Video: jeff kuzmich - Migrate_People_Powered_Success_06112025_4947800 | Duration: 2888s | Summary: jeff kuzmich - Migrate_People_Powered_Success_06112025_4947800

Transcript for "jeff kuzmich - Migrate_People_Powered_Success_06112025_4947800": Hello everyone and welcome to today's event, People Powered Success, Engaging and Keeping Hourly Workers. My name is Rob Parsons and I'll be your moderator today. So before we get going, I just want to cover a few housekeeping issues. Note that the primary audio is going to be coming through your computer. There's no dial in option, so just make sure your speaker volume is set. Let's take a look at some of the other important features you may want to look into. You can download and print a copy of today's deck for future reference and access additional resources. Just go to files and resources window at the top right of your console. It's available anytime during the event. And if you have any questions during the webinar, just send them via the Ask Us a Question window and just type in your question, click Submit, and we'll try to get to it if we can. Please note, this presentation does not constitute legal advice. It's for informational purposes only. And now, I'd like to introduce our speaker. Our speaker today is Scott Greenberg. Scott is a business partner we work with here at Paychex to help clients do more with their teams. He's an acclaimed speaker, author, and consultant, known for transforming leadership, team performance, and operational excellence. His books, The Game Changing Steps to Becoming a Thriving Superstar, and Stop the Turn Your Struggling Hourly Workers into a Top Performing Team offer actionable insights for building stronger teams and more successful businesses. A Leadership Network VIP with Entrepreneur, Scott's thought leadership has been featured in Global Franchise Magazine, Nation's Restaurant News, CEO World Magazine, The Food Institute, Chief Executive Magazine, Hotel Dive, and Modern Restaurant Management. Welcome, Scott. Why don't I hand it off you to, run us through the agenda for this webinar? Sure. So, everyone's gonna come. There's a lot we're gonna go through here. I'm so excited for this. So we're gonna talk about, smarter staffing, reducing turnover, tactic to drive loyalty and performance productivity, how to keep hourly workers connected and committed, their unique needs, and how we and how paychecks can help. And I first, Rob, just wanna thank you for having me. Paychecks has kind of always been at the epicenter of all things related to employees and especially hourly employees. And so any chance I have to collaborate with you guys, I embrace, but I also want to thank, everyone who actually registered and is here today. You're here presumably because you think I know something, which is directly contrary to what my teenage daughter believes because she constantly tells me that I know nothing all the time. I have no credibility with her whatsoever. And her favorite refrain is, well, dad, things are different from when you were a teenager. Now, I try not to take too much insult in that and really I have to be very careful about disregarding her when she makes those kinds of comments because she is right. Since I've been a teenager, a lot has changed and most certainly in the business world. The values and desires of the consumers are very different. Technology has changed. The marketplace has changed, but in particularly, the labor market has changed. Employees today have different expectations, different needs. It's a whole completely different world. And so just as we have to update our technology and update our products and services, if we want to stay relevant, we also have to update the way we manage today's worker, and that's what this conversation today is all about. And so, I'm very excited to share with you as much as possible. We'll save some time at the end for some questions. I want to begin, with a poll. Rob, do want go ahead and introduce that? Sure thing. And I love the introduction there, Scott, about change. And we know it's been a while since the pandemic, since the COVID-nineteen pandemic, but things changed. That a real shift in the mindset. So I'd love to know for our audience, what is your perception? What have you seen in your employees? What has changed in hourly workers since the pandemic? Have you noticed things are the same? Are things a lot different, not much different, a little? How do you even know? Maybe it's you're new to this and you're new to hourly workers and new hourly employees, but love to get a feel for what you've seen change in the last five years. Interestingly, Scott, I found it was interesting that those hourly workers, those frontline employees were typically the most important and most relied on during that time when many of us were sent home to work remotely. Very interesting. So I'll be curious what happened with that mindset. Well, in a little bit, I'll be talking about the difference between hourly workers and those who are on salary. The differences are profound, but one of them is that a lot of people who are salaried workers doing the white collar work, often they can do it from a desk or they can do it remotely. Whereas a lot of hourly workers, they have to be there in person, right? They're doing things that are physical, things that take a toll on their body. And often that work cannot be done remotely. So that's just one of many things that we'll talk about. But I'm really curious to hear about, you know, those who are chiming in right now, how much they feel that the mindset of hourly workers has changed just in the last few years. And it looks like, yep, there we go. Here are some results. And, boy, maybe you are not surprised by this, Scott, 63% say it's a lot, a lot of hourly workers' mindset has changed. Yeah. And that's the response that I usually get to that question. And so, you know, to what extent their mindset has changed, I mean, that's important, but what's equally important is how we, how employers and managers, how we feel, what our perception is, because a lot of people do not feel so good about today's hourly workers. In fact, I want to share a story with you, and this is what prompted me to write my book, Stop the Shift Show. I wrote an article for Nation's Restaurant News, and it was about how fast food restaurants can enhance the customer experience by training their employees to pay attention to certain codes, that, you can spot in customers. There's things that you can kind of pick up on that can give us insight as to what they want. So I talked about that in the article. It wasn't that deep, but it was about making your employees more present and paying attention to little tells to help us enhance the customer experience and break out of robotics. A day after it comes out, a man who I call angry guy this is not his photo, this is stock footage, but it's how I picture him writes me a scathing email. Hey buddy, I just read that horrible article you wrote about trying to get your employees to pay attention to customers like that. Have you ever actually run a business? Have you ever managed hourly employees? I can barely get mine to show up, but it will become armchair psychologists. Why don't you get some more experience before you actually start writing articles? I mean, the dude just lays into me. But I can understand his anger, because a lot of people are so frustrated about not being able to find the employees to keep them or to get the performance that they want. Earlier this year, Paychex came out with a great report called the twenty twenty five Priorities for Business Leaders. And one of the statistics they found is the number one HR challenge, not surprisingly, is hiring and recruiting talent. But more than nine out of 10 people who are managing employees also said that things like workplace productivity, managing employee performance, and engaging or retaining employees, more than nine out of 10 people say this is a huge source of stress for them and it's a problem. So we're talking about finding people, achieving people, and helping them be great. So I can understand how this guy might have these feelings. In his mind, he's thinking, well, he couldn't get more out of his employees, therefore it's not possible. And I can relate to that feeling because for more than ten years I was a multi unit business owner with edible arrangements. I had my own hourly workers, not making that much more than minimum wage, and we struggled for a while. I had a hard time finding them, hard time keeping them. Some would ghost, some would move slowly. There would be not just all those kinds of toxic behaviors that make us nuts as business owners. Even though I'd already been doing motivational speaking for thirteen years before getting into that business, I found that all that stuff I said on stage did not apply in the real world. My employees didn't care that there's no I in team. Then that was just a statement about spelling. So, I had to unlearn what I thought I knew about leadership and really ask bigger questions, really experiment. So, it took a long time but eventually things got better and better and better. We cracked the code and suddenly our customer service reviews went up, employee retention was great, sales went up, it was awesome. But again, not at first. At first, I really struggled and today when I hear my kids and how they would, you know, behave as teenagers at work, that sort of thing, and I hear people talk about them, it makes me nuts. I can't believe the idea of ghosting, let alone, know, giving two weeks notice, telling your boss when you're available, when you're going to work, mental health breaks. I mean, I can't imagine this stuff. Sometimes I just cannot believe kids these days. And then I realized I just said it. That same phrase that employers have been saying for generations: kids these days. It's funny, the discussion of generations at a very large scale happened when Millennials came about. At that point, there was the internet, there was social media, so everyone was talking about Millennials. And Time Magazine came out with this story describing them as the me, me, me generation narcissists live with their parents, right? How entitled they are, that sort of thing. Well, that article that came from the perception of baby boomers. But what was said about baby boomers when they were young entering the workforce? Well, let's go back to the 1970s. Look at this story from Tom Wolfe, a cover of New York Magazine, described baby boomers as the Me Decade. Let's look at another quote. We defy anyone who goes about with his eyes open to deny that there is, as never before, an attitude on the part of the young folk which is best described as grossly thoughtless, rude, utterly selfish. That came from an article in 1925. Let's go back even more. This person says, Young people are high minded for they have not been humbled by life nor they experience the force of necessity. They think they know everything and confidently affirm it and this is the cause of their excess in everything. Rob, you know who said that? Aristotle in the fourth century BC. The old have been hating on the young, especially in the workplace, for ages, and I promise you that Aristotle's parents probably had plenty to say about him. What's with this kid? All he does is sit around and think. Like, I'll guarantee you, generation four is criticizing them. This has always been done. And so I understand that we have frustration about today's workers, especially young workers. But what the Gen Z all have in common is that they really are the youngest. Their brains are still developing. They're really not yet the people or the workers they're going to be. So there's this phenomenon which I call the kids these days effect where we really judge them harshly and while we're judging them, it becomes harder for us to understand them. If we can't understand them, we can't manage them. Not that I want to enable them or approve certain behaviors, but when we approach it more from curiosity than from judgment, that is when we're going to have more influence. That's hard. That requires some self discipline, but I'm telling you that there are so many people who are doing it. So, it begins with us understanding the difference between hourly workers and salary workers. Putting judgment aside, if you are a white collar salary worker, you probably have more education and because you're on salary, you have predictable income. You probably also have predictable hours, which makes it easier for you to plan daycare and build a lifestyle. Hourly workers tend to have fluctuating schedules. If things you know, it's slow, their hours might be reduced. But even if things are busy, their hours might be changed and they don't know at any given time period how much money they're going make. So, it's harder to determine what kind of rent they can afford or what kind of car payments if they could, you know, get a car at all. How do they plan daycare? Very different set of issues. Again, for salary environments, these tend to be white collar people who are more educated might be a little bit older, whereas in hourly environments, it tends to be people who are doing more physical manual labor, as I said earlier, and often has to be done in person. That takes a toll on them and because they might have less education, they don't do as well with abstraction. So, for your health wanted post, you get into your company's mission statement values and you have all this big corporate language. There's going be a disconnect there between that organization and maybe the people that are trying to work their front lines. I can go on and on, but the idea is that the hourly worker is a completely different profile. And here's the thing, these might be this very often of the salary workers of the future, but we need to adjust. Again, I'll tell you something else that's important. You know, if you're in salary and you're part of some organization, then you're part of a culture, you're part of a team, there's often a path for growth and it's laid out for you. You can see you can grow within the organization. Hourly workers are often just looked at as just a number. They're a cog in the wheel. There may not be a path forward for them. So relationships between management and this worker might be more transactional, so they feel less loyalty. So why should they stick around and treat the place like they own it? It's a very different demographic. Now, companies, if they were you know, creating products and services, they're going to create them for the specific part of the market they want to sell to. They're going to change their marketing based on who it is they want to market to. We need to change our management based on whom we want to attract, retain, and get performance from. But in order for that to happen, it requires different kinds of management because I believe that often the issue is management itself. The data shows that most people will in a leadership position will have that role for more than ten years before they ever get any formal training in managing people. They'll learn how to run the operation, but as far as how to actually build culture and motivate people and engage them and create an environment where they thrive, most of us don't get trained in that. So what do we do? We manage the way we were managed. There's this legacy that gets passed on from generation to generation before management. It's funny how everything else has evolved but not so much management. So we need to go beyond that. So I understand the perspective of Angry Man, but I have met a lot of other, people. They're outliers, but when I wrote my book Stop the Ships, I did my research and I found work environments that have hourly workers who I thrive in. We're talking in fast food, in hospitality, in manufacturing. So many different work environments. I've met people who are doing great. I interviewed one person who owns 128 KFC restaurants, who thrives and he says he couldn't do it were it not for his hourly teams. He's proven that it can be done, but what it requires is a certain amount of self management. Before we can manage them, we have to manage ourselves and that means be aware of what's going on. Angry man isn't aware. I have people who come to me because they want help. They believe that the employees are broken, but when you dig a little bit deeper, often you find it's management that isn't as good as it can be. If you're not managing at your best, you never know how good your hourly workers can actually be. And because they don't have as much compensation, because they're not necessarily getting benefits, because the job, you know, might be harder, we need to provide a better work environment, better management, because these people leave managers before they leave their jobs. So, what does this mean self management, self reflection? Well, we have to understand what kind of manager we are. So, here's just two types of managers I think it's interesting to look at. One is called the GSD. That's get stuff done. Sometimes people use another word for that S. They're about metrics. They're about getting stuff done. They see the workplace as a beehive. Their hourly workers are the worker bees. So, this manager focuses on manufacturing the honey and getting it done. So, they want results. They want to hit their numbers. That's what they're focused on. It always exists just to help out productivity. That's the GSD manager. Then we have what I call TLC managers, Tender, Love and Care. They're about personal growth and making people happy and life balance and building culture. They are all about the people side of it. So we have these two kinds of managers, Rob. Those focus on the numbers and those focus on the people. Any guesses as to which one is more effective? Oh, boy. I would guess the TLC manager. Yeah, so when I share this on stage live and I ask for a show of hands, most people say the TLC manager. They may not say they are a TLC manager. Most people think that they're more effective. Well, a study was done where they looked at a 100,000 managers, mostly of hourly workers, and they got data from 1,000,000 employees who work for these people. And they asked all these different questions about the managers, and then they ranked the managers percentile for the most effective to the least effective. So here's what they found. For people who employees believe were mostly results focused, GSD, only 9% of that group made it into the top 10%. But what's interesting is when they focused on another group, they isolated TLC managers, people focused managers who aren't as focused on results. Only 8% of that group were considered by employees to be among the top 10%. It appears that hourly workers want to play for a coach who wins games. They care about results too, as much as they want a great culture. So what this means is we need to find a way to do both. And in the study, they isolated a group of managers who employees said were able to do both, to focus on getting stuff done and on really building great teams. Of that group, 82% were considered among the top 10%. We need to be able to focus on getting stuff done, but we also need to be very people focused. Here's the rub. To get stuff done, you have to use a certain part of the brain, right, more the prefrontal cortex, but the people side is more the midbrain. And there's sort of this neurological seesaw that when you're using one side of the brain, the left side isn't as engaged. So we kind of can't do them at the same time, which means we have to be deliberate to say, Time for me to take a step back from the metrics and now focus on my people. Well, this is where so many managers don't do it because of a primary, issue, especially in hourly work environments, and that is busyness. Angry man has got to run that restaurant. There is so much that's got to get done. I was at Edible Arrangements, we need to crank out those orders on Valentine's Day, get them made and wrapped and delivered. There's so much work that's got to get done. And when we get busy, the first thing to go is the people stuff, is the culture, because we got to get stuff done. I was approached a few months ago by a husband and wife couple who own 12 restaurants in one of the largest fast food chains in the world. They brought me in to help with their culture and employee performance because they were really upset that so many of their employees were missing little details. Like, you're supposed to get a certain amount of slices of tomato from an average tomato. You're not supposed to use one of the M that has a stem on it. But they kept having little problems like that, and rightfully so, they blamed managers. They said managers were not holding employees accountable. So they talked about this up, down, and sideways with their managers, holding employees accountable. They talked about culture, they had all kinds of creative ways to try to get their managers to hold employees accountable and it wasn't happening. So they brought me in. So I did a deep dive. I interviewed these managers and I surveyed and I watched what was going on. And here's what I noticed. Number one, a lot of these managers were promoted from the floor, from employee to manager, so they're like leading peers, and they're afraid to have these uncomfortable conversations, and they received no training whatsoever on how to have those tough, uncomfortable conversations. As advanced as this restaurant system is, they never learned how to have those conversations. But here's the second thing. Because this is a very advanced restaurant franchise, the biggest metrics they have are about speed. If a manager is in a situation where an employee is underperforming during a busy time, they have to make a choice. Do they stop and coach the employee and give them feedback and retrain them? Or do they just step in line and just take care of it themselves because they know that's how they're going be judged? Most of them were doing the latter. The system was set up for busyness, not for elevating people. So therefore there's mistakes, therefore there are problems, and therefore there's this constant revolving door because people aren't getting what they need from management. And I realize it is really tough when you're in a high pressure, fast environment. But what I've learned is if you can invest the time upfront to get it right and give your employees, they're going to work better, they're going to work faster, and they're going to free up your time. So again, we have to catch ourselves as we think about these things. So I've got another question here that, Rob, I'd love for you to throw out to the group. Sure thing. And thank you for that, lesson in the law of unintended consequences there. For sure, you've to take the time to get it right. This is good question. What is most important in employee performance? What makes a bigger difference? Aptitude or attitude? Do you think makes a bigger difference in employee performance? Just to add some depth to the question, aptitude is what they know. It's their skill set. Attitude is what they feel. It's their mindset. And it's, I'm going to weigh in my opinion with the attitude, because I can teach aptitude. That's where I'm leaning, but let's see what the audience says. Yeah. Now here's the thing, you know, if you could have the, you you needed a serious surgery and you can have the world's greatest surgeon, but he's kind of a jerk and doesn't have good bedside manner, or someone who has, you know, really good people skills, but they're fresh out of medical school. Who do want to do your surgery? Yeah, I might lean into the aptitude there. Probably the person with the aptitude, right? So it kind of depends, right? But today we're talking about hourly workers. And so what matters most? So let's see, we have a bit more than half the answers. So, all right. Audience That agrees with me, is something I could predict, right? That here's the thing. I think that we need to hire for attitude and then train for aptitude, but attitude we often kill by bringing great people into a not so great work environment. And so we need to create an environment where people are inspired and where they feel motivated. But again, this is fairly interesting. But I wish people did pay more attention to attitude. I find in job interviews, sometimes what we do is we're interviewing people, but we don't really have a good process for it. I write about this in my book. We're kind of just going with our gut and just talking to the person. We find that, wow, this one person, the other candidates, they're charming and they're a good conversationalist and they have a firm handshake. What does any of that have to do with how well they could do on the fryer or mopping up? Right? Unless you need them to actually be charming in their role, that doesn't matter. It's like there's so many things that we have to pay attention to. We have to focus on what matters most. But across the board, whether they're outgoing or not, we do want to bring on people with a great attitude, but then we have to do the work to preserve it and not kill it. And part of that is understanding motivation. Rob, motivation is when I want to somehow impact the way you think and what you do. I want to be able to either put you in motion, right? Or stop from something that you're doing. So basically, want to change the inertia. That is what motivation is. We have to understand there are two kinds of motivation that we want to use in different circumstances. So the first one is extrinsic motivation. That is like the carrot or the stick. That is something on the outside. So that's usually what we rely on. So that means I want to give someone a bonus or a gift card or a prize, or I'm going to buy them pizza or throw them a party. It's giving them something tangible to get them to do something to reinforce what's already done. Extrinsic motivation is great for short term bursts of activity. So it might mean in a help wanted post, you're saying, Hey, here's what you get. Here's the pay and here's the benefits. Here's the perks. At Edible Arrangements, I had a contest for employees. I wanted to see if I could boost the ticket average. So I told everyone, Hey, over the next week, every one of you that can hit these sales numbers, I'm going give you a $100 bonus. They got excited. Every one of them were able to do it. It motivated them to sell more. So I'm like, great. Let's continue the contest for the second week. Everything was the same, but the performance went down. It sort of lost its shininess. It lost its excitement, even though it was still there. Extrinsic motivation is great for short term bursts of activity, but it doesn't last. What does last is when we have an environment that promotes intrinsic motivation. That's the motivation that comes from within, that I don't need anybody else. You know, I've got this wonderful little dog and I just love this dog. I don't get compensated to take care of her. It just feels good. Every morning I pick up my phone, I play Wordle from the New York Times. Again, I don't get any extrinsic prize, but internally it feels good to figure out what the word is. There's some work that I do, not because of money, I mean, the money is there, that's great, but something inside me just gets excited by it. Well, there are ways to promote a work environment that does it, whether it's a great culture, where people feel valued, where they feel connected to other people, when we can create autonomy for them, we've given them training, and now we can trust them. So people like to be in charge. So if we can understand what their values are, not make assumptions about what their values are, meet their soft needs, I'll talk about in a second, we can create a place where they're gonna be motivated, whether we are there to motivate them or not. So we use extrinsic motivation to create bursts of activity, but intrinsic motivation to preserve it and to sustain it. Now, a big part of maintaining intrinsic motivation is to be able to create a high performance culture. When I ask people, hey, what do do to promote a great culture? They start telling me all the extrinsic things that they do. Well, we buy them pizza. You know, we treat them like family. Like, what does that mean? Like, there's a lot of toxic families out there. Culture is not positive. You know, it's not, you know, about being nice to people. Culture, Rob, is our way of doing things for better or for worse. It's our social norms. You know, you think it's a combination of two things: shared set of beliefs and then shared behaviors and rituals. You can think of a country. You know, here in The US, we have a certain value system with freedom probably being our number one value, right? And then so we have all these, you know, values and then we also have rituals, holidays and fourth of July and things that kind of make us American because different in other places. Religions have cultures made up of shared set of beliefs, rituals, traditions that support those things. Every group of two or more people has a culture, their way of doing things. Every merry couple, every country, every sports team, every prison block, every gang has a culture for better or worse. The best organizations, it's a culture by design. Most it's by default. It becomes what it becomes. When I was at UCLA in the late eighties, there was a fraternity known for just being wild and crazy or really harsh on their recruits. Just total party house. Thirty years later, not one person was there when I was at UCLA was still in the fraternity. But my nephew decided to rush that fraternity. Nothing had changed in terms of culture. The people changed, but culture tends to last. So in your workplace, you're going have employees come and go, but unless you change it, your culture is going to stay the same. So what we want to do is create and maintain or rebuild the best culture possible that attracts people. And there's three levels at which we need to do this. First, in the head. People need an intellectual understanding of what your culture is. That means they should be able to articulate it, especially in terms of your values. I was working with one restaurant chain in Houston and they have these values and they repeat them all the time. They were meeting with employees, but they didn't define the values. One of them was integrity. So I asked one of the employees, Hey, can you define integrity for me? She couldn't do it. She knew that integrity is the value, but she didn't know what it looked like, what it felt like, what the lack of integrity is. So what I had them do, and this is what I advocate in my consulting and in my book, is for every value that you have, make a list of behaviors, do's and don'ts that correspond with it. For integrity, you might say we always tell the truth. We get each other's backs. We follow through on our commitments. Do's and don'ts so employees recognize that when it's happening, when it's not happening, and can hold each other accountable. So we need to have an understanding of what the culture is and take it off the mountaintop, off the poster and website, make it a real tangible thing you can reinforce because this is our way of doing things. It's our belief system. That's in the head. Then there's in the heart. That means I need to feel the culture and I'm going feel the culture if this work environment meets what I call my soft needs. We all have hard needs. That's the stuff we get in the job like compensation and benefits and perks. There are soft needs. That's how we want to feel at work. Now, people don't always articulate what they want to feel, but everybody has a value system of their own that they want to have. These days, value workers value quite a bit is across the board people want to feel like they're doing meaningful work. They want to be part of a team. They want recognition. Younger workers very much value life balance. I'm Gen X. I didn't grow up caring about life balance. I expected to suffer at work. Not the younger generations. They really value that. They value health and especially mental health. So we need to stop judging them. Identify what are the soft needs of our employees and especially your specific employees. And if you create a work environment that meets those soft needs, there's gonna be more emotional resonance. The workplace is going to feel better and then they're less likely to leave to go work somewhere else. So many employers are trying to take care of the recruiting retention problem by throwing money at it. Here's the thing: people will pay more for a better experience. Employees will accept less for a better experience. Not that we should pay them less. I believe in paying fairly. I believe in paying well. But much more important to create a workplace that feels awesome. And when you can give them that emotional compensation, they're less likely to leave for a couple dollars an hour to go work down the street. So we want to identify and meet their soft needs, all the while being productive. You pay a little more attention to what their soft needs are and meet them, people are more likely to say. The last thing I'll say on that Rob is that for generation Z, they're known for being highly entrepreneurial. So, I say if that's the case with your employees, treat the job like it's a paid internship. Have conversations with them where you're connecting this job to the kind of business they want to have in the future. They feel like they're actually growing and being prepared and they appreciate that you're having that conversation with them. That's their soft need. Meet the soft need. They'll make the job more relevant to them. So they need to feel the culture in their head and to understand it, feel it in their heart, and then they need to experience it on the floor. That means regular rituals all the time to remind them of what the culture is. That might be a daily huddle. You know, I've done a lot of restaurants where everybody at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of the shift, they get together and they talk about their values. And we used to do a value of the week and we'd go around the circle and say, Hey, what's one thing that you did this week or going to do to honor a value? Or Hey, here we give an example where you observed another employee honoring a value. Another ritual I had, once every month I'd get my employees together. We do some other things, but we did this activity. We go in a circle. We spend three minutes focusing on each person and everyone just humbled them with praise and love. And here's what I appreciate about you. For three minutes, they just stood there getting all this praise, often in a prime as many of them, they weren't getting this kind of love from anywhere else in their life. And that connected to their loyalty to the job. So again, what are the rituals that you could have that might make, you know, just a little bit of a difference? You know, I've heard of a football coach who had a special team to have clickers. So, whenever they pass each other in the hallway, the locker room, they would just click. Just a special team to say, hey we're part of a larger team, but this one thing, this is us. This is our way of doing things. So, you want to figure out how can you incorporate that into your workplace. Some of are thinking I'm too busy for this nonsense. Great! Continue being average. Continue being normal. We want to look at what's above average, what's abnormal, even if it's a little bit silly. Sometimes that's stuff that makes you different and makes you better. Better is necessarily different and I promise you these little things will end up saving you time. And really that's such a huge difference between angry man and the really great managers who are out there. Look at some ways that we'll contrast them and then we'll answer some questions. First of all, the philosophy about employees is angry man sees them as necessary evil and his biggest headache, whereas the top manager sees them as the greatest opportunity and biggest responsibility. His management philosophy is that employees should work in service of him. She says that, no, I have to work in service of them. His primary objective is to facilitate employee behavior so work gets done. She facilitates employee growth so work gets done. His relationships with employees are transactional, hers are relational. He just onboards people, just gets the forms filled out, puts them on the floor. She sets goals with them, establishes a healthy working relationship, and really onboards them into the culture before she starts training them. He complains about job jumpers and pays more to key people. She monitors their needs and improves their experience. He just wants to light a fire under them. She wants to light that fire within them. My daughter, my teenage daughter, is currently working her first job at a fast food restaurant and this weighs heavily on me because they're teaching her how to be. They're modeling how to lead for better or for worse. There's some franchise business owner there and managers who are in charge of my baby girl. All of you have employees who are someone's baby, who have potential. They may not be realizing that potential yet, but just like a seed can become something wonderful and beautiful and nutritious, it still needs gardening. It needs nurturing. That is the case with our employees. So, we are the best managers possible, focusing on self management, focusing on culture, constantly improving ourselves, and creating an experience worth investing themselves in, we'll never know how good they can be and how good the business can be. So, hopefully what you've taken away from this conversation is to understand some of the unique characteristics and needs of these workers, and how to influence them more by being a better manager, the importance of self leadership so you can do that, and understanding some of these leadership styles and how we need to have all of them in order to be the best managers that we can be. So Rob, those are my thoughts. I'm happy to answer any questions. Oh, that's tremendous, Scott, and just a great presentation. So much useful information. I want to touch on one solution before we get to questions, because there are ways that paychecks can help and one of them is with a tool we have to help you boost engagement and productivity of your hourly workers. This is called Paychex Flex Engage. It's part of our technology platform and it's a unique combination of goal setting, performance management, manager employee one on ones, team collaboration, engagement surveys, instant people analytics, real time recognition, peer to peer even, and compensation management, all together to help you build that engaging workplace culture that Scott was talking about. It's all in one platform. It's just a great tool. Watch your workplace come alive as Paychex Flex Engage helps build business momentum and bridge the communication gap and bring together your employees, teams and goals. So let's take a moment and address some of the questions that have been submitted here. And first, I'm going to stop clicking the buttons and let Jeff take us to the next one. And there we are, there's the Q and A slide. Very nice. And our first question here is, okay, this is from Rachel. And Rachel wants to know, what's one of the biggest misconceptions about engaging hourly workers? I think you touched on a little bit, Scott, but maybe you can elaborate a little bit more now. I think the biggest misconception is that we can buy engagement, That it's just a transaction. Right? It's just like a marketplace where, okay, what do I have to give you in order to get to certain characteristics and engagement in return? I think that's a misconception. We're not going to buy our way to better employee performance. May look again, because that's extrinsic motivator. Give someone a raise or a bonus temporarily. Maybe you'll get more performance. Maybe they'll stick around a little bit longer, but that's not the secret to engagement. Engagement is about creating a workplace where they don't have ownership in the business, but they have ownership in the culture, where they feel cared about, where they feel seen as a human being. It doesn't mean that you can't hold them accountable. I believe in tough love. The work has got to get done, but it can get done in a way that's healthy, that is humane, where everybody has a part of it. And those environments are the ones where people are more engaged. Love it, love it. And this one is from Tracy, I've got another one from Holly. I want to, like, append to it, Scott, but I'm going open up with Tracy's first. How can managers better connect with their teams day to day? Okay, so it's a great question because it's really hard that, you know, managers might have different shifts than employees. There might be a ton of employees and there's a lot of work that's got to get done. So you do your best. And really, think it comes down to just little moments. One of the people I wrote about in my book makes a point that when he shows up at work, he not only says hello to each person very briefly, but he always uses their name. Hello, Rob. Hey, Rob. How's it going? People love to hear their own name, whether they realize it or not. It makes them feel more acknowledged and more seen. So it's about these little moments, little connection points, and you're very deliberate about it. You know, you show up and you strap on an apron and you go right to work. It's all about the GSD stuff. So it's just being more conscientious and more deliberate thinking, I have to, there's probably nothing more important in my job as a manager than to just find a little moment just to connect with each person, to say, Hi, how are you? Everything going okay? What do you need? Just those little check ins make a huge, huge difference. And again, I know it's tough, so we do the best we can. For sure. Holly will give you another challenge here, Scott. Holly asks, Our employees don't come in all at once. They work in shifts. So how do we do these things asynchronously? How do we do them when we're not there all the time? Yeah, so it's going to require a certain amount of creativity. But let me tell you one organization that has twenty four hour shifts. It is Ritz Carlton Hotels. Ritz Carlton is known for being ritzy, putting on the Ritz. Those expressions literally come from Ritz Carlton. They're hotels, so they have people on staff twenty four hours a day, cleaning and front desk and housekeeping and maintenance and restaurants and bars and other things, all these different employees around the clock. Well, one of their rituals is every single day, every single shift, the supervisor leading the shift leads a staff meeting. They stand in a circle, they pull out their credo card, they read their credo, they recite it together. It's a required part of the uniform to carry on this card. I've been to Ritz Carlton's and have asked people, I said, Hey, do you have your credo card? And they take it out. They discuss their values, and then they hear a story about someone at some property who did something on the values every single day, every single shift. And that supervisor might be overseeing multiple or overlapping shifts, so not only they leave the meeting a few times, but the supervisor might have their own supervisors and they're participating in the meeting there. In this very complex, tough operation, they've made it a priority. I know that's not always easy. So once again, we do the best we can. So if you can't do a daily huddle, that kind of thing, then maybe you do a weekly huddle or you do it with whoever is there. You kind of have to figure out what these things are, but asking the question in the first place is the important thing. And you can like, you can go on the chat GPT and now say, Hey, here's my circumstances. How can I? And get some better responses than you might be getting on your own. The idea is to break away from the busyness. So, hopefully there's something there in the answer, Holly. Excellent. And, oh boy, I've got another tough one here for you from Jason. And this plays into the, about employees who are disengaged. How do you motivate them? Jason says, In our hospital, often feels like we as leaders are doing everything we can, training, onboarding, support recognition, but it still falls flat. The hourly team members can focus only on how things affect them personally in the moment, rather than the bigger picture? How do you lead a culture shift when leadership effort is high, but the team feels reactive and disengaged? How do you get through them when it feels like they're checked out? You know, it's such an important question and there's so many factors that might be impacting why employees feel that way. It might be the direct supervisors, it might be the culture of the organization, stress, that kind of thing. We need to get that figured out. But I will say this, and again, I don't want to insult anybody here, especially those who are asking questions. The most common type of question that I get with this stuff is people come to me and they'll tell me their situation, like that they need fixed, that the employees are broken, our workplace is broken. So how do I get them to? And usually my response is to first look in the mirror, you individually and you as management. Not saying it's your fault, your blame, but it's usually where you find the most answers. So all the time people say, We've tried everything. No, usually you haven't tried everything. Right? To look at what are the cultural norms, to find out what's really going on. What are the rituals you have? How well do they understand the culture? How do they want the culture to be? So I'd love to be able to give this person this like a really quick answer, but I would start off by doing some kind of analysis to figure out what's really going on. What are they discouraged about? That sort of thing. Give them a voice and then get back to, okay, what is your mission and what are your values? And how can we now create new rituals and do new things to create that? And when a culture is already there, it's very hard to undo it. So it's going to take some time and you might lose a few people along the way. You might need to let go of a few people along the way. But if you're serious about transforming culture, you need to rearticulate what that culture looks like, right? And then it insists that it's there. But management needs to do its part and not just say, we've done everything. We've given them this, we've done that. Dig deeper because I guarantee there's other things that you can do. I know it's a very flip answer, right? I just don't know the situation that's happening at this hospital. But I promise you, there's probably more that you could be doing, but it starts with understanding what the problem is. Yeah, and then some of these questions do get specific. And thank you everybody for submitting them. There's a lot to think about. And trust me, we have a lot of follow on topics for content and webinars here, and I suspect we'll have Scott on again to share some of the thoughts. This last question's going be from me. Scott, what is a practical stop I can take tomorrow to improve retention? Tip to prove intention. Sorry. So what is a tip to improve retention? What I would say is that create a workplace where people want to be by determining what the value systems of the people you lead, their soft needs, and be more deliberate about meeting those soft needs. Here's what I did. I wanted to improve retention at my edible arrangement store, so I surveyed my employees. I asked how they felt about things and asked what was most important to them. The answers surprised me. My assumptions about what mattered to them did not align with what actually mattered to them. So they appreciated the question once I had the answer, well, then I can be more deliberate and I could train my managers to be more deliberate about meeting those needs because you might think they need to get paid more in order to stay. That might not be the case. You you might think that, you know, they need different hours. I mean, we need to find out what's going on. You know, it's just this one simple idea is all of us exist to try to make other people happy. What's going to make it asking them what is it that they need and then feeding that to improve retention. So being more deliberate about it. And then the other thing I would say is I knew you asked for one thing, I'm going give you one pair of ideas, that when you coach employees, distinguish between what they know, skill set, and their mindset, how they feel. What they know and how they feel. So if you see employees underperforming, unhappy, ask, Is the issue what they know? In which case they need more training? Is it how they feel? In which case they need more support? Or is it a combination? Because you might misdiagnose them and give them the wrong thing. If it's an attitude problem, more training addresses aptitude. They're not going to like that. So I realize that there's a lot of nebulous answers to some very complicated problems and I want to own that. But here's the thing, we want to sometimes just find a band aid for that one thing, we need to take a step back and look at our entire workplace and our entire culture. You get that right, it solves so many other problems across the board. So think more high level first before you get to the granular stuff. Love it. And these aren't flip answers. These are complex issues. We're dealing with humans and work and workplaces. It's challenging. It's complex. We're at time. We're a little over actually. So I'd like to take us to one more poll. And I just do, I do want to hype up Paychex Flex Engage again. If you'd like to talk with a Paychex sales representative about improving your company's ability to engage and retain employees, just click yes. One of the tools Engage has these surveys, so you can get down to the root of what people are looking for, and that's really important. So thank you again for joining us today. Thank you, Scott, for joining us today. Just such great, great information. As a reminder, you can download and print a copy of today's presentation in the files and resources. We'll also be sending out follow-up emails with recording of the presentation for you to share with your leaders, your managers, your owners, and they can see this, get this perspective and get this understanding of this different view of how to really build a full functioning workplace. We will have a closing survey at the end of the webinar, so just take a minute to complete it. We can use your feedback to continue to improve and meet your expectations. Well, hope everybody has a great, great day. Thank you again for attending and thank you again, Scott, for presenting. My pleasure. If I can be of further help to anyone, you can find me, my website, scottgreenberg.com, berginberg, scottgreenberg.com. Excellent. Thank you all.