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- [00:00]
Courtney Johnson
Foreign. Welcome to Slay the Gatekeeper. I'm your host Courtney Johnson and I am here to un gatekeep the gatekeeped. Thank you so much for being here. Enjoy. Welcome Matt to Slay the Gatekeeper. Super, super excited you're here. You've got some good cheat codes that you're going to share with us today and I would love if you just want to introduce yourself to the listeners.
- [00:30]
Matt Reek
Sure. So my name is Matt Reek and I am the author of a book called the Employee Retention Bible. And I'm also the chief human resources officer for In Zone Insurance out in Anaheim, California. And let's see, I've got three kids and three bulldogs and so my life is always full one way or the other.
- [00:51]
Courtney Johnson
Beautiful. Well, I know we're going to dive into some employee retention cheat codes, but before we get into that, I have another cheat code that I saw on your LinkedIn and this is too good not to talk about. And that is what you think about yourself determines your income. Tell me, tell me about this, Matt.
- [01:10]
Matt Reek
Self perception and the confidence that you carry about yourself will determine how much money you make. And I know that sounds simple or easy, but let me, let me give a good side of that and a bad side of that. So I'll give the bad side first. How many of us have worked for umpteen number of people in our lives and been like, how in the world is is that person in that position? Like they have no idea what's going on. And the unfortunate and honest answer for all of us is that they thought that they could, so they tried and they did. And so where all of us have all these stories inside of our own heads where we say like, I don't think I would be able to do that because I don't have this certification, I don't have this many years experience, I didn't go to this school, I don't have this background, I don't have these connections. It's all a bunch of BS that we tell ourselves in order to keep ourselves subjugated. So what you really have to do is don't be your own self rejector. Like if, if there's something that you want to go after and get it, just try. So the worst that happens is they say no, which is what you thought was going to happen already anyway. But if they say yes or they give you some kind of an in, you can move towards that. All of these folks that are above us in organizations or in life in different ways, none of them are that much smarter than us or that much better than us in any way. Nobody's better than anybody else. So the way that you think about yourself and carry yourself and think about what you deserve and what you accept in life is where you'll end up. So a lot of times we get in our own way.
- [02:41]
Courtney Johnson
I love that. I think that's so important. I always call this the audacity. Like people that are really successful just have the audacity to think that they can be. And there's a lot of people who almost self in prison. They have, they're smart, they're, they're great. But they keep themselves small.
- [02:58]
Matt Reek
Yeah, they keep themselves small and they keep themselves down and they don't even realize it. And it's, it's the thought process. A lot of times if you talk to people, like, look at the current job market, for instance, if you look at the job market right now and you say, okay, well, most companies give people a 3% raise every year, right? And I've been in HR for like 25 years in one facet or another. And so I'll tell people, no, give them like 5 to 7%. They'll be like, no, we can't afford that. And I'll be like, really? So you can't afford to keep them long term. You can't afford to keep the people that you recruited, trained, developed, spent all this time on that you think are great people and you're going to have them go work somewhere else? Because the average is 3.2% right now for people that are stay within their own company and to leave a company and go to another company, it's 17.9% is the average right now of the income bump that you're going to get. So what happens a lot of times is smart, capable people are somewhere for three to four years and then they jump and they just do this every three to four years and skyrocket their income. Well, how do companies keep them? Well, maybe the answer is just to pay a little bit more upfront and then not have to start over with somebody else you don't even know is going to be good. So it's that kind of thought process that puts companies behind, Courtney?
- [04:05]
Courtney Johnson
Yeah, yeah, that's really important because I think a lot of, a lot of companies don't think long term. And you're right, it is so expensive to hire someone to train somebody new. And let's get into some of the ways that we can actually retain employees. This first cheat code is that most companies are just not using social Media for employee recognition. So I'm curious. I mean, I am such a big advocate for personal brand on social. If you have a company page, you need to be putting out the people that work for that company. So tell me how entrepreneurs that are listening to this can utilize social media for employee retention or to boost their employees and share about them.
- [04:43]
Matt Reek
Okay, so I wrote a whole chapter in my book about this because it's so ridiculous that every company I think doesn't do this because it's completely free if all you do. Let's just give a really easy example. Let's say that we've got Bob and Bob is our employee. All you need to do is take a nice picture of Bob or ask him to send you his picture and do two paragraphs. So that format will work on every single thing that we're going to talk about. So every company should have a company. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. Even if you just want to do the print ones, even if you don't want to do video ones where you can just put photos, you know, Twitter X, whatever it's called. Right now all, all of those are just a photo and some words, right? So if that's the case, every single year, every month of the year, you can have an employee of the month, or if you don't want to call it that, you can call it employee spotlight. Right? So if you just take that employee spotlight and that's Bob for this month and you say this is why Bob is a great employee and you put that to an internal email to your company and then everywhere out on social media. Okay, so what would that do? What, what's benefit of that for a company? Okay, so first of all, Bob gets recognition specifically for what he is good at. So internally in the email to everybody else in your company, you're not only recognizing Bob and giving him praise so he feels like he wants to stay, but you're also telling people what you as a company find important and what behavior you want repeated. So Bob does this. It's really effective. He's great about this. So everybody in the company goes, oh, I want to make my boss happy too. So they repeat that behavior. So benefit to the employee and the company. Now it goes all around social media. Now that brands for employee recognition. So people looking at the company that might want to work there, they know, hey, this is a good company to work for. They recognize their employees. You get free media and free reach out of it. That a company doesn't have to pay $25 million a year in marketing for that nobody watches. Right? That happens all the time. So. And you blast it cross platform, okay? So there's 12 months in the year. So you got 12 employees of the month a year. Okay? Now you've got all your new hires. Now you've got people that hit their 5, 10, 15 year anniversaries. Now you've got a charitable time off program. Maybe you give employees two more days off a year and they can go help at the Red Cross. When like the disaster help happened in Florida or the fires in California, they go help for two days and they give a couple pictures and that's a story. And the employee gets a couple days off and the company gets recognized for helping the communities that it works in. And you just keep adding to this and you just keep doing it, Courtney. And all of this is completely free and to huge benefit to the company and the employees. And so then every single company has sales leaders every quarter, you know, service leaders every quarter. If you're tracking KPIs and you know, safety awards for something somebody you know made a close call, whatever happens to be. There's a million things that different companies have that you can literally just drop into social media with one picture, two paragraphs. You can put five hashtags if you want on every platform and it's done and it's free. And the level of a person that you have to have do this, you don't have to have like a chief marketing officer to do this. In fact, probably whoever at your company is best at social media, it should just be given to and you can track it on a free Excel spreadsheet. So it's like that simple. But it has to belong to somebody, Courtney. Because if you talk about Bob's five year anniversary and what he did and you miss Susan's like, Susan's going to be pissed. Like she's probably going to leave. And so like you have to have it be somebody's responsibility. But you know, the lift on this, this is not like more than 5 to 10 minutes work each time they do something like this. Not a whole job for somebody. So the fact that companies don't do this and it's free is nuts to me.
- [08:12]
Courtney Johnson
Yeah, yeah. A really tactical way to implement this is just have a form that you have every single person fill out when you're onboarding them that has their bio a little bit about themselves, what they like to do. You could take that form, put it in a chatgpt, get you the copy for these social post. I want to highlight, you know, I want to highlight Matt and here's his forum answers and it says Matt likes to water ski or whatever and do all these things and we want to shout him out.
- [08:37]
Matt Reek
And I mean look, look at, go down the LinkedIn feed for most companies. First of all, most companies hardly post on LinkedIn. Maybe they want to do a new territory or hired a new VP and that'll be like their post for six months or something. This is all free content and you have whole marketing teams at companies that don't do this stuff when it's completely free and it would make the employees feel great. Your recruitment is easier your ret way up because people stay like, why in the world are companies not doing this? It doesn't make any sense to me, Courtney.
- [09:03]
Courtney Johnson
It also is the best performing types of content for company pages. Like I have managed probably 200 company LinkedIn pages in my career and every time I would pull a report for top performing posts, it is always company recognition. So this really works on the marketing side. Beautiful. Okay, we have our next cheat code here. Which is the biggest point of failure for businesses is that they don't train their manager in management when they promote them. Tell me what, what this means.
- [09:36]
Matt Reek
Okay, so there's an old and by the way, I'm not that smart. Most of the stuff that I've learned over the years I've stolen from people that were way smarter than me in my discipline and I've just regurgitated it to try to help people understand things. So I'll use one that's not mine and that's the widget maker scenario. And for anybody that doesn't know what that is, that means that if you've got a whole line of people on your floor doing whatever, selling insurance, making tires, whatever your company does that they're making that widget and then you go, oh gosh, I as the owner, you know, need to go back out and sell. I need to, you know, generate sales, generate new contracts, everything. I need to have somebody manage the widget makers, whoever that is and whatever you make. So you're like, okay, so Bob is the person that makes the most widgets per hour. Which is how companies look at this, Courtney. Right? They're like, okay, so put Bob over all the other widget makers. Well, it's the stupidest thing that you can do because maybe instead you should go, who is the best leader of people that can motivate people, that people like to work for, that people will be happy to come into work to every day to be able to Ask questions to and trust and look up to. That's the person that you have to promote. But they promote the person that makes the most widgets. Then they wonder why people don't want to work for them. People get disgruntled, People do the bare minimum. People check out, people leave. It's because they have no support in the management. And the other thing that is so silly about that is that you expect just because Bob can make widgets that he has any idea how to manage people. So companies just like, okay, Bob is the manager now. Well, yeah. Did you teach Bob how to be a manager? Did you teach him, like, how to do reviews? Did you teach him how to motivate people to teach him, like, how to really do an effective schedule so that everybody's happy? Did you go through a whole checklist of things to make sure that Bob can be an effective manager? Or you just went, I think he's the most responsible dude. Throw him into it and he'll do fine. Sometimes that works if it's like a good person that people like. But a lot of the time it does it, and we've all worked for those people and it sucks. But why do we do that as companies? Just because they're a manager, we don't have to train them is so stupid.
- [11:37]
Courtney Johnson
Yeah, I've been on the other side of that too. I've been, like, promoted to being a manager and not having those skills, and I'm like, wait, what? I'm. I've been doing copywriting and now I'm managing, like, a marketing team. I need management resources. Beautiful. All right, we've got our next cheat code, and that is get rid of high performing jerks. That's hard, especially if they're really high performing.
- [11:58]
Matt Reek
Layla Hermozi has a really good thought process on this. When I listened to a podcast that she was on and what she was saying was that, you know, if. If you have a higher performing jerk, he's made everybody else's life so miserable to work around him because the arrogance, because of the talking down to people, because of everything that comes with that. And maybe that person has the best sales numbers or they lead the most effective team, but everybody hates them and they hate working for them and they hate coming to work. So what do you get out of that? And how does that even happen? Like, that should be an easily recognizable thing. Like, yeah, Bob has the best numbers by far, but he's a complete jerk to everybody. We have to get rid of him. That's like a natural thing that would make sense to somebody thinking about it. But we have to think of perception, like, how does this even happen? And it happens because when the person above Bob is looking down, they go, man, Bob is killing it. And he makes sales over everybody else. And why can't everybody else be like Bob? So when somebody complains, says, ah, Bob, they go, are you just jealous? Like, what is it? Why can't you get along with Bob? He's killing it at the job that I gave him to do. So what happens is it will generally spin up until it becomes a big problem and then it's let go so long. And people have lost faith in their leaders because they didn't do anything about it for so long. And they said, you know, whatever you kind of let happen is what really is acceptable to the culture of your company, right? And so if you have a high performing jerk and you let that person go, what usually happens is everybody else blooms, everybody else can get sunlight because somebody chopped off the big tree that's soaking up all the sunlight above, and everybody else kind of grows up around it. And so it's just, it's a decision that companies have to make, but they're blind to the fact that it's hurting everybody else around them. So collectively, you might think it's helping your numbers. But I bet you if you remove that person, your culture will grow and the other people will grow up and make up that revenue.
- [13:50]
Courtney Johnson
How do you identify if someone's being a jerk? Like you're looking down on it? Is this like company surveys? This like interviewing people? Is this like in your one on ones you're trying to like get the, the gossip on who's annoying everyone? Like, how do you find out who that person is? Or should it be pretty obvious?
- [14:06]
Matt Reek
I, I think that interviewing is not what we would all hope it would be. And what I mean by that, Courtney, is that I have interviewed hundreds of people over the course of my career and I've made good decisions and terrible decisions and all from a place of like, good hearted judgment about like skills and attitude and everything else. And what happens is that some people are just really good at interviewing and then they show up and after a couple months you're like, who is this person? Because they killed it in the interview and they're terrible now and then sometimes you're like, I just need a body. This is like the best person out of everybody I interviewed. I got to get somebody in there to do this work. And you throw them in and they're great. So it's not always something that can be deciphered in the interview process. But what I would tell you is that if the complaints are things like, you know, he's so much better than everybody else, but, like, nobody else can, like, catch up, that kind of stuff, that's probably rooted in jealousy and some silliness and that kind of stuff. But if the complaints are, like, he really talks poorly to other people, he talks down to people, he makes people miserable with his interactions. He was, you know, belligerent or cussed at him or yelled at him or this type of stuff where systemically this is happening. Like, anybody can have a bad day, but when it gets repeated and it goes throughout multiple people, then, like, an organization has a responsibility to be like, if you're at the top, you can still keep Bob. If you say to him, listen, like, whether it's how to Win Friends and Influence People or any number of great books that are out on this topic, like how you treat people and what results you get, the thing that you have to tell them is, like, you have to make a correction to how you're being perceived and how you interact with others, because you're fantastic and I want you here and your results are great, but if you don't change things, I can't have you here negatively affecting everybody else. And that's where it has to go. And if they can't make the correction, then you have to get rid of them.
- [15:48]
Courtney Johnson
Yeah, it's like a toxic poison in your organization.
- [15:53]
Matt Reek
Yeah, it's going to. It's going to just infect everything else, Courtney. It's not good for the organization long term. Really?
- [15:59]
Courtney Johnson
Yeah. Well, our next cheat code is something that I have not implemented, that I'm going to start implementing, and that is all company meetings. What's the best structure way to do this? Why is this even important?
- [16:12]
Matt Reek
To be completely honest, I consulted for about six years, and what I will tell you is most companies don't understand how terrible their communication is, and they have no mechanism in place to communicate with their employees. Really. And so, like, what you'll see is like a yearly investor meeting where they go talk to the board and their investors about the stocks, but that doesn't have any to do with the employees. So every single company and every single group of leaders in a company has at least quarterly financials. Trust me, they look at them daily, if not weekly, if not monthly, at least quarterly. They know exactly what the results are, and their stockholders know what their results are. So if you know what your results are quarterly, then why is it so hard just to disseminate that information to your employees? So I'll give you an example. Company I'm at is at 900 people. When I got here a year and a half ago, it was 268 people. So it's exploded in growth. So we thought, how in the world, with that many people coming on every quarter are we going to be able to get a message to them about, like really simply, here's where we are, here is where we're going, and then here's how we're going to get there together. If you just do that, like, like the structure we use is not the one that everybody has to use. But I get on, I tell people what this meeting is because it might be a whole bunch of people's first meeting. And then you lay out the structure. You're going to talk about your high performers that quarter, any awards that you did that quarter. You're going to talk about new territories or states or updates to products or new products. The company's coming out. You're just going to get everybody on the same page. And then the leader of the company or somebody that can actually speak to people in a way that people understand if that's not the leader of the company, just gets on and says what I said, this is where we're at, this is where we're going and this is how we're going to get there together. If you think about it, do you really want people to go more than a quarter of the year without knowing what's going on at the company and how you're moving forward together? Like if your company is moving fast and developing, you need to do at least that. And there's no cost to this. It's, it's a 30 minute, you know, teams zoom, Google, meet that you can get on and talk to everybody and invite everybody all at once. And so that's, that's the bare minimum that every company should have in place. Now if you go downline, because we still have in person, we have hybrid, we have remote workers, right? And you know, as silly it is as it is, you often have people in their office on a teams call with person in the next office, right? Like that's how kind of silly American work culture has become sometimes. And what that ends up turning into is like, why is there not a mechanism in place where you do at least a weekly team meeting with your individual team every week? So, you know, you probably shouldn't have more than 12 people, right, directly reporting to one person because too Many to manage effectively. So if you get on with your 1 to 12 people a week and you have a quick teams meeting and you go, hey, Courtney, how was your weekend? What'd you do? And they talk about it a little bit. So everybody's a little bit interconnected. You go, okay, so what did you have last week? Okay, I hit a B and C. Okay, what do you have this week? I had a B and C. Maybe C didn't get done last week and I need to work with Bob to get it done. Okay, we'll do that. And then you go through the whole team. Everybody has an idea of exactly where everybody's at, what's going on with them, a little bit of a personal view, whatever they're comfortable sharing. And then, you know, doesn't need to be more than 20 minutes once a week, like Monday at 10am and how simple is that to interconnect everybody? But why in the world are companies not doing this? It doesn't make any sense to me.
- [19:31]
Courtney Johnson
Why do you think companies aren't doing it? Is it like.
- [19:33]
Matt Reek
No, I think they don't know how I think that they haven't. Somebody had somebody say, because everybody I have said this to like, just try a weekly team meeting, 20 minutes once a week. Just go through the structure I just gave you. It's so simple. And then companies put in a quarterly all meeting and they're like, oh, all of a sudden I walk around and like people know my name of the executives when. When I used to walk through where they just put their head down at their computer and do their work. This kind of stuff, it's like it just humanize yourself a little bit. On the all company meeting, you even say like, these are the goals that we hit this quarter that we're after. These are the ones that we missed. And this is what we're going to do to try to make it up next quarter. Like, it's. Failure is completely acceptable and normal in business and in life. So you can talk about where you did well and where you need to fix. And it humanizes people and lets people feel like they can talk to you. And that breeds communication, it breeds a good culture, all of that.
- [20:18]
Courtney Johnson
Yeah, beautiful. Yeah. It does seem so obvious, but I have been at very few places that actually implement it, so this would be a great resource for these folks. Okay, our last cheat code is succession planning. Whenever you sent this, I'm like, I don't even know what succession planning means. Please explain.
- [20:38]
Matt Reek
Okay, so succession planning means if. And by the way, I'VE been through a lot of succession planning training through the years. I'll give the the easiest explanation and formula that I've ever stolen from somebody that was smarter than me. So if somebody is in a role and they're going to leave that role, it's simply saying who on the team will be able to take over that role for them if they leave. And we know that a lot of Companies have like 20 plus percent attrition a year, right? So then if that's the case, you're going to lose 20% of your people this year. Then you go, you know, I need to know who's going to be able to take that spot. And yeah, that can kind of be like, you know, in the moment you can try to figure that out. But why do you not have a plan for the whole company? So everybody from the CEO all the way down that's in any kind of a management role needs to have a succession plan in place. And this is the easiest formula I've ever seen to do it. You're simply going to say this is the person's name and title. You're going to succession plan for who on their team can take over for them. And then if you don't have somebody on their team that was like in a year of two in realistic training that can take over for them, which is like actually pretty rare. Like people think that they're so far above everybody else, they're not. Like in a year or two you can catch just about anybody up. So if you go, this is the person that could take over for them. But if you don't, if you're like, you know, nobody has this skill set or this certification or anything like that, you know, you have a hole there. So in the next time that you hire somebody on your team, you better hire somebody that you can train and develop into that role. Right? So who's the person that's going to be replaced? Who can replace them on the team? How long would it take for you to train and develop the person to be able to take over for that role? And the last one, number four is most important and that is what skills would the person that's going to come up into the role need that they don't have now? Because if you can identify, Courtney would take over for Bob and she would need six months and she'd need these two skills that she doesn't have right now or they need to be developed. That becomes your training plan for Courtney for the next six months. So that's so easy for managers to go, oh, that's really obvious. Courtney needs to be able to have this certification and be able to work this program that she doesn't have experience with right now. And the next six months she can work in that. And so. But companies don't do this. And so every single company, all the way down. And one of the reasons that companies don't have this in place is that they either complicate it, like I said, they make it way more complicated than that. And two, that there's fear. So if you don't have a good culture in your company and I'm in a position and Courtney is in the position right below me, a lot of people won't want to train and develop that person right below them because they think, oh, they'll take my job. But no, you should be looking up already to see I want to take this next job. So if I'm going to move up in a company, then I better have my replacement ready for my boss so that they can move into my role so that I can move up. That's my responsibility. So you have to have the self confidence in yourself and the feeling of self worth to be like, yeah, I'm not afraid to train Courtney because I think she'll be great with these skills in this amount of time and then I can move up to where I want to go. So that's how people should look at it. But people sometimes, if they've had bad experiences or they've been in organizations that were kind of crappy like that, where they had that culture, then they won't want to train because of fear. But really, if the culture is healthy, everybody should always be training and developing. Everyone. Because if you're not, you're like top 20% of people, Courtney, you're A players. They're not going to stay if you don't have a path for them to develop, to be able to get more responsibility, make more money, you know, get further into the organization, why in the world would they stay instead of bouncing to somewhere else? It doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't. So that's where with your A players you have to develop that path and succession planning is how you do it.
- [24:07]
Courtney Johnson
Yeah, I think that's amazing because that really taps into like an abundance mentality rather than a fear based mentality. And there is, there can be an organization such like a grip to where you are now and you're feeling threatened that somebody could come up and take, take the role. But you're right, it does start with Culture. And if you're creating a culture around growth, you can position this as something that's very exciting, that everybody can be stepping into the next thing. And the next thing, that's really beautiful. Are there any other cheat codes for retention that you would like to share?
- [24:38]
Matt Reek
If you talk to your managers right now and you ask your managers this question, which is, what are you doing right now to train and develop your employees? And if your answer is something to the effect that, well, they're doing their jobs and if they have questions, they come and ask me, you are in trouble. Like, so even if that has to be somebody at your company that's good in training and development or in hr, whatever, it happens to be somebody that's good at training people, comes along and puts together materials or helps you put together. It's not that difficult for anybody to put together a PowerPoint deck on what they know and be able to train other people. But what happens is people don't think about the fact that they have knowledge that other people just don't have and they're afraid to share that because of how they'll be perceived. And so rather than just doing like death by PowerPoint and everything is like a million details, put two or three things on a slide you want to talk about and share some of your personal experiences and life stories and career stories and how they feed into it. And you can train and develop your people on stuff. But if you do not train and develop your people, then you're going to have to spend all this time training new people to come in when those old people go out because they're completely disengaged. And if you start training and developing your people and people are glazed or you can tell people are done with you, it probably means that you need to spend more time one on one with your people because they're disconnected from you. And you can usually feel that pretty easily if you have some self awareness. But I would tell companies that investing everything that you can in training and development to, you know, Mr. Beast has a great talk about this where he says, I don't want to train somebody for six months and then they leave in a year because they have these great skills and go, I want to train somebody for a year and then for the next nine years they grow and develop and I pay them more every year because they become more valuable to me and they can do more for me and they do more for the organization. And that's the way you have to look at it. You have to look at this with Longevity because companies have behaved so badly in the last several years with the mass layoffs and everything else. It's broken a trust where people don't really think that their company is a home in a lot of times. Courtney. And so if, if that's the case, you really only need one good person that you're connected to at a company in management or leadership that you're like, I can work for. Bob. They're a great person. I really like going to work every day. They're kind to me, they answer my questions, they help me, they try to train me. And, and so that's what you have to remember, is that we've all had a great coach, a great mentor, a great teacher, whatever it happens to be that we really looked up to, that we have love for in our heart. And if you remember the things that made that person great to you, you can be that to somebody else, too. If you're in a leadership role, all you have to do is give your time and your knowledge and other people will appreciate it. And that's what builds that bond and that's what keeps people.
- [27:15]
Courtney Johnson
Yeah, I love that. That's so beautiful and actionable. Well, Matt, where can people find you? Where, how can they read your book? How can they dive deeper into retention?
- [27:24]
Matt Reek
So they can find me on my website, which is mattreke.com and the funny spelling of the last name is R I E C K. And then they can find my book on Amazon. It's called the Employee Retention Bible. And they've got it in, I think Kindle, paperback and hardcover if they want to check it out. And you can always reach me on LinkedIn if you have any direct questions. I'm happy to hop on there. And if people want follow ups, I've got many years. I show my age of HR material saved up that I'm always willing to share with people to try to help them train and develop their folks.
- [27:53]
Courtney Johnson
Beautiful. Thank you so much.
- [27:56]
Matt Reek
Yeah, it was wonderful. Thank you for having me on, Courtney.
- [27:59]
Courtney Johnson
Okay, y'all, if you like this episode, you would love, love my Patreon. Okay? You get exclusive access to me, exclusive content, tons of other resources and a lot of juicy shit. Okay? So I hope to see you on my Patreon.