When Engagement Shows Up in Real Time
Sometimes employee engagement shows up in surveys. And sometimes you can just see it in real time on the company chat.
Wash Cycle Laundry dispatch got a distress signal — a hotel guest lost their stuffed kitty at the largest hotel in Boston. Somewhere among three full truckloads of laundry. That’s like finding a needle in 42 haystacks.
If you’ve ever worked in a commercial laundry, you know what three truckloads looks like. Thousands of pounds of sheets, towels, pillowcases, and duvet covers tumbling through a sort line at speed. The chances of spotting one small stuffed cat in that volume are genuinely slim.
But Daniela Ortega coordinated with our front-line staff on the sort line, and they found the cat. Tagged it. And celebrated the win along the way — whether you understand Spanish or not, you could see the energy in the group chat.
Culture You Can’t Mandate
That’s engagement you can see. Not the kind that shows up in an annual survey or a Net Promoter Score. The kind that shows up when someone on the sort line — doing one of the hardest, most physical jobs in the plant — takes it personally when a kid’s stuffed animal is on the line.
Nobody told our team to care about this. There’s no KPI for stuffed animal recovery. But somewhere along the way, our people internalized something that matters: the laundry we process isn’t just fabric. It comes from a guest’s room. That guest is a person. And sometimes that person is a kid who can’t sleep without their cat.
When your front-line team makes that connection on their own — that’s culture. You can’t mandate it. You can only build the kind of workplace where it happens naturally.
Learn more about our team and the culture behind our operations.