Hello and welcome to This Is Not What I Signed Up For, the podcast for first time managers teaching you how to swim so you don't sink with your new responsibilities. Now today I am very happy to have Marc Haine with me. Marc has been in hospitality and service-based industries for 35 years and he knows one thing for sure. People don't stay because of perks. They stay because they feel seen, heard, and valued. And I absolutely love that. It's so true and I can see it through my own career when I was still in corporate. Exactly that. Um, so spot on there, Marc, uh, and Marc, as he said in, in his bio to me and all that, he helps turn casual participants into committed ambassadors, which I think is such a great way of putting things. he's the author of the book lights, camera action, and he hosts the podcast Marc Haine Live. Uh, and I encourage you to give it a listen. I've been on there as well. It's a great podcast. And you can find out more about his work in the show notes. Everything is going to be down there. On a personal level, Marc is authentic. He's warm and he's got a great sense of humor. And I'm always happy to speak to him. And I'm very happy to have him on the podcast today for all of you. So welcome Marc. Thank you so much. goodness, if you kept going, my head would kind of explode out the sides of the frame, I think. Well, your achievements are least longer than that. Marc, I start all of these podcasts out with one question. uh What is the worst piece of management advice you've ever received? I have to go back to when I was 17 years old. I was in the workforce in the late 1970s and I got promoted to a swing manager and I got chastised because I didn't scream enough. They thought I was too easy on the staff because I didn't yell and scream at people. Yeah. As a fellow non-screening manager, I feel you. Well, you know, and what was interesting about that, it gave me an example of the kind of manager I didn't want to be. And I thank Steve for that. So Steve, if you're watching, you're probably 100 years old by now, but that's made an impact. Yeah, great. Sometimes you serve as a warning for others. So today, we are going to be speaking about going from onboarding to forever boarding. So Marc, you talk about forever boarding, you put this forward to me uh with coming on here. Why should we be ditching onboarding and adopting forever boarding and what exactly is forever boarding? So this is really interesting because whenever I mention this to people, people go, oh my goodness, that makes so much sense just by the title. And so what happens when we onboard people is we bring people literally onboard. We have a whole process. We give them binders of stuff and policies, procedures and things that they need to sign. And we have them sit there and then we assign them somebody maybe that they could shadow for a little while, uh maybe up to three months. And then we let them loose. And when we let them loose, that's the time that they start learning what all the unsaid policies, unsaid behaviors, the stuff that nobody talks about starts to infiltrate into this poor person's life. And it is a time when they learn through osmosis, not because they're being trained for anything. And it's a time that causes them Probably the most frustration. mean really when you think about it when you bring new people on board That is probably the most engaged anybody's gonna be Right that day one is like they're excited to be there. This is gonna be exciting. They're nervous They're scared that they might fail and then you support them and their happiest pie as they go through the onboarding process But then somewhere along the way just feels like we have been What would happen if we, instead of thinking about onboarding, that we make this a finite process? And I know a lot of people are gonna think, do you know how much it costs to bring somebody onboard? How can I make this a finite process? Well, the one component I have to challenge every business operator with is that employees will evolve with us. And if you don't believe it, I have one question. Would you talk to a five-year employee the same way you will talk to that day one employee? Hmm. And of course the answer is everybody says, of course not, no. And the big question is why? Well, the five-year employee has five years of experience with you. They have five years of growth in their own evolution. And so one thing that I talk about is I know that when we bring people on board, they hit definable milestones within their journey with you. And whether or not we are prepared for those milestones to be able to... fulfill their wants and needs and answer the questions they have at each of these milestones, that will dictate if they continue on to become an engaged participant within our business and maybe even an ambassador, or if they're going to be falling into the pit of the tainted and wallowing in the pit of the tainted being a disengaged employee. Tell me a bit more about that pit of the tainted. I've seen you mention that before and I'm very curious to hear more about Well, you know, the 2025 State of the Workplace uh Gallup survey just came out, the results, the report just came out, and they say that uh worldwide, the employee engagement level has dropped by another 4%. We are at the lowest engagement ever within our workplaces right this minute. This is what I call the pit of the tainted. Now the pit of the tainted could be just casual kind of displacement. It's like, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to step up. I'm not going to bring ideas forward because I'm just going to get shot down. You have some people who are just happily wallowing in the pit of the tainted. I'm here to do my job. I'll do my job. Then I go home, collect my paycheck. That's, that's all I'm going to do. And that's good for some people for a little while. There are other people in the pit of the tainted people who are kind of up to here. and they're drowning. These are people who turn into kind of the gossippers of our business. They become the cancers of our organizations. They're the ones that every time you bump into them at the Keurig machine in the lunch room, they're the ones who are bellyaching about something and telling everybody how hard done by they are. These people are afraid to leave because they like the security, but what they do is they cause a lot of tension, a lot of toxicity within our workplaces. And then of course you got people in a pit of the tainted who are like, I'm done. Thank you very much. Yeah. So like, mean, I think you've touched on so many topics there from like malicious compliance to, to your role, as well as those folks that, that kind of spread bile in the business. Um, I'm thinking back to, folks that I've worked with before where there's been folks that have been at the company for 12 years, but they are the most toxic part of the, of the staff compliment, um, because of that. and because of various reasons over those 12 years getting to that point. uh But speaking about this and bringing it back to the forever boarding ah and talking about, think we generally do an onboarding and then we set and forget, like, okay, we've done that three months, that two weeks, that six weeks, you've completed your checklist. uh And I know from designing a lot of these onboardings over the years myself, some of the stuff is really hard to come up with, especially if you've been there for a while, because you've got that kind of intrinsic knowledge of what everything is and a kind of like, oh, well, everyone should know that. I'm not going to include that. But people don't. you know, it can be hard to kind of keep up. I'm trying to think how we keep this as a forever thing. How do you... fulfill finding how to set this up as a forever thing. How do you get those needs going forward? the first thing we have to understand is that people are on a journey with us. And so, ah and it's really definable, for instance, like when somebody first comes on board, we're not going to talk about the prospecting side. That's a different, know, that's, if when somebody starts with you, they've already prospected. They've between your interactions with them up until that point, they've turned around and they said, yes, I'd like to work with you. So whatever you did to get the prospecting, you're successful to that point. When they come on board, they become, they enter in what I like to call the newbie phase. The newbie phase is where they are stepping into, and this by the way is the same thing with your customers. It is the same thing if you run associations. This newbie phase is where people have signed on the dotted line. They're excited to get going because you've promised them a bill of goods. So you've promised them the schedule that they want. You've, you've sat down with them and understood that maybe they have an aging parent and you know, every third Thursday they have to go to the home because they have to do something. They have a specific responsibility and you go, that's no problem. We can manage to make that happen for you. Right? you need every third weekend off, you know, we'll manage. we'll absolutely manage to do it. So the newbie is coming in saying, you've promised me a bill of goods. I said that I will come and work with you and learn what the job is, but you've promised me a bill of goods and What I'm interested in knowing in the newbie phase is are you going to deliver what you've promised? I'm excited, but at the same token, I'm really, really cautious that I'm looking for anything that's going to be a telltale that you've lied to me. Right? And the newbie goes into what I like to call the taker phase. ah They'll migrate into the taker phase where everything they're looking into, they're testing against what you, it's all about me. You promised me something. You promised that you're going to pay me once every two weeks. You promised me that that certain conditions are going to apply, that certain things are going to happen. You told me that it was going to be 38 hours a week, not 44 hours, not 48 hours a week. You've told me that my work week is going to be 38 hours. We really want people to do seven and a half hours every day. Right. And so the taker phase is all about give me, give me, give me, give me what you promise. You've promised me training. Give me the training. You've promised me resources. Give me the resources. And so this is where we build, have the ability to build trust with our new employees. Right. And I really love the Stephen Covey metaphor about like a trust bank account, right? Where, where trust is built in by making deposits in the bank account. And when we let people down, it's like a withdrawal, but we're okay. As long as we don't become overdrawn with the trust. So the taker is in this mindset of give me what you promised. And if you're able to deliver on that, they become what I like to call an engaged participant. The engaged participant is where they still want you to give them what you promised, but this is the first time that they are actually entering into this mindset of what else can I do? How can I help you? Right? And so for people running associations, this is the perfect time to turn around. This is the point to turn around and say, if you'd like to give back, we, we welcome new volunteerism. We welcome somebody on the board and so on. The worst time to ask anybody to join the board in a nonprofit organization is the day they sign their check because that's not what they're there to do. Right. And so, and so as an, as an employer, now you have somebody who is super engaged and they're looking at, I want to make a difference. I want my role here to mean something. And if you can support that, they then evolve into becoming this ambassador. They become. the people who are going out into the world saying what a great place it is to work with you. This is, you know, this is, I'll do anything for you because I am, you know, I am your representative. I want to be a part of this. I self identify as an employee here. I'm wearing the jackets, I'm wearing the caps, I got the winter jackets with the logo on it. I tell people what a great place this is to work. And isn't that what we all want when we have employees, right? We just want everybody to be excited. getting to your star performers there. somewhere in there. But here's the thing with star performers. It's interesting because star performers don't necessarily equate to being ambassadors. And I take, so for instance, I take commission employees, right? um Highly competitive work environments uh where, you know what? I'm going to become the best salesperson and I'm going to do it on the backs of everybody regardless. I don't care who I hurt as long as I get the numbers. That is a toxic work environment. in spite of having a high performer. Right? Now you started the thing by asking how can we keep Forever Boarding going? When we understand these milestones are definable, when I sit down with organizations and actually do the workshop for this, they can actually put people into these spots. They can actually put names. yeah, this sounds exactly like Jim. no, Jim's deaf. Donna's an engaged performer. no, I'm sorry. Sam, unfortunately, is in the pit of the tainted. We can tell, right? And so we know this, we can actually map it out. The flip side or the feedstock of being able to support these milestones into what I call forever boarding is changing the dynamics of what we call a manager. Right now, I believe that we give managers too many responsibilities of sitting down and actually being technical contributors. we're getting them to do the work. I saw your eyes just go, bang. And so, you know, what happens is we end up with managers who are sitting down doing reports. They're sitting down doing work. They are doing technical or technician work. They're not leading. My door is always open. If you need anything, just come and see me. But the work stacks are so high because I got all these reports to do, all these things to do. And so what we're actually doing is we're under-resourcing managers. with time and with personnel forcing them to do work and they're not actually becoming leaders. And more importantly, the key to forever boarding is we have to turn managers into coaches. When we watch a hockey game or a football game or a basketball game, we're not telling the coaches, okay, you know what, we're losing the game. think maybe as a manager, I think you should go in there now. Right? But in business, we're always doing that. We're always kind of relying on, we're short staffed. I guess the manager is going to have to get away from the desk and contribute something. Right? And it's like, it's always good. It's always good. Managers being on the front line, you'll get respect from your staff. And being in food service, I've done it. I've done it. I've been, you know, as a manager, I've had to jump on lines. I had to serve banquets. I've had to do, right? Under resourcing managers is probably the worst thing you can possibly do because it forces them into crisis mode and you force them to doing multiple jobs within their job description, burning them out and making them less effective as managers. And then when you turn around and go, why so many people in the pit of the tainted? It's because we don't have a manager now being able to fill the needs and answer the questions, fulfill the needs and wants of their employees as they come into. the various different milestones. Turning them into coaches now is the way that we turn into forever boarding. We start actually training managers to be coaches, to be able to sit down with their direct reports. And if you're a top level manager, you're meeting with middle level managers. If you're a middle level manager, you're meeting with frontline managers. And if you're a frontline manager, you're meeting with your staff. Understanding what people's paths are, sitting down and... actually understanding what the roles and responsibilities are is an absolute game changer. Why do you think shows like Undercover Boss are so popular? Right? Yeah. Like, what's the big aha moment, right? A boss who's been sitting up in the corner office for ages actually goes to the front line and actually sees what's going on. Yeah, get out of the ivory tower and take a look. talking to people and they start seeing the personal challenges people have, the interpersonal conflicts people are having, the inter-customer problems that they're having, the challenges of service delivery because they might themselves might be under resourced. And the big aha moments come when we realize this and we're like, my goodness, I can't believe we've created this environment. Yeah. No, I see that a lot. mean, just even from an unrelated unrelated, but related space. mean, I work a lot in policy development, process development, working with businesses to change their processes internally and things like that. uh And when you have that separation with folks not talking and not having that, I think, as you put it, a coaching relationship with people, you have a lot of disconnect that starts happening. And we see it over and over with trying to design processes that you ask the manager, well, how does this work? How does this go in your business? Or you ask the executive team, how does this work in your business? They'll tell you a fantastic story about what all the steps in the process is. And then you eventually go speak to the people on the ground and that's not the process. That it's wildly aspirational and it's great, but it's not the process because no one's had that opportunity to chat. Yes. when we get that engagement going, there's a lot more sudden value and you can move quicker because now suddenly everyone's on the same page. Like that's how I'm kind of equating this coaching and just that value that comes into it there. And take it to the next step by turning our managers into coaches, having a focus on forever boarding, makes us more curious, but at the same token, it conquers all the micro behaviors that form over a period of time. there's a cute story. I just mentioned it on my podcast the other day about, and I don't know if it's a true story or not, but some sort of kind of society. sociological exercise where they put four monkeys into a room. They put a banana at the top of the stairs. Have you heard that story at all? And so they put a banana at the top of the stairs. Of course, one of the monkeys goes running up the stairs to get the banana and then all the monkeys get sprayed down with water. And of course now you have a bunch of really unhappy monkeys, right? The next day they put a bin on in the room and a monkey goes running up to get the bin and all the monkeys get sprayed down with water. Well, what do the monkeys start to learn? If I go up and get a banana, we're all going to get wet. So we better not even try. there's a banana. No, no, not going to touch it because we don't like to get sprayed down with water. So then they remove a monkey and they bring a fresh new monkey into the little community of four monkeys. What do think the new monkey does when he sees a banana? He goes up, runs to the back and everybody gets sprayed. Well, they very quickly learn. The next time they introduce a brand new monkey, That monkey goes up the stairs and everybody pounces on this monkey. Don't touch the banana. And they beat up the monkey. They're making absolutely sure they're not going to get sprayed. Hmm. They do this a few more times. Now you have monkeys who've never been sprayed ever. Seeing a monkey go up to get a banana and everybody's jumping on that banana, sorry, jumping on that monkey, making sure he doesn't touch that banana. They don't know why. Hmm. Right? And then we get into this whole environment of, well, that's the way we've always done it. And so a lot of times in my world, in hospitality and so on, we'll put procedures in place. We'll teach cooks how to do certain things. We'll teach bartenders how to do certain things. But then over a period of time, they'll come up with their own shortcuts or their own interpretation and this sort of thing. And then when you come in and you go, I don't know why the quality is so terrible. And you go in and you go, oh, how'd you? do this while Steve taught me. Well, Steve, Well, because John taught me. You've just, people have just lost the plot because it becomes, well, that's the way, that's the way we've always done it. And so processes and behaviors evolve this way. And with the coaching, becoming coaches rather than managers. Focusing on forever boarding, finding out and understanding where people are in their journey allows the managers to start understanding where people are, what their needs are. But at the same token, you conquer micro behaviors much, much quicker. Hmm. Yeah. One of the things that I've done for a long time, and it was a lesson I learned, I think far too late in my career, uh, was regular meetings that weren't KPI meetings or your quarterly review meetings. Um, I think when I first became a manager, that was what I did. I met with my staff when it was the quarterly review and you've got three months then for things to go very pear shaped in some cases. And some companies I worked at was an annual review. There was no quarter review. And if you don't meet regularly outside of that, you're never going to know what's going on. And I think one of the best things I ever did was implement for myself that it was because of I had a total disaster on my hands from not doing it. uh I had to meet with the team regularly and then it started kicking off that I would meet on like every two weeks with my team, just the, guys, like what's happening. Meetings were short, they were valuable. We knew where each other were standing. Anything was going wrong, we could correct it very quickly. Course corrections were great. And that made the KPI reviews and the quarterly reviews and the annual reviews even quicker too, because no one likes doing those either. But then we know what the pulse is for everyone and where everyone's struggling and all that. Very valuable. And, and you know, one of things that I encourage every business to do is to do daily standups. mean, at the very least get everybody together for, and standups, because when you standing up, you, want to make it quick if it's a standup, but then have a format. And it's a great way to introduce people to new conditions and changing conditions and so on. You know, in my, in my world hospitality, maybe you have a You have a special event happening or you have a special guest coming in. You've got a couple of birthday parties. You've got a new menu item and it gives people a chance to try the new menu item so that people go out to their customers and try this the next time you're out, just out of curiosity. Hey, what's the soup of the day? And tell me if the person doesn't go, um let me check. I'll be right back. consistently and ongoing. is my number one pet peeve because it tells me that, you know, whatever's going on, the team is not being communicated to. Right? Yeah. So I want to kind of just I've got one other burning question that's on my mind around kind of that that pit of despair and when you have someone that's kind of fallen into that and you want to bring them back. I'm curious as to have you got any pointers for because I I can feel it in my bones that folks listening are going to be asking this question. Like how do you start bringing someone back from that? I know this is probably a very big loaded question as well and depends on the circumstance, but uh where would you start? So, so number one is recognize that there are people who are disengaged. You're have people who are, like I said, they're up to here. There's only two ways to get out of the pit of the tainted. One is they're gonna leave, and for the toxic people, the people, you're gonna be, I mean, you're gonna be doing, ding dong, the witch is dead, the witch is ding, right? I it's gonna be the greatest thing, right? But interestingly enough, what's gonna happen is when that toxic person leaves, you'll have everybody coming to you and go, oh, thanks. God, because do know what she did to me? Do you know what happened to me? Do you know what this person did to me? And you're like, well, why didn't you tell me? Ah, because you're not communicating, because you're not creating a medium by which people can safely come to you and talk to you. And so what you need to do first and foremost is you have to instigate the conversation with your team. Use curiosity and service as your mindset to sit down with your people and say, hey, how's it going? What are your concerns? What are you loving about your job right now? What's frustrating you? And have a real honest sit down, honest one-to-one conversation. And the important thing is we can't fall back into defense mode. We can't go back into blame mode. We can't go back into, well, you don't understand how hard my job is kind of mode, right? uh And understand that all these people have a perception and assumptions about their reality. And we have to accept the fact that they're looking through their glasses, using their bubble, using their frame of reference. And what they will perceive is they're going to perceive intent when maybe there is no intent. But we just have to park our own ego and our own pride. And we just have to be able to listen to them and then find out, okay, so why do you feel that way? I can understand that that is frustrating. Why do you feel that Why do you feel that your direct supervisor is a bully? Why do you feel that the people you're working with are kind of jumping all over you um and they are doing less work but being the loudest, you know, because people say, ah you know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. Why do you feel that that's the squeaky wheel? Right? And actually have one-on-one conversations. The minute you start to listen, the minute you understand where they're coming from, their frame of reference, you're then... able to start figuring out how do I pull this person back into the fray. And interestingly enough, when you think about the path, when you pull people out of the pit of the tainted, not going to become an engaged participant. They're going to come into the taking phase because they're going to say, well, you know what? I just had a conversation with you. You've said that you're going to address this. You've, you've made some more promises. I'm back in taker phase. Prove to me, I can trust you. Prove to me, you're going to deliver on your promises. Prove to me, I'm going to get what you just said I'm going to get. And then they'll continue their journey into the engaged participant. Does that make sense? that makes absolute sense. It's an aha. And it sounds so simple, it's like having you point that out is like, that's fantastic. And you know what? That's why I said it's not really that big of a question because really at the end of the day we're dealing with human beings Right and and again if we can curiosity number one, we have to bury our own ego We can't we can't because too many people will hang their hats on and as soon as they hear any kind of criticisms Like oh, well, you don't understand. You don't understand what I have to go through, know, right and and that just shuts everybody down. Nobody cares Nobody cares. It's like again, I'll use my reference to hospitality You go to a restaurant and you say, I'm sorry, the food's taking, don't you understand how busy we are? I don't care. I've been sitting here for 45 minutes waiting for an appetizer. I don't care, right? So, and it's the same thing from a leadership and employee perspective. Yeah. Wow. Marc, thank you so much for your insights here. This has been great. It's going to be great for the listeners as well. I'm so thankful for you having been here. uh Tell our listeners, what are some of the things that you're currently busy with? So I am, I talk about this all the time. I work with intact teams. I want to bring in, I want to bring in like taking this concept one step further. I am tired of going into organizations and hearing from people, this is a great word, just a happy family. And so I believe that most families are really dysfunctional. Like, I mean, I don't know if you can look back in your family and go, yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to work in my family. Like, I don't, I don't want, I don't want gossip stand, you know, Thanksgiving, you know, know it all stand to be in my team. Um, so what, what I've been really focused on now is this idea that I really want people to start thinking of their organizations as communities. They're within communities. have other communities, right? Just like you have within Toronto, you have, you know, regions of Toronto. Within regions of Toronto you have, right? And so it's the same thing in our organizations. We have the organization. Within the organization we have teams or departments. Within departments we have teams. Within teams we have individuals. And understand that when we start thinking about our organizations as being communities, right away you have already assumptions of accountability. That we are accountable not only for ourselves, but we're accountable for the people around us. And I do believe that if we can create that sense that people belong to a community and that we are this community, I think we end up with a lot less interpersonal conflicts, a lot more communication. that's fantastic. I absolutely agree with you on that one. Folks, if you want to see more about what Marc's doing, please read the show notes. There'll be links to all his socials and websites and all of that there. So Marc, thank you again for coming on board. It's been great having you. It's been great chatting as always. uh And thank you very much to our listeners for being there as well. And until next time, everyone, keep swimming.