 Hey, good afternoon everybody, Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter, our guest today's Kedry and Konkel. We're gonna be talking about employee engagement. This is smart business moves. Wow, good job, Tom. You said that's a well, and you got Kay's name, correct? With this new cadence here, the new format of the show, I mean, this is a, God, I feel like it's been forever since we've done one of these. It really does feel like a long time, yeah. All right, who is the filthy bucket, Tom? Do you know who that is? I don't think I do, no. I don't either. Okay, filthy bucket, let us know what your name is. I love that, that's awesome. Me too, I'm not forgetting that anytime soon, that's for sure. Give us your name, filthy bucket. We wanna know, inquiring minds. So, for regular viewers of the show, you guys have met Kevin Konkel a few times. He's been a guest of ours. And Kevin's a friend of mine. We go way back, done some consulting work together. Kevin has a brother named Cal, and Kevin and Cal, and we and I were actually partners in the business a long time ago. Anyway, Kevin is really into the HR part of the business, as you guys know, and is a wealth of knowledge and a wonderful guest. We reached out to him some weeks back and shared with him what we were doing this month. He says, you know what? I've got a better resource than me. And it's like he offered up his daughter. So, okay, welcome to smart business with us. Thank you, thank you for having me guys. Oh, we're super excited, we love Kevin. So, if you're better than Kevin, that's gonna be an amazing win right there. That's a big standard to live up to. Really? The bar is pretty high. Yeah, no joking there. Not sure how I arrived. I wonder, do you think that Honoré is your, do you own the Filthy Bucket, LLC? I don't know, but I do love your name. I like it, it's pretty, I like a French name. So, okay, just for the benefit of our guests, you want to share a little bit about yourself? Oh, sure. So, my name's Kydrian Kunkel. I'm an operations director with a nonprofit company called Eckerd. We're a nationwide program services, direct services contractor. And so what we do is provide workforce development services, foster care services, juvenile justice services, kind of across the country in 21 states. So that's what I do. I cover the state of Louisiana, specifically geared toward workforce development services. So that's what I do. I've been doing this work between workforce development and then adult education and some other training things for about 13 years. And it's really exciting. It's my passion. That's what I love to do. Came from South Carolina to Louisiana about a year and a half ago. We got a new contract here. I don't know really how it happened but somehow I specialize in startups. So we got this new contract and they said pack up your Jeep with your dog and head down to Louisiana because we kind of get this thing rolling. So that's how I ended up here, but it's been great. And yeah, so that's really it. I've done a lot of different, like I said, different types of programs and worked with lots of different teams and different personalities. And it's had to motivate people in a lot of different ways. So when my dad asked me to do this, I thought, well, I probably have a few things I could share. So just, what is workforce development? What does that involve? Yeah, that's a great question. So nationwide, we have these things called American Job Centers. There's an American Job Center in every county or if you live in Louisiana, every parish. We have parishes, we don't have counties. Anyway, in every parish or county across the country, and so what these job centers do is work with job seekers and employers to try to connect everybody together. Okay. You're kind of like match.com on the employer-employee side. Right. And so what you get, the folks that we work with, my program would be those folks on match.com, like maybe their profile's not that great. Oh. And we got to take them out and get them to plan and say, well, you're probably not gonna get a date for like three months, but if you do these things, we can probably get you there. So. Okay. Absolutely. You send them the glamour shots, and the whole, okay. Right, right. Put a napkin on your lap when you eat, things like that. Yeah. So workforce development, the way I explained it just now, Tom, is very, very deluded, but kind of just for broad overarching definition for the listeners today. That's what workforce development is. It's a federally funded program that connects job seekers and employers together. Some people need more comprehensive support than others, and we do the best we can to kind of link them up to their, you know, with their educational needs, supportive services, anything they need to get connected. So you're more on the employee side of it, but within effort, within your organization, and you work your effort, if I'm not mistaken, is like a contractor that is hired by the Department of Labor to do this type of thing. Correct. All right. Correct. There was, you can hear them stop. Not my dog. Not my cat. Molly. Why don't you ask a question? I'll be back in a second. Okay. So one of the things that I was wondering as you're talking, like, why haven't I heard about this? What? It seems like a natural fit. Everybody needs employees. You're developing them. Wouldn't we all be looking for, wouldn't we all be looking to you to help us? So Liz, that's a million dollar question. I hear all the time, again, from working in South Carolina to, you know, coming down to Louisiana, so many entities, so many companies, community organizations don't know about us. Don't know that there's even a federally funded workforce development program. So we're the hidden gym. Yeah. I think that there is a lot of opportunity for us to expand just nationwide to, you know, to work and connect people. And what is the magic pill for that? I don't know, but you are correct. You're correct. We are the hidden gym. Yeah. You know, obviously we're in a market now where all employers are looking for labor and the house cleaning industry certainly is no different. I mean, that's the hot topic. We'll do a gratuitous plug here. What are you doing tomorrow afternoon, Liz? I'm doing the hiring boot camp for ARCSI with Debbie Sardone and with Sean Day. So that's how big of a deal it is. We're all focusing in on hiring and, hey, Tom, can you pull up the website for the American Job Centers and maybe in South Carolina or one of your counties there. I'd love to be able to see it and what I should be looking at here. I would also love it. Okay. Oh, first let me just talk to Honoree real quick. Honoree doesn't know how he got here to smart business moves, Tom. He's in California. He owns WeDoLightsForYou.com and WavWC.com and he's not sure how he found us. He just popped up. My guess is he was a member of cleaning business today and he got an invite. Does that make sense? Coming in from LinkedIn and might have just been thumbing through and we could have been one of a number of things, not sure. I'm gonna guess that you probably are interested in employee engagement though, Honoree. So no matter how you got here I think it might be a lucky day for you. So I guess I'm always referred to it as the one stop. Correct. Is that kind of the- That's the same. The terms are synonymous, Tom, yes. Okay. Yes, there is, Honoree, there's one in every county in the United States. So you are, there's one in your county, wherever you are. Or Parrish. Or Parrish. Well, he's in California, they don't have Parrish's. I didn't know if they have one there in California. So does, when we're looking for it, would we search for, it looks like we would search for a career one stop, not America Job Centers. What you would actually wanna search for, and I wasn't sure how deep you guys wanna get in the weeds on this, but I can talk about it all day. I would search for the, I'll say it two times. So y'all can write it down. The workforce, innovation, and Opportunity Act, that's workforce, innovation, and Opportunity Act programs in my region, or in my area, in my state. And that should give you the information that you need kind of for your area and get you pointed in the right direction. I'm gonna type this in forever. You type Google, you just type workforce, and INN, and the rest of it pop up. It's been Google's more than once. Innovation and Opportunity. That looks like, Tom, you're on the DOL website or something like that, that we kind of give you an overview of the regulations and what WIOA is kind of all about. I explain it to people this way. I say I go all the way back to the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, way, way back. That was kind of the original federally funded workforce development program, right? We may not think of it that way. From that time, it's got transcended onto the GPA, the Workforce Investment Act, and now here we are with the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. And again, it does all those things and more that I described. But I think as it relates to our listeners today, there are ways, and if you're not working with your local workforce development program, there are ways to get you connected with those job seekers. There's a platform that we all use, state database that actually has a matching feature. So you as an employer, I know this isn't about employee engagement, but I'm just gonna run with you. We'll get there, okay. As an employer, you can work with your local workforce development region and get your jobs posted, do a job order, okay? And then there's this key functionality that will flag resumes who have keywords from your job order, resumes of job seekers and kind of automatically send those to you so you get linked together, okay? And that's just one small nugget of all the possibilities, but again, it's free. It's part of the workforce development programming and it's definitely a tool that's out there that I would strongly encourage you all to use if you're not, I mean, you know, the LinkedIn's of the world and Indeed and all that's wonderful and you certainly are directly connected to job seekers, yes. But these are individuals who are coming into our jobs and there's every day or they're going online and using the SCWorks website in South Carolina here in Louisiana, our higher website, it's all the same platforms called something different because they're looking for work. So that takes us directly into employee engagement. In my mind, these are people that are actually engaged in looking for work and one of the things that we want is people who want to work, not people who are feeling like they're forced to work or they don't want to work, that they're just doing it because, but it sounds like anyone that's in your program actively is actively searching for work and looking for how they can increase their skills, et cetera to be an even better employee. Is that right? Is that what I'm hearing? Absolutely, that's the whole point of our program. So yes, definitely. I think it's a no-brainer, yeah. We'll be happy to kind of share some more resources or Kevin is another subject matter expert on this type of thing too. Okay, well, we got you, so we don't even care about Kevin right now, right? We got Kay, why we need Kevin? All right, so tell us. So talk to us maybe a little bit about, I love this unique perspective that you're bringing here, Kay. Maybe you could talk to us a little bit about what employee engagement might mean to us in our businesses within this whatever I'm trying to say. What am I trying to say? Come on, tell us. Well, in this hemisphere, in this world, this particular topic, you're coming at this from a unique perspective. Part of what you do, Kay, is basically help people who are wanting to find a job, develop the job skills and to get themselves prepared in order to be long-term, gainfully employed. So it's just like playing pitch and catch, right? And the better you throw, the more times it's gonna be caught. So we're half the equation as employers. What do we need to know from employee engagement to match up with the work that you're doing to be the employers that the people that you're preparing need us to be? Right, absolutely, yeah. So lots of different things that we can talk about today and did wanna share, beyond just the individuals who we serve as participants in our program, but individuals on my team, kind of working for a nonprofit, doing workforce development, federally funded contracts. So we don't pay a lot. Just putting that out there, especially some of our entry-level staff or administrative-type staff, we don't pay a ton. Some of my staff, I have about 15 people on my staff right now. They only make 14, 15 bucks an hour. It's not a lot, but I don't have high time. You're looking to drop a target making 24, right? Correct. And so, but I also can't give them Christmas bonuses. I can't do a Christmas party. These are all, and then I wanna kind of start there because I think it's important. Being in a nonprofit world, yes, it's not the same as the house cleaning business, but the profit margin is not very high because, well, there is no profit, right? Well, you gotta really make do with what you have and you have to get creative with employee engagement because I still have to keep my program staff. That's part of my contract, right? I can't run this deal, $5 million contract here if I don't have the staff to do it, okay? Absolutely. So what are some things that we do to keep our turnover low? That's kind of like meat and potatoes, like cut to the chase, right? Of what we're talking about. How do we attract them? If we do turn new staff, we do turn people over. And I'm super excited about this even more because you can't pay people a lot. Right. So if you can't rely on pay, what are you gonna rely on? That is amazing. Yes. Right. Reach to us, okay? Teach us. How to do the best I can, I don't know. I would say kind of the very beginning is from a leadership standpoint, do you know the mission of your company? What's your company's mission? What's your company's vision? That sounds very, very simplistic, but you'd be surprised. If you know your own company's mission and vision, and I'm talking about just a small encapsulated boom. This is at one sentence, this is who we are, this is what we're here to do. Don't expect your team to know. Yeah. All right. So that's kind of the biggest, the seed you wanna plant. Kind of start from there is what I would say. The other thing, stretching beyond that, you need to understand who you are as a leader. What type of leader are you? What's your leadership style? Again, kind of sounds cliche. Yes, I'm gonna tell you, if you haven't done one yet, you need to go take a personality, leadership personality, style assessment to really understand. I encourage you to do more than one, do two or three and kind of look at those results. Myers-Briggs, if you haven't done that, I think that's a great tool and go back. If you did it five or 10 years ago, that's great, but I guarantee your results are different today than they were five or 10 years ago. So, because you've developed and you've changed. So you need to have all that, give feedback from people. I like my leadership team here, who I work with, my director ports, daily talk to them, hey, give me feedback. Give me some tough feedback. Yeah. Tell me what I, you know. The better, really. Right, exactly. So that kind of helps me understand my style and I need to adapt and adjust my style to my team. So the second part of that is, yes, knowing your style, but who you're working with because we know all different types of personalities of people that are on our teams, right? Yeah, absolutely. And so you have to know how your leadership style meshes with your team's personalities and their styles, right? So that you can drive your outcomes and figure out what motivates them, okay? So, circle them back to leadership style. No matter what your leadership style is, whatever that little assessment tells you, like me, democratic leader, that's what it, you know, I kind of always get back on that or laws I fair because I do like to delegate and give people opportunities for buy-in. First and foremost, you need to figure out how you're gonna be a certain leader to your team. That needs to be a forefront of your mind. For me personally, I have, as a contractor, I have a lot of different bosses. My local funder and my boss at Eckerd, okay? And different partners I report, you know, work with. The most important boss is my team. I work for them, they work for me, right? We're nothing without each other, okay? You're nothing without your team and it's hard because a lot of times as leaders or managers, we say, well, you're getting a paycheck. So I'm just, you better just, I mean, go clean that floor because I'm paying you to do it. So all this employee engagement stuff is you're never gonna meet your KPIs. You're never going to get the profit margins you want and all of that stuff. If you're not working for your team and motivating and pushing them from the back to get what you want, period, Deanne. So you're kind of speaking a little bit opposite to what we would normally say. Normally what we would say is don't push your people and instead lead them. Show them the direction and get them to want to follow you versus standing behind them and forcing them. Well, you're leading, but you're leading from the back. Okay, that looks a little bit more about that. Yeah, so you wanna find out what motivates your team. Let them tell you, cause if I'm at the front and I'm telling you, well, and I'm just gonna use some metaphors that I think are fitting for the house cleaning industry. Okay, I'm at the front and like, you better clean. You gotta clean 10 houses a week or we're not gonna meet this and da, da, da, da, da and we're gonna get your Christmas bonus, all these things. They might, just because it motivates you because you wanna meet your KPIs, that doesn't mean it motivates them. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And don't assume that you know what motivates and there's lots of different things that motivate people. For us, in this industry, nonprofit, just helping people, knowing that you go home every day and you're able to help change somebody's life. That's a big motivator, you know? Of course. I might not be able to pay you a ton, but you get to do that. Yeah, okay. But you know what, that's one of our motivators too. Right. That people in this industry, they like to help. They like to be a service. So that's also a motivator. Absolutely. You made somebody's life easier because you came in and you cleaned their house for, you know, you helped them help clean their house before they had a big party or whatever. You changed that for them. You made their day better. And so that's good. I think it's a good reminder of, you are in the service industry and this is how you're impacting people. I did want to go back to leading from the back and finding out what motivates your team. Ask them. Let them tell you, okay? And once you kind of establish that, you can use those motivating factors to propel the ship forward, okay? And different things that I do, and this is something more of a tangible example, is like a staff likes form, okay? So when everybody comes on board, we have them fill out this little form and it's like, what's your favorite candy? What's your favorite magazine? What's your favorite team? What's your favorite, you know, whatever, you know, color, whatever, you know what I mean? So you have this list of like 20 different things. And sometimes when you want to just tell somebody, give them a little thank you, hey, bag M&Ms, I know what's your favorite candy and I just want to tell you, you know, thank you so much. Man, I can only pay you $14 an hour. That little bit, that 75% bag of candy, I could really change somebody's position, okay? You'd be very surprised because you, as the leader, you took that extra step to make, to recognize that person, to kind of push them along and say, thank you for doing a good job. So Andre has a few different questions over here. Let's hit these up real quick. So the first thing he wants to know is, do you feel they would have qualified high-rise window cleaners in this type of platform? So the company that you work for, would they be able to match somebody for him, do you say? Oh, probably, we serve all types of individuals, absolutely, yeah, definitely. So that's kind of an easy question there. I'm not exactly sure what we mean by prison style. We were talking about leadership styles. I'm not sure if that's, and Myers-Briggs or not, but... Yeah, I'm not sure either. No, yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know if this was a joke, if it is a country style. I presume it is, Liz. I'm thinking it's a joke, I kind of want to, you know, I just wish I understood it better, yay. And then he also wants to know, how can I speak in that type? I think that you can't hear, that would be like on Zoom, you can speak, but here you, unfortunately, you can't, you have to leave, you have to leave a message, or a typed message. See, it was a joke, it was a joke, I knew it. All right, so Kedrian, continue, please talk to us about leading from the back a little bit more. And what I'm hearing now is a little bit different. Leading from the back, you're talking more about leading from a place of understanding who's at the back, not pushing them, more about leading them, but from their position, not from your high and mighty position up here, with your goals and your agenda, from theirs. They keep in mind what they are interested in, yeah? Absolutely, absolutely. And it sounds like the worst part of this is establishing a level of trust and showing that you care, you know? There is a leadership style that if it was ever, I mean, I guess it was a time a hundred years ago where maybe it was effective, but you know, like I'm the boss, I really don't care what you want, this is what you're going to do, but that really doesn't work at all in today's world, which seemed that we would all agree with that. Absolutely. And so, you know, you're establishing trust and showing that you care, and if your favorite candy is M&M or, you know, peanut-covered M&Ms, which are pretty awesome, or you know, the difference between, you know, what's your favorite cheese puff for the crispy or the baked? Huffy, all day long, everybody knows that, Tom. We'll have that argument another day, but we're also hearing, I hope everybody is recognizing that Kay is also hit on two of the top three things that you have to do, or four things, matter, meaning, measure, and autonomy. She's already hit on meaning. First thing she said right out of the gate, mission and vision, gotta have a meaning, and second thing is matter, let them feel that they matter. And you know what? It doesn't sound like it, but M&Ms can do that as one piece of making people feel like they matter. So I'm already loving everything you're having to say. Great, great. And like I said, so the M&M thing, that's kind of a tangible takeaway, right? So some intangible things that you can do to lead from the back, I would say is getting that buy-in, like you said, making them feel like they matter. So we've got to clean, and again, I'm just pulling numbers out of this guy. We had to clean 20 houses this week. Those are, that's you and your, you know, little cadre of folks, like you got to clean 20. We know it's a tough ask, you know, they're big houses, but we got to get it done. Okay, so what we can do is we can brief the team and tell them, well, you got to get done, here's your map, here's all your supplies, and good luck. And I really don't want to hear any complaints on the back end. So, bye. Or you can say, we have to clean 20 houses this week. We had this, you know, situation come up a couple of months ago. We were in a rush. We didn't really strategize. We actually had to put off some houses to the following week. We had some upset customers, so on and so forth. Okay, I hope I'm coming up with a reasonable scenario here. Oh, you're doing really well. So what can we do to mitigate that? Y'all tell me. That's what I say. So I'll give you an example here. We have a summer youth employment program where we serve 300 in-school kids who are juniors or seniors in high school. We connect them with an employment opportunity for eight weeks over the summer. Really great concept. Last year was Eckerd's first year here, and our funder had this really unrealistic vision of how this was gonna go, and they just kind of said, go paint that wall red, essentially, and, you know, best of luck to you, and didn't give us a lot of resources, and I'm not being that great. And it was, there's a, you know, a lot of ownership in different sides from that. So this year the funder said, hey, we see that, you know, really, we should have let you guys be at the helm more on this. So I got my team together, and I said, hey, we're gonna do a SWOT analysis, and you may not need to get that far in the weeds with your team, we're gonna do a SWOT analysis, we're gonna talk about last summer, what went well, what didn't go well, what do we need to do differently, and who's gonna be responsible for what when we come up with a project, man. And that's what we did. So those kinds of things, but I didn't write it, I typed it, isn't all the information they gave me, I didn't write any of that, that was all that. So guess that was all them. So now when we get to summer, and we have to do the project plan, this is what y'all told me, this was gonna work. And it's gonna work because now they're invested. They're invested, this is it. And you have to listen because sometimes they tell me all kinds of things, and I'm like, well, yeah, I guess I didn't think about that. Like maybe this brand of cleaner like really does suck. And I've been hearing you, but I also know the sales guy and I'm getting a good deal on it. So we're just gonna keep using that one. Well, that's fine. But again, you gotta listen to your team, right? And so that's kind of an example I wanted to give. Give them I and have them tell you, you can't do, you have to take that with grain of salt too, because you can't do everything your team wants because sometimes they have an unrealistic vision, but just allowing them to be able to give you feedback, give it, share their thoughts and ideas, and help them understand the why when we can't do things that they, well, this is why we actually, why we have to use that cleaner for these houses is because these people have allergies, X, Y, and Z. They really are focused on being environmentally friendly. So that's why we're gonna use this cleaner. I know it's not as effective, but I want you to understand the why. So, do you have some other ideas? Have you heard of another cleaner that we could use that would fit the same mold, right? And just to make sure that we're not missing an opportunity here, drill down a little bit as to why it's important to explain the why. Why it's important to explain the why. If you don't understand the why of what you're doing, you're gonna go back to that intrinsic motivation. What's your motivation to either A, do the work or B, do the work well? Okay, so why do we have this rule? For me, it's, okay, why do we have that? That's a stupid policy. Why do we have that in our stupid local part? Why can we only have whatever it is? Well, we have to do it because the federal regulations say this and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And if we don't follow this, we could get sanctioned and we could lose our contract. Oh, okay. The bigger picture in helping understand how all the things that the staff does and the team does every single day fit into our why and fit into our mission. If you're trying to affect someone's behavior, if you're trying to get them to modify their behavior, you're either do something that they weren't doing or stop doing something that they are doing, there's a lot of research out there. It's like, if you can explain the why behind it, there's a higher probability, some cases a much higher probability that they're gonna give you the behavior that you're looking for. And I've seen studies in a lot of cases, it can, the why doesn't even have to be that awesome. It's not even, you know, the why doesn't even have to be that compelling. It's just a why. Well, you know, if left with nothing else, it's like, could you do this because it's really important to me, could be the why. Absolutely, the why, whatever the why is, just needs to be better than because I told you to do it. Because I told you to do it is gonna get you C minus results, okay? But like Tom, you're saying, even if the why is, because this is really, you know what, these are our top, you know, customers that you're gonna be working for this week. And it's really important, you know, and it could just sometimes, I cut straight to the chase with the team. Hey, it's really good for our image. It's gonna make us look really good if you follow through on this. Makes me happy, you know? And also kind of the, I put it, you know, in the notes that I sent you guys too, the growth versus the goals mindset. So we have our KPIs and we have all of, you know, those things that we're always striving for. How are we doing better than we did last year? So the growth piece of that as well in kind of getting the team excited. Why do we wanna do 20? We know we can only definitely do 18 really well, but we would like you to start doing 20. Well, why does that matter? What you see what I'm saying? So getting them to understand and getting them to have the buy-in into the growth. That's the word. That's the word right there, Kay. So they need understanding. When they understand what's happening, then I can connect with it. I can't connect with the job if I don't understand it. I don't, I just, I don't get it. So it's not even a lot of times that people are disengaged. It's just that they're not engaged because they're confused. If you can give them something to hold onto, give them the understanding, then it's like, oh, okay, now I can do it. Now, periodically you will get the person that says, oh, now that I understand why you're doing that, yeah, I'm not in. I'm not in for that. I'm not interested in that now that I know why. But that is rare. And even if that is the case, you're in a better position because those people were never working toward your vision, your values, your mission. So you're still in a better place. Right, absolutely. And so helping your team understand the why is critical. Here's the other piece of the why puzzle, understanding their why. Speaking of cleaning, the cleaning is coming through my office right now. So I apologize if you're not in the back row. I don't like that sound, right? She's doing what she told to do, okay. This is just the way we planned it. This is part of it. Right, right. So, but understanding your teams, why in each individual staffs, why are you here? Okay, it's not because you need, because paycheck, we already know that there's more pieces of the puzzle. Well, because I need to provide for my family. Well, who's your family? Oh, well, I've got a little boy and I got a little girl and, you know, husband and da, da, da, da, da. And, you know, sometimes maybe my mom lives with me and, you know, that was, what's your why? Why are you here? We know you need a paycheck, but why do you need a paycheck? And so understanding that and getting to know your people. So kind of that was the other piece of the puzzle with that is like, I've got 43 staff right now in my rollup and it's like kind of hard sometimes but it is really good for me. And I know the value of remembering that Sally, the career coach, her husband had surgery three weeks ago and just shooting her a quick email like, hey, Sally, you know, just thinking about you and how's your husband? Or next time I see somebody, hey, I heard your daughter got, you know, she's going to be going to LSU, like how's everything going with that? Or your son's going to be graduating soon or your granddaughter had a baby. All those things make people feel value, make them feel especially when your way up here and you don't get to be in the weeds with folks every day. Oh man, like Kay remembered that, you know, this happened in case thinking about me. I hadn't, you know, even yesterday, somebody on my team or somebody on my leadership team had to have a surgery checking on her in the afternoon. Hey, just checking in. Do you need anything? Just a little, you know, comment back, like thank you so much for checking on me Kay. Like you didn't need to do that. Like no one's ever done that before but it makes people feel value. Yeah. I can't pay you a lot, but I sure do care about you. Is that something that comes natural or are there any like techniques? I mean, with 43 people, you know, it would seem like that that would be kind of hard to kind of keep up with. Are there any tricks to? I will say the part that's natural with that Tom and I'm not being smart is just that I need to, when I came here, I had this brand new project. I had a funder who didn't want me here, but they had me here because they had to have somebody here taking over a whole new operation. And I had to figure out how I was going to build relationships to get people to do what I needed them to do. And so that's just one piece of the puzzle. And so does it come natural? I guess in a sense of it just came natural to me like I'm gonna have to figure out a way to connect to all these people. I'm not from Louisiana. I don't know a thing about being Cajun or how to eat a crawfish or any of that stuff. You've been out here a year and you haven't figured that out? Well, I know now, now, but the first couple of months I didn't know. I was learning I could understand the thing anybody was saying it was a mess. I'm kidding. But you see what, so just building those relationships and if you build those relationships and you have that strong foundation, now you know what's important to me. You know I'm a servant leader to you, I work for you. Okay. Now you're gonna deal with the things that I want you to do. And this all gets back to the trust thing and the caring thing, right? Correct, absolutely. You have to show it. It doesn't, it's genuine for me, right? Some of these folks, you're gonna have a dear leadership assessment and you might wanna be that kind of autocratic dictator and that might work for you, might be who you are, but you need to find a way to pretend to be servant leader somehow, some way, okay? Or weave some things in to show you that your team that you care, because if you don't, especially in this industry where I'm gonna kind of go on a limb here and say, especially for your entry-level positions, you're probably not paying a super high wage, right? Okay. Decent. Decent, but not, you know. But not the best. Yeah, it's not like they're getting the best. Not like an entry-level job at Target. Right. Yeah. All right, what else do you wanna know about? Well, I'm actually pulling up something real quick here. So one of the things that I would like to talk about is I'm, so you're talking about a lot of the things that we talk about often, right? And anytime we're talking about employee engagement, we talk about all of these things. But for some people, it's less natural than others. For some people, they just automatically understand that if you tell people why, that they will want to do the thing more than if you don't tell them why. Whereas some people, it seems more natural to just tell people, just do it because I said so. And that they feel like that will get people to do it better than if I tell them why. So one of the things that we're doing is we're putting on a program called the Employee Life Cycle Program where we walk through 15 different stages of the employee life cycle. And we talk about how to bring matter-meaning measure and autonomy into all of those portions of the employee life cycle. And you're talking a lot about meaning and matter, bringing meaning into the job and showing them how it's for a bigger purpose than just cleaning some toilets. And then also that they individually personally matter to the company and also that they have a voice, the autonomy piece. So I've heard you talk about all three of these pieces. I wonder if you can talk a little bit to how maybe we might bring some of those in the different areas of the employee life cycle. For example, how can we do that when we're talking about pay structure? Like so we have to pay our people obviously and we want to pay them, we want to pay them well. Now we don't need to pay them top dollars. So we've talked a couple of times about pay structure but how can we bring within the pay structure, how can we show them that there's a bigger meaning that they matter, that they have a voice in the pay structure, any ideas on that Kay? I mean, definitely employee incentives if you're able to do it, that's something I wish that I could do just being a nonprofit. That's not really something that's available to us but certainly employee incentives. If you're able to afford to do that and I would develop some kind of standardized structure but that would be, I mean, I think if you wanna, if you have identified that money is truly what motivates your team and you've kind of verified through a trial that that, yes, I've paid you more and now you're doing better because studies have shown when you pay people more they don't always do better. So I say all that to say if that's the direction you wanna go, certainly an employee incentive plan and whatever that structure would look like maybe it's you get a, it could be small. It doesn't have to be anything huge but maybe, hey, if we do get through you know these 20 houses and I know it's crunch time I know you got a lot going on with your family and everything but if you could really help me get this done you'll be able to give you a hundred extra bucks at the end of the week or a $50 gift card or something that doesn't have to be this huge huge. Well, actually it shouldn't be. Everybody over here, you know I have to preach on drive, right? So read Daniel Pink's book drive because money as a bonus, et cetera is not a motivator. Exactly what you've been saying all along, Kay, right? Doesn't motivate people. It's a motivator for some people but it's a very small portion of the overall population of the people that are actually working. Now, very little twist going on right now and I'm wondering if you'll agree with us here. We are thinking that right now there's a little twist in that while people are not necessarily motivated by money there's too much research about this. You know that people are not, the majority of people are not motivated by money especially not employees, business owners, yes but not too much the employees, right? But there's a new twist going on right now in that the majority of people out there believe that the minimum wage either is or should be at least $15 an hour. So if you're not paying at least $15 an hour you might be getting some pushback about pay even though people aren't necessarily motivated by money. It's not that they're being motivated by that money it's that they feel that that's the baseline of respect and trust. Right, would you even feel like they're being cheated out of an opportunity? Yeah, honestly again and not to be repetitive but if you're talking about your incumbent staff man okay well I heard that minimum wage is $15 an hour or I can go over to Chick-fil-A and make $15 an hour whatever the case may be help them understand why that's what you pay and what the growth opportunities are for them as an individual. We might be paying you $14.25 right now here's why because we have a hundred of you this is our staff and whatever it is this is and be honest with them and then in order to keep the company running we have to have all the other revenue rolled up right. We're paying you $14.25 an hour but we value you you're crushing it you're doing a great job and if you continue on this pathway 90, 120 days or during your yearly performance evaluation we can look at maybe bumping you up 50 cents, 75 cents and a dollar to get you beyond that threshold or here's some different growth opportunities for you maybe you can move up to a management position or different type of role. And so again, I think it is really just understanding getting them to understand the why and again pushing back the ownership to them of just because you make $14.25 a day that doesn't you don't have to make $14.25 forever and I want you to work here so what can we do to get you to the next? Very well that's the trick right there going back to the leadership from the back of asking questions right. So ask them how can I what can we do here what can you be doing that I can pay you more money? Right I see you as valuable. Right and you're so talented at this that's another thing like that's you know if you're in the house cleaning business and you go you're doing that I mean that's kind of a niche thing for you. It's probably not I mean my dad could tell you it's probably not something that anybody will really want to pay me to do you know it's something a subset of the population is really good at so you're here you agree to take this job of working 25 an hour and what can we do we value you what are we going to do to get you to the next? I love that I do want to say real quickly because sometimes this gets messed up just a little bit they don't tell people that they're doing a great job if they're not so I know that it goes without saying that you have to be honest but we're saying it. Yes I want to have two things if you don't mind related to that so since you brought up accountability yes don't tell people they're doing great if they're not all this stuff and I haven't even gotten to my list of you know things you can do to keep the team engaged in that kind of but don't do all that if they're not performing yeah yeah all right you know absolutely if they're not performing you need to learn how to be a better like half-time coach come in well we need to move in this direction now and then if we make it to the Super Bowl and win the game then we can talk about having a party and I'll pat you on the back and I'll give you a raise you see what I'm saying? Yeah. I say all that to say accountability and also this is something that is common with new leaders and old leaders alike okay sometimes we don't like to hold the team accountable sometimes you may have somebody maybe you know you keep getting complaints about Sally not doing a good job or she always forgets to like put the mop up when she's done whatever the case may be okay nobody likes working with her but she's got a really strong personality and you're kind of intimidated to talk to her well you need to figure out how to get over all that and I'm being very you know blunt when I say it because I see it a lot even you know with my leadership team sometimes it's like okay well you need to tell her that she's not doing a good job and what you need to tell her what she needs to do to do a good job and then she needs to tell you how she's gonna make that happen but if you don't the rest of your team is gonna lose motivation well if she's not doing a good job no one's holding her accountable why should I? And she won't be happy in her job either. Correct. Well we can't forget that people are not stupid you know they know if they're not doing a good job if you say hey you're doing a great job and they know they're not you lost all credibility they don't trust you anymore because you lie. So all this kind of ties together I mean the whole pay thing and we'd love to pay you more we can find ways to for you to contribute more and if you're contributing more you're creating more value for us and for yourself too and you feel better about the job and you're more engaged it's like a virtuous circle I was a little slow getting to this but I did share a link to a book which I think means a whole lot today in a world where everybody expects to be making $15 or more an hour and the whole premise of this book is you can pay more as an employer if you create opportunities for your work forced to contribute at a higher level. So you know we do need to be mindful of what's happening with wage inflation and part of that is making sure that you're charging enough but the other part of that is creating opportunities for people to contribute in larger ways and if you're interested I drop the link in chat and if you're wrestling with these problems in your business it's what they want. I think that's great and I guess you know your team even further buy in of what are some thoughts you have on how we can expand what can we do you know I told the team that here you know the more contracts we get the more business we get in Louisiana and across the country the more opportunities each of us have as an individual. And that hits on two things. One is when you ask people that question they feel like they matter. They matter to you what they have to say matters that they are important in your organization that's engaging but that's why matter is so important. Also you're putting a measure on there. This is how we're this is how we are gauging whether or not we're successful. So throwing what measure in there really really matters as well having people be able to see with their own eyes not being told from the outside in that they're doing a good job. The whole the whole idea of intrinsic motivation is that it's coming from inside me. Correct. Not from you. It's coming from me. Right. And some people are intrinsically motivated by recognition right. So then you have to kind of play off that. And so this is the last thing unless you have other questions but just recognition and this doesn't have to cost you a penny okay recognizing staff and this is not trademarked or anything like that. So feel free to take it steal it if you want. I do something called a ripple effect award and that comes from somebody on the leadership team and we try to do one sporadically. So it's not like everybody's guaranteed to get one every month or whatever but it's a ripple effect award is that you did something Liz you identified this new cleaning product that is like way more efficient than this other one that we were using way more cost effective like thank you. And it had a ripple effect across the organization. I helped identify a new neighborhood that we need to kind of penetrate those types of things. And so whatever that may be as I think that's important for leadership to recognize staff and to recognize staff in front of others. Another thing that I really believe in is peer to peer recognition. And so again that buy in that ownership what's happened I don't know everything that happens on the ground level every day that how staff helps each other how maybe you have one unit out cleaning houses and they helped another and then you don't even know what happened you don't even know what happened right. We just made it work to get the job done. So I have this thing called the star award and it's literally this thing I bought from TJ Maxx it's like this little three dimensional star thing and they pass it from every other week they pass it to each other and they tell the whole team I'm passing the star to Sally this week because Sally helped me with X, Y and Z out in the field she's really does a great job and then it helps us to see as leaders again, things that are happening in the weeds that we lose sight of all the time. Now, well, maybe Sally has some potential I didn't know about, you know? So I just wanted to share that because those things really don't it cost me 12 bucks to buy that stupid little star people feel everybody wants to know who gets the star they, it's like an exciting thing and everybody's kind of even me sometimes you're kind of an edge you see like who's going to get it this time. So if I have the star for this two week period is everybody else in the organization trying to impress me on how awesome they are so I give them the star? I don't think so because I've seen the star go across parishes, you know? So I think it's just, yeah, it's, yeah we're an eight parish region and I've seen the star go from all the way one part of the region to the other and I think, and it made me feel a lot of it. I'll tell you that there is a little bit of that we do something that's the same exact idea and it's not that way though this is the compound effect one of the things that does happen is people notice when people are doing things that are star worthy I'm using your terminology, right? So we also have stars because we have stars and stripes in our company, American made so just coincidentally that we both have stars, right? But we also have that and people do say things they do point out was like, wow us like star stuff right there, you know? And so they start talking about what's great they start noticing it, pointing it out seeing it in other people and again, that's engaging. Right. So I do wanna put a link in here real quick for anybody that is hearing these ideas thinking, yeah, these are really great ideas I love all of this but I just don't know how to tie it in my company and how to make it happen going to put a link for the employee life cycle workshop because that's what we're going to be doing we're just going to show you how to bring everything that we're talking about today and about 300 more ideas into the employee life cycle into every piece of your employee life cycle up to at least a three year period. All right. And then Tom is gonna show us about what you're doing tomorrow, right? Yes. We have, looks like it is from one to five Eastern. It is my time zone is Pacific. So it's 10 to two Pacific depending on where you're at and can you go down and just show a few real quick here Tom? Yeah, there we go. This is, we're going to be talking Debbie's going to be talking about the first thing that she says there. How to, I think it's finding like top how to find the top people out there and get them into your organization. Sean is going to be talking about how he hired over 100 employees last year just in his company. He's hired thousands last year for other companies as well but in his company just over a hundred. And then I'm going to be talking about using disk to which is one of the tools that Kay was just talking about, right? One of the different assessment tools that you can use for recruiting, interviewing, hiring and onboarding. So we're gonna be hitting this employee issue from a lot of different angles so that you can, everyone will be able to take away something that will work for you. We also have a code. If you're an ARC team member, you can register for free. Tom's putting that link in there for you. Our code is bootcamp49. Well, if you're not a member and you put in bootcamp49, you will get $49 off or $50 off and you'll only pay $49 because the price for the bootcamp is 99. If I'm a member, how do I get it for free? You just register and you put in your membership. And you'll get it for free. Yeah. And then one other last thing about the hiring bootcamp, this is part one. Part two will happen on May 12th and that will be again another four hours and it will be all about retention. And during retention, we will be talking a lot about some of these things that we're talking about again today, right? Because these are tried and true, this is tried and true fundamental ideas of how to engage and retain employees. It is not about some trick. It's not about you have to buy a star and that's not it. You don't have to go out and buy a star. You don't have to pass it around. It's the fundamental ideas of what makes people feel engaged matter, that they feel like they matter, that there's meaning in the work that they do, that there's some type of a measure that they can see how well that they're doing and that they can bring their best selves, that there's some autonomy. They get to bring themselves to the job. It's not just about doing your thing your way. Last ideas here. Is this the event that you were talking about that happens in April? So we're getting a lot of logical and this is a happening day event? It's three days. It's like two and a half days. The 21st through the 23rd of April in Charleston at your place, Tom at Castle Keepers. Wow. It's gonna be fun. That's worth the trip just right there, right? Yeah. This, the thing that I did want to say about the ELC workshop is that it is especially for the people that think I'm not wired that way. I just don't know how to do that. I don't know how to make people feel important or to pass on the vision. I don't get it. It's not natural for me. Then you need to be at this workshop because that's what we're going to be doing is we're going to show you how to make it happen in your company. You don't have to be a natural. You can lead regardless. I'll be there. I know, me too. Yay. All right. Kay, we have a lot of things. Can we just get one last thought from Kay? I love everything you had to say today, Kay. I can't believe we've never had you on before. Hopefully we can entice you to come back again. Don't turn me with a good time. Absolutely. Look at you and your dad both on and I'll just sit back and drink coffee and I won't have to do anything. I love it. I love it. Any last final words? One thing, what should they do? Getting off today. They're going back to work tomorrow. What's one thing they can do tomorrow, Kay? Find out what motivates their team. Find out. You guys ask, right? Don't assume. Ask what motivates your people. Make it an action item for yourselves to find out. Perfect. And I believe the code for C is bootcamp49. It might also be, I thought somebody else said it was bootcamp22. Oh, that's, all right. Check either one of those, but I'm pretty sure bootcamp49 will get you there. See? Okay. All right. Well, we're done for the week. We'll be back next Wednesday, five o'clock Easter. Yeah. Okay. Thanks again. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.