Category: Training & Development

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Engagement Training & Development

Management Communication Basics: Engaging Employees in Staff Briefings

With company e-mail dominating internal communications, staff meetings are becoming an endangered organizational activity. Yet managers and employees still need to get together to stay informed on what’s happening in the organization and how it impacts their work, including the opportunity to voice their concerns.

Why a staff briefing?

The purpose of  periodic staff briefings is to keep employees connected and get them “on the same page.” It is not intended to focus on problem-solving or detailed planning. Here’s a sample meeting template that helps engage employees and minimize passive participation.

  1. An aerial view of what’s going on – share new top-down information such as organizational strategies, operational updates, policy changes, etc., including the rationale behind any changes or direction. Employees need to understand the “why” as well as the “what” of executive decisions in the context of the company’s mission and goals. Allow time to address employee questions and concerns.
  2. New business/project/program development – overview of any new initiatives that support and/or impact departmental goals, including who is involved so staff know who to contact with questions.
  3. Current projects/programs – employee share progress updates, results.
  4. Teachable moments – employees can take turns reporting on business topics of interest to the group or share lessons learned from a recent work-related situation.
  5. Wrap up/next steps – acknowledge employee participation; agree on any follow-up action items.

Food and face time

In a positive work environment, face-to-face staff briefings serve employees’ needs for information-sharing, learning, and connecting with each other.  Consider providing food and/or beverage depending on what time the meeting is held. Refreshments can be a strong draw and serve to create a hospitable meeting environment, but they should not be the main attraction.

Email and other forms of digital communication are expedient and timely in keeping employees informed. However, face-to-face is better for periodic staff briefings because:

  • people are wholly present (for the most part)
  • there are fewer distractions in a focused meeting setting
  • actual body language and tone of voice minimize misinterpretations
  • feedback and clarification are immediate.

“Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other’s micro-expressions.” Peter Guber

[Source: Peter Guber. BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2015. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/peter_guber.html, accessed April 7, 2015.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/citation/quotes/authors/p/peter_guber.html#Ksbj93R6pceeLx7o.99]

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Training & Development

What Do a Business Training Professional and Zumba Fitness Instructor Have in Common?

Quite a bit actually.

Several years ago, I decided to ramp up my exercise and tried Zumba. It took me quite a while to get with the program, so to speak, as participants are not “taught” the dance moves – you just follow the instructor’s moves. I was WAY out of my comfort zone with this, despite the fact that the instructors don’t expect you to follow along perfectly; they just want you to have fun and get fit in the process.

Eventually I became more comfortable with the challenge of following the different dance moves and routines offered by various Zumba instructors. It’s great to get away from my office and enjoy the loud music, the camaraderie in class, and exercising my body as well as my brain.

I take an average of three  Zumba classes a week. Observing different instructors and listening to feedback from attendees, I began to analyze the instructors’ approaches to teaching Zumba and rapport with their classes. The best and most popular instructors share these characteristics:

  • A passion for doing and teaching  Zumba.
  • Smiling and making lots of eye contact.
  • “Connecting” with attendees by facing the class as much, if not more, than they face the mirror; also periodically moving away from the mirror/front of the class and dancing among the attendees.
  • Making the dance moves easy to follow with clear hand signals, verbal cues, and repetitive steps.
  • Encouraging fun and fitness while reinforcing attendees’ participation throughout the class in ways that are most comfortable for them; no one is ever made to feel inept.
  • Preparing for each class by practicing the routines and learning/demonstrating new ones to mix things up a bit.
Gladys Colon, Zumba instructor
Gladys Colon, Zumba instructor

I recently spent time outside of class with Gladys Colon, one of the more popular instructors, to talk about her experience teaching Zumba. I also wanted to let her know how much I enjoyed her class. The more we talked, the more I realized we had much in common as instructors even though our classes are so very different: she teaches Zumba fitness in a gym and I teach marketing workshops in a corporate business setting.

Here’s what we have in common. We both practice as much as possible – regardless of how well we know our subject matter. We intentionally engage our attendees without overwhelming them. We work hard to ensure the people in our classes feel the time they spend with us is worthwhile. Above all, we both share a passion for what we do — whether it’s energizing people through cardio or helping them broaden their marketing acumen.

In what unlikely places do you find professional inspiration?

[With special thanks to my favorite instructors Gladys Colon, Tarnisha “Moe” Sass, Manny Balseiro and Krista Cernansky … you all rock!]

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Engagement Training & Development

More Favorite Employee Engagement Quotes

Here are more great quotes that apply to workplace engagement – some relatively new, some from a century or two ago. You can use these or other quotes as conversation-starters in management development training by asking participants to choose and briefly discuss which quote(s) they find most meaningful.

“Just as there are no little people or unimportant lives, there is no insignificant work.” Elena Bonner

“Correction does much, but encouragement does more.” Goethe

“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.” Albert Einstein

“It’s easy to get good players. Gettin’ them to play together, that’s the hard part.” Casey Stengel

“Delegating work works, provided the one delegating works, too.” Robert Half 

“Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.” Anonymous

“When people thrive, companies thrive.” Bob Chapman

 

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Engagement Marketing Training & Development

Best Job Ever! Reflecting on 2014

“To give your best is to receive the best … ” Raymond Holliwell

I’m fortunate to do work that I enjoy. This past year I had the opportunity to train managers how to strengthen employee engagement with internal marketing, facilitate planning retreats, and help marketing team members “get on the same page.” What’s most challenging is that each client presents a unique workplace culture and situation. The process of working with them to achieve positive outcomes in the context of their organizations is rewarding and a privilege I do not take lightly.

In addition to my client work, I met many fascinating folks at a variety of conferences. Highlights of this past year’s speaking engagements include:

  • Asomercadeo’s International Marketing Congress – I traveled to Medellin, Colombia, to share internal marketing practices with South American marketing colleagues.
  • BlogPaws – For the second time I participated in this special gathering of people who are passionate about animal welfare; my workshop there was designed to help rescue/shelter volunteers and staff better understand nonprofit marketing.
  • Volunteers in Medicine – I was truly inspired by this dedicated group of healthcare professionals and volunteers driven to improve health care access for the under-served and under-insured  in their local communities; in multiple sessions we discussed how to strengthen volunteer and board engagement.

Here’s to a new year of new opportunities and challenges and why it will be another successful year:

“The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hope you find similar success in 2015!

 

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Customer service Engagement Training & Development

5 Tips to Keep Employees Engaged During the Holidays

The last few weeks of the calendar year can be stressful in the workplace as people become distracted preparing for the holidays. Employees can be overwhelmed with year-end reporting and planning deadlines just as everyone else seems to be using up the last of their vacation days. And those at work may be so into the holiday frenzy that they’ve mentally checked out.

Here are five ways managers can help employees stay on-task and engaged during the holiday season.

  • Keep employees mission-focused, customer-focused, and connected.
    Respectfully remind employees how year-end projects and planning are critical to your company’s mission and goals. Make time to recognize employees’ individual and collective efforts in taking care of customers and each other as the year winds down.
  • Acknowledge and alleviate seasonal stresses.
    Consider what you can do ahead of time to minimize year-end pressures such as starting your business planning cycle earlier (if feasible) to avoid a planning crunch when fewer people are at work. Or schedule the employee holiday lunch or dinner party in January when there are fewer social activities; this also gives employees something to look forward to after the holidays.
  • Ask employees to share their ideas.
    Go to the source and solicit suggestions from your employees as to what might be done to improve productivity during this time of year — whether in a special discussion at staff meetings or as a project for a designated employee task force.
  • Inspire and de-stress.
    • Invite employees to share with each other how they cope with seasonal work stress … the funniest holiday situation they’ve encountered at work … how they successfully defused a difficult situation with a customer, etc.
    • Give-back to the community by volunteering time as a group to work in a food bank or collect gifts for needy families. To keep such an activity from creating more stress, however, employee involvement must be voluntary with no management or peer pressure regarding time and financial contributions.
    • While bringing holiday sweets to the office is welcome by many, also consider healthy ways to reduce stress. For example, a licensed massage therapist can be hired on-site to provide 10-15 minute back massages for employees or a yoga instructor can lead mini-meditation sessions.
  • Patience, patience, patience.
    Keep in mind the end of the year can be a challenging time for everyone: you, your customers, employees, colleagues, and business partners.

Try one or more of these ideas to help get through the season. When you find what works, you can apply it next year when you go through this all over again. Happy Holidays!

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Engagement Training & Development

Please Pay Attention If You Really Want to Learn: Guidelines for Respectful Engagement

The multi-tasking attendee is a challenge for professional speakers and trainers. So whenever I give a training workshop or conference presentation, I respectfully request my audiences’ complete attention so they can fully engage in discussion and applied learning.

Attendees who are focused during the session benefit from new and/or reinforced knowledge, insight, and ideas – individually as well as collectively. As the presenter, I benefit from an attentive audience that actively participates by asking questions for clarification or elaboration and sharing their ideas and experiences – all contributing to a dynamic session. I bring my professional skills and dedication to help my audiences get the most they can from my sessions so their time is well-spent. Recognizing that learning is a dual responsibility between a speaker/trainer and attendee, here’s what I ask of my audiences in return.

Attendee Guidelines for Respectful Engagement

  • Please bring your complete attention so you can fully engage in discussion and be able to apply the information and ideas to your organization.
  • Out of professional and personal courtesy to everyone in the audience, please silence your cell phone.
  • If you know in advance that you might be contacted during the session – for example, you’re waiting for an important message from your boss or key customer – then please keep your phone on vibrate and attend to it quietly; leave the room, if necessary.
  • If  you’re alerted by an emergency call or text from a family member or someone at work, please excuse yourself quietly and leave the room to do what you need to do. If you’re unable to return to the session, consider getting in touch with me afterwards (via email or phone call) to let me you had to leave for this reason.
  • Please refrain from sharing session content during the session. If you want to tweet an idea or learning takeaway, please wait until a break or after the session. In the meantime, you’ll be able to better digest the ideas discussed, including how you might actually apply them to your business/situation. (Note: This guideline will vary depending on session-content. Many of my colleagues who speak on social media topics encourage in-session tweeting.)
  • If you find you’re not interested in the topic and are inclined to email, text, or check your social media networks, I prefer you leave the session to avoid wasting your time.

Pay attention if you really want to learn, and avoid multitasking that distracts you and those around you.

“If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”  – Sir Isaac Newton

 

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Customer service Engagement Training & Development

Great Customer Service Quotes for Training

“It’s risky to underestimate the benefit of exceptional [customer] service; it’s equally risky to overestimate the level of customer service that you are currently providing.” Unknown

I often use this quote in the beginning of my customer-focus workshops to engage attendees on the impact of customer service in their organizations. Discussion is based on addressing these questions: Who defines quality customer service? How is it measured? To what degree is your company truly customer-centric? etc. learn_and_share

Another approach to foster discussion and idea-exchange is to add the words “How do you …?” at the beginning of each of these customer-centric guidelines from Diana LaSalle:

  • See who you are and what you offer through the customer’s eyes.
  • Consider the well-being of the customer in all decisions.
  • Train and trust employees to care for customers in the moment.
  • Anticipate customers’ needs by continually striving to improve their experiences.

You can also use the following quotes as a springboard to talk about the importance of taking care of customers:

  • “The easiest way to turn a service into an experience is to provide poor service – thus creating an memorable encounter of the unpleasant kind.” B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy
  • “Customers care about the degree to which you respect and value their business … If you provide customers with clues that you don’t value their business, then all the customer satisfaction in the world won’t help you.”  David C. Lineweber
  • “Technology has evened quality; hardware is all the same. The difference is how you treat customers. If you treat them well, they’ll love your product. If you treat them poorly, they’ll find 100 things wrong.” Lee Iacocca

I welcome your favorite quotes and suggestions for using them in staff development.

 

 

 

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Customer service Training & Development

A Customer Never Forgets–3 Customer Stories and What They Mean

Impressions of customer service — good and bad — can be long lasting as these three stories illustrate. In this post my marketing colleagues and I share special situations we experienced as customers more than 20 years ago.

“A legendary service experience that touched my heart”
From Toby Bloomberg: “I walked into an Eckerd Drug Store to buy a sympathy card. Before the clerk even rang up the purchase, he took a silk rose from a display at the counter, presented it to me, and said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. I hope this will cheer you up a little.'”

Toby’s takeaway: There were no dramatic gestures, no casts of thousands, no high cost involved. Simply an elegant approach to ‘service’ between two people. And when you get right down to basics, isn’t that what “legendary service” is all about — people who go the extra mile to connect to the customer?

Take care of the customer and worry about the details later
From Chris Bonney: “It was a Saturday around noon at the Hyatt Woodfield in Chicago for an AMA (American Marketing Association) chapter leadership meeting. Just as our people were sitting down to lunch, the first alarm went off. We were quickly hustled outside by the staff and stayed outdoors for the better part of an hour due to a water emergency.

“A couple of weddings were scheduled to take place at the hotel later that day. One of the brides arrived that morning and, not finding a closet hook high enough to hold her wedding gown off the floor, she hung it on a fire system water sprinkler. The weight eventually broke the sprinkler head, spewing rusty water all over the gown in her room and other rooms on the floor that were linked on that sprinkler water line. The water also leaked through to rooms below the bride’s floor. The hotel could have easily blamed the bride for her misfortune and the inconvenience caused to everyone else in the hotel. But instead they summoned a limousine, took the bride and her mother across to the Nordstrom’s at Woodfield Mall to buy a new dress.”

Chris’s takeaway: I don’t know if the hotel was insured for this kind of thing or not. But they knew that it was cheaper for the bride to get a new dress so that her wedding could proceed and worry about the details later. They recovered the situation without embarrassing the bride and her family. (Perhaps as a result, hotels posted warning signs to not use sprinkler heads as hangers.)
Helping a customer in a difficult situation

This is my story: My husband and I were traveling to Boston to attend a conference for his work when I had a medical emergency on the plane. Upon landing at the airport, I was immediately taken off the plane in a special ambulance gurney and we were whisked away to the hospital. While filling out our medical forms in the ER, my husband and I suddenly looked at each other to ask, “What happened to our luggage?!” given we left the plane in a hurry.

My husband took a taxi to the conference hotel while I was in surgery and explained our situation. The Marriott Copley Hotel staff called Logan airport to find and place a hold on our luggage. They also arranged for a hotel courtesy car driver to take my husband back to the airport to collect the luggage, drop him off at the hospital to be with me after surgery, and then place our luggage in the hotel room for when my husband returned.

My takeaway: In our situation, we were guests who arrived at the hotel with a problem that had nothing to do with the hotel itself. Yet the front desk staff showed their compassion and concern by going the extra step take care of us.

My colleagues and I had different customer experiences that share a common theme: a favorable impression made by customer service providers who were empathetic to their customers’ situation.

Categories
Marketing Training & Development

Marketing Animal Rescues & Shelters – BlogPaws 2014

One of the reasons I love my work is that I get to meet dedicated nonprofit professionals and volunteers eager to share their stories. They’re also eager to learn how to further their respective organization’s mission in the marketing workshops I teach.

The volunteers and employees from a variety animal rescues and shelters who attended my recent BlogPaws 2014 Conference session, Fundamentals of Nonprofit Marketing: Building Share of Mind & Heart for Your Rescue/Shelter were no exception. These people involved in animal welfare are most passionate and inspiring. While rescues/shelters benefit from showcasing cute and appealing animal images in their marketing and social media outreach (i.e., the “aww … ” factor), they face intense competition from other rescue/shelter groups doing the same. They also run the risk of “wearing out people’s compassion.”

Animal Rescue/Shelter Marketing Challenges

In their efforts to save animals and find them “furever” homes, animal welfare volunteers and employees are challenged with service demands that often exceed their resources. Yet they manage to do what they can to:

  • educate the public about animal welfare, including raising awareness of animal abuse
  • advocate for spay and neutering
  • obtain the necessary support of volunteers, pet foster parents, donors, veterinary assistance, community sponsors and partners
  • communicate via social media to support their special events and the important work they do.

Intentional Marketing

Like many nonprofit organizations, animal rescues/shelters strive to maximize their mission with minimal resources. With this mode of operation, marketing is often a casualty — ” Marketing? Who’s got time to do marketing?!” But being a well-kept secret won’t sustain an organization. That’s why building and maintaining brand awareness through marketing needs to be intentional, and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It starts with understanding that each point of personal and/or media contact between the shelter, its stakeholders, and the market-at-large (e.g., every phone call, shelter visit, special event, email, letter, press release, Tweet, Facebook post, etc.) impacts the public’s perception of that shelter’s brand. Recognizing people’s individual and collective impact on the brand, intentional marketing then focuses on how best to ensure its brand contacts are as positive as possible.

Employees and volunteers who run animal rescues/shelters are already intentional in their commitment to help animals. By marketing intentionally as well, they’ll be able to continue their valuable work.

“Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.” —  John Muir

 

Categories
Marketing Training & Development

Is Your Recruiting Hurting Your Brand?

Talk about first impressions! Managers responsible for recruiting new employees have a significant impact on both the employer brand and their organization’s overall brand.

Here are two examples of how an ineffective recruiting experience – described by a potential candidate looking for work in the nonprofit sector – resulted in a negative brand impression. [Note: I’ve heard similar job applicant horror stories in the for-profit sector as well. ]

Example #1. “I had a telephone interview for a grant writer position in an arts-related organization. It was clear during the interview that the supervisor had no interviewing skills — she did not seem to know what she wanted to ask, nor could she process my responses. She was very busy concentrating on what to say next rather than evaluating my answers. Mid-way through the interview she sighed with exasperation and said she had no idea how to talk with me because I was not ‘part of the art world.’  At the conclusion of the interview the HR person asked if I would be available for an onsite interview, and I said yes. I never heard from them again.”

Example #2. “In my experience with another organization, the telephone interview was a fiasco. Three people on a speaker phone interviewed me; I could barely hear one of them and was never quite sure who was speaking.  The first question asked why I had applied for the position. My response addressed the unique combination of duties, appeal of the variety of work involved, etc. When I finished my response they told me they were no longer certain that the position would be structured as posted. They then asked a series of narrowly focused questions that indicated very clearly that they had not read my resume or that they were incapable of shaping the questions to elicit additional information. At the conclusion of the interview, the convener told me that additional interviews were being scheduled the following week and that he would be in touch ‘either way.’ Two months passed and I received an email from him saying they had decided to put the position on hold while they reviewed and possibly revised the position’s responsibilities.”

Bottom line brand impact

The job candidate had previously worked in HR. Here’s what she had to say about her experiences with the two organizations that interviewed her:

“As a former HR and management professional, I am appalled at the ridiculous turn the interview process has apparently taken. I am struck dumb by how little regard or understanding these folks have of their role as brand slayers. They seem completely unaware of the fact that an interview is not a one-way street.  While they are asking questions and making some attempt to assess the applicant, the applicant is gaining a great deal of insight into the nature of the organization and the people who inhabit it!  My respect for these organizations is diminished, my interest in supporting them in any way is erased, and my new and distinctly negative view of their capacity is going to be a topic of conversation for some time to come.”

Do the people who recruit and interview potential employees for your organization understand how their actions affect perceptions of your employer and external brand?