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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, one day I would like to take a hot air balloon ride, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned by handing out gold dollars.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
In 2001 I took over as the store manager of a bookstore in Wichita Falls, Texas. Even though I was only 25 years old, I was confident in my abilities to manage over $1 million in inventory and a staff of 30 people. Of course, I had no idea just how much I didn’t know and the best way to learn is by doing. So I dove in head first.
The store had a really good staff. Unfortunately, the previous two managers had made some very poor decisions and the store was in rough shape. The store was dirty, poorly stocked, and morale among the staff was low. To be honest and completely truthful, just the simple act of changing the manager was enough to bolster morale. It could have been Mr. Peanut that stepped to the helm, but it was me.
Even though they would have reacted positively to Mr. Peanut, their enthusiasm would not have lasted long with him or me if they didn’t see positive things happening soon. I had every intention of taking the support and confidence they had offered me and making it count.
I felt like it was important to make the staff realize how important they were. I began holding regular staff meetings and I would try to motivate them to improve their quality of service both to the customers and to themselves. I tried to break down the invisible walls seen only by the employees. The walls that divided one department from the next.
The bookstore also sold artwork and collectibles. That department was located right next to the book department. If a customer saw a person working in that area, they assumed that an employee should be able to help them with anything in that area. However, employees from the book area tended to see an invisible wall that separated them from the other department and wouldn’t try to help customers that didn’t want a book. This type of territorialism was taking place all over the store. The kids department was adjacent to music, but employees would not cross over. This was having a negative impact on our customer satisfaction.
I went to a management training seminar that focused on employee incentives and morale. One thing they suggested was to create a reward system that allowed employees an incentive for engaging in exceptional service. They suggested various types of rewards.
One thing I tried was a simple and somewhat goofy reward. I took a baseball sized squishy ball and made it a reward. The ball was yellow and had a big smiley face on it. At a team meeting I gave it to an employee in recognition of a specific thing I had observed that demonstrated a kind and exceptional attitude toward another employee. I then instructed that employe to keep the ball near them during their shift. When they witnessed a co-worker demonstrating an attitude of teamwork, they were to recognize that employee, tell the employee what they’d observed, and pass the ball on to them. The cycle would continue.
It may have been a goofy yellow ball with a smiley face on it, but it worked like a charm. They began to work together and go out of their way to earn the smiley ball.
Eventually I also implemented another incentive. This incentive involved keeping a roll of gold dollar coins in my pocket. I also gave them to each of my management team. Each manager was empowered with the ability to recognize any employee at any time for an act of exceptional customer service and award them with a gold dollar. At the end of the month the employee who had earned the most gold dollars earned a small bonus. I was amazed at how much more engaged our employees were with the customers at the simple thought of earning a gold dollar. I’m quite certain that the potential to be recognized in front of their peers was the biggest motivator.
These two incentive programs had a quick and powerful impact on our store. Once each year the company conducted a customer survey. That year the store went from being one of the lowest scoring stores to one of the highest scoring stores. It had the biggest improvement of any store in the entire company.
My district manager met with me to find out what I had been doing. He liked the gold dollar program so much he had me draft a memo that he then sent out to the entire company and encouraged all managers to implement it. It was met with mediocre success. Some managers didn’t see the point and did nothing. Some managers awarded a symbolic gold coin but not real money. Other managers implemented it as I had. I bet you can figure out which ones saw the most improvement.
However, even at my store, the program fizzled out. We as humans are a flawed bunch. I’ve noticed this about myself. I’m sure you’ve noticed it in yourself too. Too often we look for ways to be cynical, jealous, jaded, or dismayed.
After a while the smiley ball became a joke. Employees didn’t want to take the time to notice something good that a coworker had done. Sometimes it didn’t get passed on. Sometimes it got passed on to someone else only because they liked that person, not because of anything in particular. One day someone changed the smiley face to a mean face. The smiley ball incentive program died soon after.
The gold coin program suffered a similar fate. Employees began to complain that things they were doing were going unnoticed. They felt ripped off. Part time employees complained that they didn’t have the same opportunity for success that full time employees had and they began to complain. The program also involved keeping a record of each customer they had offered to assist. This was done on the honor system and worked great at first. But then as employees felt that someone else was getting overly recognized or they were getting jipped, they began to take advantage of the honor system. That program soon died too.
Here’s what I learned.
I learned a lot during my time as a store manager. I learned that people can be the most rewarding and most frustrating part of a job. I suppose that is true of life in general. I loved working with that team though.
I learned that people, in general, want to be recognized for the work they do. Yes, they want to get paid what they deserve, and they should. But money isn’t everything. Paying someone well and expecting that to be the end of it is going to leave people feeling unfulfilled. However, they also want to be treated fairly. If they feel like someone else is getting an unfair advantage, then that’s just going to create a mess.
I learned that finding the right balance between these things is unbelievably challenging.
I learned that there’s value in variety. The truth is, it may sound like I did these incentives at the same time but I did not. I did one, and then after the shine wore off and the program lost its value, I dumped it and did the other one. When that program’s flaws were exploited and it lost its value, I changed again.
Each program brought a renewed sense of teamwork and focus on serving the customers. This was a constant battle because outside of the once a year survey, the company paid more attention to other duties that the employees did. Things like ordering the merchandise and keeping the proper amount of it on the shelves. Those things were graded every month and people will always focus more on what is graded.
However, coming up with fresh ways to keep them focused on serving customers and serving each other also helped keep things, well, fresh. And that ended up teaching me a good lesson. If I find myself feeling like things are stale or I’m stuck in a rut, I look for simple ways to freshen things up. It can be something as simple as reshuffling the deck of my daily routine so that things are done in a different order. It can be a challenge to learn something new or perform a monotonous task in a more efficient way. It can be to set a well defined goal and then push myself to achieve it. Every time I’ve done this either with myself or with others, all those involved have been better because of it.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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