There has been a lot of worry about employee engagement and working from home. “How do we keep people working together as a team? How can we keep people from isolating themselves into their own little world?” These are questions I have heard over the last year and a half as companies have navigated a new landscape.

For several months, I have had the opportunity to work with a company who has found a great solution for maintaining a team and keeping everyone close like a family. The solution is aptly called WIN which stands for What I Need.

WIN is simply a 15 minute—yes, 15 minute—meeting conducted like clockwork every day at the same time. It is an online meeting where every employee—it’s a very small company—gets together to let everyone know what they are doing and then to ask for help if they need it.

At first, I was dubious about it and thought, “a meeting, every day, ugh.” But boy was I wrong. In the meeting, every employee from executive leaders to customer-facing technicians gets to have a voice. There is good banter, good discussion on problems, people opening up, and a closeness that gets developed pretty quickly. After several months, I was made as much a family member—I know a lot of you hate that and say co-workers are not family, but too bad, I think creating a family is good—as any other long-time employee. In addition, I found that the team had no problem saying they needed help. No one hid things or made anyone feel bad because they had needs, and this included executive leaders and managers, everyone had times when they asked for help. It really felt like a team all working together for each other as much as customers.

To experience this only solidified my belief that the best way to improve service to your customers is to improve the service your team delivers to each other. When the team cares for each other, they will naturally care for customers because serving has become part of their DNA. It really is simple and doesn’t require lots of mapping or designing or training. It just requires getting everyone to help each other and a WIN meeting is a great way to get it done.

Try it. Call it whatever you want. But try it. Get your team, department, or whole company together every day at a prescribed hour for 15 minutes to see who needs help and then get them helping each other. It will help you, your team, and your customers. What could be better?

==> If you liked this post, CLICK HERE to subscribe.