Honesty in the Workplace – Do Your Employees Want to Stay or Open Their Own Food Truck? E23
Andy and Kristy were another perfect pairing for the Culture Crush Business Podcast. Kristy discussed what her team does to help leaders to enhance culture and optimize performance, while Andy gave us insight into the heart of his company and ways other leaders can support their internal teams.
According to Kristy and her team, the four main areas that individuals in the workplace are searching for is to be known, grown, included and inspired. These four pieces are areas that Kristy and her team focus on improving but these are four main areas that your team and company can start to focus on as well!
When improving company culture and focusing on your people, the ROI is there in the end. There are a handful of tips that came from the conversation that can help improve the company culture, increase retention, and attract the right new candidates.
So where do you start?
Take the time to know your people and who they are. Support and grow your people. Provide them professional development support and stop being afraid that they “might” leave the company. Guess what? They might stay too! Reach out to your staff and ask for their thoughts and input. Allow your staff the opportunity to feel inspired with the work that your company is doing.
Both Know Your Talents and ESI are perfect examples of companies that are doing great things and allowing their staff to feel inspired with what they are doing. The next step is honesty. This means that leadership is honest to the staff and they provide a space for the staff to be honest as well. This opens the opportunity for staff to be open with their bosses and management about their goals and future growth. Maybe the employee wants to grow in the company or maybe they want to have a food truck someday. You’ll never know unless you give them the space to open up.
This podcast is for any level leader that understands culture is going to happen whether you work on it or not. So why not work on it and make it better? You don’t have to be sick to work on your health and your culture doesn’t have to be bad to want to work and improve it.
All in all- when you start to focus on improving the company culture at your company, once you start you have to keep going. You can’t talk to employees about their feelings, thoughts, and ideas and then not consider them as you grow and improve. Andy put it simply, “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
In the end- as a leader- be bold, courageous, purposeful, and mindful.
Know Your Talents (KYT) is a management consulting firm that enhances culture and optimizes performance at every level. Our expertise is centered around four key principles: helping businesses know, include, inspire and grow their employees.
Kristy Bach serves as the President at Know Your Talents, a premier management consulting partner working with leaders to enhance culture and optimize performance at every level. Know Your Talents is the corporate division of LearnKey, a workforce education solutions provider. Kristy leads the corporate division enabling the company to offer a complete “enterprise development solution” that aligns people strategy to business strategy.
Kristy brings her success to immediately connect with, consult, and inspire individuals across every level and discipline, building trust and authentic relationships with clients, team members and peers. Prior to joining KYT, Kristy was with BestCompaniesAZ a leading Arizona Marketing Company. Additionally, she served in a COO capacity for over ten years at The Finders, a local staffing and recruiting firm, specializing in Technology, Human Resources, and Finance/Accounting.
Kristy currently serves on the Board of Directors for a local non-profit organization, Career Connectors and serves on the GCU Technology Advisory Board. Kristy is a graduate of the University of Arizona and she enjoys spending time with her husband and family, friends, community involvement, running, biking and hiking in her free time.
Follow Know Your Talents on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Educational Services (ESI) is the leading provider of employee staffing solutions for Arizona school districts, as well as assisting governments and colleges. Founded in 1999 by three educators, ESI has a passion for helping people by making a positive impact in education and public service. 
ESI’s featured services include a return-to-work program known as RetireRehire, and SubSource, the largest substitute staffing program in the state. ESI has proudly served over 10,000 of Arizona’s public retirees and actively employs over 6,000 substitute educators.
Andy Shirk is the President & CEO of ESI, delighted to lead a company where heart and integrity are cherished in a people-centered culture.
Prior to joining ESI, Andy lead TrueRoots Development for 7 years advising business owners throughout the Valley.
Kindness, curiosity and wisdom are his core values. His greatest joy is serving people with warmth and compassion which is the bedrock of his career.
Whether as a business leader or playing upright bass in the local music scene, Andy genuinely loves to create the setting for others to shine.
Follow ESI on LinkedIn and Facebook.
About Culture Crush
Culture is not just a tag word to be thrown around. It is not something you throw in job descriptions to draw people to applying for jobs within a company.
According to Marcus Buckingham and Ashely Goodall in their book Nine Lies About Work, “Culture is the tenants of how we behave. It’s like a family creed. This is how we operate and treat each other in the family.”
As a growing company- Culture Crush Business Podcast is THE culture improvement resource that supports companies and leaders. Our Mission is to improve company cultures so people WANT to go to work. Employees and leaders should like where they work and we think this is possible.
Within the company: Culture Crush has Vetted Resources and Partnerships with the right people and resources that can help improve your company culture.
On this podcast: We focus on everything surrounding businesses with good company culture. We will talk with company leaders to learn about real-life experiences, tips, and best practices for creating a healthy work environment where employees are finding joy and satisfaction in their work while also striving and growing within the company. We also find the companies that offer resources to help improve company culture and showcase them on the show to share their tips and tricks for growing culture.
About the Host
Kindra Maples is spartan racer, past animal trainer, previous magician’s assistant, and has a weakness for Oreo cookie shakes. Her journey working with people actually started working with animals as a teenager (don’t worry we won’t go that far back for her bio).
She worked for over 15 years in the zoo industry working with animals and the public. Her passion of working with animals shifted into working with people in education, operations and leadership roles. From there her passion of leadership and helping people develop has continued to grow.
Then came the opportunity for leading the Culture Crush Business Podcast and she jumped on it. Leadership, growth, and strong company cultures are all areas that Kindra is interested in diving into further.
Shout Outs
We want to thank a few people for their behind the scenes effort in helping this relaunch to come to life. James Johnson with Tailored Penguin Media Company LLC.– It is a small, but powerful video production company with a goal to deliver the very best by articulating the vision of your brand in a visually creative way. Gordon Murray with Flash PhotoVideo, LLC. -Flash Gordon has been photographing since high school and evolving since then with new products that will equip, encourage, engage, and enable. Renee Blundon with Renee Blundon Design – She is not only one of the best free divers (that’s not how she helped with the podcast) but she is great with graphics design and taking the direction for the vision that you have while also adding creative ideas to bring to your vision to life.
These are just a few of the folks that supported the relaunch of the podcast. If you would like to be part of the Culture Crush team or would like to support underwriting the show- please reach out: info@culturecrushbusiness.com
