The HR Truth: Why Human Connection, Performance Management Beat AI for Top Teams.

Welcome to the Built by People Podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

To the Built by People podcast, Mark, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

Sure. You know, I started working in restaurants as a teenager. It was a fun way to make money and, and make friends. And I worked in restaurants during the summers all through college. So upon graduation, I joined the Peace Corps, and after a couple years in the Philippines, I came back to my hometown and ran a restaurant that I worked at while I was in school. And that's how I got into management. From there, I went on to work in operations for some excellent brands, including Red Robin, the Nordstrom restaurant division, before completely moving over into HR and training. Since then, I've held senior HR leadership positions with Legal Seafoods, The Palm Steakhouse, Bar Taco, and now I'm the Chief People Officer for Smokey Bones. Awesome.

Thanks for that great introduction, Mark. Can you tell us about a time when effective talent acquisition made a significant impact in your organization and also what strategies you employed to achieve that success?

Yeah, sure. Any understaffed operation is going to suffer. Without enough of the right people, you're compromising the guest experience and eroding your business. So at Smokey Bones, we've really focused on improved selection at both the hourly and management level. We've improved retention so that our restaurants are staffed at higher levels and our guests can get a great experience. And the team's more excited about coming to work every day when you know you're going to have enough, enough team members to take care of the guests. Some of the ways in which we did that were we launched a standard interview guide for our operators to make sure that we're hiring for skills and the attributes that align with our core values. Every concept or business is different, and we wanted to make sure we're picking the right people for our brand. The other thing that we've done is we give smaller but more frequent pay increases to reward performance now. At all levels of the organization. It's not like you get a raise every year on your anniversary. If somebody's performing and maybe they've taken on more responsibility, we like to give more frequent pay increases. An example would be in the kitchen. If you hired somebody and after 6 months, maybe they're cross-trained to work multiple stations, give them a 50-cent-per-hour bump. After a year, if they can, if they're a certified trainer, give them another increase. So those more frequent touches make a big difference. And with some of those moves, we've seen significant improvement with our social ratings. We're at a system-wide 4.7 Google rating over the last 18 months.

Mark, can you share a case study where performance management directly improved team performance in the hospitality sector and what practical steps you took to drive those results?

Yeah, at Smokey Bones, we are aggressive at managing performance. We use a scorecard that measures many aspects of the business, and we can drill down into each restaurant on a weekly, period, and annual basis. So the restaurants are then ranked and we can evaluate them based upon these metrics. The key performance indicators that we use, some examples would be cost of goods, your food and beverage costs, your labor costs, your direct operating expenses, your turnover, at the hourly level is something we measure. And then guest complaints too. So, you know, evaluating performance on a consistent basis with hard, tangible statistics is really powerful. And what we found in addition to that is that great team members just want to work with great team members. You can't tolerate poor performance. Your top performers will leave. If the managers aren't managing the poor performers out of the business, The good people are going to get frustrated with that. We find that top performers, they want to win and they're self-driven. And it's important to upgrade when you lose someone on your team, look to upgrade and bring in somebody stronger than what you had. You may, might also find it interesting that I'm not a fan of the traditional performance evaluation. I believe that performance management is ongoing. It's an everyday thing. Your team should know where they stand at all times, what their strengths are, what their opportunities are. A talented team wants to be challenged, empowered, and then they want to be recognized at the same time. The reason I leaned on that statement is that I also don't want to tell 250 managers to do something they don't want to do. They don't like writing performance evaluations. They don't like delivering them. And most of them don't like receiving them. If you have more frequent touches, that makes a big difference. And again, Some of these strategies have helped us see a reduction in turnover and better performance from a guest perspective.

Mark, can you tell us about the most challenging recruitment situation you faced in your industry and how you navigated it to find the right talent?

I was thinking about this earlier today and definitely a new restaurant opening in downtown Washington, D.C., coming right out of the pandemic. The environment was one where the industry had lost 80% of its workforce, many of which went on to get what they called real jobs and decided they weren't going to come back to hospitality. So we're having to hire a new team with many of the team members never having worked in restaurants before. So we focused with a boots-on-the-ground approach. I was personally and highly involved in every step of the recruiting process. From the advertising of positions, the reaching out to the applicants, bringing them in to meet with them. I felt like it was really important to have personal contact at that moment in time too, because so much of the world had gone into a shell. So we literally texted candidates directly. Hey, this is Mark, come in and see us today for an interview. And that personal connection made a difference and we were able to get really good, not only applicant flow that was there, but getting people in to meet with us face to face and build the team. So we also focused on hiring a team with a great attitude and personality, knowing that we could train them on the steps of service. We had to give in to that notion of we need people with experience because they just weren't there. They didn't exist. They had left the industry. So we focused on those qualities and attributes that we felt like somebody would be open to learning. And that made a huge difference. We were able to staff the restaurant, get it off the ground very quickly, teach them the fundamentals of hospitality. As long as they're nice and treated the guests with respect, the guest was willing to, you know, deal with maybe some longer ticket times because they knew that we were just opening a new restaurant. The pleasantries made a big difference.

Mark, off the cuff here, I'm curious to get your perspective on how you evaluate openness and curiosity among candidates to ensure that you are finding the right fit from a values perspective.

What we look for is we want to find somebody that is coachable. So we use behavioral-based interview techniques and methodologies. To help us understand whether or not somebody possesses that attribute. So the type of question we may ask is, tell me about a time where your manager coached you on your performance. What was the situation? How did that go? So it's open-ended and it's very difficult, maybe impossible for somebody to answer that question if they haven't actually experienced that before, right? So an example may be you're talking to a bartender candidate. And you say, tell me about a time where you were coached on your performance. And if they can provide you with a specific example, my manager came to me after the shift and told me that I need to learn to multitask because so often I get laser focused on one thing and I've got guests sitting around the bar top and I'm not acknowledging them quickly enough. Maybe you could just give them a quick head nod going, hey, I'll be right with you so that they feel like the service has been initiated. That's a very specific example of somebody who was coached, took the information and internalized that and said, okay, that'll make a difference for me. Somebody who hasn't had that experience would give a more generic sort of conceptual approach to how they were coached. An example would be, I've been coached before and I'm always open to feedback. They don't have a specific example. So you're looking for specifics.

Mark, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

I would say that don't lose sight of the fact that nothing is more effective in the hospitality industry than making human connection. With all the AI initiatives and automated programs that tout efficiency and success, I think that applicants, candidates, team members, the guests, they still want a personal connection. A restaurant, I want to go to a restaurant where it's an oasis away from like today's high-tech screen swiping world. I want to feel like it's a departure away from that. We get inundated all the time with businesses reaching out saying, hey, we've got great AI technology. You know, that's fine to use, in my opinion, for things like schedule writing and forecasting of sales. But I don't want to lose sight of the fact that connecting with people on a personal level is really, really important. And I think that's what they crave and they will crave forever.

Mark, thanks so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

Thanks so much.