There has been a lot of progress made this past year in all of your units. Many of these incremental improvements have been just that, small, but important changes which are all designed to develop and retain our business and our team members. The positive impact can be seen in client loyalty, resident satisfaction and employee engagement.
Your work on and the region-wide sharing of these “Soaring Higher Together” initiatives has been greatly beneficial in helping us focus on our tactical strategies. These include Culinary Innovation, Hospitality Mindset, Wellness, Community Service and our People Component. With this in mind, we are now focusing on the liberation and engagement of all of your team members throughout the department through the implementation of “Ideas Are Free”. The emphasis here is on how you will dialog with your employees to obtain their ideas to improve the overall operation. As we have discussed, most people already have lots of ideas, they want to tell managers about them and would be thrilled to see their ideas used. This is because people have a natural inclination to FIX problems.”
When done correctly, this is not a suggestion program. In fact, it’s far from it. Instead, it is an effective way to leverage diversity of thought as a catalyst to innovation, creativity and problem solving. It helps us attract and retain the best talent and it creates an environment conducive to each associate reaching their full potential. These inclusive practices will help us embed Diversity of Thought throughout our region.
This strategy is an important element to achieving our bold mission to “Be the Benchmark”. As you think about the value of what we are doing in this region, I would like to share one of my favorite quotes from Walt Disney:
“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long.
We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious…..
And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
So, Keep Moving Forward