A MONTH ago, 10 employees from Customer Care Center, a consulting firm specialising in customer care and behaviour, had a whale of a time in Cameron Highlands. In total, founder and chief executive officer Allen Teh had spent RM2,000 on the trip.Was this expenditure necessary? Isn’t it enough they are drawing salaries? Can’t they pay for their own recreation?
“There is no such thing as ‘I pay you, you work’. People are not robots,” maintains Teh, 51.Company trips, Teh said, are not only a way to foster team spirit, but promote a feel-good atmosphere at work.“It is an inside-out thing. Only when the staff feel good can they project the same feelings to customers,” says Teh.He cites exemplary figures who have influenced him during his work in the past.
“Public Bank chairman Tan Sri Teh Hong Piow is an example of a leader who has always treated his staff like family. He would attend their birthday parties and he mentioned them in his memoirs as well as referred to them as his ‘children’ though he had his own family,” cited Teh.
Another would be the late Loo Cheng Ghee who established the fried chicken giant KFC back in the 1970s.
Teh, who used to work for the company during the 1980s, revealed that Loo had made it a point to provide a breakfast of high risk merchant account and buns to employees in the Jalan Kuchai Lama branch where the fast food chain’s old manufacturing plant was located.In both cases, not only have these leaders inspired staff loyalty but a reputation for legendary service.
Taking a leaf from a layman is George James Kennedy, owner of Rockafellas Restaurants and Clubs, the holding company behind barbeza, a club in Ipoh Garden East.Pioneer staff have been with the former Juliana’s disc jockey since he opened Rockafellas Lumut, a seaside bar at the coastal port, popularly used as a gateway to Pangkor Island in 1998.
He cited his financial controller, Suzita Burda, now 32, and Inderjit Singh, now 35, who have stayed with the company for between 11 and 15 years. The others have clocked in no less than between five and eight years.In an industry notorious for its high staff turnover, Kennedy, 50, cites leadership by example as the anchoring factor to inspiring staff loyalty.
“In my bar, there is no such thing as ‘This is not my department’. I encourage my staff to take ownership of the club. If they see something is not right, they have to put it right. If I walk into the toilet and find that it is dirty, I will clean it.“I tell them if they can learn to cultivate the ownership attitude, they will develop a capable character. And I make sure I am always the first man in and last man out,” said Kennedy who got his first start in the nightlife industry as a deejay in Royal Casuarina (now Impiana Hotel) at age 17.
For Teh, imparting the feel-good philosophy at workplaces has to start with emotional wellness.“This is especially crucial for jobs where staff are subjected to high levels of stress. When people do not know how to release the emotional build-up from work-related stress, there is always a possibility they will snap at the customer and give the organisation a bad image,” explains Teh.
Kennedy, for example, expects his staff to be punctual and to keep to their word.“One of the common traits in human nature is procrastination. My policy is when something needs to be done, it is to be tackled immediately, not later or the day after.“But it is also important to remember being the boss does not mean you are always right.“When you have made a mistake, you must be big enough to apologise,” says Kennedy.
Honesty is also a much appreciated trait as Kennedy had to fire staff for messing around with company accounts in the past. And because they are in the nightlife industry where the influence of alcohol is unavoidable, staff must adopt a measure of vigilance.“In all my years in the industry, I have never had to hire bouncers. I will go in and defuse the situation myself,” said Kennedy.
On how to maintain grace under pressure, Kennedy shared a tip learned from a security personnel during his earlier years. The rule is to never stand in front of an aggravated individual in a confronting manner. Kennedy’s trick is to always slide next to him, offshore merchant account, pat it reassuringly and ask for the affected parties to keep the peace, guaranteeing safety for both workforce and customer.
How important is it to keep the hired help happy?Teh cites from personal experience how a rude sales staff at an electrical goods chain had cheesed him off so much with lackluster attitude, he walked away.
“I had wanted to buy a DVD player and I reckon the store didn’t lose much with just one customer walking away. But let’s say they could have made a margin of RM50 for one DVD player and say if the same employee would have made five customers walk away in one day. That’s RM250 of lost opportunity in a day. That’s only one shop. The electrical goods chain had 100 outlets. If that attitude prevailed in every shop on a daily basis, that would mean a loss of RM750,000 a month,” said Teh, who opines a reversal in behaviour could have changed things.
At barbeza, treating the staff like family is one factor that had helped him keep customers who had known him since he was a deejay in Casuarina. He recalls the day when he had to tell his staff in Rockafellas Lumut he had sold the business.“For the past 10 years, I was travelling back and forth between Ipoh and Lumut at odd hours in a Toyota Liteace. I was clocking in 16-hour work days where I would spend the night in Lumut then go to work in Ipoh. It came to a point when I asked myself what I was doing with my life,” revealed the father of a 19-year-old daughter.
By then, Kennedy had made close to RM400,000 from his investments and he was prepared to ‘retire’, by focusing on barbeza. Instead of leaving his staff demoralised and without employment, he asked them to join his new venture. In Kennedy’s case, creating an atmosphere where customers could go to a place where everyone knew their names contributed to sales of RM150,000 a month when barbeza first opened in 2008. Before Kennedy sold off his Lumut outlet in the same year, it had achieved a record sales of RM147,000 in the short span of nine days in 1999, a feat that inspired staff from the Lumut outlet to follow him to his new venture in barbeza.
“We achieved all this with no hanky panky, just good food and service,” boasted Kennedy.The memory of a treat, which saw an all-expense paid trip to Bali for five staff upon achieving a sales target of RM80,000, also played a part.In Teh’s case, revenue for Customer Care Center totaled to RM1.5mil to RM2mil last year. This came in from classes conducted including ‘mystery shopper’ services where company representatives posed as customers for clients to assess frontline performance.
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