Customer Service Reader

Customer Service and the Pursuit of Happiness

Does happiness at work matter? Most of your life is spent going to work, being at work, going from work, thinking about work, and talking about work after work. If you work in customer service, and are not happy with your job, you have the wrong job. You should find the calling that makes you happy. When you are happy at work, you’ll never have to work another day.

Most people don’t expect to find happiness, working a customer service job. But customer service, by its very nature, presents unique opportunities for the pursuit of happiness, not only for individuals, but for society as a whole.

Researchers in the field of Subjective Well-being (happiness) have found that there are certain characteristics that happy people have in common. Happy people:

• Have self-control
• Are grateful
• Have good social relationships, supportive friends and family
• Have an adequate income
• Have respectable jobs, and
• Have a philosophy that provides meaning to their lives.

Using this framework, can we, as providers, find happiness through customer service?

Self-control

The consistent practice of outstanding customer service behaviors requires an extraordinary amount of self-control. It starts with the realization that YOU are in control.

• You choose your attitude
• You choose your response
• You choose to set aside your personal problems
• You choose to give others a better day

When we take control, we refuse to be victims of circumstance, or of our own personal weaknesses. We take charge of our lives and of the situations that we face. This is a principal requirement of a life in service and, as it turns out, a principal requirement for a happy life.

Gratitude

"Thank you" is perhaps that the second most important customer service phrase. We use it (or ought to use it) dozens of times a day (thank you for calling, thank you for bringing that to my attention, thank-you-come-again). When we use these phrases authentically - i.e. when we mean what we say - we develop a habit of thankfulness. In Akumal III, Dr Bob Emmons reported research which showed that "people high in gratitude are more satisfied with life, have more vitality, more happiness, more optimism, hope, positive affect, lower psychological symptoms, more prosocial behaviors, and are higher on empathy".

Good social relationships

When you consistently practice customer service values and skills, such as kindness, listening, empathy, gratitude, responsibility, and persuasion, you develop habits that will stay with you for the rest of your life, and that can be applied to all other aspects of your life. You'll be able to make friends more easily, and will be better skilled at strengthening your relationships with your friends and family. They in turn will tend to reciprocate. People who are happy have strong relationships with friends and family. This is both a characteristic of happy people, and a consequence of their behavior.

Adequate income

There is a premium in the labor market for outstanding customer service providers. More important, we have the opportunity to constantly increase both our short-term and long-term income by applying our customer service skills. As Henry Ford once said, one who is “absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”

Respectable jobs

This has two components. There’s the respect that you get for how you do your job, and there’s the respect you get for having that job. It’s not easy to provide outstanding customer service to every customer, on every transaction, every minute of the day. If you can do that, that’s something you can truly be proud of, and it’s certainly deserving of respect. Chances are you already stand out, and are duly rewarded.

The second component, respect for the job itself, depends less on the individual, and more on the team as a whole. When everyone in your organization or location provides outstanding service, people tend to talk about you, and you're likely to be known and respected for the service that you provide. It's a source of pride just to be part of such a team. The hard part is that it does depend on everyone. All it takes is one bad player to ruin the whole game.

A philosophy that provides meaning to their lives

The principles at the root of outstanding customer service are simple enough to say:

• Our lives have more meaning when we serve others
• Customer service is, first and foremost, a form of service
• To serve each other and each customer is to serve humanity

As customer service providers, we touch millions of people each year. Each contact is an opportunity to make each life we touch a little better each day. And when we make people happy, they tend to pay it forward. Through the phenomenon psychologists call the “emotional contagion”, we can be carriers of an epidemic of kindness. We can be weapons of mass construction.

I'll end with some thoughts from some people who are a lot smarter than me:

Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. Martin Luther King Jr

Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service. Leo Tolstoy

The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive. Only a life lived for others is a life worth living. Albert Einstein

Every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make, not only our own happiness, but that of the world at large. Mohandas  K Gandhi

See also: Q&A with Dr Ed Diener

The Solution

An organization’s success at the consistent delivery of outstanding service is merely the cumulative result of the contribution of each of its members. Outstanding service is just the consequence of each individual’s choice to be great at service. That’s our decision, as individual providers, to make. It’s our responsibility. And it’s our gain.

Notes from Chapter 3, The 8th Habit, Stephen Covey

Most of the great cultural shifts started with the choice of one person. Sometimes it was the formal leader; most of the time, it was not.

These agents of change first changed themselves, then inspired and lifted others. They possessed an anchored sense of identity, discovered their strengths and talents, and used them to produce results.

• People like this don’t get sucked in or pulled down by all the negative, demoralizing, insulting forces in the organization
• Their organizations are no better than most organizations
• All organizations are, to some degree, a mess
• Don’t wait for your boss or organization to change
• Be an island of excellence in a sea of mediocrity
• Be contagious
• Learn your true nature and gifts
• Use them to develop a vision of great things you want to accomplish
• Understand the needs and opportunities around you, and meet them
• Make a difference
• Find and use your voice
• Serve and inspire others
• Inspire others to find their voice
• All of us can decide to leave behind a life of mediocrity, and to live a life of greatness
• We all have the power to decide to live a great life
• No matter how long we’ve walked life’s pathway to mediocrity, we can always choose to switch paths

The employee experience

Notes from Customer Experience Management, Bernd Schmitt

In most companies, employees do not care about their jobs. A Gallup survey found that only 25% of employees are “actively engaged”. 75% are just muddling through. University of Michigan’s David Ulrich observes that “job depression” is on the rise.

• Disengaged and depressed employees are not likely to deliver a great experience to customers.
• To turn that around, you must engage the heart and soul of every employee. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago found that employees want to experience work as “flow” – when they become so involved in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. Flow is about optimal experiences and enjoyment in life, and the ultimate goal is “turning all life into a unified flow experience”. When that happens, work does not feel like work, and the separation of work and leisure becomes meaningless. Work and leisure become one.

You can make that happen by treating employees as customers, and applying the principles of Customer Experience Management.

1. Find out what they want, learn about their experiential world.
2. Ask them what they would change.
3. Instead of imposing a regime, let them help develop their new work environment.
4. Get them really involved in the brand. Run workshops and discuss what it means to them. Let them suggest how they can live the brand in their work and in their personal lives.
5. Examine the employee interface. How can you improve contacts and interactions?
6. Seek their input about innovation, include them in developing innovations.

If you pay attention to your employees experiences, you will be rewarded with a happier, more productive, more proactive workforce. Utopia? Yes, sadly many companies today still operate according to a command-and-control system. Strategy is developed at the top and disseminated to the front lines in an environment of fear. This experience-destroying, military model of the organization fails to recognize the innovative and value-creating forces that a positive employee experience can unleash.

Good people make good service. Good service makes good people.

Listed below are competencies extracted from the Emotional Competence Framework of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. They are the competencies that matter most to the success of customer service providers. Conversely, when we practice service - whether on customers, family members, colleagues, or communities - we become better at these competencies. We become better people.

Outstanding customer service providers:

• Realize the links between their feelings and what they think, do, and say
• Have a guiding awareness of their values and goals
• Are reflective, learning from experience
• Are open to candid feedback, new perspectives, continuous learning, and self-development
• Are able to show a sense of humor and perspective about themselves
• Can voice views that are unpopular and go out on a limb for what is right
• Are decisive, able to make sound decisions despite uncertainties and pressures
• Manage their impulsive feelings and distressing emotions well
• Stay composed, positive, and unflappable even in trying moments
• Think clearly and stay focused under pressure
• Act ethically and are above reproach
• Build trust through their reliability and authenticity
• Admit their own mistakes
• Meet commitments and keep promises
• Hold themselves accountable for meeting their objectives
• Are organized and careful in their work
• Smoothly handle multiple demands, shifting priorities, and rapid change
• Adapt their responses and tactics to fit fluid circumstances
• Seek out fresh ideas from a wide variety of sources
• Entertain original solutions to problems
• Generate new ideas
• Are results-oriented, with a high drive to meet their objectives and standards
• Set challenging goals and take calculated risks
• Pursue information to reduce uncertainty and find ways to do better
• Learn how to improve their performance
• Readily make personal or group sacrifices to meet a larger organizational goal
• Find a sense of purpose in the larger mission
• Pursue goals beyond what’s required or expected of them
• Cut through red tape and bend the rules when necessary to get the job done
• Persist in seeking goals despite obstacles and setbacks
• Are attentive to emotional cues and listen well
• Show sensitivity and understand others’ perspectives
• Help out based on understanding other people’s needs and feelings
• Understand customers’ needs and match them to services or products
• Seek ways to increase customers’ satisfaction and loyalty
• Gladly offer appropriate assistance
• Grasp a customer’s perspective, acting as a trusted advisor
• Are skilled at persuasion
• Fine-tune presentations to appeal to the listener
• Are effective in give-and-take, registering emotional cues in attuning their message
• Deal with difficult issues straightforwardly
• Handle difficult people and tense situations with diplomacy and tact
• Orchestrate win-win solutions

In addition, outstanding customer service leaders:

• Acknowledge and reward people’s strengths, accomplishments, and development
• Offer useful feedback and identify people’s needs for development
• Mentor, give timely coaching, and offer assignments that challenge and grow a person’s skill.
• Understand the forces that shape views and actions of clients, customers, or competitors
• Accurately read situations and organizational and external realities
• Use complex strategies like indirect influence to build consensus and support
• Listen well and seek mutual understanding
• Welcome sharing of information fully
• Foster open communication and stay receptive to bad news as well as good
• Articulate and arouse enthusiasm for a shared vision and mission
• Step forward to lead as needed, regardless of position
• Guide the performance of others while holding them accountable
• Lead by example
• Recognize the need for change and remove barriers
• Challenge the status quo to acknowledge the need for change
• Champion the change and enlist others in its pursuit
• Model the change expected of others
• Spot potential conflict, bring disagreements into the open, and help deescalate
• Encourage debate and open discussion
• Build rapport and keep others in the loop
• Make and maintain personal friendships among work associates
• Balance a focus on task with attention to relationships
• Collaborate, sharing plans, information, and resources
• Promote a friendly, cooperative climate
• Model team qualities like respect, helpfulness, and cooperation
• Draw all members into active and enthusiastic participation
• Build team identity, esprit de corps, and commitment
• Protect the group and its reputation
• Share credit

See also this article which codes the whole EC Framework according to customer service requirements: basic competencies, higher-level competencies, and competencies for customer service leaders.

Because it feels good

Excerpts from Dazzle Me! By the editors at Dartnell. Writer: David Dee

“Providing great customer service is a triple win,” says Paul Timm, a professor at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. “Your customers feel good, your organization prospers, and you feel good.”

Q: In 50 Powerful ideas, you say “the best reason to give good service is that it makes you feel better.” What do you mean?

A: If customers expect that they’re going to be treated poorly, they become defensive and begin treating you, the employee, poorly. Very few people can put up with the day-to-day barrage of unhappy customers who expect to be treated poorly.

Q: What’s the alternative?

A: Choose to provide outstanding customer service instead. No one can force another person to give good service beyond the most rudimentary mechanical levels. But when we choose to give of ourselves – to apply the power of customer service - we feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction. Then, a job can be fun and rewarding.

Q: A cynic might say that most customer service jobs don’t pay enough for all that extra effort.

A: But there are other rewards. Like the satisfaction you feel for acting professionally on the job. And providing good customer service is really teaching you how to get along with people. Those skills are widely applicable to all the relationships in our lives, personal and professional.

Q: You’ve said that providing good service can be fun. How’s that?

A: For most people, true fun is equated with satisfaction. It’s fun to feel good about something you’ve accomplished. It’s fun to know you have the power to give of yourself to achieve team success. It’s fun to grow as a person and develop new skills and abilities, and to know you’re increasing in value every day through your experience and learning.

Easy to surprise

Excerpts from Dazzle Me! By the editors at Dartnell. Writer: David Dee

Deliver surprisingly superior service

“Go the extra mile for customers” is another way of saying, “surprise customers by doing something extra for them.” If you make a personal commitment to surprise your customers, you’ll have gone a long way to providing service that far exceeds the service average reps provide.

Here are four ways you can achieve this simple personal goal:

1. Surprise customers by always being courteous.
2. Surprise customers by doing more than they ask for.
3. Surprise customers by taking pride in your work.
4. Surprise customers who have come to expect the worst by being professional in your bearing and manner.

Commitments to yourself

1. To always maintain a professional manner and appearance.
2. To greet customers warmly and to always make them feel welcome and comfortable doing business with you and your organization.
3. To always be prompt, courteous, and friendly in serving customers.
4. To always adopt a problem-solving attitude when you handle complaints and inquiries.
5. To carefully assess each customer’s needs and recommend specific products or services that will provide the highest level of satisfaction.
6. To find the right answers to all customer questions and to keep up-to-date on the products and services your company offers so you can pass the correct information on to your customers.
7. To be familiar with all organizational procedures and policies so you can handle every customer transaction with minimum error and delay.
8. To follow up on inquiries from customers and ensure their satisfaction.
9. To know your company’s promotional campaigns and to support these efforts whenever you deal with customers.
10. To turn new customers into returning customers by providing the kind of service they expect and are entitled to.

The living brand

Excerpts from Creating the Living Brand 
Neeli Bendapudi and Venkat Bendapudi, in Harvard Business Review

Any company can deliver outstanding customer service - even convenience stores, where low pay and high turnover supposedly make service a problem.

• Even companies that position themselves for the mass market can provide outstanding customer–employee interactions and profit from them. Their secret? They consider employees their living brand and devote a great deal of time and energy to hiring and developing them so that they reflect the brand’s core values
• We studied the convenience store industry in depth for two years, in conjunction with the National Association of Convenience Stores, and conducted detailed case studies of two companies: QuikTrip (QT), a $4 billion privately held firm based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that operates 462 stores in nine central, western, and southern states, and the $2.8 billion Wawa, a privately held company based in Wawa, Pennsylvania, that operates more than 500 stores in five eastern states. QT has been listed as one of Fortune’s 100 best places to work three years in a row; in 2005 it was ranked number 19. Turnover rates at QT and Wawa are 14% and 22% respectively, a small fraction of the triple-digit average turnover in the retail sector.
• Both companies routinely outperform the market. From 1977 through 2003, Wawa stock has grown at an average annual compounded rate of 17%, nearly twice that of the S&P 500. QT’s stock value has risen 19.2% in the past three-year period, more than four times the S&P’s rate.
• We uncovered six principles that both companies embrace to instill the brand and its meaning in their employees - and to create a strong culture of customer service. Both Wawa and QT demonstrate the power, even in minimum-wage businesses, of investment in employees to create a positive customer experience.

Six Lessons of the Living Brand

1. Know what you’re looking for

• Every organization must have a clear vision of the skills and characteristics it wants in its workforce, and have a plan for getting them. But few companies that hire in the mass market have the discipline to go about doing that rationally and systematically.
• A company must decide which skills and qualities can be taught and which must be hired. QT insists on hiring “nice” people who like people, because that’s a tough quality to teach; it’s either present or not. At Wawa, the must-have is passion, for work and life.
• QT puts applicants through a rigorous, structured process that includes a personality assessment based on the qualities of QT’s most successful performers. Interviewers probe for stories to complete the picture.
• Hiring decisions at QT aren’t left to store managers. Instead, managers in each of the company’s eight geographic divisions do all the recruiting and hiring for their regions.

2. Make the most of talent

• In mass-market retail environments, talent is generally viewed as a commodity, and employees are basically interchangeable. But that outlook becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Studies have repeatedly shown that people rise or stoop to the expectations set for them.
• Wawa and QT get more from their people because they expect more. One way they communicate expectations is through training. At QT, each new full-time employee is partnered with a personal trainer who has previously held the same position.
  
• Such investment in people continues well beyond the initial hire. Wawa encourages its people to pursue degrees in any field of study, and reimburses tuition at three colleges with which it has relationships. The emphasis on learning helps Wawa to be an employer of choice, even though its pay is on a par with other companies in its labor market.
• People perform at their best if they see a future for themselves at a company. Employees know they can have a career at QT, due to its strong culture of promoting from within.
  
• These companies ensure that employees have the support they need, both externally and internally, to do their jobs well. Wawa involves store managers, who have the best information on store operations, in improving the performance of vendors. The company takes the same hard-nosed approach to analyzing the quality of internal support processes such as marketing and human resources.

3. Create pride in the brand

• In retail, service is the manifestation of the brand, and service quality depends directly on employees’ attachment to the brand. QT and Wawa constantly and consciously invest in maintaining brands that employees can take pride in.
• Such is the attachment to Wawa brands that the company’s 1994 move to put Taco Bell and Pizza Hut outlets in more than 100 stores was met with opposition from customers and employees alike. In 1996, Wawa began to phase out the brands to make more room for Wawa products. The company openly discussed with associates the error of the earlier decision and acknowledged the value of employee input.

4. Build community

• While many convenience store chains have focused on speed of transactions and sales volume per store, Wawa and QT have made concerted efforts to build customer loyalty through a sense of community. Almost all the customers we interviewed mentioned employee friendliness as one of the reasons they come back to the stores.
  
• At both stores, customers remarked upon two things they believed were unique: The people who worked at the stores seemed to be glad to be there, and they seemed to like one another. The perceived sense of community among store associates appears to spill over into a sense of community with customers.
• At QT, the community feeling extends to the customer-service appraisal system and the reward structure. The emphasis is on the team’s performance in satisfying and delighting customers. If a mystery shopper is especially impressed with a particular employee, everyone on staff at the store during that shift receives a bonus.

5. Share the business context

• Employees need a clear understanding of how their company operates - particularly, how it defines success. Because they understand the company’s values, employees don’t have to follow a rigid set of rules - they just have to behave in ways that meet customer needs.
• Employees also need to know how their work affects companywide financial performance and how the company arrives at its targets. Armed with this information, workers can better understand the decisions of upper management and improve job performance. At QT, every full-time associate is trained to read the store’s monthly financial statements and earns a bonus that is based on the store’s operating profit.
• QT executives are quick to dissect their mistakes. One of the purposes of this policy of openness is to encourage innovation by conveying the company’s tolerance for well-meant mistakes. Chet Cadieux, the CEO, tells employees that as long as the company hires smart and caring people, no employee can make an error that the company cannot recover from.
• Wawa coffee, which has a devoted following, was introduced because a lone employee decided to offer brewed coffee in a store.

6. Satisfy the soul

• Researchers suggest that to truly harness an individual’s creativity, to get her full passion and engagement, a company must meet her needs for security, esteem, and justice.
• Security. QT’s employees know that their safety and well-being are of paramount importance to top management, which deploys technology and staffing models to create a sense of security.
  
• Esteem. The emotional and physical demands of a service job can be wearing, so Wawa provides rejuvenation by celebrating successes and milestones. Every month, mystery shoppers evaluate Wawa stores along the company’s brand standards, which detail expectations for every element of the store experience, from waiting time to the freshness of the food to the cleanliness of the restrooms. Highscoring teams are visited by the “prize patrol,” which brings rewards and a party.
• Justice. So that workers will feel they are being treated fairly, Wawa gives eligible employees a share in about 10% of the company’s base profits. It has expanded its employee stock-ownership plan and is offering associates an opportunity to purchase additional shares. A mark of employee confidence in the company: Some 29% of company shares are held by associates.

At first glance, the investments that Wawa and QT make in their living brands may seem excessive. Executives are quick to agree that both organizations spend more than their competitors, though as private companies they keep the numbers close to the vest. “How can they afford to do that?” is a question we have heard as we have shared these stories of uncommon service quality in a commonplace industry. The leaders of Wawa and QT reply: “How can you afford not to?”

The revolution begins with you

When I started this blog, one of my concerns was that the customer service literature mainly tends to treat those of us who actually provide the service as objects to be manipulated (see "That's a good doggie"). I argue that for any customer service program to succeed, providers must turn that bias on its head. We must exercise leadership, and take personal responsibility for our success. While trying to develop that theme, I recalled this article by Peter Drucker, who died in November 2005, after having devoted 70 of his 95 years to the hope that he could make us better people, as well as better managers.

Excerpts from Managing Oneself
Peter Drucker, in Harvard Business Review

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen  profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive.

To do those things well, you'll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself -- not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

What Are My Strengths?

• A person can perform only from strength.
• We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.
• Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.
• The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
• Several implications for action follow from feedback analysis.
• First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.
• Second, work on improving your strengths.
• Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it. Far too many people -- especially people with great expertise in one area -- are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge.
• It is equally essential to remedy your bad habits -- the things you do or fail to do that inhibit your effectiveness and performance.
• One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

How Do I Perform?

• Amazingly few people know how they get things done. Indeed, most of us do not even know that different people work and perform differently. Too many people work in ways that are not their ways, and that almost guarantees nonperformance.
• Like one's strengths, how one performs is unique. It is a matter of personality.
• Just as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways that they best perform. A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs.
• Am I a reader or a listener? What’s the best way for you to get information? The first thing to know is whether you are a reader or a listener. Far too few people even know that there are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both. Even fewer know which of the two they themselves are.
• How do I learn? There are people who learn by writing. Some people learn by taking copious notes. Some people learn by doing. Others learn by hearing themselves talk.
• Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if you do work well with people, you then must ask, In what relationship? Some people work best as subordinates. Some people work best as team members. Others work best alone.
• Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser? A great many people perform best as advisers but cannot take the burden and pressure of making the decision. A good many other people, by contrast, need an adviser to force themselves to think; then they can make decisions and act on them with speed, self-confidence, and courage.
• Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?
• Do I work best in a big organization or a small one?.
• Do not try to change yourself -- you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.

What Are My Values?

• To be able to manage yourself, you finally have to ask, What are my values?
• Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, a person's values must be compatible with the organization's values. They do not need to be the same, but they must be close enough to coexist. Otherwise, the person will not only be frustrated but also will not produce results.
• A person's strengths and the way that person performs rarely conflict; the two are complementary. But there is sometimes a conflict between a person's values and his or her strengths. What one does well--even very well and successfully -- may not fit with one's value system. In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one's life to.
• Values are and should be the ultimate test.

Where Do I Belong?

• Most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong.
• Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong. The person who has learned that he or she does not perform well in a big organization should have learned to say no to a position in one. The person who has learned that he or she is not a decision maker should have learned to say no to a decision-making assignment.
• Equally important, knowing the answer to these questions enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment, "Yes, I will do that. But this is the way I should be doing it. This is the way it should be structured. This is the way the relationships should be. These are the kind of results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am.”
• Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person -- hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre -- into an outstanding performer.

What Should I Contribute?

• Knowledge workers have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
• It is rarely possible -- or even particularly fruitful -- to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half? The answer must balance several things.
• First, the results should be hard to achieve -- they should require "stretching," to use the current buzzword. But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved -- or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances -- is not being ambitious; it is being foolish.
• Second, the results should be meaningful. They should make a difference.
• Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable.
• From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set.

Responsibility for Relationships

• Very few people work by themselves and achieve results by themselves. Most people work with others and are effective with other people. Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships. This has two parts.
• The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are. This means that they too have their strengths; they too have their ways of getting things done; they too have their values. To be effective, therefore, you have to know the strengths, the performance modes, and the values of your coworkers.
• Bosses are individuals and are entitled to do their work in the way they do it best. It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of "managing" the boss.
• The same holds true for all your coworkers. Each works his or her way, not your way. And each is entitled to work in his or her way. What matters is whether they perform and what their values are. As for how they perform -- each is likely to do it differently. The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values.
• The second part of relationship responsibility is taking responsibility for communication. Most conflicts arise from the fact that people do not know what other people are doing and how they do their work, or what contribution the other people are concentrating on and what results they expect. And the reason they do not know is that they have not asked and therefore have not been told.
• Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity. It is a duty.

Conclusion

The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naïve. But managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer. Further, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves, profoundly challenges social structure. Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put.

But today the opposite is true. Knowledge workers outlive organizations, and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs.

Q&A with Dr Ed Diener

Can customer service providers find happiness? To answer that question, it may help to gain a better understanding of what happiness is. Ed Diener is Alumni Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. He is the Founding Editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society. Dr Diener is past-president of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, and of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. He won the 2000 Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, and has more than 200 publications, around 150 of which are in the area of well-being.

Excerpts from Frequently Asked Questions About Subjective Well-Being
Ed Diener, Alumni Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois

What is subjective well-being(SWB)?

• Subjective well-being is the scientific name for how people evaluate their lives. People can evaluate their lives in terms of a global judgment (such as life satisfaction or feelings of fulfillment), in terms of evaluating the domains of their lives (such as marriage or work), or in terms of their ongoing emotional feelings about what is happening to them (feeling pleasant emotions, which arise from positive evaluations of one's experiences, and low levels of unpleasant feelings, which arise from negative evaluations of one's experiences).
• The English word "happiness" means several different things (e.g., joy, satisfaction), and therefore many scientists prefer the term "subjective well-being." However, subjective well-being is an umbrella term that includes the various types of evaluation of one's life one might make - it can include self-esteem, joy, feelings of fulfillment, and so forth.
• The key is that the person himself/herself is making the evaluation of life - not experts, philosophers, or others. Thus, the person herself or himself is the expert here: Is my life going well, according to the standards that I choose to use?

Is SWB important?

• Happiness is important in and of itself because it is how people evaluate their own lives. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a good society in which we think people are living in a desirable way, but they are all unhappy and dissatisfied. Thus, SWB seems absolutely necessary for the "good society," although is not sufficient for that society because there are other things we also value and would want in such a place. Thus, it can be said that high SWB is necessary, but not sufficient, for the good life.
• When we ask people, they say that SWB is extremely important. For example, college students the world over rated happiness and life satisfaction as very important or extremely important in the 41 nations we surveyed. In fact, in only one country did students rate money as more important than life satisfaction, and happiness was rated as more important than money in every single country.
• SWB is desirable for another reason - because it seems to lead to many good outcomes. Happy people (those high in long-term average positive emotions) seem to be more sociable and creative, they live longer, make more money and are better "citizens" in their workplace. A host of good outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction) often follow from happiness. Thus, there are many reasons to suggest that high SWB is extremely desirable.

OK, so people think happiness is important. But is it really desirable? If we are happy, might we achieve less, be bad citizens, or be just plain dumb?

It turns out that, at least in western culture where the studies have been conducted, that SWB (high levels of positive affect, in particular) produces good outcomes in many areas. For example:

1. Happy people on average have stronger immune systems, and there is some evidence that they live longer.
2. Happy people are more creative, at least in the laboratory.
3. Happy people are better citizens at work - they tend to help others more, skip work less, etc.
4. Happy people are more successful - they earn more income, have better marriages, get job interviews more, etc.
5. Happy people do better in social relationships. They are more sociable to begin with, and other people like them more.
6. They seem to be more successful in leadership work positions.
7. Happy people are better able to cope with difficult situations.
8. Happy people like themselves and other people more, and others like them in return. They are also more helpful and altruistic, on average.
9. In judgment and decision making, happy people act efficiently, and spend more effort only when it is truly required (on important problems, and ones where old solutions are not working).
10. Happy people can perform well if they are cued that motivation is required and that the task might not be an easy one.
11. Happy people can dual task and complete complex tasks better because they will use heuristics for parts of the task, or for one of the tasks, thus allowing more computational power for other parts of the task.

Is there a "key" to SWB; a secret to happiness?

• So many popular writers seem to search for the "key," and sometimes even offer what they think is THE key to happiness. But our research indicates that there is no single key.
• Some things seem to be necessary for high SWB (e.g., solid mental health, good social relationships), but they are not sufficient for happiness (some unhappy people possess these, too). So a variety of things appear to be necessary for happiness even though we have not found any characteristic that is sufficient for happiness.
• The above findings suggest a better analogy than a key - a recipe. Most good recipes call for quite a few ingredients. Some of these ingredients are absolutely essential, and other ingredients are merely helpful. But there is no single key ingredient that by itself gives you the good food. You need to have multiple ingredients put together in the right way. This is like SWB - you need several important and necessary ingredients, but no single one of them by itself produces a happy person.

What is your advice to those who want to be happy?

I have no simple, easy answer that will make everyone happy. Some people with serious problems need to see a therapist and get professional help. And many of us have such deep-grained habits that it won't be easy to change overnight. Plus, we all have our temperaments that will put some limits on how easy it for us to be happy. So there is no magic elixir. Having said this, I think there are some steps people can take to insure that they are as happy as they can be (although nothing will make us happy every moment, fortunately).

• First, we need good friends and family, and we may need to sacrifice to some extent to insure that we have intimate, loving relationships - people who care about us, and about whom we care deeply.
• Second, we need to involve ourselves in activities - work, for example - that we enjoy and value. We are likely to be best at things we value and think are interesting.
• Finally, we need to control how we look at the world. We need to train ourselves not to make a big deal of trivial little hassles, to learn to focus on the process of working toward our goals (not waiting to be happy until we achieve them), and to think about our blessings (making a habit of noticing the good things in our lives).

Can we make ourselves happier?

This is a 64,000 dollar question, about which we have surprisingly little direct evidence. We know that cognitive style correlates with SWB. We also have some studies where cognitive style is altered, and people become happier (or less depressed). So it seems as though people can change their level of SWB with persistent work, but we need much more data.

Michael Fordyce has conducted a few controlled studies to try to raise people's happiness, and finds that a multimodal intervention (get more friends, think positively, don't worry so much, etc.) can increase people's reports of SWB, but these studies too are in their infancy.

What role do values play in SWB?

• People's values influence the goals that they set for themselves. For example, people who place a high value on the environment might set a goal of recycling and composting. People who set goals for themselves that are consistent with their values will experience fewer internal conflicts.
• As people work for their goals, and achieve them, they experience subjective well-being. Thus, SWB can be achieved by seeking those things that one values. Values (including helping others, hard work, contributing to society) are thus not inconsistent with SWB. Instead, people's SWB can be enhanced to the degree that they work for goals that are consistent with their values, and are able to make progress toward those goals.
• Being happy is not just a hedonistic enterprise of "eat, drink, and be merry" - for most people, obtaining high SWB means working for important values. People might not enjoy specific activities that are necessary to achieving their goals. However, these activities in the long-run can lead to satisfaction. Thus, some activities might not produce pleasure or even positive affect at the moment, but might lead to longer-term life satisfaction. There is evidence, however, that people on average do tend to enjoy activities more if they are consistent with their values.
• It is important to understand that there is not a choice between other important values and SWB. If a person is socialized to desire values and goals that are positive, the person will achieve SWB by moving toward those values. Thus, achieving SWB is not a sort of search for hedonistic pleasures, but instead can be best achieved by working for the things that a person values. Being happy does not stand in contrast to basic values - the choice need not be between one or the other. Instead, SWB can derive from working for one's values.

What are the most important things scientists have learned about SWB?

We have learned some important things about SWB, but there is much that is still uncertain. Oftentimes people will ask us questions for which we simply have no good answer. But here are a few of the important things we have learned. Below I list my favorites:

1. We seem to be able to measure the components of SWB with some level of validity.
2. Temperament is an important predictor of a person's SWB, but conditions can matter too. Some conditions have long-lasting effects on SWB (e.g., unemployment, living in a very poor nation), and many situations can dramatically influence SWB in the short run.
3. Culture makes a difference to SWB; some cultures have higher levels of SWB than others. One reason for this seems to be that in some cultures happiness is valued more than in other cultures.
4. People in unstable and very poor societies avow lower levels of SWB.
5. The happiest people all seem to have good friends.
6. On average most people are at least slightly happy. But everyone has up and down moods - nobody is happy every moment. Even the happiest people sometimes get unhappy.
7. Negative and positive emotions are to some extent independent. Thus, one can have a lot of positive affect, but this does not tell us with certainty whether one is low on negative affect. Similarly, a person high in negative affect might also be high in positive affect. Thus, "happiness" cannot be simply understood as a single dimension, but is multidimensional.
8. There seems to be no single key to happiness - no one thing that guarantees high SWB once you possess it. Instead, there are many necessary conditions that together seem to contribute to high SWB.
9. High average positive affect is not a bad thing; instead, it seems to have desirable consequences (as outlined earlier). Furthermore, high SWB can follow from the values that people cherish, and is not simple hedonism.
10. Emotional intensity seems relatively independent of average happiness. Instead, happiness is based more squarely on the frequency of positive moods and emotions - on being in a good mood (even though not intense) most of the time.

Joy to the whirled

I read three more books on customer service over the past week, and still no material on how customer service benefits the providers. Beginning to think that I may just have to make stuff up.

One approach I want to take, although I suspect it's overreaching, is to link customer service to happiness. It's not much of a stretch to say that service to a higher cause - a religion, a movement, an ideal - does promote happiness, because it does provide meaning to people's lives. But customer service?

Since I don't have much credibility to lose, having expressed my belief that we can use customer service to make the world a better place, I may as well carry on.

So what is happiness? Tired of reading, I downloaded a broadcast on the subject of Joy, from Radio National's All In The Mind.  Some excerpts:

Happiness is fundamental

Dr Lea Williams, Brain Dynamics Centre, Westmead Hospital: The key thing that is driving human survival is that we need to try and minimise harm. And once that’s sorted out, hopefully find some pleasure in life. That’s a fundamental goal driving everyone. All of the decisions we make and even our long term goals are to some extent driven by that sense of minimising the negative experiences and maximising the positive.

Happiness & aging

Williams: The prefrontal brain, which regulates negative emotion, actually becomes better able to do that with older age and, in a sense, takes the brakes off the positive emotions. The shift goes from less experience of negative emotion and more ability to experience positive. As you age you bring your life experience to the way that your brain regulates your emotions, and become better at being more selective about the perhaps social experiences you have and so on, and are able to manage the negative emotion better, so that you have a more quality experience.

Sue Turk Charles, School of Social Ecology, University of Southern California: Older people have changed their priorities in life and their values and they focus more on the emotional value of the world. And as their perceptions of life change and how they really realise they are not going to live forever and they savour the moment. That they’re able to as we say, pick their battles, and are able to let go of what’s negative. Because frankly they don’t feel like they have time to do it and so why hold onto that.

Happiness & gender

Charles: The gender differences are smaller than the age differences. They do vary a little across the lifespan but the general pattern is that females tend to have more persistent responses to the negative emotions and males tend to have more transient responses. So males get over them more quickly, but females have a better ability to regulate them, so in a sense whilst they have these more persistent responses, they do seem to have a better ability to manage them.

Happiness & health

Charles: It is amazing how our perceptions form our wellbeing. It’s incredible the power over mind, and it is absolutely ‘how we perceive our stress’ - how we appraise the situation is very important and when we control for all those objective stressors, we find that the way people appraise the situation does play a powerful role in their health. Research on people injected with the flu virus found that people who developed the virus are people who report less social support and more inter-personal problems in their lives. The social support has a strong effect on their antibodies and their immune system. Wound healing – people who are under a lot of stress take longer to heal.

Happiness at work

Dr Charmin Hartel, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Monash University: Emotions can be contagious, so you can be in a group and if the group is generally positive, enthusiastic, those emotions can be contagious. And if it’s a fairly cynical group that too can be contagious. Organisations are big social systems - they can create environments that facilitate and help people to increase their wellbeing or, they can decrease it. This, in turn, spreads back out into society.

Positive disobedience. There’s an old saying that if you took three people and you put them in a room and two of them were positive and one of them was negative, they’d all come out depressed. It’s a lot easier for the emotional tone of a place to go negative than it is for it to go in a positive way or create a positive environment. And similarly in organisations the norms in a place that are created are not always healthy or positive, and if we recognise that, then we understand that sometimes to disobey the norms, to challenge the norms is an extremely important thing that we require of people, not just in our organisations, but in our societies.

Hear the broadcast: The Emotional Brain: Part 4, Joy
Warning: It's in Australian, not English