How Do Your Employees Behave When No One Is Watching?

Jim McCann, Founder & CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com, thinks that the most important thing that he works on as a leader are the people that he is able to recruit, attract, hire, develop, and retain. Once you have the capital and environment you want to be in with a strategy in place, your job  is to be a ‘cultural engineer’. This means putting in place the mechanisms that will help you to attract the right candidates,  and help you select the best of those candidates. You must set expectations for those people and give them the resources they’ll need to be successful. Celebrate their successes and help them work in a team environment.

Jim then talks about the relationship between culture and customer service. He says it is a direct combination and that his definition of culture is “how will our people know how to behave when nobody is watching?”  He challenges them by saying that he wants them to handle the customer in such a way that they’re inspired to write a letter about how good their service was, and the only way that will happen is with an emotional connection. Jim motivates people by ‘keeping score’ and giving them a measurement so that they can see their progress.

Find out how to motivate your employees on this week’s CEO TV Show.

5473 views