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While I have always thought I would write a book, my main focus these past few years has been to build a successful company that is a great partner and resource for service-oriented companies to deliver a great customer experience as well as reducing turnover and improving productivity. I also wanted to share my insights and some best practices around what we should be doing to improve corporate culture and your employees' experience. Before I get into this, let me give you a brief overview of the journey to date and why I want you to read this book.

A lot of my professional career has been involved with hotels and hospitality – operating them, managing them, or consulting for them. The biggest influence on how I operate my business today comes from my time with The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. The day I became a manager at the Ritz-Carlton in 1996, my boss told me that my first priority was no longer the guest but the employee. This was a hard lesson for me, and it took a while for me to understand, because up until that point, I had been entirely focused on creating the best possible guest experience. At that moment I had to shift from delivering great guest experiences to doing the same for my employees.

Making the employee experience a priority seems simple enough, yet for me initially, and I believe for many managers still today, this seems counterintuitive. After all, haven't we been told so many times that the customer is the most important person to our business? Well, let me begin with this reality for all business owners, executives, and managers–your employees are your most important asset and focus. I know we are told that we are in the customer experience economy but I believe we have already transitioned into the employee experience economy. Are you still waging a talent war? Let me tell you: the talent war is over and the talent won. If you do not start taking better care of your talent, then as company owners, executives, or managers, you will lose your best people and a lot of money.

Now this is not something new. Some of the most successful customer service organizations just happen to be the ones that take care of their staff the best. Starbucks' former CEO Howard Shultz put it perfectly when he said, “Our first priority was to take care of our people, because they were the ones responsible for communicating our passion to our customers. If we did that well, we'd accomplish our second priority, taking care of our customers.”2

For me happy employees equals happy customers so when I experience poor customer service and become frustrated, disappointed, or angry, it would be easy to blame the employee trying to take care of me. However, I would argue that he or she is only a small part of my poor customer experience story. Because while it is the employee's bad attitude or lack of effort that is frustrating me, the real problems are the managers and organizations behind employees that accept and many times incite that attitude or lazy behavior. I become frustrated with the employee but angry at the organization and managers who have allowed this problem to happen.

A couple of years ago I did a TV show on the Travel Channel called Resort Rescue. What stands out to me the most were the interactions I had with members of my production company, who always wanted me to get upset and freak out on all the employees I came across delivering poor customer service – as some of my reality show peers at the time were doing. However, I refused, because, as I explained over and over again, it wasn't the employee's fault. The owners or managers were the real villains in this poor customer service story; therefore, any frustrations should be directed toward them.

You see, it is the employees' experience at work and how their managers treat them that creates the attitude they display and is responsible for the effort they exert.

Poor customer service is often the result of a poor attitude or a lack of effort from an employee, which is often the result of a poor employee experience. Over the years as I have worked with and consulted for many organizations seeking to improve their customer experience abilities, and invariably at some point we would talk about those elements of the employee experience that were failing to instill the type of mindset and attitude that their customers expected or deserved to receive. The company I founded, SGEi, has evolved from designing and delivering customer service skill training to leadership development to what is now the methodology and thinking behind the Culture Hacker concept.

As I considered, researched, and discussed what it meant to take care of employees in the workplace, it became more and more clear that if I truly wanted to impact customer service and experience, this was the way I could do it. One article early on that sparked my thinking came from Time magazine's Health and Wellness issue back in 2005 – before everyone was really getting on the work culture bandwagon. The article noted:

Researchers in psychology, economics, and organizational behavior have been gradually discovering that the experience of being happy at work is similar across all professions. People who love their jobs feel challenged by their work but in control of it, have bosses who make them feel appreciated, and co-workers that they like. They can find meaning in what they do.3

To inspire better service, we needed to focus on creating happier and more engaged employees. As Timothy R. Clark, CEO of LeaderFactor, a consulting and training organization, says, “Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.”4

Now, although the employee mindset has a significant impact on customer experience, it can also influence so much more. Employees' mindsets determine how much effort they will put into their jobs and their overall performance. Effort is important regardless of the industry or job, so employee mindset and experience matter in every business. Over the years, I have implemented our training and Culture Hacker methodology in hospitality, of course, but also in sports entertainment, retail, manufacturing, the automotive industry, real estate, the airline industry, the technology sector, on cruise ships, and at malls. We have worked with companies large and small, well established and start-ups. Regardless of your focus, if you want your people to perform better, then our methodology to improve the employee experience should be a priority for you. And, of course, this is a global issue, indicated by the fact that we have worked with companies in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Great Britain.

In addition, how people feel about coming to work is going to impact your ability to retain them. If they are not happy, they probably are not going to stick around for long, especially younger workers who are a lot more comfortable moving between jobs and industries than earlier generations are. The bottom line is, the main reason so many organizations fail to keep their best and brightest talent is that they do not understand or focus on how to make their people happy at work.

Now, I hear you saying “But I thought this book was all about culture.” It is, because “culture” is defined as “the collective mindset and attitude of employees about what they do and who they do it for.” This mindset manifests itself in how employees do things or, in other words, their actions and behaviors when interacting with customers, peers, and the business itself. And culture is top of mind for many owners, executives, and managers today, as indicated by a recent Bersin by Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report that reads: “Employee engagement and culture issues exploded onto the scene, rising to become the number one challenge around the world in our study. An overwhelming 87 % of respondents believe the issue is ‘important,’ with 50 % citing the problem as ‘very important’ – double the proportion in [the previous] year's survey.”5 So there is obviously plenty of talk, but based on the continued lack of great customer service and high turnover rates, there is not enough action. Whether you like it or not, culture must be a priority in your business today.

So I came up with Culture Hacker, a methodology for improving the employee experience and mindset at work. The focus was simple and clear, with a quote from Campbell Soup CEO Douglas Conant guiding our thinking: “To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.”6 I wanted to help as many organizations as possible win in the workplace so their customers could receive a better experience. Over the years I have put together a great team of customer experience and human resources experts to execute on this Culture Hacker methodology with our clients.

When I talk about culture, I often get asked “Can you really change it?” My answer is yes, because I truly believe you can affect how people think and feel. Now, you can never control a person's attitude 100 % of the time, but I certainly think you can have a big impact on it. One of my favorite quotes on attitude is by Pastor Charles Swindoll, who suggests that life is 10 % what happens to people and 90 % how they respond to it.7 I believe that organizations have a 90 % chance of positively influencing how people feel about their jobs though the employee experience. This is an important idea, because while we might not be able to influence our employees' attitude 100 % of the time, it suggests that we can certainly make a difference most of the time. And that is an important point for me. Companies can do more to make their people feel better, which in turn will ensure better customer service. And yet many businesses are not and that really frustrates me.

Companies can improve their employees' mindset or change their culture but it is generally not some easy, short-term initiative, and it cannot just be made up along the way. The process of focusing on and evolving culture can never stop, because employees are always changing. Evolving a culture is a transformational process that requires its own plan, the right resources, a focus on the right things, and, most important, the right leaders. So even once you have the right culture in place, you need to constantly measure and check the pulse of your people as their expectations and those of your customers evolve.

Although Culture Hacker is about change, I suggest that a reason we have been so successful with our methodology is that we do not make a big deal about that change. We all know that when we start talking about change, people become uncomfortable, resistant, or even antagonistic. When you start making proclamations of change, people will get scared, which will cause them to be unable to contribute to or support any positive cultural transformation. Remember that when you loudly declare change is on the way, you will also cause the militant few to gather the troops and make it their life mission to resist anything that is suggested or implemented, no matter how positive the intended outcome. So as you approach the idea of hacking or transforming your culture, do it without all the fanfare. Speak loudly with your actions, not your words – like a hacker whose work happens without the end user noticing any change, at least initially. This is the core of our Culture Hacker approach – being subtle and exact, without causing a lot of fuss or distress.

As an example of what not to do consider this example from a client I worked with. A company executive sent a video out to the entire company, stating that their culture was broken and it was time for change. Talk about adopting the completely wrong approach toward change and improving their culture. We saw an employee base that became not only frozen by the idea of change but also miserable, because they were told that their culture and, more specifically, that they as service providers were broken. Rather than promoting a large cultural change and telling everyone that the culture is off, we quietly focus in on individual mechanisms (as explained in this book) that are relatively easy to explain and manipulate, even though they are a part of a larger change effort. Simply put, Culture Hacker is about making big changes quietly.

I want to mention here in the introduction the importance of technology. Technology is changing – and, arguably, enhancing – every aspect of our lives, our jobs, and even the employee experience. New technology is changing how our staffs work, and so it is important that we recognize that the employee experience of the future and many of the mechanisms that influence our employees' mindsets will be managed and organized by technology. Today technology is prevalent in interviewing, onboarding, communication mechanisms, performance management, recognition, career development, and training. So what is the relationship between technology and culture? In their Harvard Business Review article, Ashley Goldsmith and Leighanne Levensaler proposed this: “[W]e like to think of values as the beating heart of culture, processed and organizational structure as the brain, and technology as the nervous system that makes sure heart and head are working together to move us forward.”8 To reiterate this idea, in each chapter we have indicated some technology companies that might be effective partners in a particular area of improving the employee experience. We recommend learning more about the many solutions out there because technology is going to be prevalent in crafting any employee experience, whether we like it or not.

Finally, let's talk about money, specifically how much you pay your employees. Although this book explains the most influential mechanisms that define how your staffers feel about coming to work, I do not spend time discussing salaries or wages. The reason is twofold. First, research indicates that money is not a strong motivator in employee performance and engagement.9 Generally, once basic needs have been met, money is not the motivator we think it is. Second, I do not focus on salary or wages because I recognize that it is often not an easy variable to change, especially in a small business or when you are not in a position to effect salary increases. So the Culture Hacker methodology focuses on everything else that can influence the culture and mindset of employees.

Speaking of small businesses, because I have owned, coached, and managed a few of them over the years, I am very aware of the stresses and challenges associated with owning and running such ventures. As a result, I wrote this book with small business owners in mind too. The lessons and practices offered apply just as easily to small companies as to large ones. In fact, I've written this book in such a way that small business owners with limited or no human resources infrastructure can and must use the tactics herein to stay competitive and grow.

I wrote this book to share my insights, best practices, and inspiration for how you can create, manage, or hack your culture – to improve your customers' experiences, your employee retention, and organizational performance. By impacting all three things I know there are direct benefits to the profitability and performance of any company, which is why I believe the focus on culture should be a priority for every business person today. Thank you for reading, and thank you for wanting to make a difference in how your people feel about coming to work. There's one more nice side effect of all this – it will make you happier at work too!