Right now, I’m battling a springtime cold. So is our Dallas account manager, Kristen. It’s also a busy month for all of our clients, so we’re rockin’ and rollin’ in our office this week – ain’t nobody got time for a cold! 😉

Now, don’t judge, but we had a bit of a pile up of dishes from two meetings in our office yesterday that sadly had to be left there overnight as we ran out of the office for another meeting. Of course, the “pile up” was relatively small in the grand scheme of things (three coffee mugs, a couple of cups – an office-kind-of-a pile up), but more than the occasional spoon or mug.

Now, our property management company provides us with cleaning service from Select Commercial Services. Our cleaning partner will wash a dish that gets left in the sink from time to time. But with this recent stack of dishes, I felt bad having her clean our dishes. So, I left a note to say thanks for all the times she washed our dishes, but that this time, she could leave these and I’d wash them in the morning.

This morning, I arrived to this:

And as I’m standing there sniffling, head pounding from a sinus headache and thinking about my to do list, I was so thankful that she did it anyway! Is it her job to tidy up our office? Absolutely! However, she could’ve made the decision to leave the dishes in the sink as I requested and move on to the next office as I gave her permission to do so.

In business, the little things make a big difference, and if your frontline staff isn’t being trained on how to be good stewards for your brand – and go above and beyond even when a client says, “That’s OK, just leave those dishes,” you could lose out on potential and current business. This is all part of the public relations spectrum – the little niceties, community outreach, small touches for customers and even the one- or two-sentence mentions in the local newspaper all work together to create that positive image for your business. Your employees can make all the difference in the world – even if by just washing a few dishes for a busy PR firm.