 cheesy. Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter, our guest today as Martha Woodward and this is Smart Business Bows. Hey, y'all. It's been a long time since we've done this. We took Monday off, right? Mm hmm. It's been longer for Martha. Martha, you haven't been a guest. I wasn't. Liz and I, Liz and I took Monday off. So but but she does um she does the Fight Club. Yeah, Fight Club. So, for her, she's like, I'm always live. Like a day or two goes by. That's like more than more than I want to test to How do you guys do a live stream? Every Tuesday. Okay. Yeah. Only once a week? I know. I don't know how you guys do it. I do not know how you we're only doing it twice a week now. Yeah. So that's I I don't feel like that's crazy. Not like when we were like every day. Yeah. Wow. And then we guys even when we went down to four days a week, I was like, wow, this is like so easy. You know, when COVID was a thing, I don't know, I just felt different. But then, you know, life started happening and business started happening and you know, only so many hours in a day. When COVID was a thing, you must mean that's true. I mean, it's still a thing. Obviously, it's still a thing. Right. When it was such a scarier thing. It was. So, it was so nobody had a clue and you know, up was down and down was up and yeah, you know, it was really are you guys hearing weirdness on from me? Out of the audience. Oh, you mean like the audio. I'm hearing something in my background. I hope my my headset's not going funky. I think you're going to hear. All right. That's good. All right. All right. So, what are we talking about with Martha today? I think this is the first one of the right. Well, actually, we started last Wednesday. Yeah, we did had had some some some tips for some hacks and yeah, this is September and September is employee retention month. Okay, which is talk about good timing, right? Yeah. And I'm ready. Yeah, we know you are, Martha. You know, most companies I know are in a situation where they don't have enough cleaning professionals to handle the work they have. And a lot of times, the pursuit answer is what we just need to run more indeed ads and hire more people and yeah, maybe maybe, you know, that's that's part of the solution, but it's definitely not all the solution is it? No need to be worried about keeping the ones you have. And I gotta worry about that first. Yeah. First, you know? Yeah. I don't know about everybody else, but my employees are wondering how long they're gonna go without more help. So and it's a valid concern. But all I can do is keep them apprised of what we're doing to try to bring people in. And I keep reminding them that they don't want to work with just anyone. So we're still gonna continue to care about who we bring in. And I do I really share the stats of we had this many applications, this many we invited for you, you know, we walked through that so they know that we're trying to get them more help. But these are the times we're in and they're always surprised at how many don't show or or the batch of the people that apply how many we invite, you know, I think they start feeling a little more special. I mean, if I can do that. Yeah, no kidding. Well, I do think that now is such a different time that I like your strategy of sharing it with the employees and letting them know, hey, I know it seems like we don't care, but look at what we're doing, like so much work. And they also know, I mean, they're out there, they see all of the signs, they go to the box and it's closed because there aren't enough employees too. Right. Yeah, so so that's what we're going to talk about today is what you can do to keep your best employees. I mean, maybe this has been a time that helps you weed out some of the ones that maybe you didn't want. But right now, probably everybody wants anyone they have. So yeah, we'll talk about retaining. Yeah, that's a good point. If you have anybody in your organization that's not a good fit, you say, now's an awesome time to look for another job. Everybody's hiring. It's hard right now, right? We want to keep these people unless they're just abysmal. They're like, oh, okay, we spend a lot more time coaching up people that we wouldn't spend time on ideally right now because at least, at least you can clean some houses, help us with some of the work. Yeah. Why or. Hi, Felicia. Highly supervised. Yeah. Well, I know you have a PowerPoint. I think, Martha, that you were going to share. Yes, I will share that and so I presented this at a couple of conferences, but I while we're going to go through the slides, I really want it to be more about a discussion and just for you guys to see some of the stats and so forth. So we'll get started and I do have to switch off to my screen. So if there's comments, Tom or Liz just stop me and we'll we'll discuss them. We'll usually put them up on the screen too. Yeah, um, I to control those you can't see. I'm on a different screen. So I got you. Oh, I'm interrupt. We'll get them in there. All right, you do it. So that's an invitation, folks. If you have any questions from Martha, just go ahead and drop them in the comments and we'll throw them in. All right. So Linda is here too. Hey, Linda. I saw Liz on there. Yeah, Liz. Um, okay. So I'm I'm just slipping through, but we're talking about retaining your best employees and to retain them, you have to figure out why do they leave in the first place and most people think money and money actually when people do the research and believe me there's a lot of research out there about this. Um, when they do the research money is as long as you're paying them a fair wage, that's usually not top reason why they leave. So, um, there are numerous studies done and the lists differ a little bit, but there's commonalities. So, okay, I got it. I got to interrupt you real quick. Yes, go ahead. Can you see me, Martha? I know, but I can switch over. No, that's okay. No, you don't need to be able to see them. I was just wondering because I hold up my hand a lot when I want to interrupt and you know me, that's a lot. So I'll just I'll just pop in there. Okay. So I know a lot of this research has um is older and so I have you thought at all about the the new connection between our employees and money because it is different. You know, I I've been preaching for years that it's not the money y'all, money's far down on the list, but I do think that money is playing a much different role today than it was even a year ago. What do you think? Yeah, and I would agree with that. So I can't remember. I honestly don't remember how old this study is, but I tried to get one that wasn't archaic of course, you know, within the last couple years, but I would agree that right now the best employees know that people are raising their wages all over the place. They know there's a shortage of employees. They know that hey, if I don't like it here, there are a gazillion jobs and guess what? They keep raising their starting salary or they're starting hourly pay. So I honestly do think that um it does play into it more than it because everyone is scrambling to be more competitive. Um but I also, it's first turnover though, I think you hit on it Maratha. If you're going to hire new people, you're going to have to have competitive wages and if you're doing that right, you're certainly going to want to increase the wages of your incumbent workforce. You don't want to hire new people paying them more than the people you already have. So if you're doing that uh Liz, are you thinking that that people are leaving because they're not being paid enough that they can find a job somewhere else or are they just leaving the workforce entirely and saying it's not worth the money? Yeah, I'm thinking that as we go through Martha's list, we're going to see that money is attaching to a lot of these things that they're not leaving just because of the money but I do think that money is is more a topic of conversation now even in the last six months than it's ever been in the past. Right and I agree now I know that um I held out a little while but I know that I did raise my rates for my current and incoming clients so that I could raise our pay for our employees and if I hadn't done that I do feel like um pay would be much more of an issue for my current employees. Now I'm not saying that none of them look at all but I'm just saying that at least they know I have tried to say competitive and that I'm not sticking my head in the sand and saying you know I don't need to be competitive because you do. Even if you have the best culture in the world you have to be competitive but if all things are kind of equal then these are some of the reasons that they're going to look elsewhere. And I really think you hit the nail on the head Martha when you said that you had that conversation with them about raising the the prices so that you could raise the wage. Just having that conversation you know it's always been the same that we've got to meet that minimum the minimum that is needed for people to feel like they're being respected and like they can have have their needs be met. It's just that that number is kind of shifting but just having the conversation and trying to do that I think is goes a huge huge long way for that. Yeah. I'm gonna try not to interrupt for a little bit. You're fine. You're fine. That's hard for me too so I absolutely. So quickly we'll go through the top 10 reasons and I believe this came out of a Gallup poll that was just a couple of years old and when it says bad boss that's typically their direct supervisor. Workload too much. Lack of recognition. Broken commitments. Coworker issues. You can read through these and you can always refer back to this you know you can replay it and take screenshots if you want so we won't go through all of that but in this session today we're mainly going to deal with number one as far as what you can do as a supervisor to not drive your best employees. Stop being a bad boss. Stop being a bad boss. Maybe that's a pain thing too if you you know paint your supervisors more maybe you can hire better supervisors. Yeah I mean maybe never mind you know there's all the reasons there's a lot of reasons that there might be problems there and and it could be that we as the owner have not done a great job training our direct supervisors to do their job well you know I mean it still comes down to us when at the end of the day that if you have mid-level supervisors that are the problem and are running your employees away you either haven't dealt with that employee you know like as in you keep having these problems keep having these problems but you keep them or you haven't done training I mean people don't just naturally know how to lead people so it does take training and for me it's all about open communication but we're going to talk today about how to not make the mistakes that we as supervisors make that drive people away. Well we have a question here from Aja. Were you trying to say something Tom? I just wanted to interrupt but you're you're better than that at that moment. I am a good interrupter yes so Aja is asking how much do you think COVID has affected how people see their own value? I think about how people tend to have a new outlook on life after trauma and I feel like we have all had a collective trauma because of COVID. I kind of think it depends on the person this is just pure opinion I mean it's not there's nothing educated about what I'm going to say it's just pure opinion but I think there's different kinds of people and I think there's people who work for you that are like you know all right I am essential I've been working I am valuable I can go out and do whatever I want to do you know it's that there's that kind of person and then there's the you know uh the E or I'm just biding my time and they feel almost the opposite of and even in my in my staff I see both so I do you know people react to trauma differently and I think that's what you see yeah I think you're right there's lots of different behavioral styles people are different obviously and not everybody handles trauma in the same way I I agree with you Aja that we all are kind of dealing with this collective trauma we're all kind of wounded and sore and not not at our best right now yeah that's a that's an interesting you know hypothesis because you know obviously there's a lot of people who are not in the workforce I forgot to look up the jolt's numbers came out today I'll look that up while we're talking but there's a ton of open jobs and there's a lot of people that the labor participation rates really low a lot of thinking is because of the extended unemployment benefits and a lot of other benefits people you know a lot of the workforce financially has an option to not work maybe what they didn't have pre-covid but some of it might be just the emotional stress of the whole COVID thing and dealing with this and it's not as much of an economic decision as it is an emotional decision never thought of that that's good yeah it was good Liz is thinking it's not trauma but frustration and feeling suppressed for some people for sure yeah yeah Rachelle Rachelle says Aja I think we were all going a million miles a minute and COVID allowed a lot of people to hit the pause button and think about what they were doing and how they were spending their time they're rethinking what they want yeah I agree with that too that's also happening yeah I do I I think it's normal and when you're going through trauma to do some soul searching on what you want out of life and Aja's tying all this back into the boss theory because she says for sure thank you a bad boss is exceptionally worse when you feel like poop all the time okay so the number one thing that you as a supervisor Bob whatever you want to call it can do to run your best people away is allowing people to stay who have bad attitudes and and when I say bad attitudes that really means that you're letting them get away with things that you say you won't so for example you know they exceeded the number of complaints allowed or if you do quality scores you're not holding them to the requirements that you say you will absences you have policies for absences but you kind of throw that out the window and I think particularly now this is probably happening more than ever because we're all short staffed and you you know you still have to decide like any other day who is making the rules and if the rules need to change then they need to change but I know I recently sat down with my employees at a staff meeting and we had a heart to heart and because they you know I mentioned earlier they're feeling the burnout of being short staffed and it's hard for them to take time off because you know who's going to suck for them and you know all those things and we had a heart to heart and you know I actually said you guys I I get it and we actually had a conversation about even though we're short staffed I want you to be happy here now that's not allowing bad attitudes but what I'm saying is that the same rules apply unfortunately whether we're in a COVID situation or not that I want the same core values as always and it just is it's just a little harder to take when you enforce it right now but you have to now Liz I know there's a big one for you too so chime in hey yeah absolutely this is but one of the things that you said I really like especially for right now you said how hey if the rules need to change then they need to change but if they don't then you gotta you gotta follow the rules I love that and I do think that sometimes it's okay to modify the rules and we all had to modify our attendance policies for COVID I mean what are you gonna do you can't say no sorry you have to come to work sick or not that wasn't a thing anymore right when the situation changes when the world changes we have to change with it right yeah absolutely yeah and so I like your strategy of bringing your people together and having that conversation as a group I think that in itself is well you're a big believer in open communication obviously and that that's a strategy for for getting your people to feel more engaged you know I'm you know I talk a lot about matter meaning measure and autonomy and that that's a heavy piece of matter like we're important we really really matter so I really like that all right we'll go to um let's see I did notice when I started going through these slides there were 44 of them and so we're not going to spend a lot of time on all 44 but come on Martha you gotta pick up the pace Martha first at that but I do want this I do think it's important that when your employees are working at your company and you make the choice to keep someone that you probably shouldn't be keeping you have taken the employee out of that equation like you're making the choice for them that they have to put up with that behavior you know they have to go um try to recover and fix whatever problems you know quality problems that the cleaning had or they have to fill in for that employee who keeps calling off etc so think of it from their point of view that it's not just you tolerating the bad behaviors it's you're asking your employee well you're not even asking you're telling them that they have to as well and that's where this I don't know how much longer I want to put up with this mentality comes from yeah uh totally makes sense I like that you say that that you're making that choice for them we're really not because if you make choices for other people they'll still make their choices but what choice are you giving them to leave now right right so I'm curious I mean we had a list of like 10 reasons that that that people leave and I know that this probably isn't scientific but just kind of experience and gut feel you do this whole thing of allowing bad performers to continue to be part of the organization do we think that's one of the the bigger reasons that good people leave yeah I do yeah well Tom you saw did you I don't know you saw this time I've been looking up a data point but just like with our KPIs you're we're always looking at that direct the biggest piece uh Martha's one of her that point was 50% because of the bad boss so I mean of course that on the other hand take up five percent or something but 50% are bad boss so this is part of being a bad boss right here yeah Liz has a comment on here too I see Tom nope uh oh I I'm sorry Martha I can't see over here I'm looking into setting up some services for the employees daycare local aid services support services housing etc one stop shop for information and help co-partnering with other services bringing help to them it's awesome that's cool yeah nice yeah very cool Liz you know those Liz's they they do cool stuff yeah it's it's a trend isn't it yeah this whole bad boss theory it's not a theory I mean it's a reality but yeah you know I mean there's so many different ways that you can be a bad boss you know I mean there's actively you know behaviors that are bad but ooh that's a good one maybe it's the action that you don't take is is is maybe worse we can probably come up on a list of the different ways of being a bad boss yeah well I know I can we're gonna go through several of them um number two is making empty promises so um it's really saying you know people do this without even knowing that they do it I had a boss that I love dearly but he did this all the time and I learned to be you know I just kind of rolled my eyes whenever he would say something is a good thing that his positives outweigh this because he would say a lot of times that um I'm gonna look into it and I'll get back to you or yeah that that sounds like something we should do I'll look into it and then you never heard anything else um and so trust is huge huge huge and when you say that you're going to look into something and then follow up or you're gonna change something or whatever whatever you commit to even if you're only committing to looking into it you have to somehow complete the loop and let them know the outcome even if you don't commit to it exactly if you just say I'll look into it and that's all you say I mean you can go back to your office and look into it say nah that's a dumb idea that's not good enough you got to provide the feedback even if you didn't say you would right right and for me I can absolutely forget and and most of the time I don't want to answer them like right then um when they're you know and it can be anything it can be something that they're disputing on their payroll or it can be this idea they have for the company whatever but whatever you have to do even if it's making that you know a reminder on your calendar or whatever you have to do you need to complete the loop and follow up with them or they will lose trust in so not only do they not believe you when you say I'll get back to you now kind of everything you say is being weighed whether it's true or not because of this problem right here so yeah that's a good one I agree um and then management rarely listens you know Tom brought that up as far as you know they might come to you with an idea and honestly I would tell you that um when I do these talks and you know I talk about when we change some things in the company honestly most of the time when I change something in the company and it's something that has now stuck for years um I can think of a couple of employees that really were very mediocre employees if if I mean I feel like that's not politically correct to say but they were not my rock star employees that made suggestions but they were things that um I did not discount just because they weren't my best employees and you know what they were great suggestions so I didn't automatically discount them and I would suggest you do the same but that doesn't mean that whatever they suggest that you follow that you actually do you have to follow through um but don't discount them just because they're not your favorites or whatever because sometimes they're the ones that are kind of the bravest to speak up and tell you what's wrong you got me worried now though is mediocre you said politically incorrect well I mean when you're referring to humans maybe it's not the nicest thing but uh but in our little world that's what we're gonna say average not not everybody's a rock star well they are not they are not so I mean mediocre is a a reality in life um we all have I think most of us I don't know somebody might have a company that everybody's a rock star I don't know that would be awesome but that would probably not be the norm right yeah um okay so I know this is a huge one for a lot of us and uh and particularly our employees is not feeling appreciated by their supervisor so you I mean boy Liz is the queen at this I mean when you talked to your your your sheet with the tally marks and believe me I am all over trying to make an employee feel appreciated when you went to the tally mark thing I'm like I'm out I cannot because I don't want it to I just know myself that it will not happen but um but yeah but talk about being committed to making sure that you are doing your due diligence making people feel appreciated um so however you do that uh they're you know our job that we offer our employees is not always the most fulfilling job especially if you know we've got customers who make the employees feel great but we have customers that make them not feel so great and same for supervisors and so if all things are equal and you don't feel good about where you're working and your role in the company then you have to start questioning why you're saying you know and so um and you know I do mean this that I feel like I learned a lot of this from Liz but I I tell you what one of the things that for me I really you know one of my missions with the employees is that I want them when they leave the company I want them to look back and associate I don't know self-esteem is not what they're gonna say but I want them to look back and associate feeling good about themselves when they worked for our company and um just feeling like that was time well spent and a lot of the ways that we go about that is the pats on the back that maybe they never ever got when they were raised you know a lot of our employees don't come to us with very high self-esteem and I just feel like this is probably the most impactful thing that we can do as supervisors is really bring out people's self-worth and help them to see how important they are so the key word in here is feel you know so a lot of times people get this confused when I'm working with people and they're like but I told her she did a good job I told her this I told her that you know just because you tell somebody something doesn't mean they feel good about whatever it is so yeah creating that feeling is is different than just telling somebody hey you did a good job hey you're a good employee they they have to feel it which means you have to come from a different place which is just a little bit oh Stephanie's on here we're gonna have Steph on here talking about the same topic coming from a different perspective on Monday I think it's Monday right Steph yeah so you're talking mainly today Martha about matter and how to make people feel like they matter to you to the company getting that feeling of of mattering and Steph's going to be talking about bringing that meaning into into the company and making the people feel like wow there's something bigger in what I'm doing here that this isn't I'm not just cleaning toilets all day long I'm actually making a difference so but Stephanie's really good at this too yeah oh my gosh she's really good at it yeah she really really is but and I agree Liz it's it's when you're trying to evaluate if you do this really think about do you make people feel like they're important like their work matters that they're making a difference you know it really is about that feeling I agree and I think that that comes from again conversations and not just uh hey you know like when you're passing them down the hall hey Mrs Smith said you did a great job and she just loved the cleaning you did sure those things are important and like being able to see their survey comments and all those things those things are important but it really is about the way that you make them feel and I think that comes from some one-on-ones when you take the time to talk that through I do like communication is my favorite strategy for making people feel like they matter I feel like it it is the straightest road or the straightest path to get there there's lots of ways to get there but that that communication that one-on-one communication is really really quick quick quick yeah hey Linda Linda says she tells her staff that she's proud of them and how far they've come and their value to her company and sometimes it makes them cry well I'm thinking that you're hitting the feeling button there then right if people are crying yeah yeah but you know tying this back you know earlier I guess Ajah asked the question about COVID how that ties into some of this some regards COVID's made it more complicated to make people feel like they're appreciated if you're wearing masks and social distancing oh it it agreed it really has it has disconnected people in general and it's uh you know the no hugging and uh like the elbow thing it's just like and I'm not even a hugger but uh right yeah right it's uh it is it it makes it much harder um I know my buddy Kurt Kimpton one of the things that he did and you know so if you're not meeting in the office as much and so forth um one of the things that he did that doesn't replace the conversations but um it is more personable than say typing something to your employee he used voxer and voxer is like a walkie talkie type of um an app and for it it's free unless you I can't remember what features are not free I finally paid whatever it is for a year but uh but anyway he would do his kudos in instead of like a group text he would do a walkie talkie type thing and and so like his customer comments that would come through he would imitate the customer whether you know how or not and you know and really lay it on thick but that makes it um you know he would go through the comment and it needs you know be like no really man it really means a lot that you did this for mrs smith and you know and what was kind of cool about that is not just that employee was hearing how great they were but all the employees were hearing how great that person was so um he did that like in a weekly update now I thought that was pretty cool I'm totally stealing that I do a weekly update um by video on Tuesdays and I'm told I can do the voices I cannot wait I can't wait so right up your alley oh yeah and you know and see that was right up Kurt's alley too but you know what when you put in that little like you said Martha it doesn't it doesn't replace that conversation but all of the things that you add on all make a difference and that shows effort and that you're putting more into it it does matter it does does make a difference it makes a difference in a big way that one little that one little toothpick all by itself doesn't make the difference but you know you stack a whole bunch of I don't know where I'm going with this go ahead finish the thought guys no no that metaphor died before I even got a whole bunch of toothpicks yeah it's obvious I I had a plan and then it went away when I said toothpick I was like why am I going with toothpicks okay so this one is um grouped together and I really feel like we covered it in number one when we said that you're allowing the bad behaviors well this is allowing bad behaviors when it comes to policies so basically you're just letting them blow through the policies and I think we've hit that um hard enough other than um employee doesn't know where they stand so I I give a visual of a straight road and a windy road and so if you think of your policies as a straight road like you know the first occurrence you hit this stop sign and that's a verbal warning the second occurrence you hit this stop sign and that's a written warning and etc so you're on a straight road but if you don't follow your policies and that straight road then that road is going hopefully I'm going to do better than the toothpick it's like that road is just winding and winding and winding and your employee is trying to keep up and it's like where are we going and where am I at and it's so again there's a trust factor in there because yeah even if you're bending the rules and it's of their advantage that you bend the rules like as in they get more chances they still are questioning what the heck what you know what's going on here and am I gonna she just keeping me until she's ready to fire me you know they don't know what is happening and um and it does feel like favoritism so your other employees that are watching you bend the road they feel like you know you may be bending the road in your mind to help them like I can't fire this person because they've exceeded their absences but all these other people including me need them so I'm bending the road but your other employees when you bend the road are watching thinking huh she bent the road for that person and that feels like favoritism to them because they know the rules or they should know the rules and so when you bend them they know you know as much as you might want to think that nobody's noticing they do notice oh no they notice and it feels very subjective so yeah it's just and it really is a quick way to undercut trust like you said I mean you keep going back to trust and trust really is just a a key piece it's a key component you know it's a toothpick now we talked a little bit about this earlier but I have so I have had points of time in in our company that I needed to bend the rules like well COVID this one but I remember distinctly having an employee who was awesome and this is after I no longer was bending my rules all over the place I I had drawn the line in the sand I was going to have a straight road and then a year or so later I had this employee who was an excellent employee but she had four she was a single mom and she had four kids and so I had this great straight road absence policy and all of a sudden I was going to have to fire this girl who I love dearly the clients love dearly she had you know she was a team player great attitude great quality but she had absences because of her home situation so I knew I could not bend the road for her so what I did is I came up with what I call an earn the cushion um Liz you have strikes and you have other things but I came up with what's called earn the cushion and basically if your quality score is above a certain level for two months you get you earn an extra allowed absence so nice yeah and what I liked about that is that it's available to anyone so I'm not bending the rules for one person it's available for anyone but only your best employees will qualify so should you hire somebody that is going to be a pain in the butt to you and they're going to blow through those absences I'm not like writing a blank check and saying oh let me open up the absences I'm saying okay you do this I give you this and so that's an example of just like I say the allowing the cushion you know to give them extras and I do the same with absences as well I mean not absences um quality issues I've had people who oh my gosh everything in the world is great about them but you know they're not the most detailed people that I've ever come across and um they are I would say above average or mediocre Tom um but they do get more complaints than our current system allows I don't want them to have unlimited complaints but they can basically buy more with their attendance and you know we have policy so anyway um that's an example of how you can allow some flexibility but within the rules still so uh I I like that so the the rule includes the flex yes so you're you're yeah I like that Martha yeah and it's not hidden you know it's not like I pull it out and go oh okay I like this person so I'm gonna you know let them do it if you're there it's just that not everybody needs it and not everybody is going to qualify for it so oh this is just um so this is just talking about when you put your policies in and this is in QDS and the HR thing where you're outline what you're gonna allow um okay so oh that's a good one yeah you know when we polled our employees which we did do this so um about twice a year we will go through this list and we actually have them fill out and say yes no I don't have them rate it you know we either do it or we don't do it and um anyway so we ask all our employees to tell us how we're doing on these things and for us this was the one and because we're pretty good about sticking to our policies and all those things but this was the one and so what I found out was they were super frustrated with like maybe repeated payroll issues happening or a big one was not getting the necessary information on job notes and you know maybe maybe the office wasn't getting the arrival time in there the way they should or maybe they weren't getting um some particulars about the house and then that makes them look bad in front of the customer you know it makes them look like they don't know and so their big complaint was that you that we keep telling you and the thing is so along these lines so this is a big one for me when we're training or when we're making a decision whether or not um somebody's quality problems are training versus attitude this is what this is how we measure so you know if somebody repeatedly is not wiping behind the toilet let's say and we know that they were trained that way initially we've done retraining and maybe we've done retraining again but they continue to not do that then that's a matter of not caring and they're making the decision to you know probably hurry and not do that detail but they're making the decision to do that basically because they don't care enough so when we as a supervisor do those repeated things like mess up their payroll repeatedly or um not get the information in the job notes or whatever it is um not have the supplies that you're supposed to have repeatedly i mean we all make mistakes but if there's a pattern to it it does send the message of you're not important enough to make sure that i'm crossing my t's and dotting my eyes um and it does cause a hassle to their job and they we all want to look good in our job i mean if we care if we're a motivated rock star employee we do not want to show up to mrs smith's house at the wrong time or with the wrong information and we didn't clean something the way we were supposed to clean it that makes them look bad and sure you might say oh i'm sorry i forgot to put that in there but if you say that frequently you're not really sorry so uh anyway it denny denny has a question for us how many times do you have to make the mistake before it would be considered a pattern maybe she's going back and trying to figure out well there's only a couple of times maybe i'm good i don't know how many yeah and um i don't know that we have a hard and fast rule on that but what i ask is okay so we have weekly stat meetings and what i ask is we actually have in our employee retention stats and their their lead measures and um one of the lead measures that i make the um supervisors track is how many errors they made when it came to job notes and payroll like we have that listed and so Liz yes i do tally i have them tally this and uh and so it's i've not had to make it a punitive thing because when it comes up we figure out okay how are you gonna fix that but um and i only put it on there when we went through this survey with the employees and found out that this was one of our problems so it was something that we were fixing but um if i was picking a number now again we're talking about the same thing happening repeated times so if you made a payroll mistake with the employee uh and this is just my take on it but if you made a payroll mistake with the employee now and then in three months you made a error on the job notes or something i wouldn't say that's a big deal but if you made a payroll error this week and you made a payroll error in two weeks and then you made a payroll error in six weeks that would be a problem yeah i was thinking the quantity matters but the time frame that it happens time matters is exactly you know you ever have somebody come back and say you guys do this all the time and it's like well when did we do this okay i happen now remember three years ago it happened yeah come on right yeah and we definitely get that and then but they're used to me saying okay you know i do say okay so what's all the time give me some specifics and so many times they're like well i don't know it just happens all the time and i'm like i can't really do anything with that i need i need some data and so if they can't give me any data then i start saying all right this isn't you know it's not trying to get anyone in trouble it's uh we need some data to know how to improve and so i do ask that they they track it and then i ask that they tell that person that it occurred and that person is put tally mark well we are quickly approaching the top of the hour um any last thoughts on your deck here martha you want to share i'm running through it um i think this is this is a no-brainer that everyone should know where they're at if they're in the disciplinary process put it this way when it comes to the disciplinary process like you should be running them through a process it should be a system that they know about um and i'm a big believer that if you're complaining about one of your employees to somebody else i mean surely we're talking somebody in management um and you haven't talked to that employee then shame on you really because you your employee can't do anything about it and i do believe that we owe it to the employee to always be very transparent about what we're thinking you know we're when we're happy and elated and they're doing a great job they should know that but if there's something that's driving us crazy about um for example something that happened in our office was my office manager was just tired of fixing their clocking errors and she would fix them but be mad about it and you know and so i remember she was complaining to me and i said have you told them how much time it takes to you know have you had a conversation with those people well no i just fix it you know and so don't ever do that you be very transparent and if you're having those thoughts then it shouldn't be a surprise to the employee they should know about it um and then i'm just going to leave it at that as far as um i'm ready well they're all good though yeah so we'll just finish it with that i'm not so close to the top of the hour and if you want to know more about you know the concepts and the application of what martha's sharing with with us here i'm assuming the best place to go would be quality driven software dot com yeah um my i do courses and stuff on uh martha woodward dot com i hate to even say that because that sounds pretentious but that is how you find me um so how is that pretentious that's how we find you well it used to be worse it used to be worse it used to say that pay for performance expert and uh i didn't like that so i take that that was for seo purposes not anything else i'm just checking martha you do know that martha woodward is your name i know literally is your name i know i think this is great it seems uh pretentious to have a website it is like the perfect you know the awesome martha woodward or the perfect or i might say something closer to that some martha so i'm thinking this looks really good anyway yeah you can find me through either one of those things and um and on this on that website it's good that you pull it up because on that website i do have that survey that you can literally print out and give to your employees if you want to so cool where do they find that martha um on the martha woodward dot com there's a bunch of yeah if you scroll down tom um there is a bunch of uh keep going email address and you get it yeah and it gets free resources right here there's that ad manager question yeah awesome that's such a cute picture of you too in that pink shirt martha oh thank you that one so cute i guess a video yeah also what's that no is that the same shirt you're wearing now no okay no it is actually it is it's my because that one's so hot pink yeah well i don't know background it is lighting it's cute yeah this one that one looks more like athleticy material the one you're wearing now looks more like um tom's material we are past the top of the hour okay one thing real quick don't forget fight club fight club too for those of you guys that don't know what that is like uh it's for business dot com is our website but we're mainly about we have a podcast like we do the live interview and then that drops to a podcast the following week so right so that's another thing you think you guys can get more info about martha from martha awesome martha thank you guys thanks so much martha appreciate it appreciate it all right we'll be back uh monday with monday and we're going to be doing more we're going to be talking meaning yeah record out you guys take care we'll see you might be talking to you sir bye bye