For enduring culture change, our most recent guest encourages leaders to embrace the process. In this episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, leadership and culture authority James Ferguson delves into his responsibilities as the new Director of Culture for the Wurzak Hotel Group. He provides valuable insights on cultivating a positive organizational culture through enhanced engagement, a clear mission focus, and genuine employee recognition. Listen in to learn how to improve workplace culture and create a sense of belonging for your people.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Returning guest James Ferguson is a leadership and culture expert, Director of Culture for the Wurzak Hotel Group, and the author of The Confetti Culture Playbook: How to Boost Your Team’s Contribution and Impact. An award-winning hospitality industry leader, James is passionate about helping hotels “change the narrative” by prioritizing their people.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
A NEW VENTURE
James Ferguson, one of our podcast’s returning guests, has recently taken on a new role: Director of Culture for the Wurzak Hotel Group. In his new position, Ferguson oversees the cultural operations across all ten hotels within the company, with an eleventh hotel slated to open in June. This transition marks a significant expansion of his responsibilities as he now plays a pivotal role in shaping and nurturing the corporate culture across the entire organization.
Ferguson’s appointment to this newly created role signifies a strategic pivot for the Wurzak Hotel Group, highlighting the company’s commitment to enhancing its organizational culture. Despite his not having a typical HR background, Ferguson brings a wealth of operational leadership experience to his new role. He said, “There’s just been a lot of opportunity to get my hands dirty and my fingerprints on everything,” and for this exciting new venture, he’s both excited and grateful.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Where to Start
“Before you tell your story externally, you have to tell it internally, so your team knows who you are, why you exist, why what they do matters, and how their day-to-day impacts that and drives that forward. The way that we kicked it off was we focused on orientation because, through orientation, you can create context, connection, and culture, and then that education enables action. So that is where we put our energy up front, and that honestly had a direct impact on our turnover numbers very early in the game when we rolled that out. It just helped our team feel unified in a way that they just hadn’t before.”
No Finish Line
“You have to just fall in love with the process of improvement, and those improvements happen every day. They’re small increments, and sometimes it’s hard to really zoom out and see the compound effect, but that’s what I’ve learned to fall in love with because if you do that, everything else will actualize over time. If you try to focus on an end result, you’re never going to get there and feel satisfied. And you don’t want to hold on to your happiness for that moment. You want to enjoy the process. And so every aspect, from not knowing what I’m doing, to learning through it, to implementation, to seeing the impact on our team members firsthand, and then watching the data reflected as well — it’s just a very rewarding process when you see it from that lens.”
Always Winning
“That’s a full-on program that we rolled out in February of this year called the Wursack WOW program. And it’s simply a recognition program where our team members are instantly acknowledged for living out our brand pillars. They get given a card, circle the pillar, high-five them, and then they go drop the bucks in the box. And from there, every week, we celebrate a winner of the week for that. So from that, you’re creating consistency right there because every day someone’s getting recognized, and every week, someone’s winning. And so when you talk about those brand pillars and that mission and that orientation in the first week or even in the first thirty days, we’re living that out every week thereafter. […] And so you’re just constantly building off this belief and this understanding that what you do matters. That we appreciate you for it. And then let’s go be better together.”
What People Want
“We’re getting to the phase where we’re starting to roll out new hire and exit surveys and things like that from an engagement survey standpoint. I think that’s the next step. You know, that’s been the interesting thing for me going from a GM who, if I had a problem, I solved it right then, to this, where you have to do it in a process — you cannot do it all at once. It’s not possible. […] But at the same time, that platform of the Culture Committee has allowed those voices to be heard and to better understand what their needs are and make adjustments, whether it’s the tools they need to do their job well or the experiences they want to feel more like they belong. All of it is kind of coming from different directions, but it’s my job to kind of keep a very close eye on what those things are and make sure we’re doing something about it.”
“The Culture Committees”
“When you’re part of that Culture Committee, you become an advocate, and so you’re out there in the field and asking your team members […], “What are the things that you need? What are you hearing from your colleagues? How can I be a voice for you?” and then go do something about it. I think that’s so important to provide that voice to those team members, and now that we’ve been doing that consistently across the board for over a year and a half, we’ve started to gain that trust and understanding that those things are happening and more people are starting to join those Culture Committees to make sure they have that kind of impact.”
LEARN MORE
For more insights on transforming your workplace, listen to some of our other podcast episodes here.