Melissa Villanueva: “Take the time to get to know your team if you want to create a fantastic work culture”

Every person on your team has a story and if you don’t treat them like a number, they won’t treat you like SOLELY as a company. You can both be people. Showing your human side and appreciating them allows you to have honest, respectful, thoughtful dialogue for the betterment of what’s best for both parties. At one point, we had a new employee who seemed great in the interviews, but during her first couple weeks she was constantly late and even missed a shift, which is cause for termination. We sat down with her and said this absolutely cannot happen, and she quickly got it together. Three months later after we started developing a good rapport and she let me know that she was three months pregnant. I put two and two together and realized that during the time she seemed a bit rocky…