The Five Most Important Questions
for Every Employee
© Holly Stiel
2. Why do you want me to do this?
Adults want to know and understand why they are being asked to do certain things such as adhere to a set of standards. Once they know the “What?” they want to know what the purpose of it – “Why?” They want to be clear about what they will personally get out of it, so they can decide if they want to do it or not. The why needs to make the case for the what. The why is also about company values. Values quite literally drive our behavior. If we see the value in something or hold the value as a personal belief, our behavior will reflect it. I learned the power of values as a foundation for the why, from my career as a concierge. The concierge profession stands on its values. These values have shaped the history of the concierge. The concierge profession has basically flourished because of these rock solid foundational values.
They are elegant and humble in their simplicity. If more businesses adopted and insisted upon living and working to a set of values, everything would work better. Here are the values of the concierge.
In Service Through Friendship: We help each other and we are kind to each other.
Our Word Is Our Bond: Trust.
My Guest Today Is Your Guest Tomorrow: We share.
Concierges say “Yes!”: They make things happen.
3. How Do you want me to do it?
The “How?” of course, involves training. The reality is that one or two days of training, no matter how excellently designed and delivered is no guarantee that sustained changes in behavior will result from the effort. What training can and does accomplish is a strong foundation and a platform in which information can be received. Real change in behavior only occurs in the follow-up, and reinforcement stages. It is highly dependent on the buy-in at the leadership level and occurs over time.
As a consultant, I have observed up close and personal, companies giving lip service to their desire for a service culture. They bring in outside consultants to conduct training classes but managers don’t even show up in support of those classes. The message they send is that this is really not very important -- it’s for you, not for us who are ABOVE you -- your superiors. Needless to say, this behavior is not inspirational to the trainees.
4 and 5. How will I know how I am doing? and How are you going to help me to improve?
Both of these questions can be answered through the skill of coaching. When employees come back from training, their attitude is usually, “Okay, that was good, now what?” If nothing is ever talked about, then nothing will be the result of the training effort.
- - Coaching, not “telling” is so valuable because coaching not only leverages the training investment, it reinforces the new skills and behaviors.
- - Holds employees accountable to them. The best part is that over time, self-discovery coaching, based on the positive, promotes consistent, incremental performance improvement throughout the organization -- from top to bottom -- and exponentially increases communication.
- - Most employees depend on once-a-year performance reviews to know how their work is being perceived. Coaching takes away any surprises and eliminates employee resentment at finding out where they stand only at performance review time
- - By regularly coaching employees, managers become self-observant and ultimately more responsible for their own performance.
Now that the five simple questions every employee needs to know the answers to have been explained, there is one last tip to help you in designing and sustaining a culture of service.
A great way to think about developing an effective service culture revolves around the thinking of a world-class concierge. This is the perfect centerpiece to use because if you think about it, the core difference between the great service provided by world-class concierges and your average service providers is the concierges’ ability to find a way to “yes.” The concierge practice of “make it happen” thinking, revolutionizes the customer experience, because it elevates customer service to an art form and ultimately improves the bottom line.