The People Philosophy are the guiding principles we employ to attract, retain, and inspire a workforce of higher hospitality professionals. These programs and philosophies improve our level of employee satisfaction, and satisfied employees lead to satisfied customers. Our employees stay longer, which means higher productivity and lower hiring costs.

Employee empowerment. We believe the only way to deliver quality service is to empower employees to do so--it cannot simply be mandated. All employees know that they can take the action necessary to satisfy a customer. No checking with the manager, no need to say "I'll see what I can do." Employees have the power and responsibility to deliver customer service on the spot, and they do.

Some companies worry about opening Pandora's box when giving employees more power and flexibility to meet the demands of customers. What we found was that employees' judgments are generally aligned with pleasing customers - - and in case they don't know, they can still ask a manager for a decision when appropriate.

Job Flexibility. We train employees to learn how to satisfy customers--how to be empowered--thus avoiding the "that's our policy" or "that's how we do it" syndrome. We also offer a job flexibility and career planning to develop high-potential employees and managers for promotions within the company. Employees set their own career goals and objectives, which managers must support. If a grill cook wants to be a Chef, for example, we will create an appropriate path for that employee to follow. If a Café Manager wants to be a District Manager, we provide a clear concise path that details the skills they need to obtain and fine tune.

Employee input. We believe that our employees are the most valuable resource we have in terms of suggestions for improvements, so we regularly ask them, through surveys, about ways to enhance our ability to meet the needs of customers. That way, we take the best practices of an individual employee and institutionalize them throughout NexDine.

We also measure the absolute level of employee satisfaction through an annual anonymous survey. Interestingly, but not surprising to us, there is a positive correlation between training, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction. We found that our Café locations that offer the highest level of training enjoyed the highest level of employee satisfaction, and the customers who dined at those Cafés had the highest "intent to return" and "friendliness of staff" levels in our company, as indicated by customer comment cards. This demonstrates dramatically that satisfied customers can and do affect the bottom line.