applause. Number two, a message goes out on their internal communication device. Why did we just clap? And they introduce the new employee and they say, this new employee just pushed code for the first time. Now, David asked you to think back to what I said earlier, when that person gets home. That night and their kids say, mommy, what did you do at work today? You know what Mommy's going to do? Mommy's gonna call up the Hootsuite website and do View Source and say, mommy changed their website today, and be able to show proof that they contributed from day one.

David Millay: 46:02

That is so cool in such a way to get emotional buy-in. We were talking about the IKEA effect in another podcast of co-creating and like act, the power of somebody creating something with you. How mu how much more powerful that is to emotionally connect with somebody. And so being able to have them create on day one, have an impact and not just go through the HR hoopla is incredibly powerful for getting that buy-in and moving them to the next lever. Before we go to the next lever though I think there are a lot of things. Traditionally I think of this, I think back to my Disney days and like one of the things we would do is obviously your first day is traditions where you're going through and you're meeting Mickey Mouse and you're doing all the things. But even going into your now local area, you go to your cubicle, let's call it, one of the things we would do ahead of time is we would fill out A form that was called we're All ears. And you would mark things like, what are your favorite foods? What are your favorite, all the things so that your manager got a better idea of knowing you. And one of them was what was your favorite Disney character? And so upon your first day, you'd get there and there'd be a poster with your favorite Disney character saying, welcome to the team David. And it was a way to personalize that experience and make that first day memorable. And you got to take that home with you. So to your point, go home with your family, say, look what they made for me. It's so cool. Can't wait to work for this incredible company. I think it's now a little bit more difficult to do things like that if people are hybrid or remote. So I'm curious as to, if you're not a team of engineers pushing code, how can we really make this activate phase relevant and important and stand out for people that are remote or hybrid?

Joey Coleman: 47:39

Yeah I think there's a number of ways that we can do that. One of which and happy to give another story from this, and in fact if I may, let me tell a story about the acclimate phase, which is the next phase, which relates to this hybrid question. So there's a company called Budai Media. What's interesting about Budai Media is they have about 30 employees. In 17 different countries. So I'm gonna stop and let you do the math there. 30 employees spread across 17 different companies. They cover, I think, 15 different time zones globally. They are the ultimate, when you think about fully remote, fully distributed. And one of the things they think about is how do we get people bought into the business early on and how do we get them to connect with their peers who they're not going into an office where they have the water cooler in the first day, lunch, they're sitting on a computer, and they're probably not gonna meet that person for months, if not a year, if ever. So how do they do this? Budai Media did an interesting thing. They put together a little package and they sent it to all of their employees, and it comes not on their first day. It comes a couple days later as they're getting ready for, and the package just says, do not open until the all team meeting. They're like, oh, okay, here's the interesting thing. I got this package do. And then they get on the all team meeting and everybody's there and they're meeting their peers and they're connecting with everybody. And they say, okay, go ahead and open the package. And the person who's the new hire opens the package on screen with everybody else in the team meeting watching virtually, and it's a mug. Now, it's not a mug with the Budai Media logo on it, which is what most companies do when they give you a mug. It instead has photos of everyone on the team, including the new hire. So two interesting things have happened. Number one, they physically feel like they're part of the team. Number two, one of the things they've done is they'll say, let's all raise a glass to David, our new hire, and all the other employees bring onto the screen their mug with the picture of the new hire on it. And they all do a little toast to each other. So what I love about this is, number one, it's a present, it's a physical artifact. It's a reminder of the connection. Number two, it includes the photos of the people. So it really is about connecting the team. It's more the important about the people than what we do. And number three, they've created something similar to the poster you shared with the Disney story, that every time the employee sees that in the next week, the next month, the next year, they are gonna anchor back to the first time they were toasted to by their peers. The first time that they had an interaction with their colleagues that left them feeling like I'm part of this team, even though I might be operating remotely.

David Millay: 50:34

I love it. Such a good way to do it, where even if your team is spread apart, there are ways you can create that connection and have, create some core memories, if you will to help people acclimate. Do you wanna go a little bit deeper into acclimate, or should we move to the next piece?

Joey Coleman: 50:50

I think it's up to you. Here's what I'll say about acclimate. David. Acclimate is a long phase. The phase before it activate one day acclimate. You gotta think less about days and more about weeks or maybe even months. So what are you doing to build it over time? There's some fun examples in the book about larger companies that have like universities where they train you on all the different aspects of the business. There's examples of smaller companies that are training you on the SOPs and the different way we can do that. There's different ways about shadowing senior managers. There's different ways about teaching folks stuff. But one example, I'll tell a quick story is a company called abt Fine Cleaners, and Tailors, now it's a dry cleaning company in Santa Barbara, California. Okay. Family owned business. They've got about 40 employees. Most people would look at this and say, Joey, A dry cleaning business. What am I gonna learn from a dry cleaning business? What Applet does, and the c e o there Sasha is so brilliant at, is she realized that her staff needed to understand the game of business so that they could participate in the success and growth of the business. The practical reality is most of your employees, especially those who are maybe not entrepreneurial or not senior executives, or maybe haven't been in business for that long or haven't built a career, maybe you're younger folks or folks that are transitioning from another industry, they don't actually know how you make money. How rare is it that a new hire gets sat down and said, okay, here's how we make money and here's how we lose money. In a dry cleaning business. Oh my gosh, it's hugely rare and in a dry cleaning business. Margins as a general rule are so thin that if you don't pay attention to every little operational detail, you can lose your shirt, no pun intended, very quickly. Okay. So what Applet does is they teach their people the game of business. They teach them how to read a profit loss statement. They teach them the difference in profitability of different types of cleaning jobs and different types of clients. They teach them the logistics of how do we take in a pair of pants, clean it, press it, and get it back to the same person without losing it, without damaging it in a quick fashion that maximizes not only the value we've created, but the profitability we've been able to extract. What I love about this story is in talking with the C E O Sasha, she shared how many of her employees are women? Who also run the finances of their home, right? In many homes, not saying in all the woman in the home is paying attention to the family expenses, they're paying attention to the family cost and basically the p and l of the household. Okay? Not saying, again, there's no stereotype or judgment in this. I'm just saying that statistically that happens more often than it doesn't. What she said she has found is that the number of employees who have come back to her and said, I'm able to operate my house more profitably. I'm able to stretch our dollars at home further because what I've learned here has allowed her to do something, which I think if I were to boil the entire book down to a single sentence of what I hope people will get out of this book, it would be as follows, the top employers in the world. Care as much, if not more about what happens to their employees lives between 5:00 PM and 9:00 AM as they do about what happens between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM What is happening to your employees when they're not at work? And whatever you can do to enhance their life outside of the office is going to make them want to work longer for you. Be more engaged in how they work for you. Invite all of their friends to come work with you. Be more committed to you. All we have to do to get our employees to care about our business is show them that we care about them personally.

David Millay: 54:55

no question. No question. And that goes back to the thing I said at the very beginning, which is right. The extent to which we care for our employees, genuinely care for our employees is the extent to which they're gonna care for our business, for our customers, and for each other at the end of the day. I love it. All right, let's talk a little bit about accomplish this next a in the framework. This one seems really simple to me, right? Like, why don't we celebrate the wins more often? Somebody gets a first sale, a big sale a marketing pitch worked. They fixed a big bug in the IT system, like, why do we not celebrate these things more often?

Joey Coleman: 55:29

I think we don't celebrate them more often for a couple reasons. David. Number one, I think it's a general rule. Founders, owners, entrepreneurs, the people that are usually running the company are horrible at celebrating their own successes and their own accomplishments. So they don't have a, so they don't have a context for it, and they're like I don't need it, so my employees probably don't need it either. It's folks, the reason they're employees not entrepreneurs is because they are hardwired differently than you. If they were hardwired the same way as you, they wouldn't work for you. They'd go start their own company. So I think part of it is we don't connect to it personally as leaders or managers in the same type of way. Number two, I think we are so driven by the next goal. That we don't stop to celebrate the progress we've already made. All human beings want proof of progress. There is a reason why the best selling issue of Architectural Digest Magazine every year is the before and after issue where they show you pictures of the house before the remodel and pictures after. Why? Because most humans are horrible at envisioning what success looks like. And then when success actually happens, they quickly move the finish line. How many times have we been in a sales situation where you hit your sales goal and they go, great. Now next quarter, here's what we're gonna do. And you're like, do we even celebrate and acknowledge what I just did? Or are you just focused on cracking the whip and driving me further? I think there's a huge opportunity to recognize that a meaningful celebration of a micro victory is something that we can build on. Let me give you an example of what that looks like from my own life. I share this story in the book, but this is one I experienced personally. I worked in sales for a company called the Corporate Executive Board. My job was to travel around the country talking to senior vice presidents of sales and chief information officers, trying to get them to buy into basically a$30,000 annual membership. Okay? Really interesting job. Really interesting organization. But as you might imagine, a tough gig. You had to get the appointment, you had to go meet with these folks. These were very busy folks that didn't have a lot of time. Were asking them to invest in a thing that would require them to attend events and be part of a community. So we're gonna take even more time. Wasn't in inconsequential investment, especially in the late nineties when I was asking for this. After a couple weeks on the job, I made my first sale. And happens in many organizations. My internal team, my fellow salespeople, my sales manager were like, oh my gosh. I was in the office. It came through, bells were being rung, people were throwing stuff in the air, and they're like, we're going to happy hour. And then we went to happy hour and had some drinks and had some happy, and everybody was feeling excited. And that was important and that was valuable and I greatly appreciated that. But before I went home, I went back to the office and I'm dating myself a little bit with this story, but I mentioned it was in the late nineties. Okay. And there's a phone on my desk and there's a little light blinking. And that light blinking meant that I had voicemail on our inner office communication system. And it's the, it's dark. It's 9 30, 10 o'clock at night. We'd had a great celebration on my first sale. And I'm sitting there and I'm ready to go home. I'm like, how am I just listen to this call. So I dial into the voicemail it's the chairman of the board of the company. This is a publicly traded company that I worked for. It's the chairman of the board and the message went something like this, Hey Joey, I heard that you had your first sale today. Congratulations, blah, blah, blah. And he said The name of the company is gonna be a great asset to our membership. We are so proud of you. We know this is only the sign of great things to come. I know we haven't had the chance to meet in person, but I look forward to celebrating in person next time I'm in the office. Congratulations. Oh my gosh, David, even telling the story today, I can feel the emotion I felt that night, right? I can feel the valued. I felt appreciated. I felt significant. And while this may be an overshare, I'll share it anyway, I actually played it again on speaker and I had one of those little Dictaphone tape machines. This is before everybody had cell phone recorders and all that. And I recorded the voicemail onto a little cassette tape, and then whenever I lost a sale, Or whenever I was on the road for, I don't know, two or three weeks straight meeting client after client, not sure what city I was in, let alone who I was meeting with the next day, I would play this recording as a reminder that the chairman of the board of a publicly traded company thought I had value, thought I had worth, thought that I was a contributor. little messages that we give to our employees that take us seconds to create as leaders, as managers, impact them to a much greater degree in magnitude than we will ever know. If nothing else, stop being selfish with what you think about people by keeping it inside and start expressing the gratitude you have for the team members that make it possible for your organization to exist.

David Millay: 1:00:42

Yeah. That's incredible. And I do think that oftentimes you hit on this earlier of why we don't do it more often is we're quick to move to the next thing. We've got other pressures, deadlines, and so I, I know I'm guilty of this where I will give a genuine thank you right off the bat, but it's rare that it is more than that.

Joey Coleman: 1:01:03

I appreciate the honesty of that, David. Yeah, and

David Millay: 1:01:05

it's just the reality cuz I'm focused on all these other things and.

Joey Coleman: 1:01:08

Of course. And here's the deal. Some people might look at this and see my book and these stories as an indictment of leadership and how leaders are failing to create remarkable experiences for their employees. I've got a lot of empathy for the leaders of organization. Here's the kicker. The typical employee doesn't fully understand or appreciate how much their leader actually cares for them. I know enough CEOs, I know enough leaders who lay awake at night terrified that they might not make payroll, who find themselves jumping from meeting to meeting in the back of their head. They're wondering, God, am I doing a good job? Am I showing my people that they care? Am I, are we grooming this person? God, we got this person who's a rising star. I wanna make the pathway for'em, but I don't have enough time to do it today. I've got six people I'm mentoring. I wish I was mentoring 30. How do I do? There's an opportunity for us to just do these little things. The little voicemail, the little handwritten note, the little stop in the hallway. Hey, I so appreciate what you just said in that meeting. I know it took a lot of guts to voice something in opposition to what the head of marketing was saying, but I really valued that perspective. Keep it up. I'm in your corner. Those little things will. Oh my God. That is fuel for the typical employee to power their internal engine for weeks, months, maybe even years. And it's something we can do that by the way, as leaders, the more we do that, the more it allows us to feel like we're winning and we are succeeding and we're doing the things to live up to our vision of what a great leader or manager could or should be.

David Millay: 1:02:51

Humongous. Alright, we've got two more a still we're an hour in. I hope we still have time. The.

Joey Coleman: 1:02:57

I've, I'm good on David. I so appreciate it. And I'm sorry cuz I love these stories and oh my

David Millay: 1:03:02

Oh, they're great.

Joey Coleman: 1:03:03

stuff we can play with.

David Millay: 1:03:04

They're great. I think they help people adapt the principles and apply them to their own organization. So I'm fine with it. I'm okay on time right now, so let's keep rolling. Adopt. How can we jump to this next phase? Moving from celebrating wins to really helping people align their personal goals and organizational goals and really a adopt that organization's why?

Joey Coleman: 1:03:26

Love it, David. To talk about adopt, I'd like to do two things. Number one, give the most startling statistic I found in doing the research for the book. And number two, share the story of a company with less than a dozen employees that solved for this problem that plagues the majority of organizations globally. So it's easily applied to organizations in any industry of any size. Here's the research I found. If you were to ask the typical employer, why are people leaving? The most common answer is they're gonna get paid more money elsewhere. At our competitor, they jump to our competitor for a bigger paycheck. They're getting more a bigger title. Do I get it? That's fair. The typical research that has been done on Why employees leave is based on a sample set of 300 to 500 interviews. They interview about 300 to 500 people and they say, why did you leave? They write down all the results and they say, statistically, this percentage of people leave. I'm not a math person, but that's a small sample set. I found a study that did 234,000 exit interviews, and I thought, what did they find? And what they found is 9% of people leave for more money. 9%. Now for some say people listening, they're like, see Joey, I was right. Fine, that's fair. But I'm more interested in the 91% who left for a reason other than more money. Cuz the more money thing, it's an escalating cause. It's mutually assured destruction we all lose at the end. Okay.

David Millay: 1:04:53

absolutely.

Joey Coleman: 1:04:55

The majority of people who left 23%, the biggest chunk of people who gave a reason for why they left was they couldn't see a clear path forward for their career at that company. They didn't know what the next job was gonna be. So lemme tell you about well-oiled operations, less than a dozen people based in Wisconsin. They had an experience where they had an employee put in their two weeks notice, who was somebody that the CEO had already flagged, was a future leader in the organization. And she was hurt. She was stunned. Many of you listening, you've had this experience, somebody leaves on the team, you're like, oh my God, this one, my A players, why isn't a player leaving? What happened? And they realized that they hadn't effectively communicated with that person about the vision that they saw for them at the organization, and the person couldn't see it themselves. So they came up with something called the future or chart. The future org chart is an organizational chart. It's a sketch that is created by the C E O every year and every year it is presented to the entire team. And the org chart shows what the business is planned to look like three years from now,

David Millay: 1:06:06

That's pretty cool.

Joey Coleman: 1:06:07

and they present it to everyone and they're like, Hey, here's what's possible. Because what often happens is an employee is sitting in the job going, I want my boss's job, but my boss just got this job two years ago and the last person that held this job was in this position for 28 years. I do not wanna wait around 28 years to have my turn to lead this job. But what they don't know is that the company is planning to create three more divisions over the next five years that will also need somebody to run those divisions. We cannot overemphasize or overexplain to our teams the future opportunities at our organization. We've gotta show them the path.

David Millay: 1:06:46

so I've never thought of that exercise as, creating your future org chart. Cause I think a future org chart does a couple things. I do think companies do a good job o occasionally of saying, Hey, here's the vision for the company. Here are the areas we're gonna explore. Here's how we're gonna grow our revenue 10%. But what's missing is what's in it for me. As an employee, I understand this vision, but you haven't explained how my day-to-day is gonna get changed. And so where an org chart is interesting is it says all of that in one document. It says, here's where we're gonna expand as a company, or here's how we're gonna contract, and here is your role that is gonna be in the bigger show. I love that exercise.

Joey Coleman: 1:07:30

Yeah. And what's interesting, David, is when they do it, they actually say to the team, and if you see something on this future org chart that is interesting to you, please let us know because we'd love to start talking with you about the skills you're gonna need, the experience you're gonna need, the things you're gonna be able need to be able to do if you want this position, so we can start doing it now. So if you look at it and you're like, oh, there's a director of photography for our product website. We don't even have a product website right now, but I love photography. Oh my God, you just opened up a whole new opportunity for me. And what we can maybe do is say, great, we don't have the whole product section of the website now, but you know what? We do need headshots for everyone. So let's have you take some headshots of everybody so we can update our existing website cuz most of the headshots on your existing website are horrible if you even have them. By the way, pro tip, everyone listening, every employee of your company should be able to go to your website and see a picture of themself. Now some of your employees are like, Joey, I don't like having my picture on the website. I get it. Give them the opportunity to opt in and if they don't like it, hire a caricature artist to do something fun and playful. Or they can have a picture of their dog or their cat or something else, or their favorite place to vacation. It doesn't matter. But again, think about that. When they go home, can they say to their significant other, their roommate, their spouse, their kids, their parents, look, I'm part of this organization and they're proud enough to have me part of the organization that they share that publicly.

David Millay: 1:08:56

Yeah, I love that. Now I will say slight danger in future casting and talking about like some of this stuff, right? A

Joey Coleman: 1:09:03

There is

David Millay: 1:09:03

there. You gotta have constant communication cuz things will change and you don't want employees building up resentment saying, oh, I thought we were opening this department, why have we not done that yet?

Joey Coleman: 1:09:13

totally, but here's the thing, David, this comes back to that same conversation that we were talking about with the dry cleaning company, about the game of business. You have to be talking to your employees about this is the vision, and by the way, this is the vision for three years from now, and you know what we're gonna do next year at this time. We're gonna check in on this same vision. That's now two years away, and then a year from now after that, we're gonna check in on the vision that's now a year away. And then when it's actually that year, we're gonna check in and see if we've actually achieved that goal. Because you and I know as leaders, what often happens in a business is you have a three year goal that seems completely impossible until about two years and seven months into the goal. And then suddenly you're like, holy cow, we're actually gonna achieve it.

David Millay: 1:09:58

Yep.

Joey Coleman: 1:09:58

up until then, there's a boatload of doubt and uncertainty. You're right. As a leader, it's our job to be messaging with our people and reminding them, Hey, we're still on the path, or The path has changed, but we're willing to adopt and morph this with you because in the same way we're growing the company, we're growing our people. And something that you might not have been interested in three years ago, but you're interested in today, that's okay too. We will find a space for the best people on our team.

David Millay: 1:10:23

yeah, no question. Just I'll share one story. We definitely had one of my, probably arguably my favorite leader that I've ever worked for at Disney. One of the things he did a good job of was future casting and helping people understand what their role in the future could be. And what people didn't understand is to your point around helping PE employees understand the bigger business, they didn't understand that, Hey, I'm on the operations team and I'm supposed to be, he's been promising me a. A promotion in the next year. They didn't ex, they wasn't relayed to them that, hey, the sales team isn't meeting their numbers and in order for you to get there, the sales team needed to hit their numbers. We can't promote you if the sales team doesn't hit their numbers. anyway alright, let's bring it home here. Advocate our last phase how we can turn employees into evangelists and get them advocating for our company. Let's talk about this one to bring us home.

Joey Coleman: 1:11:11

Yeah. So the, one of the examples that I love as a case study story in the book about the advocate phase is so often we will say to our employees, Hey, if you know anybody else who would be a good fit for our company, let'em know that this position is open. That kind of half-hearted lackluster approach usually produces the half-hearted, lackluster results of people not sharing job postings with their friends. There's a company called Brasa Peruvian Kitchen. It's a fast casual restaurant, okay? And what Brasa does brilliantly is every week while people are at work, they get paid time on their shift. These are hourly employees to scroll through their social media feeds and their contact list in their phone to identify people that they know that they think should work at Prosa Peruvian Kitchen.

David Millay: 1:12:08

Interesting.

Joey Coleman: 1:12:09

In the same way, David, that you talked at the beginning of our conversation about paying people to do the work. Brassa pays people to think about referrals. This is a completely different approach to how you might encourage, motivate, suggest that your employees identify other folks that could work for your organization. And what they have found is anytime they have an open position, they have a huge number of pre-vetted, super qualified candidates cuz their people are always making referrals. And the fact of the matter is, if you think about the quick service restaurant industry, most people that work in that industry have friends either from previous jobs or in their social networks that also work at Quicks serve restaurants. In other chains or other different locations. So they know the target market, they know who's out there and this allows them to dramatically increase their talent. What I will tell you is, and we just got some research back from them that regrettably didn't make the book cuz we had to lock the book, but they basically went, they had one store that went 18 months with zero turnover. Now if you know anything about the quick serve restaurant industry, their turnover rate, I think annually across the industry is like 130% or something like that. Which literally means not only does everybody who is here on January 1st leave, but a third of the people that we bring in after January 1st to replace those people also leave before the end of the year. It's insane. Zero turnover for 18 months. Why? Because the people felt valued. They felt like they were part of the team. They felt like they were part of the story going forward.

David Millay: 1:13:54

Incredible. I know we could go a lot deeper on this topic too, but I want to give us a chance to wrap up here. A advocating or turning your help, helping your employees become advocates is huge. And there's so many different components to it. I love it. Joey, the book is coming out. When is it coming out?

Joey Coleman: 1:14:09

The book officially comes out June 27th, right? It's available now if you're on Amazon, if you're on Barnes and Noble, if you're at your favorite indie bookstore, you can get it now. I will share, if I can put in a little plug, one of the things that was really important to me is that the book is available in the format that works for you. What do I mean by that? There's a hardcover version if you wanna have it on your desk to refer to as a resource going forward, or it's a big book, it's 300 plus pages. You can use it as a doorstop after you've done reading it or to prop up your camera. Number two, there's an ebook version. If you're one of those folks that likes to Kindle, highlight and be ready and be able to review your notes afterwards. Great. We're all set up. And number three, there's an audiobook version that I narrate. So if you've enjoyed this conversation, if you've liked the way I tell a story, you get to hear me tell all 50 in the audiobook. So my ask my request is, if you have found any interesting ideas that you liked from this, if you think this is an area that you might be able to improve on, if you think this is an area that you think other businesses that you interact with or other folks you know might be able to improve on, get the book in the format that works best for you and let me know what you think.

David Millay: 1:15:18

Huge Joey. Other than buying the book, where can people follow along your journey? I know LinkedIn, you always drop some good stuff on there. Where can people reach you?

Joey Coleman: 1:15:26

I appreciate that, David. Yeah, my best social media platform and really my only social media platform is LinkedIn. So come find me over on LinkedIn. The other place is on my website, joey coleman.com. That's j o e y, like a five-year old, or a baby. Kangaroo Coleman, c o l e m a n, like the camping equipment, but no relation. Joey coleman.com. There'll be all kinds of book bonuses up there things that you can get if you wanna pre-order the book, which I so appreciate. And lots of opportunities to continue the story and continue the conversation.

David Millay: 1:15:56

Incredible. Joey, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for all this extra time. We're gonna have to split this episode into two and no I just really appreciate you and all the work that you're doing out there in the world.

Joey Coleman: 1:16:05

Oh, David, it is my pleasure. Thank you so much for the meaningful and thoughtful questions and the conversations, and hey, anytime I get to hang out with a fellow Notre Dame grad and alum fan, it's a great day for me. So thanks to everybody else who is kind enough to listen into the conversation and for staying with us for the marathon episode of Flip The Switch with Joey Goldman.

David Millay: 1:16:24

Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you next week. Hey guys, before you head out, just wanted to say thank you so much for listening to the show. If you enjoyed it, head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. That helps more of your peers find the show as they search for ways to get better in their own roles. But this podcast is just a small part of what we do at Engagement In our normal day in the office, we're crazy focused on helping athletic departments and sports and entertainment companies generate more revenue by becoming more customer-centric. To see how we might be able to help your organization, visit Engagement partners.com to learn more. Download a free guide, check out our blogs and case studies or schedule a call with us if you wanna see how we can help with your particular objectives. Our goal is to help you create deeper connections with fans and generate more revenue. So when you're with us, hopefully you find a nugget or two that helps your cause.