Chris Dreyer:

Hey listeners! Chris here, CEO at Rankings, wishing you happy and healthy holidays as we wrap up 2023. Thanks to all of you, we had a groundbreaking year – shattering records for downloads and growth. And had some truly incredible guests.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from and engage with this community of ambitious, purpose-driven attorneys. As we look ahead to 2024, I’ve got some big things in store! Keep your eyes and ears open!

And for the first time ever, we’ll be gathering in person! I’m thrilled about the first-ever Personal Injury Mastermind Conference – aka PIMCON – happening in the fall of 2024. That’s right – clear your calendars because next year, the PIMCON is ON. It is THE event for dominating attorneys laser-focused on accelerating growth.

Be the first to know more about PIMCON! Follow the link in the show notes!

The new year is almost here, and I’m energized by all we’ll accomplish together. However you celebrate the holidays, I hope you get some well-deserved rest and quality time with loved ones. Thanks for an amazing 2023 – now let’s dominate 2024!

And for those who just can’t get enough, here is one of our favorite episodes from 2023.

See you next year!

Joey Coleman:

Globally, 65% of current employees are actively looking for a new job, 65%. So my question is, which 65% of your employees don’t you need on the team next year?

Chris Dreyer:

If you feel welcome, you feel loved, you feel needed, and you have a purpose at that organization, I think that’s a lot of times what people are looking for is that purpose, not just passing through in life.

Joey Coleman:

I want your people to be bringing the best people. If they’re not, we’ve got work to do.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of rankings.io, the elite legal marketing agency. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. On Special Toolkit Tuesdays, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technology, services and strategies that help law firms not just survive, but thrive in today’s competitive landscape. Now, this isn’t about selling the latest software or getting kick kickbacks from affiliate links. It’s about bringing you the best so you can be the best for your firm, for your staff, for your clients, and for you. This is Toolkit Tuesday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. If you’re listening on Apple podcast, do me a favour. Scroll down to the bottom of the show profile. See that stars at the bottom? Tap those five stars. I’ll be forever grateful. Let’s get started. Employee retention is a billion dollar problem. It’s not just the revenue that’s lost when an employee leaves. Consider the amount of resources and time it takes to find the right replacement. Today we unlock the secret to a thriving team with New York Time bestselling author Joey Coleman. Joey first came on PIM way back in episode 40. I am thrilled to bring him back today. Author of the hit book Never Lose a Customer Again, Joey takes us on a ride to explore the second side of the same coin in his new book Never Lose An Employee Again. We challenge conventional hiring wisdom and dig deep into soft skills your firm needs to succeed. Attitude embodied by traits like curiosity and optimism is a far more valuable investment than mere aptitude. We dissect the importance of onboarding instead of just a boring orientation for new hires and offer tonnes of actionable steps to build the dedicated team of raving fans you need. Here’s Joey Coleman, chief experience composer, public speaker and bestselling author.

Joey Coleman:

It’s interesting. People ask me, they’re like, Joey, for 20 years you’ve been known as the customer guy, the customer experience guy. Now you’re going to be the employee experience guy. What’s the change? And I understand why folks might see that as a change, but to me it’s the other side of the same coin. I realised early on you can’t expect to create remarkable experiences for your clients if you don’t have remarkable employees helping you to deliver that experience. And so what we’re really doing is writing the second half of the story. The first half of the story is this external view of what are you doing to create remarkable experiences for the wonderful clients you’re representing and serving. Now I want folks to think about, well, how do we get our employees to have enough of a remarkable connection with us that they can deliver on the promise we’re making to our clients? So it’s really just kind of the rest of the story or the second half to the story of the customer experience work.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s the saying, it goes hand in hand. I can’t remember who kind of made this on the forefront, but it was if you treat your employees well, they’ll treat your customers well.

Joey Coleman:

So true, so true. And here’s the interesting thing. I kind of almost see it as like polishing two sides of the same coin because if we have really, really happy employees, they’re going to do great by our customers. Conversely, if we have customers and clients that can’t stand us, they’re going to make our employees lives miserable. All boats are rising together. Either customer and employee experience is going up or it’s going down on both sides.

Chris Dreyer:

One of the things that I was wondering about is this the research component that went into this because there’s a lot of great statistics, what did you do to approach this process of writing the book and gathering the information to provide to the consumer?

Joey Coleman:

Well, Chris, I love this question and I hope your audience loves it too because to be honest, I leaned on my legal background. As a lawyer, my job was to do a boatload of research and you’re doing research on the case law and the statutes and kind of what’s going on in the jurisdiction. But as a trial attorney, I was also doing research on who’s in the jury box. Right. What are their preconceived notions, what are their beliefs? And I kind of approached writing this book the same way. I wanted to go to the studies. I wanted to look at human psychology, I wanted to look at workplace research. I wanted to look at what kind of contributes to employee behaviours in the marketplace, but I also wanted to try to anticipate the reader, and here’s what I know about book readers. They’re reading along in the book and they go, well, Joey, that’s an example from a chiropractic office. I’m a lawyer. That doesn’t apply to me. Or Oh, Joey, that’s an example of a company with 1000 employees. I only have 37 employees, so it doesn’t apply to me. As a result, Chris, I included over 50 case studies in the book from all seven continents. I think I might be the first business book in the history of business books to have a case study from all seven continents including Antarctica because I wanted to address the objections. I wanted people to be able to look at this and go, it may not be a doggone all four legs, but three of the legs are on the ground. It’s a similar sized business or maybe in a similar industry or maybe in my country I can at least find enough parallels to draw some tactics, some techniques that’ll help me interact with my employees better.

Chris Dreyer:

I love that. And those being applicable to all shapes and sizes and some of the numbers you outlined in the book are staggering. 40% of new hires quit in the first year. 77% of those people who quit could have been retained. A billion dollar problem. And you talk about shifting the narrative from orientation to onboarding. So can you explain that shift and practical sense? What do you mean by that?

Joey Coleman:

Absolutely, and Chris, you’re right. The numbers were absolutely staggering and to anybody who’s maybe listening in and now this is the lawyer in me getting ready to address the objections, the person who’s going, well, Joey, I haven’t had an employee leave in two years, three years. I’m good. Here’s the one other stat I want you to keep in mind. The most recent research shows that globally 65% of current employees are actively looking for a new job, 65%. So my question is, which 65% of your employees don’t you need on the team next year? Because that’s the threat. That’s what’s there. Now, I’m not saying they’re going to take the job, but they’re considering it, and this is part of the shift that’s happened in our society post COVID. Now that anyone can work pretty much in any job remotely, especially for PI folks, right? Let’s be honest, you can have a lot of this stuff handled from home. They don’t need to be in an office. As a result, the marketplace for talent and the poaching that is happening is unbelievable. You’re at a bigger threat of losing your people to a different offer, a different opportunity in another industry from another employer who doesn’t live in your jurisdiction than ever before. But let’s bring it back to your question, forgive me, about orientation versus onboarding. See, the challenge I think is most people use those words synonymously, but what I know about lawyers is we’re all trained as one Ls our first year of law school to define the word. What is the operative definition. So let’s look at the definition of orientation and the definition of onboarding. Orientation is an introduction to an employee’s new surroundings and employment activities. What does that mean? Well, new employee comes in and we’re saying, here’s where the bathroom is. Here’s where you go if a fire alarm goes off, here’s the paperwork you need to fill out. These interestingly enough, are the same things that would happen in the first hour on a cruise if you were on vacation. Okay. You’re not being part of the team. You’re just being told how to avoid problems and crises that might arrive. I like onboarding. I define onboarding as inviting in new employees using a managed structured series of contacts that are designed to create a warm and welcoming experience. Let’s break it down just a little. Inviting in, not training, not first day on the job. It’s an invitation to join something bigger than themselves using a managed structured series of contacts, not a haphazard well, if you get Joanie as your manager, you’re going to be great, but if you get Franco over there, whew, good luck. We’ll see how that goes. That are designed to create a warm, welcoming experience, not a first day on the job experience, not a Hey, you’re now an employee with us experience, but rather a warm, welcoming experience. Think about having someone over to your house for a dinner party. Right. You offer to take their coat, you get them a drink. You’ve probably thought ahead to prepare something they might like to eat. They’re a guest. Your employees are the same way, especially at the beginning of the relationship. We should be catering to them in the sense that we let them know they are welcome, we’re embracing them, we’re bringing them in. Now, I’m not saying you have to do everything they want you to do, but what I am saying is we would all benefit from a little more warmth in our initial activities with a new employee.

Chris Dreyer:

I couldn’t agree more, and I was thinking about those initial experiences and I was kind of getting anxiety when you’re talking and when I don’t have that warm welcome, when you come into the party and no one’s coming up to you, you feel awkward, you feel out of place, but when someone does greet you and here’s this person and here’s where you can get a drink or some food, it’s just such a better experience. And you talk about this being shaped in the first 100 days and it just being critical. Why the first 100 days? Why not say the first month or two months? Where does the kind of data lie? Why the first 100 days?

Joey Coleman:

The data really comes from people other than me. Right. So this isn’t Joey just saying, Hey, the first 100 days matter, this is what the research shows. So for example, the research shows that when it comes to hourly employees, I recognise some of the people on your team are salary, but some might be hourly. Hourly employees, more than 50% will leave before the 100-day anniversary. I mean, these numbers are staggering. We also know from our own anec data, right, our anecdotal data of our own lives, that first impressions matter. How things go in the first week or two or three weeks or month usually are really representative and dispositive of what life is going to be like long term. So when we think of those first 100 days, it really is making the deposits in the karmic bank account, laying the foundation early on, getting someone up to speed. A lot of employers, what they do is they hire a new employee, they do about a day of orientation, and then they expect that employee to stay there for four or five years contributing great value. Really? You invested a whole day and you think it’s going to result in years of results. There’s pretty much nothing in our life that works that way. Instead, if we think about how are we building a curriculum, how are we building a strategy of onboarding that says, well, on day one we’re going to do this, and on day four this and on day eight this and day 20 this. I understand that as I describe this, it might be making some of the leaders that are listening in anxious. Oh my gosh, Joey, this sounds like a lot of work. It is, but the payoff is enormous. Last piece of research I’ll cite. If you look at employees and you say to an employee, they’ve done huge surveys on this through the Department of Labour, and they said, did you have a strong onboarding programme? And that’s it. They just let the person self-select how they would define the word strong. If the person said yes, 69% of those people stayed at the firm for greater than three years, 69%. Now, if we think of all the people that are leaving and how quickly people are leaving, if I can get you to stay just because you’ve had a strong onboarding programme, a thoughtful, an intentional, a strategic systematic programme, why wouldn’t I want to invest that time in the first 100 days?

Chris Dreyer:

It makes me think, Joey, when I was in Vistage, and this was several years ago, I had a speaker, his name was Jack Daley. He was a very intense sales guru, and he talked about we need to quit throwing employee exit parties and start throwing parties when they join the company and celebrate them coming to work at the company, and it just hits so hard. I think if you feel welcome, you feel loved, you feel needed, and you have a purpose at that organisation, I think that’s a lot of times what people are looking for is that purpose, not just passing through in life.

Joey Coleman:

Chris, it’s so true. I mean we, I’ve yet to meet a human that doesn’t want to feel welcome where they’re at. I’ve yet to meet a human that doesn’t appreciate when they show up to a new place, being welcomed with open arms and that folks have thought ahead. Now, with all due respect to Jack, I don’t know him personally and I wasn’t in the room on this. I think it’s a yes and. I think you need to throw a great party when they start and a great party when they leave. Now, some folks might hear that and say, well, wait a minute, Joey, they’re leaving. Why would we celebrate that? Well, folks, I outline eight phases and the eighth phase that we’re trying to get every employee to is being an advocate. And the tricky thing about being an advocate or the thing a lot of folks misunderstand is that you can be an advocate while you’re an employee or after you’re an employee or both. And some of our best leads for new clients, some of our best leads for new employees and new team members are going to come from people that worked for us in the past if they had a positive experience and when they left, we didn’t light a blow torch on the bridge and say, never again. Don’t let the door hit you. If we pay attention to those folks early on, we’ve got salespeople in the marketing place singing our praises saying this is somewhere where you should go work or go become a client.

Chris Dreyer:

Interviews are some of the best ways to get to know candidates, build rapport and see if they’ll be a good culture fit for your team. But Joey sees the typical approach to interviews as fundamentally flawed.

Joey Coleman:

In what situation in your firm would you put a brand new employee in front of a judge or in front of a client without any preparation as to what the agenda of discussion is going to be? I understand partially we’re like, oh, I want to see how they handle stress. Great. Keep one or two questions back, let those be surprises. But I don’t know about you. When somebody asks if they can meet with me, one of the first things I say is great, what’s the agenda? What are we going to be discussing? What are some of the things you’re concerned about? What do you want help with? What do you think I might be able to provide? Give people some context because it will make for a richer conversation. Now, when it comes to questions with an employee, I also think it’s important to ask the non-obvious questions. I don’t know about you, but I’m sure some of the folks who are listening have had the experience where they’ve been sitting in an interview and the interviewer said, tell me two of your strengths and two of your weaknesses. Tell me what this item on your resume really was like, tell me where you see yourself in three years. What’s something you don’t want me to know about you? These type of questions that just feel trite, they feel ridiculous, and let’s be candid, your candidate has prepared for those stupid, I mean obvious questions. Right. What I’d rather do is ask questions that figure out how they think, because that’s what’s important to me as an employer. I can train somebody on a system and a process. What I can’t train somebody as easily to do is to be kind, to be generous, to be thoughtful, to be able to respond in real time to evolving circumstance. In order to suss out those skills and not be emotionally caught in the idea of, well, they like the same sports team I like, so I bet they’ll be great to have on our company or in our law firm. No, I want to get a feel for what it’s going to be like to work with you. So that’s why I want to trot out some of the questions early on so they can actually have a little bit of thought, time to compose and answer, and I’m also willing to answer the same questions that I ask.

Chris Dreyer:

On that, one of the things that I liked was the story of Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, the man behind the Antarctic voyage of Endurance, and he hired for optimism as a personal trait, and my coach, Bobby Castro is on that. He’s big on that. He talks about positive mental attitude, I think the half glass full and not the Eeyore sense of vibe. What was the question that Mr. Shackleton asked to gauge that level of optimism?

Joey Coleman:

Well, it’s interesting Chris, Shackleton’s preparing for this voyage to Antarctica, right? And if you’re familiar with the endurance story, it’s epic. If you’re not familiar, oh my goodness, go check it out. But the abbreviated version is we load 27 guys on some ships. We’re supposed to go to Antarctica and see if we can make it to the South Pole. So Shackleton’s trying to figure out who’s going to be able to handle being at sea, who’s going to be able to handle being in the cold? He had scientists, he had seamen, he had cooks, he had all kinds of people on the ship to make sure everything was going well. Well, they get down to off the Antarctic coast and the ship gets stuck in the ice for 10 months. The ship then breaks and sinks. They have to get off the ship, and they’re standing on the ice as they watch the ship break apart and sink. They then spend another 10 plus months living on the ice. They’re gone for two years and not one person dies. This is unheard of. Expeditions that had gone beautifully lost people. Two years. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. No one dies and everybody comes back not only grateful that they lived, but feeling great about the expedition. Why? Optimism. Shackleton figured this out early on in the interview process. He’d have folks go through and he would ask them a single question, and that question was, do you sing? Now let me be clear. It wasn’t, do you sail? Wasn’t are you ready to eat seal? It was do you sing? And it caught some of the people off guard. They’re like, sing, what’s that have to do with anything? He said, no, I don’t mean any of this opera stuff. We’re not going to have a talent show and ask you to stand in front of the rest of the crew, but when you’re hanging out with the boys around the fire, are you willing to join in, in song? And if they answered yes, they were hired. If they were answered, no, they weren’t. Why? Because Shackleton had learned on his two previous cruises and expeditions to Antarctica that in the cold night when the [inaudible 00:19:38] winds were blowing, when the temperature was dropping, when folks were huddled in the darkness trying to stay warm, if they could light a fire and sing a couple songs, it raised morale and guys were willing to live to fight another day. Now, to be clear, I keep saying guys, because at that time it was only men that went on these expeditions back at the turn of the century. My question to everyone listening is, is there a question you could ask in your firm when hiring a new team member that would give you the insight as to their personality, their character? I like to hire for attitude and then train for aptitude. We can teach them. With all due respect, you didn’t know how to be a PI lawyer. You didn’t know how cases worked until you went to law school. Since you started working, when you started going through the system, now you figured out we can teach that. I can’t teach you to be curious. I can’t teach you to be resilient. I can’t teach you to, when faced with daunting questions or circumstances, to be able to not only navigate through it, but show empathy to the clients we’re serving, who many of them, because we’re in a PI environment, are at the worst moment of their entire life. Literally, they are at the worst moment of their entire life, and they’re probably one of three, five, eight clients you’re going to talk to today. So everybody you’re interacting with is in the doldrum, they’re in the pit, they’re in the despair. How are you going to be able to lead with empathy? Well, empathy doesn’t come up in an interview question based on, tell me a time where you had to go further than you thought you had to go or where you worked harder or a project you were happy with the completion of? No empathy comes from, have you lived? Have you been through it? Do you like to sing?

Chris Dreyer:

Me and my president talk about us waiting tables and having those customer interactions happy and unhappy and just such an experience, and it really limited itself great to learning that skill. And so totally agree on all fronts on that. After we get to this, Hey, the employee accepts they want to work at our company and it’s not uncommon that there’s maybe some remorse. How do we reaffirm that they made the right decision to join our company so that we keep them, so that they’re not in that big statistical pool that leaves there in the first year? So what are some of the things that go into that?

Joey Coleman:

Chris, you’re so true. I mean, I imagine folks might be familiar with the concept of buyer’s remorse when someone makes a purchase and they begin to doubt the decision they just made. What folks may not be as familiar with is the scientifically proven new hires remorse, where a newly hired employee begins to doubt the decision they just made to accept your job offer. So how do we counter that? Well, there’s a number of ways, but the overarching umbrella of how we counter that is to communicate in the time period between accepting the offer and their first day on the job. Most firms, you accept the job and they say, great, what’s your start date? Oh, I want to start on the 15th of next month. Great, we’ll see you on the 15th, and nothing happens during that period. How would it be different if there were communications during that timeframe that got people excited? Let me tell you quickly about one of the case studies in the book, a company called Impact. They’re a great online marketing company. What Impact does with their new employees is once they accept the job, they say, awesome, there’s a package coming in the mail to you tomorrow. People are like, tomorrow, I just accepted. A FedEx arrives the next day with their new computer, their new headset, everything they need to work. It’s all ready to go because here’s the thing, friends, you knew you were hiring for this position, go buy the computer before they accept the job. It doesn’t matter. You can send the same computer to different people if you go with a different candidate, but boom, they hit them with all the technology they need, and it also includes a note to say, Hey, we’d like to introduce you to this person on the tech team who’s going to do a call with you. Call them and schedule it. They’ll get you all set up on the computer. Everything’s ready to go. Okay, interesting. Couple days later, a second package arrives in the mail. This package is full of swag, new shirts, hats, fun, playful things that have the company brand, but are the kind of swag and clothing items you’d be comfortable wearing out in public, right? It’s not a billboard for the company. It’s tasteful, right? It’s fun. So now you’re part of the team because you’ve got the gear and you’ve got the clothes. Then there’s a third package that comes. Yes. For those of you keeping score at home, there are three separate packages that come between the time you accept the job and the time you start the job. The third package includes two books and they say to you like, Hey, here are the two books that create the foundation of our organisation. These two books outline the principles of what we stand for. Your assignment for the first week at work is going to be to read these books. You’re going to be sitting in the office reading these books, and at the end, we’re going to have a book club discussion about it with your coworkers talking about what you learned in the books, because these are, they’re for lack of a better way of putting it, and forgive the analogy, the Bibles of our organisation. This is what we come to. This is the foundational piece. So if you want to start reading in advance, you can, but it’s not required because you’re going to have time set aside at work the first week to read. Chris, a couple things happen. Number one, this employee knows they’re valued. Number two, they’re immediately feel like they’re part of the team. And number three, if for any reason they’re not the kind of person that is interested in reading books, they’re not the kind of person who’s interested in wearing the brand where they work, we know before they start. They push back and say, you know what? Actually, I made a mistake. I’d like to rescind my acceptance. Great, we found out before we wasted any more time. We found out before they came in and their attitude, your or else impacted anybody else on the team. So the question is, how are you communicating with people between the time they accept and the time they start to reaffirm their decisions?

Chris Dreyer:

Joey’s book covers eight critical phases in the employee retention process. Now, we’ve already taken a look at a couple of the phases, but I wanted Joey to give us an overview of each phase. He explains how to guide employees into the coveted phases we as employers want, adopt and advocate.

Joey Coleman:

There’s eight phases. They all start with a letter A. It’s kind of like if you gave a report card to your employees, they’d give you A’s in all eight subjects. Straight A’s, that’s what we’re going for. So the first phase is that assess phase where prospective candidates trying to decide if they want to work for you. They’re checking out your job listing. They’re social media, they’re on your website, on the about us page, the careers page. They’re going through your interview process. We then come to phase two, the accept phase. In the accept phase, you make an offer to your desired candidate, and ideally they accept it. We then go to the third phase, the affirm phase, that buyer’s remorse that we just talked about, but it’s new hire’s remorse, where they begin to doubt decision they just made. We then come to phase four, the activate phase. This is the only phase in the eight phases that is a single day. It’s the first day on the job, and what are you doing to make that first day on the job epic, so remarkable, so special that they’re still talking about the first day on the job years later. We then come to phase five, the acclimate phase and is a pro-tip to everybody out there. This is where most organisations start to go off the rails. The acclimate phase starts on day two, and it lasts for weeks, maybe even months depending on the role in your organisation. In the acclimate phase, we want to hold the employees hand. We want to help them navigate. We want to teach instead of train. What do I mean by that? Teaching implies that when we’re done, you have that knowledge forever. Training implies this is going to take rote repetition for a long time before we’ve conditioned you to have this behaviour and to follow these steps. We then come to the accomplish phase, phase six. In the accomplish phase, the employee achieves the goal they had when they originally decided to accept your job offer. Every employee has personal and professional goals that they’re hoping will be easier to obtain due to their accepting the job offer. Do you know what those goals are? Are you tracking their progress towards them? Are you celebrating with them when they achieve them? If not, you won’t have an effective accomplished phase. If they do accomplish their goals, they move on to the adopt phase. This is when someone becomes loyal to you and your firm. They’re not picking up a call from a headhunter. They’re not looking for other jobs. They are bought and committed. And if, and only if Chris, we’ve gotten them through all seven phases, do we have the right, the privilege to invite them in to the Holy grail, Nirvana, the final phase, the advocate phase where the employee becomes a raving fan for us singing our praises for and wide. They’re writing reviews on Glassdoor and other review sites. They’re going out and publicly recruiting people to join the firm. You have a job posting for a new position. They’re coming to you with three stellar candidates that are ready to go. Why? Because they want their friends, their loved ones, the best people they’ve ever worked with to come work with you too. That’s how bought into your mission they are. Last thing I’ll say on the advocate phase, lots of times people say to me, well, Joey, we’ve got good advocates in our firm. I’m like, really? Can we look at the data? And here’s how we measure it. Whenever you have a job posting for any position in your firm, how many of the candidates are referrals from your existing employees? If that answer isn’t greater than 50%, you don’t actually have advocates. You may have one or two, but you don’t have a lot of them. I want your people to be bringing the best people. If they’re not, we’ve got work to do.

Chris Dreyer:

Those referrals tend to be some of the best candidates because the individual that refers them, it puts their reputation on the line, and it’s this incredible scenario. And,

Joey Coleman:

Chris, you’re spot on. That’s the thing. We fail to recognise the social capital that is expended when we make a referral. Somebody asked me on a conversation I was having the other day, they’re like, Joey, what do you think about hiring someone that is the sibling of one of your existing employees? And I’m like, well, did the sibling refer their brother or sister to come work at the firm? And they’re like, well, yeah. And I was like, do you have siblings? If you’re willing to vouch your name on your sibling’s name, I think they’re going to be an amazing employee because if they’re not, and this person please, siblings know where all the bodies are buried. They know all the truths. So I was like, if you’ve got a sibling making a referral, you are spot on that that person is probably 99% of what you’re looking for. Because the person would never put their name in the hat if they weren’t.

Chris Dreyer:

I couldn’t agree more, and I was kind of chuckling on the inside thinking about that question. Looking at it for my myself in particular. We’ve covered so much great information here and there’s so many amazing tips and strategies. I wanted to just lean into the remote side. COVID kind of changed the game. There’s not as many people going to the commercial building. They’re working from home. How does this all factor into the remote culture? Is one of your case studies is talk about this specifically. How do we make this work for the remote companies?

Joey Coleman:

Chris, there are multiple case studies in the book that speak to this specifically, and what I would say is the landscape has changed, and for anybody waiting for it to go back, sorry, friends, it’s not going to. I’m sorry. I understand the benefit of having it go back. I understand as a leader in your firm, you might want it to come back and you might be frustrated by the fact that people aren’t in the same office anymore. It’s kind of like being frustrated that we don’t use fax machines anymore. Let’s be candid, the fax wasn’t that great to start with. Why are we lamenting its absence? Working in a cubicle in the office wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. So why are we lamenting that? What I’d rather do is have people recognise that as the world increasingly moves to become more digital, more remote, more distanced, our opportunity is to make more of analogue interactions, to make more of the in-person interactions. It used to be when the employees came to the office, let’s be candid, we took them for granted. We expected them to show up every morning, stay all day and leave that night. Now, if we’ve got employees coming, let’s make it so there’s a reason to come to the office and that reason shouldn’t be foosball tables and free lunch. Okay, those are fine and those are dandy, but no one’s sitting at home going, gosh, you know what I haven’t done in a while, played a game of foosball. Maybe I should go to work. Right. That’s not how humans think. They’re looking for connection. They’re looking for personal and emotional growth. They’re looking for meaning. Provide that. On the remote side though, you can still connect with them while they’re operating remotely. Here’s something I find fascinating, Chris and the lawyer in me really gets excited about this. So legally, anybody listening in the United States, if you’re an employer, you have to know the home address of your employee. You’re required to report that to the government for tax purposes. You often send them tax documents at home. You send them pay stubs, those type of things. Why is it that that’s the only thing you ever mail them? Why don’t you mail them gifts? Why don’t you have somebody show up at the door with some presence for their kids or their spouse? Why not unexpectedly coordinate with their spouse? Oh wait, you don’t know if they’re married or not, or what their relationship status is? Are they really part of the family? Are you that personally connected or is this somebody that you’re just counting as a number? Why not coordinate with their spouse and say, Hey, Jenna has been working like crazy here for the last three weeks. She has been just crushing it and doing, but we know we’ve been pushing it. So what I’d love to ask you is where’s her favourite place to take the whole family to dinner? Oh, loves taking us out to Olive Garden. That’s just, that’s our place with the breadsticks. We’re all about the breadsticks. Let’s do it. Great. We’re going to treat the whole family to dinner at Olive Garden. We can do this one of two ways. Either I’ll send you a gigantic Olive Garden gift certificate and you take the family and pay for it. Or if you want to tell me what your order is, we can have the order delivered for dinner tomorrow night as a surprise. The investment of time and money that this takes is minuscule in comparison to the impact it would have on your team members.

Chris Dreyer:

Where can our audience go to learn more about you and get the book?

Joey Coleman:

Chris, I so appreciate it. The best place to get the book is anywhere that you like getting books, whether that’s Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local indie bookstore. One of the things that was really important to me was that the book came out in all formats the same day. So if you love hardcover books, you can write in and take notes. We got you. You want to read on your Kindle or your Nook? You’re good. There’s an ebook. You liked listening to my voice in our conversation today, guess what friends? There’s an audiobook that I narrate, so if you’re comfortable with my voice, you’re going to love listening to me at 3X speed fast as you can, so you can get through the book faster. Available anywhere you’re looking for books. If you want more information, come to my website. It’s joeycoleman.com. That’s J-O-E-Y, like a five-year-old or a baby kangaroo. Coleman, C-O-L-E-M-A-N, like the camping equipment, but no relation, joeycoleman.com. There’s information there, not only about customer experience, but employee experience. And my hope is that in our conversation today, folks have gotten at least an idea or two that they can try. But more importantly, I hope you’re slightly thinking differently about what it means to have an employee journey. An employee is with you for a period of time. It’s just as important to pay attention to the time before they join you, the process of hiring and joining you, the training, onboarding, and then the long-term adoption and advocacy retention as it is to say, oh, do we need an employee? Yeah. If you need an employee, that’s the investment you need to make in terms of your time and care.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Joey for sharing his wisdom today. Let’s go over some of the actionable tools you can add to your kit and level up your firm. First off, train for aptitude. Traits like curiosity and optimism are much more difficult to train than how to use your preferred software. As attorneys and firm owners, you’re in the trenches together day in and day out. How you show up for each other and for your clients have a lasting impact.

Joey Coleman:

My question to everyone listening is, is there a question you could ask in your firm when hiring a new team member that would give you the insight as to their personality, their character?

Chris Dreyer:

Next up, make your new hires feel welcome and wanted. Go beyond orientation. Onboarding should include multiple touchpoints that reflect your firm’s values, cultures and expectations. Take time to construct a managed series of contacts that help the new hire feel valued from the first day.

Joey Coleman:

It’s an invitation to join something bigger than themselves, not a first day on the job experience, not a Hey, you’re now an employee with us experience, but rather a warm, welcoming experience.

Chris Dreyer:

This is a great way to avoid the dreaded new hire remorse, send tech, swag, and book packages and intervals before day one. This communication helps the new hire get excited about the job and gives additional opportunities to evaluate if the job really was the right one for them.

Joey Coleman:

So the question is, how are you communicating with people between the time they accept and the time they start to reaffirm their decisions?

Chris Dreyer:

To grab your copy of Joey’s new book, Never Lose An Employee Again, check out the show notes. While you’re checking out those resources, scroll to the bottom and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right everybody, thanks for hanging out.