Employees that Play Together, Work More Together

            I came across this article posted by a colleague on LinkedIn and thought hmmm how does this relate to Coastal and how it can affect your office as well. I feel that our camaraderie in the office helps our productivity level perform at a higher level. Now we are much smaller company than iGate but we have a lot of similar comparisons in our workplaces. We chit chat on Monday mornings about what we did over the weekend, gossip about whats going on in the celebrity world, brag about their NFL football team beating one another team, discuss our favorite show Revenge (that is if everyone watched it, we don't like to spoil the surprise), celebrate birthdays with cake or breakfast (because we ALL love Suzy's cheese grits). It is impressive to hear this happens in a large 27,000 employee company as iGate. Below is the article from Business Review, its worth the short read.

It’s actually true – a workforce that has fun together builds trust, engagement – and increased productivity.
Everyone needs a circle of friends – and when employees feel they have compatible peers at the workplace, the workplace is a more comfortable, pleasant, peaceful place to be.  At iGATE, we’ve confirmed this through research, and developed several structured employee engagement programs in response.  These include peer groups where our employees interact, around favorite sports, favorite teams, favorite TV shows – whatever their interest; and structured employee engagement programs.
For example, we celebrate ‘Thank God it’s Monday’ to kick off the week in a high energy way. Every Monday, lunch is accompanied by our own in-house, all-employee band, which has grown from seven to over 30 employee members. This has been going on over five years, and just keeps getting stronger.
It’s a fun way to get people involved and engaged. We also build camaraderie by eliminating a lot of those irritating aspects of work – we strive to reduce meetings and meaningless paperwork; and many of our peer groups help employees learn new skills and pursue new interests. Our aim is to create a high happiness index and add meaning to our employees’ lives – all 27,000 of them.
At iGATE, we take a comprehensive, integrated approach to people management. We’ve worked to understand what truly motivates the workforce, through numerous surveys and studies, and we’ve developed a best practices approach from leaders around the globe.  This approach has inspired outstanding employee engagement, and helped us consistently deliver quality service and solutions to our clients in Canada and worldwide. We’ve received the ‘Practice of Excellence’ award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), for its Competency based Career Planning and Management System; and we are one of only two companies globally who have been assessed at People CMM® Maturity Level 5 – a framework from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), USA that comprises state-of-the-art, best practices for Human Capital Management.


Now I would like to give a congratulatory high five for everyone at Coastal. It does make a difference when we are all getting along and working as a team. Every employee here is an important part of day to day functionality and making Coastal a success. Let us know what you do in your office to keep the team playing together and happy. 

Come Run Walk on June 16th for CHKD

Join Coastal Office & Promo Products for the fun filled family event this year in Norfolk on Saturday June 16th.We are excited to wear our custom made t-shirts designed specifically for this event and printed on the "new" DTG machine. The technology behind the DTG has helped us print smaller Tshirt orders at an affordable price. It used to be that you would have to order 50+ shirts to get a good price. Not anymore!


Because fitness runs in the family, the RunWalk for the Kids is a community-wide project designed to encourage exercise and healthy lifestyles in families and children. The event is a project of The King's Daughters to benefit Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters.

CHKD's experts are concerned with the alarming rates of childhood obesity in this community. Lack of exercise plays a big role in childhood obesity, but the RunWalk for the Kids can help in two ways. First, all the funds raised by the event will go to support CHKD and its special programs for children. Secondly, children and families are encouraged to participate in the RunWalk together. We even have a special family rate along with +children's marathon training program to help young athletes prepare for the big day and incorporate daily exercise into their lives.

Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters
CHKD is the only facility of its kind in Virginia and serves the medical and surgical needs of children throughout greater Hampton Roads, the Eastern Shore of Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. The not-for-profit hospital never turns any child away.  Last year, children' made more than 500,000 visits to CHKD caregivers as inpatients and outpatients, for routine and complex illnesses, injuries and chronic conditions.


Let Rachel Kemp know if you would like to join our fun, dynamic team in the 8k event for CHKD. rachelkemp@coastalop.net or 366-5502. Follow us on Facebook for updates on events. www.facebook.com/coastalop

Customer Service: Does it still exist?

John Willcox, owner of Coastal Office Products & Promo

How to Really Show Your Customers You Care

Two companies were interviewed by Inc Magazine and we found their customer service initiatives very powerful and unique to a locally owned company. Below are the key lessons that Tara Hunt of Buyosphere and Lauren Thom of Fleurty Girl shared, It's not all about you; its all about them. At Coastal, you are always a neighbor and never a number.

1. Go far, far out of your way for the customer (it will pay off!).

Thom recounts a family who recently came in to buy the same shirt for 10 people. The store only had nine in the correct sizes. "I drove 30 minutes to another store and back downtown to deliver the last shirt to their hotel. That's the southern hospitality I was raised on," she says.

2. Put your self in the shoes of your customers. Do what they do.

"Be your customer. We are active on our own site. We 'eat our own dogfood,'" Hunt says, using a software industry expression for using a product to see how it works. "We regularly invite people to test the site, look over their shoulder, ask them why they went to certain areas. We use software to capture their clicks and analyze how they use the site. We don't try to capture the customer, or get their information solely for marketing purposes."

Thom adds: "We have friends go in and shop, and recount their experiences. We analyze the checkout process in the store—we have very seasonal variations, but we need to maintain consistency. Sometimes we have a line to the door so we look at past busy influx times to see where we can improve."
3. Make sure your online interactions are just as good as the in-person ones.
Fleurty Girl's friendly and helpful in-person service is replicated online. "We don't just sell, we share socially to be ambassadors of the city. We promote other's events." Thom's employees are all Facebook and Twitter administrators, and they all share the responsibility for answering questions on social media, just as if they were picking up a phone ringing in the store. She hires people who are passionate about the store, the brand, and New Orleans.

4. We all know a great customer experience when we feel it

Hunt recalled an instance of great service: a New Orleans waiter who insisted on sharing other locations in town they had to see, including other restaurants. "I still have the piece of scrap paper in my bag, and it has a list of places to go for everything from a good dinner to bread pudding," she said. Thom added "If you want your customers treated well, love your employees. We regularly do 'rock and bowl' nights or dinner as a team to build camaraderie. I've been in business for more than two years and we have almost no turnover."

5. Let your customers promote you.

What do you do about difficult or cranky Yelp reviews? Is it OK to ask your customers to review you in a positive way? The journalistic answer: Yelp's Terms of Service state you may not "…otherwise attempt to manipulate the Site's search results." So, it's probably not advisable, but you can certainly create experiences good enough to make people want to share.

Both panelists talked about the need to be very responsive to customers in social media. Buyosphere has a private Facebook group where they solicit feedback from some of their top users. Thom's "customer army" was introduced by another New Orleans native who asked about it from the audience. She was selling shirts with the "Who Dat?" phrase popular with fans of the New Orleans Saints football franchise. At one point she pulled them off the shelves and a fan tweeted to ask about it. She tweeted back that the store had received a cease-and-desist from the NFL about their use of the phrase. Within two hours she had national media outside the store. The fans of the store and the city rose up to help her, demanded her shirts and she went back to selling. (While the NFL has backed off, there are still pending legal issues that Thom can't discuss.)

Keeping the customers first is a great strategy, and these two savvy businesswomen have provided some great tips. What are your suggestions? Please share them with us