If you haven’t already done so, you might want to check out Smart CEO Question #71 before thinking about this one.
In Q71 I talked about how every experience I’d had with ‘Timpsons’ had been remarkable – made more remarkable because each experience had been at a different branch of the company.
If I was pushed to find just one word to describe these experiences, it could easily be …
‘KINDNESS’.
Because each experience went beyond ‘great’ customer service.
In each interaction, I got the impression that ‘they’ genuinely care about their customer …
The ‘umbrella incidence’ I talked about in Q71 was a great example.
So, as a business with thousands of employees, how’d they do it – I wondered if they’d figured out how to only hire kind people … or if they perhaps discovered how to teach kindness (in which case they are probably in the wrong business!).
Turns out it’s a lot simpler than that – they are simply kind to their employees. Or to put it another way, they treat their employees (they call them colleagues) how they’d like them to treat their customers.
On their website it says …
‘We passionately believe helping colleagues achieve a good work/life balance is key to their happiness in the workplace. We are a family business, we understand family dynamics and we treat our colleagues like extended family members’.
So, what does that look like? Well …
Every colleague gets a paid day off on their birthday.
And a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the big ones.
They get a paid week off when they get married. An extra £100 in their pay packet. And free use of the company limo!
They can holiday for free in one of 10 company owned holiday homes.
If they want to learn to drive, the company will pay for driving lessons.
They even give colleagues a paid day off for their child’s first-ever day at school.
And through a profit-sharing bonus scheme they ‘pay every colleague as much as they can afford, rather than as little as they can get away with’.
Although this could look like just a list (albeit an impressive list) of employee benefits, it’s actually so much more meaningful when you connect up the dots.
(You can see the dots here, can’t you?)