Take Care of Your Employees. They'll Take Care of Your Guests.

We work in an industry built around fun.

So let me ask a simple question:

Do you want your employees to be fun?

Of course you do.

We want the person at the front desk to be welcoming. We want party hosts who are energetic and engaged. We want attraction attendants who interact with guests instead of staring at the clock. We want managers who can turn a frustrated parent into a happy one.

Then we sometimes build workplaces where our employees aren't having much fun themselves and expect them to clock in, flip a switch, smile, and create an incredible experience for everyone else.

I don't think it works that way.

My philosophy is pretty simple:

Take care of your employees.

Your employees take care of the guest.

The guest takes care of your company.

The company comes last in that sequence.

I think that's important.

Our Average Employee Has Been With Us About 20 Months

Employee turnover is part of our industry. We employ a lot of teenagers and young adults, and for many of them, we're their first job.

They're going to graduate. They're going to college. They're going to start careers. They're going to move.

Eventually, most of them are going to leave us.

But when we recently looked at our current workforce, I was still surprised by the number.

Our average current employee has been with us for about 20 months, and about half have been with us for roughly a year and a half or longer.

At a trampoline park.

I don't think that's because we've discovered some magical employee-retention program. I think it's because we've tried to create a place where people actually enjoy working.

Hire for Personality. Train for Competence.

Most of the kids we hire have never had a job before.

That's okay.

I can teach someone how to use a POS system. I can teach them how to check waivers, clean a restroom correctly, run an attraction safely, make food or host a birthday party.

What I can't easily teach is personality.

So we hire heavily based on personality and then teach the mechanics of the job.

That doesn't mean everyone needs to be the loudest person in the room. If someone isn't comfortable being the big personality in front of 20 kids at a birthday party, why are we forcing them to host parties?

Maybe they're incredibly organized and fantastic in the kitchen.

Put people where they can succeed.

It's like benching your quarterback because he missed a field goal.

Different people are good at different things. Our job as managers is to figure out how to use those strengths.

Your Employees Are Human Beings

There's an old-school management idea that employees should learn to "leave their problems at the door."

I've never liked that.

People don't work that way.

A teenager doesn't stop thinking about the fight they had with their parents because they clocked in. They don't stop being upset about a breakup or worrying about a test. They don't suddenly forget they're overwhelmed with school.

I'm not friends with my employees.

But that doesn't mean I can't be friendly.

If an employee comes in and I can tell something isn't right, I'll ask. I'm not going to pry, and I'm not their therapist. Sometimes they don't want to talk about what's bothering them, and that's completely fine.

But I want them to know somebody noticed.

I'm somewhat famous around our parks for my walk and talks.

If an employee is having a rough day, I don't necessarily bring them into the office, close the door and ask them to explain their personal problems to me.

We walk around the park and talk.

Maybe they tell me what's going on. Maybe we talk about something completely unrelated. Sometimes the point isn't to talk about the problem. The point is simply to get their head somewhere else for ten minutes.

Maybe we stop at concessions and I get them a bag of chips and a drink.

My actual cost for both is less than $2.

I don't know how to calculate the return on investment of spending two dollars to show a teenager who's having a rough day that somebody noticed.

I also don't think I need to.

Sometimes it's okay to do something simply because it's the decent thing to do.

And I don't need to call my employees "family" to do it.

We're not a family. We're an employer and employees. There are boundaries there, and I think those boundaries are healthy.

But you don't have to make your employees your family to treat them like people.

I've had employees sitting in my office working through AP Statistics homework with me.

They needed help. I could help.

So I helped.

Sometimes good employee culture really is that simple.

Meet Them Halfway

Here's a policy that surprises people.

If our employees submit a time-off request with at least a week's notice, we approve it.

We've never declined one.

The obvious question is:

"What happens when everybody requests the same Saturday off?"

They don't.

I think one of the reasons is because our employees trust us to work with them.

If one of our teenage employees has a school dance Saturday night, they often don't request the entire day off. They'll tell us:

"I can work, but I need to leave sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 so I can get ready, go to dinner and make it to the dance."

They meet us halfway because they know we'll meet them halfway.

When you take care of your employees, they take care of you.

Stop Stepping Over Dimes to Pick Up Pennies

Our employees get free fountain drinks. They get 50% off the rest of concessions. If they work more than 5.5 hours, there's an employee menu with items they can eat for free.

They can also bring friends into the park for free when they're not working.

Some operators look at policies like those and immediately see lost revenue.

I look at them differently.

Teenagers working around fountain drinks are going to drink soda. Employees working long shifts are going to get hungry. Kids who work at a trampoline park are going to want their friends to come play.

You can create reasonable policies around reality, or you can create unreasonable policies and encourage employees to hide things from you.

I'd rather establish the rules, make the benefit legitimate and create clear boundaries around it.

And if someone abuses those privileges?

Privileges can be taken away.

Being employee-friendly doesn't mean abandoning accountability.

Free admission is a great example.

If an employee brings four friends into the park, someone might look at the retail ticket price and say:

"We just gave away more than $100 in admissions."

Did you?

If the building was already open, already staffed, already heated or cooled and wasn't at capacity, what was the actual incremental cost of those four guests?

Now look at what I get in return.

My employee is voluntarily spending Friday night at their workplace. They're proud enough of where they work to bring their friends. Those friends might buy food or drinks. One might eventually apply for a job.

And while my off-duty employees aren't there to work, they don't forget everything they've been trained to notice. If they see something seriously unsafe, they're probably going to say something. If they notice something that needs attention, they tell us.

Think about the cultural signal there:

Our employees choose to come back when we're not paying them to be there.

I'll take that over an employee-engagement survey.

Give Employees Something Worth Caring About

We try to create experiences for our employees too.

Every summer, we rent out a waterpark and close our parks a couple of hours early so our employees can have the place to themselves.

The rental costs us nothing. We trade for it.

Sure, we lose a couple hours of business on a random Tuesday night in July.

I'm okay with that trade.

Around Halloween, we get haunted-house tickets for every employee who wants them, again through trade. We have an end-of-summer BBQ.

After the holidays, we throw a large employee party with roughly $10,000 worth of raffle prizes, structured so every employee walks away with something worthwhile.

Some of these things cost real money. Some cost almost nothing.

That's not really the point.

The question I care about is:

How much value does this create for the employee compared with what it actually costs the company?

Those numbers can be very different.

During Service, We Lead

Employee culture doesn't work if management operates under a completely different set of expectations.

We're in the trenches with our staff.

Can I spend my entire shift monitoring the slide tower? No. That's not my job.

Can I cover an employee's break there? Absolutely.

Can I refill water? Of course.

Can I jump in somewhere when the team is overwhelmed? Yes.

You can't tell employees everyone needs to work together and then make it clear that certain jobs are beneath management.

There's another benefit too:

It gets me on the ground floor of my parks.

I see what employees see. I see what guests see. I hear the questions guests keep asking. I see where a process doesn't work. I notice where employees are struggling.

You don't get all of that from a spreadsheet.

There is absolutely a time for office work.

Wednesday morning during toddler time? Great. Build schedules. Answer emails. Look at reports.

But Saturday during service?

Get out of the office.

During service, we're not sitting in the back managing the business.

We're leading it.

Your employees should see you. Your guests should see you. And you should see what's actually happening in the operation you're responsible for.

Employee Experience Becomes Guest Experience

Our guests don't know about the free drinks.

They don't know about the waterpark. They don't know about the haunted-house tickets. They don't know that I helped an employee with AP Stats or approved someone's time off for a school dance.

They don't know an employee had a rough day and spent ten minutes walking around the park talking with me before going back to work.

They experience the result.

They experience the front-desk employee who's happy to see them.

They experience the party host who genuinely wants their kid to have a great birthday.

They experience employees who don't act like helping a guest is an inconvenience.

They experience managers who are actually on the floor.

And they experience employees who know what they're doing because they've stayed long enough to become really good at their jobs.

That's what the guest sees.

That's what the guest remembers.

That's what the guest reviews.

Employee experience becomes guest experience.

What Do You Want Them to Leave With?

None of this means you shouldn't have standards.

We have standards. We coach. We hold people accountable. We expect employees to do their jobs. When someone abuses the trust or privileges we've given them, there are consequences.

Treating employees like human beings and running a disciplined operation aren't mutually exclusive.

I think they support each other.

Eventually, most of our employees will leave. I'd love for every great employee to stay forever, but especially when you're hiring teenagers, that's neither realistic nor necessarily something you should want.

They're going to graduate, go to college, start careers and move on to bigger things.

But the skills they learn while they're with us can last much longer than the job does.

I want them to learn how to communicate. How to work with a team. How to accept coaching. How to take accountability. How to lead. How to deal with difficult people.

Most of these kids came to us having never had a job before.

We're on the ground floor of teaching them what having a job is supposed to look like.

Someday, many of them are going to be managers themselves. I hope they remember how to treat the people working for them.

We work in an industry built on fun.

If we want employees who can create fun for our guests, maybe we should make sure they're having some fun while they're here.

The formula really isn't complicated:

Take care of your employees.

Your employees take care of the guest.

The guest takes care of your company.