New Speaker:
{News Break}.

Carolyn Schnare:
Welcome to Convenience Matters, I’m Carolyn Schnare with NACS, and I’d love to introduce my co-host for today, who is more than just my NACS colleague, but a friend and a fellow podcaster, Rose.

Rose Johnson:
Hi everyone! I’m Rose Johnson also with NACS and I am delighted to be here today.

Carolyn Schnare:
I’m so glad we finally got to do this Rose! Rose, we’re going to talk a little bit about engaging people or a lot a bit about engaging people, actually, both customers and employees and today’s guest is going to talk to us all about that. This is Joseph Michelli, who is a speaker, an author, an organizational consultant, and the CEO with the Michelli Experience. His latest bestseller is called “Stronger Through Adversity,” which is full of advice that we could all use these days. Welcome to the show, Joseph.

Joseph Michelli:
It’s great to be here, Carolyn and Rose.

Carolyn Schnare:
So you were at our most recent in-person event at the NACS Leadership Forum back in the spring and we talked about building loyalty with customers in a post-pandemic world. While we’re still trying to find that very elusive post-pandemic world. I feel like I’m in one of those nightmares where you’re running down the hallway and you just can’t get to the end of it and you just try and you’re late for class, you’re late for work, but one of these days we will get past this and we’ll keep working together to make that happen. But in the meantime, a lot has changed. Like I said, in the beginning, people have changed. So in your opinion, let’s just jump right in – how have people or customers even, or employees you can pick either or both, how have they changed since the beginning of this pandemic? And what can we learn a little bit about that?

Joseph Michelli:
I love that I’m not going to answer your question at all. You gave me customers or employees, and I’m going to talk about leaders really quickly. I know what I’m doing at least. You know, I think leaders have changed in terms of the way they look at employees and customers. There used to be a time that I think the customer was the be-all-end-all, I think. Henry Ford once said that it’s the customer who pays the salary and it’s just the employer who manages the money. I think that in the last year and a half leaders have really put a priority on employees because they understand what that employee experience as being awesome. They don’t have customer experiences. On the customer side we know that this is a time when customers are focused on all the classics. I mean, it’s certainly part of your industry – the digital pay, the convenience, the physical safety, the enjoyable shopping experiences when they elect to engage and certainly just the effortlessness of getting their needs met. So all of that I think is well known, but what has really started to shift, I think, is an appreciation for just how critical the employee experience is into the delivery of the customer experience.

Carolyn Schnare:
Oh, for sure. And I mean, leadership, you said the word, I like the way you answered that question while we just jumped in on leaders because we were all looking for leaders. We still are. Whether it’s the head of a country or your state or your school system or whatever’s going on in your life, you’re always looking for someone to guide you, especially these times, because it’s just, someone’s gotta be in charge. So I was reading your book about leading with adversity and what are some of the things that stood out to you with really strong leaders since this pandemic began?

Joseph Michelli:
The very fact that leaders have time to talk to me for a book was kind of standing out because they were so absorbed, but I think people needed to talk. There was an emotional need to process what was happening and still is. And there’s a need not to be alone in what feels like a very alone set of situations that we all face. We’re kind of on the same turbulent ocean, just on different ships. And I think that figuring out how do we continue to navigate in the direction that creates success for our businesses is pretty important. I think beyond that, taking care of yourself was probably more important than ever. We could get by with some marginal coping skills going into the pandemic. We may have even faked our way through it for a short period of time in the beginning, thinking it was going to be time limited. But as this is protracted, self-care has been particularly important. So networking, self-care, I think at the more organizational level, it was changing the way you set goals and not being able to set goals for annual goals or quarterly goals. Sometimes it was hour by hour and day by day, and it was communicating what is our objective for today, doing a critical incident debrief at the end of the day to determine did we achieve our goals and then reset our expectations just for the next day’s activity.

Rose Johnson:
So Joseph in preparing to speak with you today, I came across your your university, your Customer Experience University, and I saw that you referenced Brené Brown and her work in leadership vulnerability. So can you speak a bit how that translated throughout the pandemic throughout the conversations you had with leaders?

Joseph Michelli:
Oh, I wish I was as vulnerable as Brené Brown. She’s so, so transparent. And she has been telling us for the longest time that people don’t want perfect leaders. They want real human beings with flaws who are aspiring to do great things collectively with other flawed human beings. And I think that what you saw in the pandemic is a lot of the pretense of the gravitas of leadership in my board room, telling you how to run your life, really had to give away because leaders were talking to people from their bedrooms, right? There was an inherent vulnerability. We weren’t having these special days called “bring your kids to work day” so they could see you being a professional in the job, we were having “bring yourself to the job from your home day.” I mean, the work came to you. And so I think fundamentally what you started to see was a lot of the pretense went down, people were more vulnerable, they’re more accessible. They were authentic and I had leaders admitting major mistakes that they would have always put a corporate spin on before. And quite frankly, it didn’t fall apart like they thought it would, in fact got greater levels of employee engagement when they were transparent and authentic.

Carolyn Schnare:
I think you learn a lot from your mistakes andthat perked my ears up. What are some of those mistakes that people really latched onto and said like, “I wish I hadn’t done that…”

Joseph Michelli:
Well, one of my favorite is a CEO of Farmers Insurance, Jeff Dailey and he said to me, Joseph, right early on in the pandemic, we knew people were going to be driving less. And my team came to me and said, we can give back some of the premiums to our auto insured right now because we just know it’s going to happen. And he said, “no, you know, I really have a lot of stakeholders to manage. I don’t know if I really should focus that much on the customer return. If we weren’t an insurance company, we don’t get money back.” And ultimately he missed the boat because USAA went out first. And so he was a fast follower. They got it right. But he went to his organization and apologized to them and saying, “I made the wrong call.” His employee engagement scores went up massively, had no impact on the level of retention of their customers. But I think it was just a willingness to say something that, prior to the pandemic, a leader might not have said he would have spun it some way.

Rose Johnson:
So there is a thing that I heard you say all throughout your clips, throughout your customer university, and it was what we want experienced outside of our organization is actually living inside. Can you expound on how organizations can use that to attract good people?

Joseph Michelli:
Yeah. I think if you want constructive feedback about your organization and you want your customers to tell you how to do it, you have to give constructive regular feedback to your employees. I think it’s one of the greatest retention elements is an honest coaching culture. And we know, I mean, there’s research that shows organizations that are highly focused on coaching one another, have a 41% increase in retention from those that don’t. So clearly I think if you want people to share with you what they think about your experience and help you make it better, you have to be willing to coach your people to do the same. I think that you have to share your values to consumers about what you’re all about. And it has to be more than just profitability. The same is true with employees and probably now more than ever, employees are looking with a massive what I’m calling purpose reset.

Joseph Michelli:
They’re trying to determine is my purpose aligned with doing this job? Is my purpose aligned with living in this town? Is my purpose aligned with the things that I buy all the time or am I just buying them out of habit? So I think because of the purpose reset, it’s more important than ever for us to take time and say to our employees, what is your purpose? How do I help you find impact? How do I help you find meaning? How do I help you find success as you determine success? And then is that aligned with what we’re trying to do organizationally? So those are just a couple of examples of retention strategies for employees that I think extend to…if it doesn’t live inside, it’s not going to manifest outside to the customer.

Rose Johnson:
And, you know, to that point, Carolyn, you and I have both worked at NACS for, for a long time, right? Over 10 years. And I will say that is one of the great things that I do like about NACS. Like we’ve been through things even before the current pandemic And there were things that we were coached through. Nobody likes change. And I remember we were coached through some changes and things like that. And so I agree with you, Joseph, I’ve seen it over and over. Recently I had a discussion with, with some 18 to 24 year olds about my career journey. And originally when I was invited to talk about it, I was like, why would anybody want to hear what I have to say? But as I was going through everything, I went through each job and what stood out where some of the things that I prioritized in a job when I got really serious about where I wanted my career to go and what type of organization I wanted to look for. I was looking for a place, like you said, that would allow you to make mistakes and to be mentored through those and to also guide you to coach you and to want to develop you. So how do you think now today with the labor shortages that companies can instill some of these things? Before we had things like maternity leave that are now parental leave and wellness and stuff like that, but people are looking for more, what do you think people want to see in an organization?

Joseph Michelli:
I love that journey to the question, Rose. I mean, I think the very fact that you’re talking to millennials. Sometimes we think this labor crisis that we’re currently in is somehow unique. And quite quite frankly, there was increasing levels of voluntary turnover going into COVID-19. Year over year, we were seeing more and more people voluntarily choose to opt out of an employer. And it was done, I think, largely because the people couldn’t understand how they could pin their hopes and dreams to an organization for more than a couple of years. Some it is cultural in the way different generations view these things. But I think ultimately organizations have to work against that trend. And maybe now they have to do it at an incredible volume. It’s almost like right now, people are trying to build a parachute as they’re jumping off a bridge.

Joseph Michelli:
We’re trying to figure out how do we get these people before we hit the water. And so I think that the answer is partly in purpose. So purpose is certainly that helping people find their purpose and align with your purpose. But I think the other two areas are things you touched on. One is mastery, and one is autonomy. And so mastery for me is all about helping people learn and grow, to develop, to become better than they were yesterday in one capacity or another. And I think that that gets into mentoring programs that gets into social support networks that you create within your organization. I think that it’s creating career paths where people can see a line of sight to a future within an organization. So those are all particularly important. I think it’s providing training and education, even though sometimes it’s hard to justify the ROI on training.

Joseph Michelli:
The ROI is that people feel they’re growing and as long as they feel they’re growing and you’re capable of facilitating that growth, they’re going to want to stay with you and grow with you. So certainly that’s on the mastery side. I think on the autonomy side, it’s giving people some control over their work environment. You know, what people got from remote work was a lot of control over working from home. And so many of those people, aren’t going to want to come back into a workforce where they lose some of that autonomy and control. But if you can’t do it in the convenience industry – certainly there are lots of jobs where that’s not an option – then what do you give people control over in the context of the workplace? Is it flexibility and scheduling? Is it when they get paid? Is it what broom they use to sweep the floor? Do they get a say in choosing the items and tools they use to affect their work? And so while we may not be able to control essentially whether we sit in our home in our jammies and our bunny slippers, or if we’re at work stocking shelves, we should be able to control certain factors of our life. And to the degree that we work on mastery, autonomy and purpose, I think we drive greater engagement environments,

Carolyn Schnare:
One of the things that struck me as we talk about in-store employees. I mean, obviously they can’t work from home, they have to be in person and you talked a lot about communication. So it led me to think a lot about safety and security, which is, you know, in the hierarchy of needs, that’s very, very important to people. Is there any advice you have about safety and security as it pertains…well, it could go to two ways. It could be about health because, that’s something we kind of can control, kinda can’t. But, in terms of also how’s my company? How am I doing? Are we doing okay financially? Am I gonna have a job next month? You know, that kind of thing. Is there some some area around the personal and professional security that you would advise people to talk to their employees about?

Joseph Michelli:
Carolyn, I love that you bring up the, the Hierarchy of Needs. And certainly I even shared it on the stage at NACS. And I’m a big fan of the book “Peak” by Chip Conley, which really takes Maslow’s mojo and applies it to workplace settings, everything from the way you treat your customers to the way you lead your teams. So I think there’s great wisdom out there we can borrow from. Specifically, I think about safety has changed a bit. I mean, most of us always concerned ourselves with safety at operated in the background of a business. You know, we were worried about occupational health and we were worried about untoward acts from some angry employee and things like that. But we weren’t thinking about death as a part of daily commerce. Most of us saw our social contract like this.

Joseph Michelli:
I give you a job and make your life better. Now I give you a job and I have the risk of making your life worse through the job. It’s very disorienting, I think, for leaders and as much as we think maybe people are decreasing their focus on hygiene. They’re kind of tired of all of this. They’re not as obsessed with making sure you’re super clean. I’m telling you the bathroom of your convenience stores still matters an incredible amount, the clutter and the perception of whether or not there is cleanliness there. It matters not only to the customer, it matters to the employee. And while it might not be as overt as it was in March of 2020, it is going to always be in there now. I don’t think you can, you can erase it from your memory. It’s kind of like jury, please ignore what the, you know, the witness was said, right?

Joseph Michelli:
I mean, it is in there now. And I think we all live with an increased wareness of it at a, at a level that we didn’t have before. So I think we have to take care of that. And wellness has been so long overlooked. We can’t run human beings as human resources. Those resources deplete to a point where they can’t come back. And so for me, it’s really a function of how do I help develop learning resilience, adaptivity, what do I do to try to encourage my teams to be well, including team building and collective activities around just taking care of yourself.

Rose Johnson:
So I think we’ve talked a lot about internal customer experience, you know, employee engagement. So let’s talk a bit about how this now translates to an outside customer’s experience. How does employing some of these steps you’ve talked about increase customer loyalty?

Joseph Michelli:
Well, the correlations are high. And in fact you know, these are all correlations. There’s not a causal effect. You can’t say that if I take care of employees that will cause customers to be more engaged, but the correlations are really striking. And they’re multi-dimensional from all types of sources. University of Michigan shows this direct correlation between the level of employee engagement to the level of customer engagement to profitability. So that’s kind of a nice little linkage between three correlated factors. Metrics like the Gallup do a wonderful job of showing customer engagement moves in the same direction as, as employee engagement. So we know that you’re going to get these benefits and a lot of have had a false choice picking one or the other. Two billionaires who made it into space and taking completely different views on the thing. And obviously it hasn’t hurt their financial position. We’ve got Richard Branson saying only take care of the employee. Don’t worry about the customer, the customer will be taken care of if the employee is. You’ve got Jeff Bezos on the other hand, who says we wanted Amazon to be the most customer centric place in the world, irrespective of whether or not the internal customers felt that way. So to me, the debate is, is senseless. What I really think about is we are trying to create human experiences. Sometimes we call them customers. Sometimes we call them employees. I did a book about Airbnb having consulted with them. And, and it was funny because one day an Airbnb employee would then be listing out their room online, so they were now a customer of the platform and an employee.

Joseph Michelli:
And the next night they would be staying at some other Airbnb in another town. So now they’re a customer, they’re the same person. They’re just called three different things, depending upon where they sit or stand on a given day. And I think we really have to start thinking about how do we elevate human experiences? How do we love on people? How do we create emotionally engaging experiences that make people’s lives better? How do we remove reduce effort and frustration? How do we help people learn and grow? You know, Peter Senge, the great MIT professor once said, we’ve gotta be in love with those we serve. And by love from an MIT professor, it’s not going to be emotional love, romantic love. By love, he defined it as just caring authentically about the growth and the development of the people around us. And I think whether we call them customers or we call them employees, that’s our end goal.

Rose Johnson:
I love that. And I love that you call it a human-centric experience. I went to Chick-fil-A recently and I don’t know if you spend a lot of time on social media, but there’s all these running jokes about their customer service and what someone experiences when they go to Chick-fil-A. And I’ve never been like I don’t really go there. I’m not a huge fan of their food, but I was really hungry that day and they were right there. So I was like, okay, let me go to Chick-fil-A. So the line was long, look at this line, it is so long, but it went so quickly and I was in contact with maybe four people throughout the drive-thru. And when I got to the first person, there was not a menu.

Rose Johnson:
And so I’m already like, no menu, how am I going to order…no menu? So he comes up to the car, shows me the iPad and guides me through the menu. So I placed my order and give my name and the other people made sure that my name was correct and what I ordered was correct. And I paid and all of that. And then when I get to the end to pick up my food, the cute little teenage guy leans out the window and hands me my food. And he’s like, “have a blessed day.” And all of that, that one experience just turned my whole attitude about Chick-fil-A around, and I can not stop talking about it. And I cannot wait to go back to the line in Chic-Fil-A. It went so quickly and the experience was so awesome. And I just felt really connected. Because we all know that Chick-fil-A is…I believe they’re Christian-based…and so to have someone to be able to say that to you…most companies shy away from that, but to have someone bless you at a fast food drive through, I was like, whoa!

Joseph Michelli:
You weren’t seeing that coming! You know, one thing I will tell you can do irrespective of how you feel about Chick-fil-A and whatever their political beliefs are. It is worthwhile going online. There’s a YouTube video called “Every Person Has a Story” that is part of the training that team members at Chick-fil-A go through. And essentially it just helps you empathize with the backstory of the person you’re serving. It’s a wonderful, short little video, and it certainly encourage your listeners to look it up online. And I think at the end of the day, what you just described is what all of us want. We want technology to expedite life wherever we can. And then we want humans available to power that technology. So technology-aided human-powered experiences for customers and team members as a team member. I want technology so I don’t have to do the mind numbing, repetitive tasks, but I also want people who care about my growth and development as well. So bottom line technology-aided human powered no matter what the brand is, you win.

Carolyn Schnare:
So I have one thought – and I know we’re running up on time – I wanted to think about all the things that we just talked about. And I mean, we talked about keeping employees and retaining them. Getting them is a struggle. Now that probably might actually be an entirely different podcast, but we’ll see what we can do in the next five or six minutes. But, do you have any tips for retailers who are looking to recruit new talent given, especially that it’s really hard to get any talent these days, but don’t just settle I’ve heard people say, but in other words, are there some things, some tips, some stories they should be telling, some things they should be saying. Do you have any ideas?

Joseph Michelli:
Well, first and foremost, you are hiring talent for three years from now. So unfortunately you’re kind of just grabbing whatever you can right now to continue to run the business, but you should be developing a culture that is building to get the best talent for three to five years out. So that’s my first step. But as it relates to just keeping the lights on and trying to bring enough people in to keep the job moving and hopefully getting the best of what’s available, I think it starts with looking around your world and seeing when people wow you, when they have that human compassion, when they seem to have the skills, I would be taking that guy from Chick-fil-A and I would be handing out my business card to him as I am getting my food the next time I go there in the hope that, that they might consider working for me in the short term in addition to the part-time jobs that they have at Chick-fil-A.

Joseph Michelli:
And maybe if the environment is culturally strong he won’t need to continue to do Chick-fil-A anymore and he can work for me on a more permanent basis. And, poaching has been around for a long, long time. But I think now more than ever, if you see somebody who’s doing more than fogging the mirror who can engage human beings, who make you go hmm, then you should follow that up with, “Hey, if you’re ever in, interested in working for a company that really values people like you, here’s my card.”

Carolyn Schnare:
That’s really smart. That’s why we have you on the show. That’s really smart advice because like Rose said, that employee is going to stick with you and the next time you go back – or maybe you have gone back many times since then, you’re like, I hope Daniel is working today because I want to tell him to have a blessed day – because that person sticks with you, but it creates loyal customers. And I’m willing to bet that I want to say kid, that guy really likes his job.

Joseph Michelli:
Yeah. But on the day when something really goes terrible, he’d have your business card available to just inquire. So you want to see the ground that maybe today isn’t today, you want to jump ship, but I’m around. Should there be an opening and sometimes those people walk in your door and you’re really blessed, to use the word

Carolyn Schnare:
Well, Joseph thank you for that last question there. I wanted to give our listeners where they can find you, because I know Rose and I both cited your book, your website, your university. Give us some links, and I’ll also include them in the show notes as well, so that you don’t have to be writing these down as you’re jogging along or driving to work or doing whatever you’re doing while you’re listening to us. Tell us where to find you.

Joseph Michelli:
We are shamelessly all over the web. So I would strongly just go with my name. It’s JosephMichelli.com. That’s our website. And from there, it’ll get you to our LinkedIn and our Twitter and our Facebook and all the things that we do on YouTube. We try to really create as much free content as we possibly can. And for those who want to take the next step with us and look at consulting or speaking engagements, we’re always welcome to explore that as well.

Carolyn Schnare:
And I misstated the name of your book earlier. It is “Stronger Through Adversity.” So I apologize about that, but if you go into that website, you can just fill in your email address and you get a really cool synopsis. That’ll give you a teaser as to what to see for the rest of it as well. So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining us back in person a couple of months ago, and Rose, thank you for being with me today. I really…I love working with you!

Rose Johnson:
Thank you. Thank you. This was an amazing conversation. Thank you, Joseph. I love the work that you’re doing.

Joseph Michelli:
Thank you both. And at the main stage I shared this, but my mom was a manager of a convenience store. So I have great love for your industry. Thanks for what you’ve done for my family and continued great success.

Carolyn Schnare:
I couldn’t end it any better. Thank you so much for listening to convenience matters.

Convenience Matters Outro.:
[Music] Convenience Matters is brought to you by NACS and produced in partnership with Human Factor. For more information, visit convenience.org.

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