SALT LAKE CITY — Customer experience doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Customers are just one stakeholder among many, and offering them the best experience possible often means looking at the people whose job it is to meet their needs.
Danny Meyer, founder of Shake Shack and Union Square Hospitality Group, puts employees first in his “virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality” — his philosophy of the most important stakeholders in restaurant operations.
Customer experience is directly related to the employee experience, Meyer said during a keynote at the Qualtrics X4 conference in Salt Lake City last Wednesday. If the employees aren’t happy, their experience will trickle down to the people they are serving.
“The employee is our first customer,” Meyer said.
Happy employees create consistency
Customers won’t have a good time in the aggregate if employees don’t enjoy their jobs, according to Meyer.
Restaurant workers may be able to fake it well enough to offer a customer one or two good experiences even if they’re unhappy. However, delivering consistently good experiences requires teams that truly feel good about what they’re doing and who they’re doing it with.
“If you keep coming back and coming back, I promise you that your experience is going to be directly correlated with the degree to which that team is jazzed with the people they get to work with,” Meyer said.
Strong restaurant teams learn from each other, respect each other and trust each other, according to Meyer. If all these ingredients are in place, they’re going to bring their best to the job, and customers will notice.
Money matters as well. Raises and promotions represent “the single best way to take care of our employees,” according to Meyer. However, companies need happy shareholders to approve the necessary employee investments, which feeds back into the virtuous cycle.
Executives shouldn’t try to affect the employee experience directly, according to Meyer. Instead, the most effective thing leaders can do is hold team members responsible and accountable for how they care for each other.
“They're not coming for Danny Meyer,” Meyer said. “They're not coming for the restaurant. They’re coming to be part of a team, because they’re going to grow when you have that team mentality of accountability to one another and trust building with each other.”
Culture, not a cult
While executives aren’t directly responsible for the day-to-day employee experience, they still have the power to create a culture that feeds into a sense of camaraderie among managers and workers.
Scaling a feeling — creating a consistent sense of what it feels like for a customer to dine at or for an employee to work at a restaurant chain — is hard, but it can be done, Meyer said. It starts with a common language, which he refers to as “the mortar between the bricks of culture.”
A common language serves as a shortcut to ensure everyone is immediately on the same page about the company’s goals. It also fosters a sense of belonging among employees that can trickle down to customers, too.
“People have a longing to belong,” Meyer said. “When your employees feel like they belong and your customers feel like they belong — when your community feels like it belongs to you — really magical things happen,” Meyer said.
However, the sense of belonging shouldn’t lead to a cult, according to Meyer. Union Square Hospitality Group’s restaurants go out of their way to hire people who are different from one another, but united in their belief in the company’s emphasis on hospitality.
