Using stories to create a great employee experience

Using stories to create a great employee experience with Ben Baker

Creating an experience and a brand that attracts and retains the best employees

I am excited that you're joining me for an interview with my friend, Ben Baker. Storytelling has always been a way of life for Ben. From a young age, he realized that through telling stories, people listen to him, understand him, and become engaged.

Professionally, that is what he's been doing for over two decades. He helps brands tell engaging stories that compel their customers to take action. I know he also does this a lot in the employee space, which is what we're going to be talking about. How do you create an experience and a brand that attracts and retains the best employees? Ben, welcome to the show.

Andy, I've been looking forward to this. Thanks for having me on the program.

I have as well since we connected on LinkedIn. We chatted a while back about what you're doing. I loved it because I talk a lot about it on this show. I've talked to a lot of people about the importance of great employee experience. For those that got my top trends and talent development report that I released a little while back, one of the top trends is about creating an employee experience. I know you're big on that. I want to talk about that. Before we get to that, maybe we can start a little bit of background of who you are and how you got to where you are now.

I've been in the marketing communications business for more than 25 years. I decided I was going to become a recovering high tech sales guy. I was in the air probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 days a year. It was brutal. What I realized is that when I stepped away from the sales role, I took the “what do you want to be when you grew up?” training. I hired an industrial psychologist. I said, “Let's run me through an entire battery of tests and figure out what I do well, what I love to do, and where my passion is at.” The passions came from marketing. It came from telling stories that came from getting people on board and understanding who you are, what you do, why you do it, and why they should care.

Marketing fell into that. I started off in direct mail years ago and killed a lot of trees. If you got something in the mail, it probably came from us. We did millions of pieces of direct mail across the United States. A lot of it was for the casino and grocery industries. We had a lot of fun with that kind of stuff. It always comes back to what's your message. What's your story? What's your brand? Before you can market, you need to understand what you’re marketing. Who are you? What makes you different? What makes you unique? If I got two companies that are side-by-side, why should I care about you if you guys do what I see from the outside exactly the same thing? It always came back to the brand.

After a number of years, I realized that as much as I enjoyed the tactical side of things, the brand is where I feel where my jam was. That was my niche. I realized that companies spend all this money and time branding for the external client but they forget about the internal client. They absolutely forget about the customer that's inside the company, the employees. You get things like employees getting a phone call from some customer and say, “This promotion is going on.” Employees don't have a clue what they're talking about. They don't have a clue about what promotions our own companies are running.

The communication isn't there. The employees don't understand what's going on. They become disengaged and disenfranchised. They start looking for work out there. All of a sudden, they're out the door. I realized that until we can build champions inside the brand and we can get that story clear and concise inside the brand, it's hard for these people to become great customer advocates. They can’t build external champions for the brand if they don't feel like brand champions themselves. That's where I've evolved over the last years.

Before you can market, you need to understand what you’re marketing. Click To Tweet

The cost of attrition

It's such an important space. You talked about people not understanding what's going on. They're not connecting with the brand if they're working there. They don't jive with the culture. They start getting a little bit frustrated or bored and looking around for another job. Eventually, they leave. Clients, prospects, and people at different companies are telling me that the attrition rate is going up. Especially at that 2 to 3-year mark, the early career professionals who don't connect well with the company, feel like they're not getting the development they need and don't see where things are going, up and leave. You've quantified this a little bit. How much are this costing companies?

Here are some stats for you. Inc. Magazine says that 70% of employees now are disengaged in the workforce. That means that they're not as engaged as they could be. They don't care about the job. They're just going to dial in and look at Facebook up to the point where they become cancerous within the organization. There is a sliding scale. Forbes says 50% of employees are either actively or passively looking for other jobs. Gallup is saying that this is costing $500 billion to the US economy every year. If you want to break it down to an employee, every employee that you lose is costing you $100,000 to replace. The numbers are staggering. The amount of money that's being wasted by companies every single year around the world because they're not retaining and engaging their employees is staggering. Ten employees lost a year is $1 million off the bottom line. That's after-tax dollars.

That's huge. I assume that's an average. Some companies are going to be less, some companies are going to be more. The point is that it's costing a lot of money. You have to recruit or go out and find new people. Do they even fit the bill? How long does it take them to train and get ramped up? If you still don't have a plan, story, or brand for your employees, it's probably going to happen all over again.

You have the recruiting, hiring, and psychometric costs. You have costs for the time spent of the employees within the company having to interview people and look through résumés. You have an external recruiting firm cost. You have your onboarding, training, and all those costs. The costs are forgotten when that employee is lost. What kind of habit does that cause in the office? All of a sudden, four people are doing the job of 5 or 6. Jobs are being either postponed or fall through the cracks or whatever. Customers fall through the cracks. Mistakes get made that get expensive. Customers leave. Your employees leave and they take customers with them. When employees leave, they take other employees with them. There are all those costs that most companies don't even look at when they're putting into the factor from the time somebody leaves to the time you get somebody up in the training and ready to go.

Reducing attrition

I can see all the costs, money, work and stress. We’ve painted the problem here and I'm sure a lot of our readers experienced this. They see it going on. I know you work with companies. What are the solutions that you're seeing companies doing to alleviate this, to create that brand and culture that reduces the attrition?

The number one thing is to build a level of engagement within the company. That has to come through leadership, communication, and culture. That has to start from the top. It truly and absolutely has to start from the top. The people at the top of the food chain, like the CEO, CFO, president of the organization, or founder have to live the culture. If they set together a mission, vision and values statement, they have to live it. They can't just say, “This is what we believe in. I expect you to live by it but I'm going to do a completely separate set of rules for myself.” That's what people are going to see. People are going to see that dichotomy.

The problem with mission, vision, value statements is that 9 times out of 10 or 99 times out of 100, they're words that are either plastered up on a wall somewhere or become part of an onboarding process and never spoken of again. They don't become part of the culture or psyche of the organization. Therefore, they're forgotten. If I spun the average employee around three times, close their eyes and said, “Tell me the six words that are part of your mission statement or your vision statement.” None of them could do it. If they could, they probably can't do it in a way where they can explain what these words mean. They probably don't believe in it. What I suggest instead is creating a brand story.

Stories have been with us for tens of thousands of years. The oral tradition predates written word by tens of thousands of years. What it allows us to do is to be able to build that culture up. Where did you come from? What was the impetus of the company? Why did you create the company? Where did it start? What were the challenges when it first started? Where are you today? What got you from where you started to where you are now? Who do you serve? Why do you serve them? What value do you provide? Who are the people that you serve and why do they care about you? More importantly, where is the company going? If people within the organization understand the story, they understand that progression of where they came from, where they are, where they're going, they can see how they fit into there. They can understand how the work that they individually do within the company helps make the company better.

Creating Employee Experience: Forbes says that 50% of employees are either actively or passively looking for other jobs. Gallup is saying that this is costing $500 billion to the US economy every year.

Your team meetings, company-wide meetings, and decisions are made based on that company's story because everybody knows it. Everybody can tell it and everybody can retell it. Not only are they telling that story internally but they're also telling it to vendors to sit there and say, “If you want to be a vendor of this company, this is what we believe in. These are the things that are important. These are the things that we need to have happen. Are you on board with this?” Your vendors become true partners of yours, not just people selling you stuff. By telling the same story to your customers, you build advocates for the brand.

The first place I start is what is this company all about? What do you truly believe in? Don't give me this BS answer of, “We believe in customer service and this and that.” The answer is why? Why do you believe this? Let's dig down deep and find out why you believe in what you believe. What are your core values? What do you believe in and let's weave a story around that? It’s something that every single employee may not tell perfectly or verbatim, the same way you do, but it doesn't matter. If they say it their own way, they internalize it. When they internalize it, it becomes meaningful for them and they have a reason to be engaged.

Do you have an example of a company that has done this well?

There are a lot of companies that are doing this. Coca-Cola, for one, is a large corporation that tells a story. They know what their brand is. Nike knows what their brand is. The brand is not the Nike swoosh. It's the service to excellence. It's not about shoes, t-shirts, or spandex pants. It's about how we get excellence out of every individual. How do we get every individual to understand that they have a personal goal and personal best that should be celebrated? That's an amazing thing. When brands are built around that and everybody understands why they do what they do, the product or the service they create is much better.

Crafting the story

You think about the story and what the organization stands for, it's got to start at the top. It's got to be embodied by the top leaders because everyone is looking to them. For someone who is in the talent development or change management position saying, “The company is changing. The culture is shifting as what's going on with a lot of companies. We want to get our people on board but we recognize that it does start with the top. How do we get our executives on board with this, telling that story, and helping to craft that story for everybody to be part of?”

You're right, where we get brought in is when companies realize that there's a dynamic change going on. Whether it's mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, grandchildren are taking over grandpa's company, companies that have gone from 100 to 500 employees or whatever. Those types of things are where there are always major shifts and major flux. The challenge is that most leaders don't understand that their vision of what the company is may not be the vision that everybody else sees. When we get brought in, the first thing that we do is we bring in a graphic recorder and sit down with various departments. We sit there and say, “Tell us the story of the brand. Tell us about your on-boarding process. Tell us about the things that are important to the company. Tell us about your customers and why you're valuable to them.” We get the graphic artists to record this visually.

It's amazing when you take the different graphics from the different departments and put them all up on a wall together. There is either complete unity or complete chaos. The different viewpoints are seen differently. Until the senior management sees that, they don't believe it until they realize that finance, sales, ops, and marketing are completely on different pages. They don't see the customer, the direction of the company, and the values of the company the same way. They have an issue. It comes down to going to board retreats or workshops with senior leadership. They sit there and say, “What do we truly want for this company? Where are we now? Where do we want to go? Let's build a vision to get there together.” It comes down to that. If you don't have a line in the sand to sit there and say, “This is where we are. This isn't the pie in the sky. This isn't what we want the company to be. This is where the company is today. Good, bad or ugly, it doesn't matter what it is. This is where we want to go,” we can build a plan of how to get there.

It starts with understanding where we are now, taking that assessment of where we are now. What's our shared background of experience? Where do we want to go? You talk about people being misaligned, coming in and doing those interviews. I've experienced that quite a bit as well in all the client work I've done over the years. I help a lot of business simulations with strategy alignment, strategy execution, and things like that. You talk to an executive, “Does everybody understand the strategy?” I'm pretty sure they do. Then, you go out and do interviews. I remember one project we did. We asked the first question, “How well do you know the company strategy?” Usually, it's like, “Yes, I know it well.” “Tell me about it.” It was all over the place. Everybody is completely different. You realize that there's some major misalignment in the organization. This is going to cause a lot of problems when you're trying to invest and achieve certain goals.

Your brand is only as strong as your unhappiest employee on their worst day. Click To Tweet

When you have completely competing goals within different departments, whether that be miscommunication or misalignment due to the way different departments are compensated or budgets are aligned, it leads to big challenges. Different departments are saying, “This is my role. I need to do this and this. They're blocking me,” instead of sitting there going, “It's not about the fiefdom, it's about the customer.” The more you can align the different departments and break down those roles so that they're all working towards looking at the customer first and having the customer at that center of the circle, it's amazing the things that get built out of that.

Focusing On The Employee

You said looking at the customer first and the customer at the center of the circle. When I talk to people about the importance of employee experience, I have used something I learned from another colleague or friend a while back, which is that your customer experience will never exceed that of your employee experience. If your employees do not have a good experience, they're probably not going to treat customers well. The example I often give, and I did a session on this at my conference, the Talent Development Think Tank, is Southwest Airlines. The late great Herb Kelleher, the Founder, always plays such a huge emphasis on treating employees well and then trusting that they would, in turn, treat customers well. Do you see that as a part of this? You're talking about the focus on the customer but what about focusing on the employee? Treating them well so they treat the customers well.

Don't get me wrong, I consider your employees your number one customers. People process profit. It's always about the people first. The comment that I use is, “Your brand is only as strong as your unhappiest employee on their worst day.” That's what it comes down to. That's the strength of your brand. The more we can focus on that, the better off we are. You're right. If your employees do not feel listened to, understood, and valued, if they don't understand why they do what they do and how their individual effort matters, they are never going to provide a customer experience that your customers want.

That comes back to the alignment piece as well. Do people know why they're being asked to do what they're doing? I love what you said. Your brand is only as strong as your unhappiest employee on their worst day. Why do employees get unhappy? Either they have a terrible manager, have a grueling job that doesn't align with their strengths or values, or they feel confused about what the heck they're doing and why they're being asked to do it. People have always connected with purpose, but more and more, people want purpose. They want to know why they're being asked to do things. If they don't know the answer, they might start looking around going somewhere else.

As they said, it's being listened to, understood, and valued. That's what most people want. I don't care if it's a Gen Z coming out of high school, through a university, or somebody who's 65 years old and at the other end of the employment process. Everybody wants to know that they matter, the work that they do matters, they're adding value, and what they do is worthwhile. They need to have pride in what they do. If they don't feel that anybody cares about them or that anybody thinks that what they do matters, why are they going to stick around? Sooner or later, they're going to find somebody that appreciates them more than you do. As soon as they do, they're going to jump. That's when you'll start looking at $100,000 walking out the door.

That makes sense. They don't feel understood and appreciated. They don't feel like they matter. They're just making a ton of money. It's time to start looking around at other jobs.

Money only goes so far. I was once on the phone with a guy. We were talking about the fact that they gave a year-end bonus of cash. It was a few thousand dollars for every employee. They asked at the end of January, “What did you spend the money on?” Most people couldn't say. Most people said, “It went in a bank account. I don't know.” The money just becomes money. It just becomes more money or less money in the bank account. It didn't go towards something of value. It didn't go to a new car, a washing machine, presents for the kids at Christmas, or something that was meaningful and tangible. The money just became money. In the end, money doesn't buy love. Respect buys love.

I'm thinking about a friend I've gotten to know who is in a fairly senior role at a large company. He was unhappy because he does not feel understood. He doesn't feel like he's being appreciated for his talents and things that he's doing. His bosses don't understand what he's doing. They're asking him to change things and not giving them the experience he wants. He's planning on leaving. He's staying to get his bonus and then he's going to be out the door as soon as that comes in. He's waiting to get the money but then he's out of there. It's a great company. He's talented and he's not going to stay. It's going to cost them a lot of money to replace him.

Creating Employee Experience: We need to understand what we're dealing with before we try throwing money and a solution at it.

His story is not unheard of. I know people that if the company bonus is paid out on December 31, by January 31, there's an amazing amount of people that are gone. People stick around, get their year-end bonuses and incentives that they feel are owed to them. They have no alignment and allegiance to the company. Their allegiance is to get the most out of the company that they can and then walk out the door.

Thinking about your own career and doing all this, what's been your greatest accomplishment or proudest moment?

My greatest accomplishment happens on a far more regular basis. We do two things. We either do a lot of online workshops or live workshops. Our live workshop is our two-day live and intensive, 20 to 25 people, senior leadership. We run them through a whole bunch of exercises about how to retain employees through leadership. It's a lot of fun. To me, it's the a-ha moments. What I've done is taken that course and put it online. There's a How to Retain Employees Through Leadership. It's 23 videos and about 65 or 70 questions. It delves through people. What I love is the coaching that comes along after that.

You can put people through a workshop, online course, or whatever. They get motivated for fifteen minutes and old habits come back 3 to 6 months afterward. People have been able to chew into the information. They've been able to see it live and watch it happen. They sit there and say, “What about this? Now, I get it.” That's what I love the most. I love those a-ha moments that people have. You watch them become better at what they do. That's my kick. On the online course, I get emails back. They’re sitting there going, “We tried this and we absolutely loved it. It worked. We're changing some processes because of it,” or the workshops where you get the phone calls or the emails back from that as well. That's where the kick is, watching other people succeed.

I like it. On the flip side of that, what's been your biggest failure or mistake? What did you learn from it?

My biggest failure and mistake was early on. It was not taking enough time in the beginning to understand the customer and assuming you knew what the customer needed before you did. A lot of that came from age. When I first started this, I was a lot younger. The younger we are, the more we know. The older we get, the less we know. I realized that when I first started doing this and dived into things with customers, it was more the fact of me saying, “I know what they need,” and making these assumptions. Now, it's more, “Let's take the time in the beginning.”

If it takes a little bit longer for me to understand your mission, vision, values, what you guys are about a company, where your real pain points are, and where the holes in the dike are, that's money well-invested. If we don't understand what the real problems are today, how can we ever fix them? That's come down to, “Let's slow the process down. Let's take the time.” It's not about me driving up the revenues for my consulting dollars. It's about understanding that this process takes time and we need to think about it. We need to understand what we're dealing with before we try throwing money and a solution at it.

Talent Development Trends

There's got to be a discovery process and asking questions to understand what's going on so you can get to the underlying issue. Ben, are there any trends that you're following in talent development, leadership development that we haven't covered yet?

People don't want to be managed; they want to be led. Click To Tweet

I'm starting to see that companies are starting to see more value in a longer onboarding process beyond giving somebody a set of business cards, a desk, and a list of customers to see and sending them on their way. We're taking the time to get people to understand our culture and how we do things in our company before we send them out to deal with the customers. We get people to build buddy systems and mentorship systems. We get people to understand who the people are through the company, what the various roles are, and why they do what they do. We let them take the time to get people to understand each other and understand the role. Not assume that somebody walks in because they worked at your competitor, they're going to be great working for you. Maybe there are habits that they had with the old company that you need to get rid of to make them a good, successful addition to your own company.

People need to feel welcome from day one. On day one, it can't be all about filling out paperwork. There's got to be introductions and lunches with the team, a coffee meeting with the senior executives and understanding what the culture is of the company and making people feel welcome. Even having promotional products sitting on their desk all laid out for a welcome package. It is amazing to me how many employees walk up to that and take a picture of it. All of a sudden, it's up on Instagram. Ten thousand people are noticing those. “I just started working with this company. Look at the cool things they gave me on day one.”

For the $200, $100, $50, or whatever you spent on these promotional marketing, to have it sitting on their desk to welcome them into the company, you got thousands of dollars' worth of free advertising. Not only that, but you've also given the person, on day one, a feeling of, “I belong. I mean something. I'm important and valued.” If you get people to walk in the first day and all they do is fill out paperwork and they go home to a wife, girlfriend, husband, boyfriend, mother, father or whatever, say, “How was your first day?” “All we did was fill out paperwork.” That feeling stays with you. That's what I'm hoping that more companies are going to understand.

That's all part of the employee experience. It starts with the hiring process, into onboarding, then onto the time they're working there, all the way through when they leave.

From day one to beyond the last day, make sure that employees feel that they are part of the team and they are part of the family each and every single day. It's building reward and communication systems, leadership, and processes that support all that. That's important. People don't want to be managed, they want to be led.

That is true. Is there a book that has made a big difference for you or that you often recommend?

There are lots of books. I'm a big lover of Roger Fisher’s Getting to Yes. I'm a big fan of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Tony's book is great and it's extremely well written. I have that in an audio file and I listen to that on a regular basis. Those are two books that I truly love. There's my book, which is Powerful Personal Brands. It's all about understanding who you are as a person. My attitude is that you can't be a good leader until you understand yourself. If I'm listening to other people, I love Simon Sinek. The Go-Giver by Bob Burg is a great book. Cody Bateman's got a book that I haven't read yet but I've thumbed through from send-out cards. He's got a phenomenal book on relationship management. That's on my pile. I've read through the first 10, 15 pages and been quite impressed by it.

Advice From The Pro

That's great. The other book you were talking about is Delivering Happiness. He's created an amazing story and experience there at Zappos. They were acquired by Amazon and all that stuff. Last question for you, Ben. For anybody reading who is working in talent development or leadership development, that sort of thing, they're looking for ways to accelerate their career and improve. What's one more piece of advice you would give?

Powerful Personal Brands: A Hands-On Guide to Understanding Yours

The one piece of advice I would give is to be curious. If you're looking to advance your career, find out what the people are doing that are doing the job that you want to be doing. What are the things that they do that you don't do? Make them a mentor or emulate them. Don't be them. Find the things that you find valuable from them and bring it into your psyche. Start doing those things that are not at your level but are at the next one. Mentally assume the next level and you will get there. People will see that. True leaders get promoted because they bring up the next people below them. When you're the person that gives the people below you, the coaching, mentorship, experience, training, etc. in order to make them better, you become the person who is hireable at the next level. It's floating the water for everybody. The more you can make the tide rise, it’s going to rise for you as well.

You become known as someone who develops people and treats them well. Everybody wants to come to work for you. It's self-fulfilling. It rewards itself. It’s your true multiplier, to use the terminology from Liz Wiseman's book. Ben, this has been fantastic. I’m glad we were able to put this together and got you on the show. I'm looking forward to coming to yours. You said you have a book as well.

I do. Everything is available through my website, my online course, speaking, consulting and my book. The book is called Powerful Personal Brands: A Hands-On Guide to Understanding Yours. It's available through Amazon but everything is available through YourBrandMarketing.com. If you go to that website, my podcast is there. Your podcast will be up on there. All the stuff I do for consulting, workshops, keynotes, and that stuff is all available in one place. I make it easy for everybody to find me in one place.

This has been great, Ben. Thank you for coming on and sharing some of your experience, wisdom, and advice with us.

It has been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.

Take care.

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Thank you for reading this episode of the show. I am always grateful for everyone who tunes in, listens, subscribes, and leaves reviews for our podcast on iTunes. By the way, if you haven't done that yet, it would mean the world to me. Head on over to iTunes, take one minute and write a quick review. It helps our podcast grow. I appreciate your support. As my gift to you, I have created a report on the top five trends impacting talent development. If you haven't grabbed that report yet, you can head on over to AdvantagePerformance.com/trends. You can download my report of the top five trends impacting talent development as well as sign up for our newsletter to get updates on everything that is going on. Thanks for reading.

• Ben Baker
• Talent Development Think Tank
• How to Retain Employees Through Leadership
• Getting to Yes
• Delivering Happiness
• The Go-Giver
• Powerful Personal Brands: A Hands-On Guide to Understanding Yours
• YourBrandMarketing.com
• Podcast – Your Living Brand Live Show
• iTunes - Talent Development Hot Seat
• AdvantagePerformance.com/trends