Summary:

Discover the relationship between customer obsession and employee retention in this episode featuring guest Sandra Scirpo. Learn how principles of customer loyalty and engagement can be applied to building an employee-centric environment. Explore the importance of clear communication, career pathing, and ongoing development in retaining and developing high-performing teams. Gain insights into bridging the gap between senior leaders and frontline employees and creating a culture of engagement. Join Dr. Jim and Sandra as they discuss practical strategies for building a loyal and motivated workforce.

Key Takeaways:

• The longer an employee stays with the company, the more they contribute to the organization, akin to a loyal customer base.
• A focus on execution is crucial in realizing the vision and strategy of an organization, which requires strong, well-developed teams.
• Identifying and addressing points of friction through consistent communication can aid in smoother execution and employee retention.
• Creating an employee-centric environment entails regular one-on-ones, clear career pathing, continuous learning opportunities, and encouraging self-advocacy among employees.
• Building high-performance teams involves understanding the 'why' behind employees' tasks, clear role responsibilities, and integrating fun and recognition into the work environment.

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome and Introduction

01:33 Exploring Customer Loyalty and Engagement Strategies

02:35 Drawing Parallels Between Customer and Employee Retention

06:13 Effective Leadership and Talent Management Strategies

11:08 Practical Advice for Leaders at All Levels

22:28 Implementing Customer Retention Principles for Employee Centricity

27:37 Concluding Thoughts and Key Takeaways

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Sandra Yang Scirpo: linkedin.com/in/sandrascirpo

Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda



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The new world of work requires you to put a new emphasis on employee development and retention. It's no longer the era of free money where you can just churn and burn your employees. It's not a perpetual talent attraction game. So what's the path forward and how can leaders build an employee centric environment?

She's the founder of Y4 Consulting and holds a position as head of strategy at GenDigital, a cyber safety company servicing over 500 million users across a family of brands. Super excited to have Sandra joining us. Sandra. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:15] Dr. Jim: I'm pumped to have you on the show. The first order of business for us to get the ball rolling is find out a little bit more about your story and your background.

It's going to be helpful for our audience to learn a little bit more about you and get your perspective before we dive into the conversation.

You're messaging what you're doing. There's engagement [00:02:00] at the consumer level as well as relevancy of messaging. So that's been the space that I've played in for a really long time. We've developed loyalty programs, engagement strategies, how to grow wallet share market share for lots of different clients across the space.

And then bleeding into organizational excellence. That is something that I've, that I'm also Deeply passionate about because I've actually had the pleasure of managing teams and leading teams for probably a good 15 years of my career. And there's lots of mistakes I've made along the way, and lots of things that I've learned along the way.

And part of that comes from experience.

[00:03:00] Sandra Schirpo: I will say when you talk about customer loyalty and that's such a big umbrella, . At the end of the day, what my clients typically are trying to do and look for is they're trying to grow and retain their customer base. And the longer the customer stays with you the more loyal they are, the likelihood to recommend goes up and the spend actually, we've seen that as well.

It goes up. So if the customer's engaged with you, happy with you, then they're spending more with you and they're likely to recommend other people in terms of how to put that into practice, you can have lots of different things at the very baseline of it. There's got to be trust. The trust of the brand has to be there.

I've always also experienced when I shop there, that if they ever run out of a product, I'm able to call back in, pick a similar product and they've actually priced match what I wanted. So in that sense, I think you can be not only building trust, But you're also empowering your frontline customer service reps to take care of you when I do call in and then they've got just a great policy,.

I can return things, they make it super easy, super convenient. So I think there's elements of those that actually engender the loyalty component for customers. For myself, I'm willing to pay a little bit more in order to get great service. So to me, that's a component of loyalty as well that. Customers are looking for.

And really, companies are trying to get right today.

Where you're cultivating a group of evangelists that tell random people about how great your product is. And that was just one of the principles in it. So when you describe the Nordstrom experience, it sounds very similar to the principles and customer for life, but I want to wind back to something that you said earlier, and that was your point that the longer a customer stays with you.

The bigger, the share of the wallet that you will get and the more revenue that you'll generate from them. And the reason why it caught my attention is when we look at people's strategy in general. Everybody seems so obsessed about finding people to come into your organization and the level of attention that.

Some of the similarities between the retention of customers and how that plays into retention of employees and what's the relationship there.

That's the middle part of your life cycle. And then they may leave. And that's the churn part of it. And if you think about that from an EX perspective, you've got, What you talked about talent acquisition going out and trying to acquire the right talent, then you've got hiring onboarding process of [00:07:00] it.

Then you've got the engagement of the tenure of the employee within that space, and then maybe at some point they exit. And that's the churn component. So I think in that sense, if you can look at it from that life cycle perspective. Then you can really apply a lot of the efforts you would put into your customer engagement strategy into what you would do with your employees as well.

And oftentimes we don't, I've never seen it, looked at it that way exactly, but there are so many parallels. And then we all know it costs a lot more to acquire a new customer. And that's true in the employee engagement strategy. Perspective as well. I have a bunch of open recs right now that I'm going through.

It would be so much easier if you hire the right person in, you're able to really engage and retain them. And there's that mutual benefits of you growing together rather than them exiting maybe a year, 2 years out. And then you're starting over again. So the cost to acquire is also true in both instances as well.

It's your existing customers. So you can get a foothold and iterate where that product goes from there. In the same way, if you're looking at it from a talent strategy perspective, you've done the work to go ahead and bring employees in. And then when you're thinking about how you're setting up your organization for success in the future, you want to be having those conversations about what's the next move for this employee that is doing a particular role?

What are the things that you've done as a leader to create space for those sort of conversations and also those strategic moves internally where people aren't getting locked into one function. You're actually facilitating moves across the entire organization. Tell us how you've tackled that.

So I think the first step is you have to have that awareness around you of what's going on. And if there are some gaps, you That you need to fix and then determine what kind of gap that is. And if it is something that you can fix simply by moving people around. I think secondarily, I'm looking at my peer set as well to make sure that [00:10:00] I'm highlighting the people that I think have the opportunity and the potential.

So maybe high potential, maybe it's not a fit for my particular role, but they will be great asset to the organization overall. We're having those conversations so that if we can move them into other areas that might be a great fit, that's also another way that we're doing it. I think there's also a lot of ongoing communication that's happening with myself and the employee involved.

What are their aspirations? Where do they want to go? How do they see themselves? And I always look at it as if they need to be If they need to move on, whether it's to another position within the company or to be able to move on, just move out of the organization. I'm there to help facilitate that. So that at the end, it is a win situation for them and for myself.

So I do refresh that on a quarterly basis. I just do a pulse check, but probably twice a year, really looking and digging into that part of it as well.

And. One of the things that you said in your answer that stood out was asking the question, where is the friction? So my question to you is if you're an inexperienced manager or you're closer to the front lines in an organization, how do you set the stage to identify where the friction exists and also Position the employees that are in your talent pool for the right next step.

What are the things or best practices that those leaders should be doing at the front lines of the organization to create that lens or allow for that lens?

[00:12:20] Sandra Schirpo: So I think that's the same regardless of what level, and it really should be. Practically I do think that managers, especially new ones, there needs to be programs within the organization to help them develop themselves as managers as well. I don't think organizations do that very well meaning, you're a great individual contributor.

Therefore, you get promoted. All of a sudden you have a team. We don't do a good job of helping them navigate what that means and what that's like. And sometimes just because you're really good and skilled at doing something doesn't mean you're a natural leader of people. But I do think for the manager, especially if you're newer.

This is a job description. Here's the rules and responsibility. Are those clear on both for yourself and for the other person? You as a leader, where is it that you want this team to go or this person to go? Is that clear for the person? And I think calibrating that on a regular basis, I think really is important.

I keep one to ones with all of my directs. I do skip levels with other levels. And I do multiple other touch points and engagements and so I think those all can be employed regardless of what level you're in the organization.

I tend to disagree in terms of what you talk about on one on ones. You can have those metrics conversations as part of your morning huddle. So when you're thinking about best practices in your one on ones. With an eye towards development of team and development of leadership capability within the teams, what are the types of things that you should be talking about in those one on ones?

So it's meaningful for both you and the employee that you're chatting with.

I think within that you also have to give a little bit of accountability to the employee and for them to be able to come in and say, [00:15:00] these are the things I want to talk about and be able to drive that. I think you have to just leave a little bit of space for that. Now, once we establish that there are, let's say, hey, six months from now, this is the skill that I would like to master.

And I don't have that today. Then I think it doesn't necessarily have to be a week over week. But certainly maybe twice a month where you're reevaluating that to say, how is that going? The last time we talked about X and you were going to do this, have you done that? How did that turn out for you? Is there any other input you're looking from me in order to help?

So I think those are the follow up conversations that you can have after the initial setup of what it is that you're trying to hit from an objective.

[00:16:00] Sandra Schirpo: So I think in my experience in building high performance teams, it really, I think people, for me, I believe people want to know the why, like, why are they here? What's the purpose? And then they want to understand that that end vision that you have. As a leader. And I think you've got to make that really clear because you can't lead a team without understanding where you're going.

So I think that has to be clear. I think the roles and responsibility of the team has to be very clear. So they also know what their accountability is. And I think in that sense, with the customer side of things, customers are also looking for simplicity,. They want to be able to understand what your value proposition is, why they're there, why they're there to engage.

Is that clear? Is the vision clear? Do they understand the why of you're trying to get from point A to point B? I think if those things are clear, then you. Generally have people who are willing to go on that journey with you.

[00:17:36] Sandra Schirpo: Yeah, that's a super question. I think earlier and younger in my career, I certainly was focused more on strategy. It was all about strategy. What are we going to do? This is the strategy. This is what we have to move towards that vision. And I think along the way. Making, mistakes as you do in your career you pivot.

But I know now that execution is everything. You can have the right strategy, the right vision, the right goals and never get there if you can't execute well. And you need a really solid team to do that.

How does the exercise of doing that help you on the execution front?

In different ways as well. Just if I was engaging with a client or any kind of an audience, there's different levels of engagement, maybe different ways of speaking different things that are important. It's really the same for me on the teams. If I'm talking to my L two, maybe it's a little bit different.

The information share or maybe the context that's shared in is a bit different. The next level down. Maybe it's synthesized a little bit more. To be relevant to what they need to execute on and then seeing how that ties into the overarching strategy. So I think it's layers that I'm trying to build.

[00:20:03] Dr. Jim: I think there's another angle in this conversation that I that I want to dig into. One of the things that often happens within organizations is that you have the senior leaders and executive tier who are very clear on where things need to go, how that needs to look, all of that sort of stuff.

And then you get further and further into the organization to the individual contributor level, the line level managers. And if you were to ask them the question, how does your job fit into the broader thing that we're trying to accomplish? You're going to get a lot of people that have no idea or limited idea about how this fits in.

How do you bridge that gap? What's the role or what are the things that leaders need to do across the organization to bridge that disconnect between what the executives and senior leaders know and what the frontline should know in order to drive better execution?

And so I stay very close to Reading those because I want to understand and you hear exactly what you're asking, Jim, which is there is a disconnect. Not everybody feels that connected to where are we going? What is the strategy? One of the things that I've seen done well is if you can break down your Okay.

Vision and your goal into sort of very simple things like double your E. N. P. S. or double your customer count. I think that's easier to digest and also speak of and understand. I think that helps. I think it's also it may seem repetitive, but it's the ongoing and transparent communication that happens again and again.

And that seems to help solidify what it is that you want them to take away from your message.

For the purpose of building an employee centric environment, one that's particularly focused on employee retention and development. Let's tie all of that together. We've talked about what it is and why we should do all of this. Let's get to the real important stuff. How do we make that real when we're taking those customer retention principles and [00:23:00] applying it to building an employee centric environment? What's the framework that people leaders should be thinking about and deploying so that they're actually effective at doing that.

If they're coming in as a frontline agent. Great. Then from the frontline agent, where can they go? If they're coming in as a senior manager director, what does that look like from a career pathing? So certainly have that as a second step within that as well. It's learning opportunities. So once they come in, make sure that there are the opportunity to grow and learn beyond just the next step in their career.

If you can implement some sort of 360 degree review process in your, organization. It doesn't even have to be an H. R. led or a company led thing. I've done 360 reviews just even on myself. And so try to implement those. Those are within your control. I would think that as a manager, those are some of the things that are in your control.

Hire the right person. Once you bring them in, make sure that you have a career pathing strategy, develop, train, Always continue to engage and then really have a feedback loop process along that,

So when you look at that dynamic and you're talking about you need to talk about career path and you need to talk about training and development for your employees and all that sort of stuff, there's a time constraint. So how do you account for that and budget for that? So you're focused on that versus.

The immediate stuff that's right in front of you.

So one of the things that I've employed is I had talked about E. N. P. S. Measurements earlier. I actually pull in all my people manager each [00:26:00] quarter when E. N. P. S. results are provided. I actually go through all of them. I send it to them so that they can also educate themselves. Read it. Then I schedule a meeting.

And so I have a standing hour meeting with all of them to say, give me feedback. What do you think? Was there anything that was surprising from what you read? What does your team think? How have you had these conversations? So I make that a habit and that's on a quarterly basis, just strictly on the culture side of it.

I have monthly standings, all hands. And these are things where you don't have to make it all business oriented. So for example, my all hands, we do peer recognition and kudos. That's a 15 minute segment of the hour that we do,. So you can start to incorporate these things and ENPS or feedback or skip levels gives you the idea of where you might be needing to focus.

And I don't want to discount the employees. Own accountability for their own career path. If it's really important to you, you should be the one also saying, wait a minute, I need a separate 30 minutes just to talk about my career path. So please make sure as an employee, you're also championing and advocating for yourself.

That's very important too.

Appreciate you hanging out. I think when you reflect on the entire on the broader conversation that we've had. And you want the listeners to remember some critical points that they should take away from this conversation. What are the two or three key things that you want them to remember about this discussion that we had?

Keep those open lines going. I use things like I tell any of my direct reports or any of their teams. They can always reach me if they want to text me. We are huge. I am user. So just I am me. Drop yourself on my calendar. I think communication is a huge component of it. And then the other part is, don't forget to have some fun to hit a day.

We work so hard and as and we're all contributing a lot, but I think take those moments to also celebrate the small wins and incorporate that as well. And you can do that very simply. If you're doing a weekly business update, if you will Just simply have some kudos and shout outs.

[00:29:11] Dr. Jim: If folks want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

[00:29:18] Dr. Jim: Appreciate you hanging out with us and sharing your insights and perspective. When I think about this conversation, there's a few things that I think are really important to keep in mind and they parallel pretty nicely with the book Customer for Life. One of the things that he's mentioned early on in the conversation was that the longer a customer stays with you, the more you're going to benefit in that vendor customer relationship.

One of the other things that stood out about our conversation is a question that you posed fairly early on in the conversation.

If we actually want to be able to take the theory of employee retention and employee obsession and really put it into practice, leaders have a responsibility to consistently ask the question, where is the friction? And this should be a question that you should be asking of yourself and also asking of your team.

So you can't rest on the excuse. That you're too stretched. There's not enough time. You've got to build the discipline to ask those necessary questions so that you are focused on the most important thing, which is your team. It's not you. It's your team.

For those of you who have listened to the conversation let us know what you thought of it. Leave us a review, make sure you join. The HR impact community. You can find us at www engage rocket. co slash HR impact, and tune in next time where we'll have another leader joining us to share with us the game changing insights that they had that helped them build a high performing team.