Imagine that one of your employees ignores company rules and procedures, takes merchandise from your inventory, gives it away to someone she hears has gone through a difficult experience, and fails to record the transaction or tell anyone about it. Would you consider her actions grounds for termination?

Many employers would, and that’s exactly what happened at a Subway sandwich restaurant in Halifax, Nova Scotia a few weeks ago. However, in this instance, it wasn’t the employee that wound up with a black eye in the perception of the public; it was the employer that was vilified.

The front line employee knew about a fire at a nearby apartment complex and decided to give the two sandwiches she was entitled to lunch away to several of the victims. The young woman was fired for not following procedures, and when the media jumped on the story, she was immediately recruited by the competing Quizno’s down the street (can you say “publicity stunt”?) stating that they wanted to have people on their staff who would ‘do the right thing.’

It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever know what really happened.  After all, it’s just a couple of sandwiches, and this happened in Nova Scotia.  Who cares, right?

Employer’s everywhere need to take note.  I’m of the opinion that this story has been ridiculously spun to make the big mean employer look like the Sheriff of Nottingham and the counter girl look like Robin Hood who was only trying to help the poor.  She may have had been warned several times about breaking procedures.  She may have had a poor performance record.  Then again, she may have had no intention of sacrificing her own sandwiches, but just used that as an excuse after being caught red-handed.  Do you actually believe that she was an model employee and this was her only offense, and that she was only trying to do the right thing?

Me either.

There’s one word that cannot be overemphasized to trainers and managers when instructing your employees about the rules, policies, and procedures for handling cash and merchandise, and the use of employee perks and discounts: clarity.

Any degree of ambiguity whatsoever leaves you wide open to your employee’s imagination. And with the story-starved media and your opportunistic competitors always on the prowl, you don’t want to end up being the main course on anyone’s menu.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 06 25th, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Blame the recession.  Blame congress for bumping the minimum wage making employers gun-shy about hiring part-time seasonal workers. But whoever you blame, feel compassion for teen job seekers this summer.  They are feeling the effects as bad–or perhaps even worse–than other demographic sectors of our workforce as this recent CNBC report points out.

You know who really can ‘feel their pain’? Our grandparents and great grandparents; the pre-baby boom matures, traditionalists, or as Tom Brokaw dubbed them, “the Greatest Generation.” They may not know Lady Gaga from an iPad, but Lordy, they certainly know how to work and they never took any job they had for granted.

The tremendous infrastructure our nation was built on and we take for granted was a direct result of their unparalleled work ethic. Makes you wonder…

At what age did they learn to ‘keep their nose to the grindstone’ and ‘give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay?’

If they don’t recall living during the The Great Depression, they inherited the work ethic that was born as a result of it. A period when jobs were few and far between and Help Wanted signs were as rare as alien sightings. Young, unskilled job seekers had no choice but to suck it up and do whatever the man asked them to do to find a job and hang on to it. And if/when they found work, they had to pinch pennies and do without anything but the bare necessities as job security was unheard of.

And as painful of an experience as they had in their youth, the work ethic they developed during those times never left them. It made them stronger, it made business and industry stronger, and it made America the strongest nation in the free world.

As unpleasant and unwelcome as this current recession is, there could be a silver lining. Perhaps Generation Why is discovering that jobs don’t grow on trees, and work isn’t something to be avoided.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 06 16th, 2010 | No Comments »

For most retail and restaurant chains, customer service training programs for front line service providers are simply an extrapolation of the same basic commands: Smile. Listen. Be nice. Be friendly. Maintain eye contact. Try to accommodate, etc.

The problem is, command-based service training programs like these never addresses the fundamental question going on inside the mind of the young trainee who is then expected to provide the service; that being “Why?”

“Why do I have to bend over backwards to please a customer, especially one that’s being rude, impatient, or demanding?”

Bear in mind, this is a generation that’s used to buying online and/or from a vending machine.  From their viewpoint as a customer, a person in the service equation is a luxury. Why should the people they wait on get better than the vending machine service they, themselves are accustomed to?

They ‘get’ that providing good service somehow leads to more money for the business and/or boss, but the young employee rarely internalizes the training because they derive no direct benefit to the outcome of providing good service. Moreover, these basic commands don’t resonate and rarely stick because the trainee doesn’t make the connection between their actions and the resulting impact on the customer.

There is one notable exception, however.

Chick-Fil-A is renowned for providing an exceptional guest experience in an industry otherwise notorious for bad service. Regardless of which of their 1428 locations you enter, you can bank on being waited on by a smiling, friendly, well-groomed, eager-to-please front line crew member.

How is Chick-Fil-A able to consistently provide a service experience that the vast majority of its competitors can’t match? For starters, they go beyond the traditional model of commanding young employees what to do to appeal to their need to know why it matters.

Pretend for a moment that you’re a young hourly worker at Chick-Fil-A. After watching this 3-minute training video, do you think you’d ever again think of the customers you serve in the same way?

Every Life Has A Story – Chick-fil-A from Dan T. Cathy on Vimeo.<–>

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 05 25th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

This morning I sent an email out to everyone in my family.  I’ve never sent a single email to all of them as I’ve never found anything so important and so relevant that they all need to pay attention.

Today’s email was an exception.

After I sent it I thought, there’s nothing that email contained of a deeply personal nature, so why not pass it along to my readers?

So below is the exact email they received.

(Consider yourself ‘family’ for a day.)

Hey guys:

Allow me to share something with you that is both simple and profound.

It is a very short blog post written by Seth Godin, the man I consider to be the smartest living human on the face of the planet. He’s a former marketing professor at Stanford and a bestselling author of 12 books. Three million people read his advice every single day making his the most read blog in the world by a large margin.  I’ve had the great privilege to meet him and spend a half hour of one-on-one time with him, and I am a raving fan.

Seth’s topic today concerns when to borrow and when not to borrow. He gives a brilliant, but very simple rule for using credit. If the 9 word rule (given at the end) had been engrained into the head of every 16-year-old in America for the past 30 years, our country would not be on it’s way to being owned by China, and our nation’s economic future would be secure.

We’ve all seen too many friends and loved ones go down in flames because they either didn’t know–or didn’t follow this simple rule:

Debt is Not Your Friend by Seth Godin

Here’s a simple MBA lesson: borrow money to buy things that go up in value. Borrow money if it improves your productivity and makes you more money. Leverage multiplies the power of your business because with leverage, every dollar you make in profit is multiplied.

That’s very different from the consumer version of this lesson: borrow money to buy things that go down in value. This is wrongheaded, short-term and irrational.

A few decades ago, mass marketers had a problem: American consumers had bought all they could buy. It was hard to grow because dispensable income was spoken for. The only way to grow was to steal market share, and that’s difficult. Enter consumer debt.

Why fight for a bigger piece of pie when you can make the whole pie bigger, the marketers think. Charge it, they say. Put it on your card. Pay now, why not, it’s like it’s free, because you don’t have to repay it until later. Why buy a Honda for cash when you can buy a Lexus with credit?

One argument is income shifting: you’re going to make a lot of money later, so borrow now so you can have a nicer car, etc. Then, when money is worth less to you, you can pay it back. This idea is actually reasonably new–fifty years or so–and it’s not borne out by what actually happens. Debt creates stress, stress creates behaviors that don’t lead to happiness…

The other argument is that it’s been around so long, it’s like a trusted friend. Debt seems like fun for a long time, until it’s not. And everyone does it. We’ve been sold very hard on acquisition = happiness, and consumer debt is the engine that permits this. Until it doesn’t.

The thing is, debt has become a marketed product in and of itself. It’s not a free service or a convenience, it’s a massive industry. And that industry works with all the other players in the system to grow, because (at least for now) when they grow, other marketers benefit as well. As soon as you get into serious consumer debt, you work for them, not for you.

It’s simple: when the utility of what you want (however you measure it) is less than the cost of the debt, don’t buy it.

Debt is expensive, it compounds, it punishes you. Stuff now is rarely better than stuff later, because stuff now costs you forever if you go into debt to purchase it.

It takes discipline to forego pleasure now to avoid a lifetime of pain and fees.

Resist. Smart people work at keeping their monthly consumer debt burden to zero. Borrow only for things that go up in value.

Easy to say, hard to do.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 05 5th, 2010 | No Comments »

At the end of a live presentation, the questions I dread more than any other all fit into the same broad category; parenting. When your topic expertise is teens and young adults in the workspace, people often assume that you must also know the secret formula to managing attitudes, behaviors, and performance at home. Risky assumption, at best.

I am a parent of two and step parent of two children (all now well into their twenties) and I’ve made more than my share of mistakes in the parenting department. Truth be told, I don’t believe there is anyone qualified or worthy of the title ‘parenting expert’, and if there is, I’ve never been in the same zip code with him/her.

That being said, I do feel qualified to call out lousy parents when I see them, and aside from the obvious (i.e. abusers, abandoners, etc.) I am about to point all ten fingers at the idiotic parents who choose to ‘unschool’ their kids.

Unfamiliar with unschooling? So was I until I came across this ABC News report revealing a growing movement among parents to allow their kids to pretty much do whatever the h-e-(double hockey sticks) they want to. That’s right, with this Laissez-faire form of parenting, the kid determines what they think they think is in their own best interests.

And the 150,000 parents who are now ‘unschooling’are not limiting this practice to mature children. Kids, tots, heck, even infants are smart enough to make their own choices, aren’t they? Don’t want to clean your room/eat your veggies/brush your teeth/say please or thank you/ or even go to grade school? Don’t worry; you don’t have to.

Talk about completely destroying a kid’s life! By the time these ‘unschooled’ children discover the choices they made through their youth were bad, the consequences will be catastrophic and many will be irreversible. Meanwhile, the permissive parents who’ve taken the easy path to avoiding all confrontations naively assuming that ‘life’ would do their job for them, are left defending their philosophy with skewed logic and shrugged shoulders.

There’s a common term for unschooled children: ignorant. There’s also a term for parents who allow this: negligent.

And with the number of parents choosing to unschool children increasing, there’s a term for a society that will not step in and enact strict legislation against this: endangered.

Watch this ABC News report and chime in here with your comments.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 04 26th, 2010 | 3 Comments »

We all loved to be thanked and praised for our efforts and our thoughtful gestures. The more personal it is, the more it means to us, and the more likely we are to repeat the behavior that led to that acknowledgement.

However, can anyone take any pride or feel good about being thanked/praised for something they really didn’t do?

Take for example when a performer says “you’re a great audience, give yourself a hand!” Are ‘you’ really a great audience, or do they just want to hear more applause?  It’s gratuitous. It means nothing. It’s air spam.

(Just once, I’d like to hear a performer say, “you’re a horrible audience, boo yourself loudly!”)

When a team pulls together and does something special, the leader/coach/manager can and should thank them as a unit, i.e..“I love the way you guys came together to get this project done under budget.” But if they want to see their team pull together again the next time, they shouldn’t be fooled into believing their blanket ‘thanks’ was enough.

A team is comprised of individuals, and individuals require personal connection.

My wife’s regional manager frequently sends out email blasts and/or voice messages to his dozen direct reports that praise them for meeting goals, or scolds them for not reaching goals. But the people on the receiving end of these messages are each independent sales reps, and even though he is personally rewarded or admonished for the overall performance of his region, the 12 individuals in his region are each only responsible for their own performance. So, while some are doing great and may be worthy of praise, others are doing poorly and need critiquing.  Not only are this regional manager’s emails and voice mails not taken seriously, he is actually the butt of a lot of behind-the-back jokes by his direct reports.

Don’t ever fall under the illusion that group acknowledgment (or for that matter, group criticism) will accomplish anything meaningful or productive.

If you want your words to be taken seriously, there is no substitute for the one-to-one.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 04 2nd, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Here we go again.

Just read another article pointing out how Gen Y young adults are moving back home in droves to live with mom and dad.  The justification behind this mass migration is, predictably, the economic hardships imposed by the current recession.

Got me thinking, maybe I should move back home, too!

After all, my business has been rocked by the recession.

I’d love for my dad to pay the bills for a while.  And mom could do my laundry and clean up my dirty dishes.

Unfortunately, there’s a fundamental flaw with this plan. (And it goes beyond the fact that both of my parents are deceased.)

Even if they were alive and well, they’d never allow it.

When I graduated from college, I was told that there would always be a place at the table if I needed a hot meal, but that my mail was no longer to be sent to their home address.  It was a gentle but firm way of telling me I was on my own.

There were multiple times in my twenties when I was flat broke and keeping a roof over my head  was my biggest problem. And you know what?  I always found the answer to that problem contained in the four letter word W-O-R-K.

So I worked in jobs that were beneath my level of education and sophistication, jobs that I didn’t want my friends to know I had, and jobs that ate up my nights and weekends. But I discovered that when you have to make it on your own, you quit whining, roll up your shirt sleeves, and work your way out of it.

This recession is a tough one, but there are still plenty of jobs to be had.

It’s a shame there aren’t more parents out there like mine who love their kids enough to kick them to the curb.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 03 26th, 2010 | 6 Comments »

I’m a huge fan of the syndicated Seinfeld shows and religiously catch an episode or two each night before I hit the hay. But if you think he’s all comedy, you really ought to read his brilliant commentary on the topic of parenting in this past week’s Parade magazine.

Seinfeld is making the media rounds promoting his new NBC comedy-meets-reality show, The Marriage Ref, of which he’s the brainchild and producer. But in this Parade article, he let down his comic guard and offered some serious and practical insights on parenting. As a father of three kids (ages 9, 6, and 4), this is one role Jerry Seinfeld takes very seriously.

Although the Seinfeld kids have an extremely wealthy father, he’s determined to provide a normal life for them. He offers three rules for parenting, which he has dubbed “the Poison Ps” – praise, problem solving, and pleasure.

• He believes today’s parents heap too much praise on their kids, feeling obligated to acknowledge even their most minute accomplishments. When it’s used excessively, praise becomes cheap and loses its power.

• Seinfeld thinks too many parents want their kids to be worry-free, so they go out of their way to solve all their problems for them. He feels that the lessons that can be learned by solving a problem for one’s self is a gift, and too many parents deny their kids those precious gifts, mistakenly thinking they are being helpful or protective.

• He also sees parents overindulge their children by giving them everything they desire. You can imagine how hard it would be for a man of fortune to say ‘no’ when his kids see something they want and he can easily afford. My guess is, however, that he’s trying very hard not to spoil them.

I seldom find entertainers to be the source on relationships of any kind, particularly child-rearing, and I’d love to point out the weakness in Seinfeld’s assessment, but I can’t. In fact, I couldn’t agree more. However, the rationale he provides in this article for why parents tend to make these “3 Poison P” errors is even more astute, and can be summed up in one word: guilt.

Here is Seinfeld’s theory:

“We feel so guilty for destroying their innocence—which is what we did—so we’re trying to repair that by creating perfect childhoods. The reason we overdo it so much is because we feel so bad about it.”

It doesn’t take much for an entertainer/celebrity to get my attention, but it takes a whole lot more to garner my respect. Jerry Seinfeld just crossed that bridge.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 02 16th, 2010 | No Comments »

Consider the plight of the average 5th grade teacher at the elementary school in your neighborhood. Forget the increased pressure they are under to raise student test scores, the constant battles with meddling parents, and the edict to balance an overcrowded classroom with a budget that’s been slashed to ribbons. Instead, take a moment to consider a far bigger challenge for the average 5th grade teacher:  reaching the average 5th grade student.

Back in the day, a teacher could give a student a book and an assignment and learning would take place. Today, that text book better come wired with a flat screen and a T-1 line or the cover might not get cracked.

According to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (as reported by ABC News) 8-to-18-year-olds spend more than seven hours each day in front of a screen, compared to a paltry 38-minutes per day with a book. Regardless if they are staring at television/movie screens, computer screens, cell phone screens, video game screens, or the screens of some other such device, one thing is for sure:  today’s students are used to getting their information with high-speed graphics and an adrenalin rush.

So, how is a teacher supposed to compete with that?

The answer is, they can’t.  About half of the heaviest media users get C’s or lower in school while only a quarter of light users report bad grades. When a kid is addicted to a screen, a talking head is going to bore them to tears.

With this kind of overwhelming evidence linking high tech with low grades, when are parents going to pull the plug on their kid’s xBox, put reasonable limits on their text plans, and reintroduce the concept of quiet, focused “study time” back into the American home?

Interesting thought.  But isn’t it a tad ironic that that I’m writing this–and you’re reading this–on a high tech device?

NOTE: I’m on a mission to curb screen time in my house, and it begins with my own addiction. I invite you to check out my poem The Screen which, ironically, is posted to YouTube.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 01 26th, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Imagine going to a strange town, checking into a hotel, opening the window in your room, and screaming “Merry Christmas to anyone who can hear me!”

Now imagine that a friend did this and you just happened to be in the streets of that town, somewhere within earshot of that voice.

No matter which side of the equation you put yourself in within this scenario, it doesn’t leave you feeling very special, does it?

It’s amazing how many people do the equivilent of this when sending holiday cards out to friends and even their clients. They take a jump drive loaded with a digital photo of their family down to the local Walmart, Target, Walgreens, etc. and in a matter of minutes — and with very little thought or effort — they walk out with a box of ‘personalized’ holiday cards.

Once they get home, they print out their Outlook address file on Avrey labels and adhere them to the accompanying envelope. Then, as if the recipient needs further proof that they are nothing more than an electronic record in someone else’s database, they don’t even sign the “card” before stuffing it into the envelope and sticking a stamp on it, or worse — metering it.

The only thing that could show less thought and care is when a generic holiday greeting is sent out as an email blast. Yeppers.  Nothing says Merry Christmas quite like SPAM. And if you think email is the ultimate expression of the “check that off my ‘to-do’ holiday list” mentality, guess again. Early reports  say that this year, a growing number of people are simply sending out mass  “Mry Xmas” texts.

Advancements in technology now enable us to wish everyone we know Merry Christmas in 30 seconds or less.

Leaves you feeling all warm and mushy inside, doesn’t it?

My father used to tell me (repeatedly) “Anything worth doing is worth doing right.” I think that axiom applies here. If you can’t take the time to make the person on the receiving end of a greeting feel, well, er… greeted, for heaven’s sake, don’t send anything.

Forgive my sarcasm long enough to see the relevance of this in all you do to connect with Gen Y in the workplace.  There is no substitute for direct, one-to-one, personal interaction and communication.

Anything less is just SPAM.

Eric Chester | Uncategorized | 12 16th, 2009 | No Comments »