WAC? may soon stop degrading and humiliating the summer help.
See “Put Your Employees First and Your Customers Second” at Jay Shepherd’s fine blog, Gruntled Employees. Jay is right. Employees, through “emotional contagion,” do color customer feelings. Job satisfaction is communicated to customers. I talk about this a bit in Rule 11 of WAC?‘s 12 Rules of Client Service: Treat Each Co-Worker Like He or She Is Your Best Client .
When I wrote Rule 11, I mentioned that in practice treating employees as well as clients is difficult for me personally. To be honest, I’ve found that most employees don’t understand client service, don’t understand lawyering, and don’t even get the concept of work and its simple joys. Although I am positive and optimistic by nature, I am very cynical about the white collar work force–in America and abroad. This, of course, is my failure alone. But am 100% certain that employees don’t perform better or worse if you are “nice” to them. Good and happy employees map out their own job satisfaction. The issue for my firm is simple: how do you find these people?
But let’s get back to Jay’s post and into the sunshine. His more “pro-employee” post–and an article by two profs at England’s Manchester