People First, Kindness Always

Having a people-first culture means designing the employee experience with the same effort and intention as the guest experience. Employees who feel supported deliver better guest service.

Here's a question I ask to determine what the company culture is like: How do your employees feel on Monday morning as they’re preparing to head into work?

If they're excited, you've done something right. If they're dreading the idea of going to work, something is off. Companies spend a lot of energy chasing some mystical formula for "culture." Unfortunately there isn’t one magical formula for creating a positive culture, but you can cultivate it by putting people first.

I've had a lot of different jobs from Disney to professional sports teams to now working at SwitchBase. If you ask how I landed in any of them, the honest answer is I was chasing the same thing every time. Not a title, not an industry. A belief that people come first, and everything else follows from that.

The chain of excellence

While I was at Disney, one concept we focused on was the chain of excellence. Leaders impact their Cast Members (employees). Cast Members impact the Guests. The Guests impact the business. It sounds simple, but many operations get it backwards. They pour all of their attention into the guest-facing experience while the employee experience becomes an afterthought. If you don't take care of your people, they will not take care of your guests to the best of their ability, and eventually you'll feel it on your bottom line.

I've managed teams of five and teams of nine hundred, and the math doesn't change. Hard skills can be taught. Soft skills involve a choice: a person can choose to smile or to go the extra mile to help a guest. You can't train a person to care or not.

If you want a better guest experience, don’t just focus on guest-facing initiatives. Build your employee experience with the same intention as a VIP program. When I managed a large team, I made it a priority to have at least one touch point with each employee. Some touch points were longer like a 1:1 while others were quick check-ins as I walked throughout the venue. Here’s a peek behind the curtain: I keep a running list on my phone to help me remember things employees had shared with me. If someone told me during the last event that they got a new puppy, the next event I asked how that puppy was doing (and usually asked to see some pictures.) It doesn’t sound like much, but small things matter.

Kindness always

The "kindness always" half of this isn't a soft add-on, it's the whole point. Kindness costs nothing. How you treat people and approach situations is 100% your choice.

At a football game I worked at we built an incredible outdoor tailgate experience. The weather had other plans and brought rain and lightning all day in Southern California where it hardly ever rains. You can’t control the weather. You can control how you respond to the disappointment your guests feel. Instead of shrugging our shoulders we brought some activations under the canopy, listened to our guests' concerns, and shared tips and tricks on how they could maximize their experience. None of this fixed the weather. All of it changed how the day was remembered.

I love a Maya Angelou quote for this: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That's true of your guests. It's just as true of your staff.

It's in the details

My colleague Trever recently posted on LinkedIn about a trip to Disneyland where he talked about how details matter. Disney believes in being intentional about the guest experience through even the smallest details. The trees and bushes are always trimmed. You don’t see a lot of chipped paint because a 3rd shift crew is constantly doing touch-ups throughout the park. The trash cans are themed to the lands they are placed in. All of those details working in tandem create that magic they are known for.

We built SwitchBase the same way - by focusing on the details. Early on, our own team was first to notice the friction: why does this take five clicks instead of one? Multiply that by hundreds of incident reports and a small annoyance becomes a real tax on someone's day. We make improvements to our platform not because a client complained, but because our own people felt it first. That's the same instinct you need for staff onboarding: every step is a touchpoint, and a chance to build trust or chip away at it.

The stairwell story

I learned this one the hard way, and I share it because it's a good lesson plus an embarrassing one.

On my first day at one of my past jobs, I had received an email covering the basics like where to park and how to enter the building. I passed those first two tests - success! Later that day as I was walking from one part of the office to another I ended up stuck in a stairwell. I didn’t have my badge yet and no one had mentioned you needed a badge to access the stairwells.

It's a small thing. It's also exactly the kind of small thing that can ruin an employee’s first day on the job, especially if their cell phone doesn’t work in the stairwells.

When I was asked to redesign our onboarding program for new team members, we focused on 3 main things we wanted them to take away on Day 1:

• Make the employee feel like they made the right decision by working at our company.

• They knew our basic safety procedures such as the evacuation plan, key points of contact, and where safety equipment was located.

• Our company values and how we used them to make decisions.

And in case you’re wondering, we did create a way to ensure new employees didn’t get stuck in the stairwell with a simple workaround: a stack of temporary access badges they could use while their permanent badges were being created and activated. Now nobody gets stuck in a stairwell on day one.

You won't win everyone, and that's fine

You are not going to win everybody over, no matter how much effort you put in. That's okay.

What matters is that you keep listening to your employees and your guests. If you made a change based on feedback you received, say it directly with “you asked, we listened” and here is what changed. We saw this with staff meals. Feeding our team during long shifts was an easy call. What wasn't easy was realizing how many dietary restrictions we hadn't accounted for at first. We couldn't solve every single one, but we could continue offering more variety as well as be transparent about what we couldn't do. We focused on giving people more choices which varied throughout the season. You won't make every person entirely happy. You'll make a lot more of them feel heard, which is very important.

How I measure it

When I leave a job, I judge whether I actually put people first by two questions:

• Did I leave the organization or department better than I found it?

• Would those people want to work with me and our leadership team again?

If the answer to both is yes, you’ve done something right. You’ll also see the impact through the metrics such as retention, talent development, and guest feedback scores. Not because people-first is a nice sentiment, but because it's the actual mechanism that makes everything downstream of it work.