When a business feels like family, everyone wants to be a part of it. How can you achieve this feeling with your company and make it stronger?
This weekend I was in the Scottish Borders visiting family. Craving a curry, I found a restaurant with excellent ratings in a nearby market town.
What a discovery! The food was amazing, yet what tipped it off was the service from the staff and the comedic talents of the manager and maître’d.
As we left, we noted a number of trophies hanging up including two trophies for “Maitre’d of the Year” in Scotland. I asked him if he was going to go for the hat trick and he said, “naw, we don’t enter any more, time to give others a chance!”.
As you can tell, we had lots of chat with him and the staff. What really struck me was that every day nine staff get collected in a minibus from various areas of Glasgow, drive an hour to this tiny country town, then all drive back at the end of the evening.
Now, if you don’t know “curry culture” in Scotland, Scots are madly passionate about IndoPak cuisine. The epicentre of this is central Glasgow, where the famous “Tikka Masala” dish was invented and then exported around the world.
So why would nine kitchen and front of house staff choose to commute in a shared minibus two hours per day to a tiny country town.
Well, when we asked one of them, he said he had worked there for a year or two, then changed jobs back to a Glasgow restaurant, but then felt drawn back.
“You see”, he said, “we feel like family here”.
It showed in the love and care put into everything they do there.
Does your business, your organisation feel like a family everyone wants to be a part of? If it does, what could you do to make that feeling even more strong?
{PS am not naming the town or restaurant here so as to keep personal life and writing separate, but feel free to contact me offline and happy to share the name of the place!]