How we recruit, train, manage and treat our employees is what makes the difference in an organisation, according to Jeremy McCarthy, Mandarin Oriental’s group director of Spa.

McCarthy sat on a panel last week at the professional spa and wellness conference in London entitled ‘Help your team bloom and flourish by unlocking their motivation and potential.’

McCarthy, who holds a Masters degree in Applied Positive Psychology, also teaches a course through UC Irvine on ‘positive leadership in Spas & Hospitality.’

“I don’t teach that negativity is a bad thing,” said McCarthy. “If you have that culture of everything has to be positive and we don’t want any negativity, than how does somebody feel comfortable letting you know that there’s a problem that needs to be fixed?”

Additionally, negative employees can be an important resource to an organisation, suggested McCarthy.

“Negative employees bring energy to an organisation, because they care,” he explained. “If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t be negative. Negative employees have energy and passion, and if you can direct that in the right way, you have a real resource there.”

McCarthy said he also shifts the conversation from how to motivate employees, to how to stop demotivating them.

“Almost everybody shows up to work on the first day motivated,” he explained. “The question is, what do we as managers do over time that starts to strip away that inherent motivation that your employees had on day one?”

McCarthy said that especially in the spa and wellness industry, there is a misplaced focus on trying to make our employees happy.

“Happiness is important, but I don’t necessarily think it’s the most important thing,” he said. “I think what people really want out of their work is a sense of meaning.”

He also suggested that while almost everyone says that people are what makes their organisation different, it’s what we do with those people that makes a difference.

“We all have great people,” he said. “If you’re going to say that your people are a differentiator, you have to ask yourself: What do you do differently with your people? How do you treat them differently? How do you manage them differently? How do you recruit them differently, or train them differently? That’s what makes the difference.”