31 Jan Why Would a Manager have Lunch with Employees?

Look at it this way, if you are going to eat lunch with people every day, wouldn’t you want to have people in the room whose company you’ll enjoy? When interviewing and hiring, look for someone that you could sit, eat and converse with, because that is the type of person your customer most likely wants to deal with.

Terry was a friend and Store Manager who I would describe as a tall, lean and fit, soft-spoken and confident gentleman with thinning hair, a rectangular jaw, sparkling eyes and a brilliant smile. Everything about Terry’s demeanor screamed “friendly”. If you were to build an AI robot whose sole purpose was customer service, you would build it to look and sound exactly like Terry.

He shared a story with me one day about a guy who came in for an interview for a customer loader position. Although a basic, labor-intensive job in the lumber yard, to Terry it was still very much a service-oriented role.

Ten minutes late, pants hanging down, underwear out and a ball cap tilted sideways, the young man sat in the chair across from him, slumped forward with his legs spread wide apart offering no apology for his tardiness. He was a big, tough looking kid. Terry stood up, walked around his desk and said, “come with me”. As they approached the store entrance, Terry put his hand on the young man’s shoulder, looked him in the eyes, and with a wide smile and in a sincere dad-like voice said, “You know John, I’m not going to hire you today, but I’ll give you some advice for your next interview. Show up on time, pull up your pants, sit up straight and leave your hat at home. Have a good day and good luck.” As Terry reached out to shake his hand, the young man looked at him as if he were about to cry. As big and tough as he was, he understood the sincerity in Terry’s tone, and Terry… well, he just couldn’t see himself having lunch with the fella.

Too often there is a gap that exists between management and employees. Sure, Managers must have challenging conversations when it comes to people, but a communication piece becomes much more valid when delivered to an individual you’ve broken bread with. There is a certain amount of respect and compassion that becomes more fluid when those difficult conversations need to happen. That fluidity can exist once a relationship has developed.

If I recall my own management days, I would say that the people that never ate lunch together, particularly the potluck lunches, birthday lunches or special occasions like Christmas and Easter; those people never stuck around long. The ones that did, ate together regularly.

Aside from staff room lunches, another opportunity that Managers benefit from is taking staff out for lunch. I made a point of taking 2-3 people for lunch once or twice a month. It was very rewarding for employees to dine out and it was important to me to build relationships. I was always uncomfortable with people who worked solely for the monetary exchange of wages for labor. I preferred people to have an emotional investment in our business. It’s a necessity if you are to be truly successful in retail.

At one point, I began a tradition of taking our stock crew for breakfast. The stock crew consisted of 4-5 people who began their shift at 5 am. I had very little turnover on this crew. One person, my buyer, had been with the company for 40 years, the other 4 had been with me for only a few. They were workhorses who took pride in the sheer volume of work they could accomplish in a week. Other than my part-timer, who was average height, I was always lucky to have 6 footers who were beasts for labor and loved working with each other.

The monthly breakfast was either at a nice buffet in a hotel or at the truck stop down the road. I would refer to our conversations as “hockey” talk. A group of players just laughing and telling stories about everything and anything. We talked about family, friends, politics, work, school… you name it and we discussed it. This was church for me.

Staff meals would usually cost me about $200.00 a month, but I honestly experienced very little turnover in my four years as Manager at that store. To hire and train a new employee in our business would have cost me 50X that, so it was always money well spent.

I can proudly say that I remember every employee that worked for me over that 4-year period. The other day I saw a post on Twitter from a dad in the city I worked in. It was a picture of a lady and her child. She had championed a local cause for children. I told my wife “I know that lady. She was a cashier at our store. She graduated from college with a diploma in multi-media. She used to come to work with the wildest hair colors. Her dad’s a local radio legend”. She just stared at me and asked, “How the hell do you remember people from that long ago?”. My theoretical answer would be that my focus was never on building work relationships, it was on building work experiences, because experiences are what people remember, but also… we most likely shared a lunch together.