In the book Finding & Keeping Great Employees, co-authored by my friend, Dr. Joan Brannick (with Dr. Jim Harris), four core cultures are described:

1. A Culture of Customer Service—examples are Nordstrom, Home Depot, Ritz-Carlton and (the place where I learned about superior guest service) Walt Disney World.
2. A Culture of Innovation—examples include Intel, Cisco Systems and Netscape.  In this environment the underlying organizational purpose is to create and shape the future.
3. A Culture of Operational Excellence—examples include GE, McDonald’s and L.L. Bean—organizations that minimize costs while maximizing productivity and efficiency.
4. The Culture of Spirit—examples include ServiceMaster, Chick-fil-A, Southwest Airlines and AES Corporation.  These companies are obsessed with creating environments that unleash the limitless creativity, enthusiasm, and energy of people.

Which culture best describes your organization? What re you doing to support that culture on a daily basis?

“Attend to small employee concerns and create a genuinely caring environment, so that they in turn will exude the same attention and care toward customers,” advises management guru Tom Peters.

Call it modeling or a positive pecking order, the concept is to treat your employees the way you want them to treat your customers.

Hal Rosenbluth and Diane McFerrin Peters echo the same priorities in The Customer Comes Second, an excellent book on superior customer service. The Rosenbluth organization’s priorities of caring for, valuing and empowering employees has proven to motivate employees to care for their clients. This people-first focus also involves the importance of happiness in the workplace as key to providing superior service. Employees who are concerned about job security, internal politics and other work-related frustrations can’t fully concentrate on customers. Focusing on employees first in the Rosenbluth organization produced a 7500% increase in revenues over 15 years and a 96% client retention rate.