Employee Encouragement Quotes

Communication is how entrepreneurs tell their story, which, in turn, should inspire employees to work smart and encourage customers to action.

It’s loneliness. Even though I’m surrounded by loved ones who care about me and want only the best, it’s possible they try to help only because they feel the same thing—loneliness—and why, in a gesture of solidarity, you’ll find the phrase “I am useful, even if alone” carved in stone. Though the brain says all is well, the soul is lost, confused, doesn’t know why life is being unfair to it. But we still wake up in the morning and take care of our children, our husband, our lover, our boss, our employees, our students, those dozens of people who make an ordinary day come to life. And we often have a smile on our face and a word of encouragement, because no one can explain their loneliness to others, especially when we are always in good company. But this loneliness exists and eats away at the best parts of us because we must use all our energy to appear happy, even though we will never be able to deceive ourselves. But we insist, every morning, on showing only the rose that blooms, and keep the thorny stem that hurts us and makes us bleed hidden within. Even knowing that everyone, at some point, has felt completely and utterly alone, it is humiliating to say, “I’m lonely, I need company. I need to kill this monster that everyone thinks is as imaginary as a fairy-tale dragon, but isn’t.” But it isn’t. I wait for a pure and virtuous knight, in all his glory, to come defeat it and push it into the abyss for good, but that knight never comes. Yet we cannot lose hope. We start doing things we don’t usually do, daring to go beyond what is fair and necessary. The thorns inside us will grow larger and more overwhelming, yet we cannot give up halfway. Everyone is looking to see the final outcome, as though life were a huge game of chess. We pretend it doesn’t matter whether we win or lose, the important thing is to compete. We root for our true feelings to stay opaque and hidden, but then … … instead of looking for companionship, we isolate ourselves even more in order to lick our wounds in silence. Or we go out for dinner or lunch with people who have nothing to do with our lives and spend the whole time talking about things that are of no importance. We even manage to distract ourselves for a while with drink and celebration, but the dragon lives on until the people who are close to us see that something is wrong and begin to blame themselves for not making us happy. They ask what the problem is. We say that everything is fine, but it’s not … Everything is awful. Please, leave me alone, because I have no more tears to cry or heart left to suffer. All I have is insomnia, emptiness, and apathy, and, if you just ask yourselves, you’re feeling the same thing. But they insist that this is just a rough patch or depression because they are afraid to use the real and damning word: loneliness. Meanwhile, we continue to relentlessly pursue the only thing that would make us happy: the knight in shining armor who will slay the dragon, pick the rose, and clip the thorns. Many claim that life is unfair. Others are happy because they believe that this is exactly what we deserve: loneliness, unhappiness. Because we have everything and they don’t. But one day those who are blind begin to see. Those who are sad are comforted. Those who suffer are saved. The knight arrives to rescue us, and life is vindicated once again. Still, you have to lie and cheat, because this time the circumstances are different. Who hasn’t felt the urge to drop everything and go in search of their dream? A dream is always risky, for there is a price to pay. That price is death by stoning in some countries, and in others it could be social ostracism or indifference. But there is always a price to pay. You keep lying and people pretend they still believe, but secretly they are jealous, make comments behind your back, say you’re the very worst, most threatening thing there is. You are not an adulterous man, tolerated and often even admired, but an adulterous woman, one who is ...

When employees see each other as teammates and encourage each other to do a better job, everyone in the company shares in the rewards.

A good manager is always looking to cultivate talent in people, and a good manager is always looking to find employees doing something right so they can give compliments and encourage the team to keep doing the good things they're doing.

But until then, you might find yourself laboring much longer than you should, still trying to get someone to change, thinking that one more coaching session will do the trick—or one more bit of encouragement, or one more session of feedback or confrontation. Or worse, one more concession.

Gallup found that the key drivers of productivity for employees include whether they feel cared for by a supervisor or someone at work; whether they have received recognition or praise during the past seven days; and whether someone at work regularly encourages their development. Put another way, the ability to communicate consistently positive energy lies at the heart of effective management.

Of the twelve, the most powerful questions (to employees, guaging their satisfaction with their employers) are those witha combination of the strongest links to the most business outcomes (to include profitability). Armed with this perspective, we now know that the following six ar ethe most powerful questions: 1) Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2) Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? 3) Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? 4) In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work? 5) Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? 6) Is there someone at work who encourages my development? As a manager, if you want to know what you should do to build a strong and productive workplace, securing 5s to these six questions would be an excellent place to start.

The key insight behind Radical Candor is that command and control can hinder innovation and harm a team’s ability to improve the efficiency of routine work. Bosses and companies get better results when they voluntarily lay down unilateral power and encourage their teams and peers to hold them accountable, when they quit trying to control employees and focus instead on encouraging agency. The idea is that collaboration and innovation flourish when human relationships replace bullying and bureaucracy.

Though the brain says all is well, the soul is lost, confused, doesn’t know why life is being unfair to it. But we still wake up in the morning and take care of our children, our husband, our lover, our boss, our employees, our students, those dozens of people who make an ordinary day come to life. And we often have a smile on our face and a word of encouragement, because no one can explain their loneliness to others, especially when we are always in good company. But this loneliness exists and eats away at the best parts of us because we must use all our energy to appear happy, even though we will never be able to deceive ourselves. But we insist, every morning, on showing only the rose that blooms, and keep the thorny stem that hurts us and makes us bleed hidden within.

Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance.

Encouraging employees to interact directly with the environment is just an interesting exercise until you debrief their experiences and encourage reflection.

Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects.

The solution to encourage creativity is to maximize use of employees’ brainpower.

Give people a voice, encourage, motivate and reward them

nothing worth having is ever going to come easy or be handed to them on a silver platter.

If most companies don’t really know why their customers are their customers or why their employees are their employees, then how do they know how to attract more employees and encourage loyalty among those they already have?

If we are in this for the long haul, we have to take care of ourselves, support healthy habits, and encourage our employees to have fulfilling lives outside of work. Moreover, everyone’s home lives change as they—and their children, if they have them—age.

How you got your college education mattered most.” And two experiences stood out from the poll of more than one million American workers, students, educators, and employers: Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors “who cared about them as a person,” or having had “a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams,” or having had “an internship where they applied what they were learning.” Those workers, he found, “were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.” There’s a message in that bottle.

The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do. Each time you write a page, you are a writer. Each time you practice the violin, you are a musician. Each time you start a workout, you are an athlete. Each time you encourage your employees, you are a leader.

Good employees are skilled; great employees are talented. Good employees are friendly; great employees are devoted. Good employees are cautious; great employees are brave. Good employees are calm; great employees are confident. Good employees are educated; great employees are experienced. Good managers are encouraging; great supervisors are forgiving. Good managers are calm; great supervisors are caring. Good managers are truthful; great supervisors are sincere. Good managers are compassionate; great supervisors are generous. Good managers are likable; great supervisors are loving. Good leaders are intelligent; great leaders are wise. Good leaders are bold; great leaders are fearless. Good leaders are artful; great leaders are kind. Good leaders are warriors; great leaders are servants. Good leaders are managers; great leaders are innovators.

Imagine if ALL employers treated ALL of their employees with the same respect no matter what their job title was. Imagine going to work every day knowing that you and your work were valued. Unfortunately, we live in a society where some people allow their job titles to go to their head. I encourage you NOT to be one of those people. No matter what your position is, at the end of the day, EVERYBODY matters in the workplace, and every position serves a purpose. I firmly believe that how you treat others is a direct reflection of who you REALLY are. Personally, I choose integrity!

Now Larry encourages his own staff to take those calls from the recruiters: “But I also don’t wait for them to come to me. If I see someone could make more money somewhere else, I give them the raise right away.” To retain your top employees, it’s always better to give them the raise before they get the offers.

What distinguishes love-driven leaders from tyrants? "Great affection" coupled with the passion to see others "run at full speed towards perfection." Love-driven leadership is not urging others forward without concern for their aspirations, well-being, or personal needs. Nor is it being the nice-guy manager who overlooks underperformance that could damage a subordinate's long-term prospects. Instead, love-driven leaders hunger to see latent potential blossom and to help it happen. In more prosaic terms, when do children, students, athletes, or employees achieve their full potential? When they're parented, taught, coached, or managed by those who engender trust, provide support and encouragement, uncover potential, and set high standards.

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else. Our design engineers had the keen experience to conceive the whole airplane in their mind’s-eye, doing the trade-offs in their heads between aerodynamic needs and weapons requirements. We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste. We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way. By applying the most commonsense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money, while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees. In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions. That may be our most enduring legacy as well as our source of lasting pride.

A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast; good news travels slow. If you investigate companies that have failed, you will find that many employees knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company. If the employees knew about the deadly problems, why didn’t they say something? Too often the answer is that the company culture discouraged the spread of bad news, so the knowledge lay dormant until it was too late to act. A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved. The resulting action item for CEOs: Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.

To illustrate: A man with 314 employees joined one of these courses. For years, he had driven and criticised and condemned his employees without stint or discretion. Kindness, words of appreciation and encouragement were alien to his lips. After studying the principles discussed in this book, this employer sharply altered his philosophy of life. His organisation is now inspired with a new loyalty, a new enthusiasm, a new spirit of teamwork. Three hundred and fourteen enemies have been turned into 314 friends. As he proudly said in a speech before the class: ‘When I used to walk through my establishment, no one greeted me. My employees actually looked the other way when they saw me approaching. But now they are all my friends and even the janitor calls me by my first name.’ This employer gained more profit, more leisure and – what is infinitely more important – he found far more happiness in his business and in his home.

Chris Argyris criticized “good communication that blocks learning,” arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because “they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.

The popular press, says Grant, is full of suggestions that introverted leaders practice their public speaking skills and smile more. But Grant’s research suggests that in at least one important regard—encouraging employees to take initiative—introverted leaders would do well to go on doing what they do naturally. Extroverted leaders, on the other hand, “may wish to adopt a more reserved, quiet style,” Grant writes. They may want to learn to sit down so that others might stand up. Which is just what a woman named Rosa Parks did naturally.

Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages my development? At work, do my opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? Do I have a best friend at work? In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow? These twelve questions are the simplest and most accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace.

At Bridgewater, criticism is encouraged, including subordinates criticizing superiors. Do any of your employees ever criticize you? All the time. Can you give me an example? I was in a client meeting with a big European pension fund that was visiting managers in Connecticut. After the meeting, the salesperson criticized me for being inarticulate, running on too long, and adversely affecting the meeting. I asked others who had been at the meeting for their opinions. I was given a grade of “F” by one of our new analysts who was just one year out of school. I loved it because I knew they were helping me improve and that they understood that was what they were supposed to be doing.

Of course a degree of competence is needed, and few jobs are entirely brainless, but supposedly knowledge-intensive organisations are often crowded with people with limited emotional and practical intelligence. These smart people may avoid careful analytical processes and instead rely on fast and frugal mental rules of thumb to get the job done. What’s more, many firms actively encourage employees not to exert their intelligence overmuch. They push smart people into dumb jobs, swamp staff with information, enforce behavioural scripts that are followed mindlessly, encourage colleagues to avoid addressing tough questions, and incentivise experts and amateurs alike to be ignorant. As a result organisations can often help to encourage remarkably bright people to do stupid things.

God. JAMES 2 : 23 Many organizations today fail to tap into their potential. Why? Because the only reward they give their employees is a paycheck. The relationship between employer and employee never develops beyond that point. Successful organizations take a different approach. In exchange for the work a person gives, he receives not only his paycheck, but he is also nurtured by the people he works for. And nurturing has the ability to transform people’s lives. I use the BEST” acronym as a reminder of what people need when they get started with my organization. They need me to . . . Believe in them Encourage them Share with them Trust them Nurturing benefits everyone. What people wouldn’t be more secure and motivated when their leader believes in them, encourages them, shares with them, and trusts them (BEST)? People are more productive when they are nurtured. Even more important, nurturing creates a strong emotional and professional foundation within workers who have leadership potential. Later, using training and development, a leader can be built on that foundation.

Imagine the following. Three groups of ten individuals are in a park at lunchtime with a rainstorm threatening. In the first group, someone says: “Get up and follow me.” When he starts walking and only a few others join in, he yells to those still seated: “Up, I said, and now!” In the second group, someone says: “We’re going to have to move. Here’s the plan. Each of us stands up and marches in the direction of the apple tree. Please stay at least two feet away from other group members and do not run. Do not leave any personal belongings on the ground here and be sure to stop at the base of the tree. When we are all there . . .” In the third group, someone tells the others: “It’s going to rain in a few minutes. Why don’t we go over there and sit under that huge apple tree. We’ll stay dry, and we can have fresh apples for lunch.” I am sometimes amazed at how many people try to transform organizations using methods that look like the first two scenarios: authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better. When the goal is behavior change, unless the boss is extremely powerful, authoritarian decree often works poorly even in simple situations, like the apple tree case. Increasingly, in complex organizations, this approach doesn’t work at all. Without the power of kings and queens behind it, authoritarianism is unlikely to break through all the forces of resistance. People will ignore you or pretend to cooperate while doing everything possible to undermine your efforts. Micromanagement tries to get around this problem by specifying what employees should do in detail and then monitoring compliance. This tactic can break through some of the barriers to change, but in an increasingly unacceptable amount of time. Because the creation and communication of detailed plans is deadly slow, the change produced this way tends to be highly incremental. Only the approach used in the third scenario above has the potential to break through all the forces that support the status quo and to encourage the kind of dramatic shifts found in successful transformations. (See figure 5–1.) This approach is based on vision—a central component of all great leadership.

Apple's approach to career development is yet another way it runs contrary to the norms at other companies. The prevalent attitude for workers in the corporate world is to consider their growth trajectory. What's my path up? How do I get to the next level? Companies, in turn, spend an inordinate amount of time and money grooming their people for new responsibilities. They labor to find just the right place for people. But what if it turns out all that thinking is wrong? What if companies encouraged employees to be satisfied where they are because they're good at what they do, not to mention because that might be what's best for shareholders? Instead of employees fretting that they were stuck in terminal jobs, what if they exalted in having found their perfect jobs? A certain amount of office politics might evaporate in a corporate culture where career growth is not considered tantamount to professional fulfilment. Shareholders, after all, don't care about fiefdoms and egos. There are many professionals who would find it liberating to work at what they are good at, receive competitive killer compensation, and not have to worry about supervising others or jockeying for higher rungs on an org chart.

Employees at all levels want and need to understand not only the particular work they are assigned and their team’s mission, but also the larger story of the way the business works, the challenges the company faces, and the competitive landscape. ▶ Truly understanding how the business works is the most valuable learning, more productive and appealing than “employee development” trainings. It’s the rocket fuel of high performance and lifelong learning. ▶ Communication between management and employees should genuinely flow both ways. The more leaders encourage questions and suggestions and make themselves accessible for give-and-take, the more employees at all levels will offer ideas and insights that will amaze you. ▶ If someone working for you seems clueless, chances are they have not been told information they need to know. Make sure you haven’t failed to give it to them. ▶ If you don’t tell your people about how the business is doing and the problems being confronted—good, bad, and ugly—then they will get that information somewhere else, and it will often be misinformation. ▶ The job of communicating is never done. It’s not an annual or quarterly or even monthly or weekly function. A steady stream of communication is the lifeblood of competitive advantage.

Fascism feeds on social and economic grievances, including the belief that the people over there are receiving better treatment than they deserve while I’m not getting what I’m owed. It seems today that almost everyone has a grievance: the unemployed steelworker, the low-wage fast-food employee, the student up to her ears in debt, the businessperson who feels harassed by government regulations, the veteran waiting too long for a doctor’s appointment, the fundamentalist who thinks war is being waged against Christmas, the professional with her head brushing against a glass ceiling, the Wall Street broker who feels unfairly maligned, the tycoon who still thinks he is being overtaxed. Obviously, personal gripes—legitimate or not—have been part of the human condition ever since Cain decided to work out his jealousy on his brother. What is an added concern now is the lack of effective mechanisms for assuaging anger. As described above, we all tend to live in media and information bubbles that reinforce our grievances instead of causing us to look at difficult questions from many sides. Rather than think critically, we seek out people who share our opinions and who encourage us to ridicule the ideas of those whose convictions and perspectives clash with our own. At many levels, contempt has become a defining characteristic of American politics. It makes us unwilling to listen to what others say—unwilling, in some cases, even to allow them to speak. This stops the learning process cold and creates a ready-made audience for demagogues who know how to bring diverse groups of the aggrieved together in righteous opposition to everyone else.

I was lucky to receive it. Most rogue interns never get a second chance. And here it’s worth mentioning that I benefited from what was known in 2009 as being fortunate, and is now more commonly called privilege. It’s not like I flashed an Ivy League gang sign and was handed a career. If I had stood on a street corner yelling, “I’m white and male, and the world owes me something!” it’s unlikely doors would have opened. What I did receive, however, was a string of conveniences, do-overs, and encouragements. My parents could help me pay rent for a few months out of school. I went to a university lousy with successful D.C. alumni. No less significantly, I avoided the barriers that would have loomed had I belonged to a different gender or race. Put another way, I had access to a network whether I was bullshit or not. A friend’s older brother worked as a speechwriter for John Kerry. When my Crisis Hut term expired, he helped me find an internship at West Wing Writers, a firm founded by former speechwriters for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. In the summer of 2009, my new bosses upgraded me to full-time employee. Without meaning to, I had stumbled upon the chance to learn a skill. The firm’s partners were four of the best writers in Washington, and each taught me something different. Vinca LaFleur helped me understand the benefits of subtle but well-timed alliteration. Paul Orzulak showed me how to coax speakers into revealing the main idea they hope to express. From Jeff Shesol, I learned that while speechwriting is as much art as craft, and no two sets of remarks are alike, there’s a reason most speechwriters punctuate long, flowy sentences with short, punchy ones. It works.

In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.

Type II trauma also often occurs within a closed context - such as a family, a religious group, a workplace, a chain of command, or a battle group - usually perpetrated by someone related or known to the victim. As such, it often involves fundamental betrayal of the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator and within the community (Freyd, 1994). It may also involve the betrayal of a particular role and the responsibility associated with the relationship (i.e., parent-child, family member-child, therapist-client, teacher-student, clergy-child/adult congregant, supervisor-employee, military officer-enlisted man or woman). Relational dynamics of this sort have the effect of further complicating the victim's survival adaptations, especially when a superficially caring, loving or seductive relationship is cultivated with the victim (e.g., by an adult mentor such as a priest, coach, or teacher; by an adult who offers a child special favors for compliance; by a superior who acts as a protector or who can offer special favors and career advancement). In a process labelled "selection and grooming", potential abusers seek out as potential victims those who appear insecure, are needy and without resources, and are isolated from others or are obviously neglected by caregivers or those who are in crisis or distress for which they are seeking assistance. This status is then used against the victim to seduce, coerce, and exploit. Such a scenario can lead to trauma bonding between victim and perpetrator (i.e., the development of an attachment bond based on the traumatic relationship and the physical and social contact), creating additional distress and confusion for the victim who takes on the responsibility and guilt for what transpired, often with the encouragement or insinuation of the perpetrator(s) to do so.

The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality. The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

It's possible to see how much the brand culture rubs off on even the most sceptical employee. Joanne Ciulla sums up the dangers of these management practices: 'First, scientific management sought to capture the body, then human relations sought to capture the heart, now consultants want tap into the soul... what they offer is therapy and spirituality lite... [which] makes you feel good, but does not address problems of power, conflict and autonomy.'¹0 The greatest success of the employer brand' concept has been to mask the declining power of workers, for whom pay inequality has increased, job security evaporated and pensions are increasingly precarious. Yet employees, seduced by a culture of approachable, friendly managers, told me they didn't need a union - they could always go and talk to their boss. At the same time, workers are encouraged to channel more of their lives through work - not just their time and energy during working hours, but their social life and their volunteering and fundraising. Work is taking on the roles once played by other institutions in our lives, and the potential for abuse is clear. A company designs ever more exacting performance targets, with the tantalising carrot of accolades and pay increases to manipulate ever more feverish commitment. The core workforce finds itself hooked into a self-reinforcing cycle of emotional dependency: the increasing demands of their jobs deprive them of the possibility of developing the relationships and interests which would enable them to break their dependency. The greater the dependency, the greater the fear of going cold turkey - through losing the job or even changing the lifestyle. 'Of all the institutions in society, why let one of the more precarious ones supply our social, spiritual and psychological needs? It doesn't make sense to put such a large portion of our lives into the unsteady hands of employers,' concludes Ciulla. Life is work, work is life for the willing slaves who hand over such large chunks of themselves to their employer in return for the paycheque. The price is heavy in the loss of privacy, the loss of autonomy over the innermost workings of one's emotions, and the compromising of authenticity. The logical conclusion, unless challenged, is capitalism at its most inhuman - the commodification of human beings.

Cool Merchandise You Can Get from a Scary House Manufacturer Watching your employees working as team for your business is always a very satisfying feeling. If you are horror house owner, you can watch your employees working together and feel the same satisfaction. There is always a true relationship between employee and employer. Dress code plays a great role in binding your employees together and with your business as well. You can ask your scary house manufacturer to provide you some personalized merchandise that your employees will relish to have. Most of the horror house merchandises are personalized therefore you have option to design it of your own. To encourage your employees, you can seek their suggestion for designing of the logo, style or design for various merchandises. Merchandise You Can Get for Your Horror House There are few items which each of your employees will surely like and we are including only those merchandises in this list, Employee’s Identity cards – When you have setup a business, all your employee should look like working in a group and not like individuals. You can ask for employee’s identity card from your scary house manufacturer and hold your employee as a team. T-Shits with company logo – Design your company logo. If possible take inputs of employees in designing and creating logo. Print it on a plain t-shirt and it becomes a brand identity of your company. There are some other cool things that not only show the brand identity of scary house manufacturer but are very helpful for their horror house operations. These include Tyvek Tickets, Queue Manager, personalized display stands, etc. horrorhouse.in

Q01. I know what is expected of me at work. Q02. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right. Q03. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. Q04. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work. Q05. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person. Q06. There is someone at work who encourages my development. Q07. At work, my opinions seem to count. Q08. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important. Q09. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work. Q10. I have a best friend at work. Q11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress. Q12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

At the café chain Pret A Manger, for example, regular customers noticed that, every now and then, they’d be given something for free with their order. One service expert wrote, of getting free coffee, “It has happened a few times over the last few years, too often for it to be a coincidence, yet so infrequent that it is unexpected. This makes me feel valued as a customer, puts a smile on my face and encourages me to visit again.” These “spontaneous” gifts are only half-spontaneous, as it turns out. Pret A Manger employees are allowed to give away a certain number of hot drinks and food items every week. Pret CEO Clive Schlee said of his staffers, “They will decide ‘I like the person on the bicycle’ or ‘I like the guy in the tie’ or ‘I fancy that girl or that boy.’ It means 28% of people have had something free.” Think on that. Almost a third of customers have gotten something free at least once. (Probably more than once, if they have dimples.) Other retail chains provide discounts or freebies to customers who use loyalty cards, of course, but Schlee told the Standard newspaper he rejected that approach: “We looked at loyalty cards but we didn’t want to spend all that money building up some complicated Clubcard-style analysis.” This is ingenious. Pret A Manger has restored the surprise and humanity to perks that, in a loyalty card scheme, would have been systematized. Note that the giveaways are satisfying for the staff as well as the customers. In an industry where rules tend to govern every employee behavior, it’s a relief for employees to be given some discretion: Hey, every week, give away some stuff to whomever you like. It broke the script for them, too. In the service business, a good surprise is one that delights employees as well as customers.

Nonetheless, our goal should always be to help set a vision for each individual that complements their talents and gifts and encourage them to see the possibilities more clearly.

Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture. Even Airbnb conference rooms tell a story; each one is a replica of a room that’s available for rent on the service. Every time Airbnb team members hold a meeting in one of those rooms, they are reminded of how guests feel when they stay there. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously bans PowerPoint decks and insists on written memos, which are read in silence at the beginning of each meeting. This memo policy is one of the ways that Amazon encourages a culture of truth telling. Memos have to be specific and comprehensive, and those who read the memos have to respond in kind rather than simply sit through some broad bullet points on a PowerPoint deck and nod vague agreement. Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon. The late Steve Jobs used architecture as a core part of his deliberate communications strategy at Pixar. He designed Pixar headquarters so that the front doors, main stairs, main theater, and screening rooms all led to the atrium, which contained the café and mailboxes, ensuring that employees from all departments and specialties would see people from other groups on a regular basis, thus reinforcing Pixar’s collaborative, inclusive culture.

This book is for anyone who wants to understand the techniques that allow a business to grow from zero to a multibillion-dollar market leader in a handful of years. These techniques should be of interest to entrepreneurs who want to build massive companies, venture capitalists who want to invest in them, employees who want to work for them, and governments and communities who wish to encourage the growth of these companies in their own regions. And even if you don’t want to build, invest in, or work for any of these companies, you’ll still need to navigate the world that they’re building. If you are a manager or a leader who is trying to rapidly scale a project or a business unit within a larger company, blitzscaling can help you too. And while we draw these lessons primarily from the world of high tech, many of the principles and frameworks the book lays out (especially regarding people management) are applicable to high-growth companies in most industries worldwide, from European fast-fashion retailers to Texan oil shale companies.

The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line. Japanese companies that implemented Deming’s ideas made it easy for workers to do so: They installed a cord that anyone could pull in order to bring production to a halt. Before long, Japanese companies were enjoying unheard-of levels of quality, productivity, and market share.

Employee engagement is where I want you to start. It is a reality of organizations that the more employees are engaged in what they do in their roles, the more likely they are to perform, stay with the company, and even encourage others to join them.

5.5 Specific Signs You Should Avoid A Van Rental Supplier! Here are 5.5 specific sign that you should avoid a van rental supplier: 1. Automated answering services: If you cannot get access to a human on the phone when you call to make a van reservation, where are they going to be when you have a mechanical breakdown? If the company cannot afford to provide a live person to receive your call, how will they afford to take care of your group when you have broken down on the side of the road or have been in an accident! 2. Rude or incompetent rental agents: If the rental company’s agents do not answer the phone cheerfully and sound like they are less than ecstatic to hear from you, they have set a negative tone for the entire van rental experience. If they place you on hold until you grow old, or refuse to acknowledge you immediately when you walk through the door of their office, get out of there! 3. Charging for mileage: Any van rental firm worth doing business with will offer you unlimited miles going anywhere in the USA. Anything else does not allow you the peace of mind needed when you are required to maximize your budget and do not need any unaccounted variables. 4. Encouraging drop-offs after business hours: This practice gives the rental company an unwritten power of attorney to charge you for any damages they find until the next business day! This leaves you or your organization wide open to paying for damages you did not cause or create! 5. Yield management systems: When a van rental firm employs this system, it skyrockets the van rental rates through the roof as demand gets tight and supply gets low. This system has been designed to squeeze every last dollar out of the client’s pocket and takes serious advantage of those groups that are forced to reserve later due to budget constraints or lack of commitments! 5.5 Accidents handled by a third party vendor: If you have an accident in a van, and the rental firm outsources this function to an outside agency, you will lose all power of negotiation and pay much more on the damage claim because the rental firm has to give that agency a substantial percentage. In addition, the agency employees have nothing to lose by treating you horribly.

The five most highly correlated factors are: Organizational culture. Strong feelings of burnout are found in organizations with a pathological, power-oriented culture. Managers are ultimately responsible for fostering a supportive and respectful work environment, and they can do so by creating a blame-free environment, striving to learn from failures, and communicating a shared sense of purpose. Managers should also watch for other contributing factors and remember that human error is never the root cause of failure in systems. Deployment pain. Complex, painful deployments that must be performed outside of business hours contribute to high stress and feelings of lack of control.4 With the right practices in place, deployments don’t have to be painful events. Managers and leaders should ask their teams how painful their deployments are and fix the things that hurt the most. Effectiveness of leaders. Responsibilities of a team leader include limiting work in process and eliminating roadblocks for the team so they can get their work done. It’s not surprising that respondents with effective team leaders reported lower levels of burnout. Organizational investments in DevOps. Organizations that invest in developing the skills and capabilities of their teams get better outcomes. Investing in training and providing people with the necessary support and resources (including time) to acquire new skills are critical to the successful adoption of DevOps. Organizational performance. Our data shows that Lean management and continuous delivery practices help improve software delivery performance, which in turn improves organizational performance. At the heart of Lean management is giving employees the necessary time and resources to improve their own work. This means creating a work environment that supports experimentation, failure, and learning, and allows employees to make decisions that affect their jobs. This also means creating space for employees to do new, creative, value-add work during the work week—and not just expecting them to devote extra time after hours. A good example of this is Google’s 20% time policy, where the company allows employees 20% of their week to work on new projects, or IBM’s “THINK Friday” program, where Friday afternoons are designated for time without meetings and employees are encouraged to work on new and exciting projects they normally don’t have time for.

(If businesses had a genuine interest in their employees’ happiness, perhaps the single biggest thing they could do would be to encourage them to unionize. Wide-scale research shows that union membership is a large and significant predictor of happiness, with union members consistently reporting far greater well-being than their nonunion peers, independent of income.)8 Indeed

Semco encourages all its employees to question and challenge everything the company does. By asking why things are done a specific way, everyone is encouraged to think rather than merely follow instructions.

Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors “who cared about them as a person,” or having had “a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams,” or

Encourage others to talk about themselves by asking questions and listening with genuine interest. Demonstrating such mutual respect will make you all the more fascinating for kinship and camaraderie.

The irony is that only by a particularly narrow definition does a Walmart job get you off welfare - as a matter of policy, Walmart encourages its employees to apply for government benefits. Indeed, Walmart and other minimum wage workers at McDonald's and similar McJobs are the largest group of Medicaid and food stamps recipients in the United States. That is to say, US taxpayers subsidize Walmart paychecks (and corporate profits) by paying welfare benefits to its workers and their children. Welfare reform eliminated virtually all education and job-training benefits beyond "work readiness" classes that taught women to dress nicely and get their kids up early. The result: women couldn't get the education to get a good job and they were still receiving welfare benefits, but they could be counted on to clock regular hours and make profits for their low-paying employers. From welfare reform to Walmart, it was all reproductive politics.

But we cannot expect people to take risks, by speaking up or in other ways, if by so doing they will get fired. Good leaders must cre- ate environments in which employees feel that making evidence- based decisions will always be rewarded, no matter what outcome occurs. The ideal organizational environment encourages everyone to observe, collect data, and speak up. The bosses who create such environments are risking only one thing: a few bruises to their egos. That is a small price to pay for increasing the flow of new ideas and decreasing the risks of disasters.

In 2017, two former Planned Parenthood employees appeared in a Live Action video, revealing that the organziation imposes abortion quotas on its clinics and incentivizes workers to convince women to choose abortion.70 Sue Thayer, former manager of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Storm Lake, Iowa, told Live Action that executives would reward clinics with pizza parties or extra paid time off if they met their abortion targets. Clinics that didn’t offer abortions were given quotas for abortion referrals made to other Planned Parenthood facilities. “I trained my staff the way that I was trained, which was to really encourage women to choose abortion and to have it at Planned Parenthood because it counts towards our goal,” Thayer said.71 Former Planned Parenthood nurse Marianne Anderson told Live Action, “I felt like I was more of a salesman sometimes, to sell abortions. We were constantly told we have quotas to meet to stay open.”72

Most management advice for the last twenty-five years has focused on issues like empathy and compassion. Advice books encourage building teamwork through kindness and understanding. There’s been very little written about scaring the pants off employees to improve results. But as Richard Nixon said, “People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

for teams to flag problems that they see. On a monthly basis, bring people together to review them and figure out which ones are worth solving. 9. Stop assigning devil’s advocates and start unearthing them. Dissenting opinions are useful even when they’re wrong, but they’re only effective if they’re authentic and consistent. Instead of assigning people to play the devil’s advocate, find people who genuinely hold minority opinions, and invite them to present their views. To identify these people, try appointing an information manager—make someone responsible for seeking out team members individually before meetings to find out what they know. 10. Welcome criticism. It’s hard to encourage dissent if you don’t practice what you preach. When Ray Dalio received an email criticizing his performance in an important meeting, copying it to the entire company sent a clear message that he welcomed negative feedback. By inviting employees to criticize you publicly, you can set the tone for people to communicate more openly even when their ideas are unpopular.

The downside to a high-performance culture is the fear employees may feel that their jobs are on the line. To reduce fear, encourage employees to use the Keeper Test Prompt with their managers: “How hard would you work to change my mind if I were thinking of leaving?

Granted, employees are a very different type of customer, one that falls outside of the traditional definition. After all, instead of them paying you, you’re paying them. Yet regardless of the direction the money flows, one thing is clear: employees, just like other types of customers, want to derive value from their relationship with the organization. Not just monetary value, but experiential value, too: skill augmentation, career development, camaraderie, meaningful work, a sense of purpose, and so on. If a company or an individual leader fails to deliver the requisite value to an employee, then—just like a customer, they’ll defect. They’ll quit, driving up turnover, inflating recruiting/training expenses, undermining product/service quality, and creating a whole lot of unnecessary stress on the organization. So even though a company pays its employees, it should still provide them with a value-rich employment experience that cultivates loyalty. And that’s why it’s prudent to view both current and prospective employees as a type of customer. The argument goes beyond employee engagement, though. There’s a whole other reason why organizational leaders have a lot to gain by viewing their staff as a type of customer. That’s because, by doing so, they can personally model the customer-oriented behaviors that they seek to encourage among their workforce. How better to demonstrate what a great customer experience looks like than to deliver it to your own team? After all, how a leader serves their staff influences how the staff serves their customers. Want your team to be super-responsive to the people they serve? Show them what that looks like by being super-responsive to your team. Want them to communicate clearly with customers? Show them what that looks like by being crystal clear in your own written and verbal communications. There are innumerable ways for organizational leaders to model the customer experience behaviors they seek to promote among their staff. It has to start, however, by viewing those in your charge as a type of customer you’re trying to serve. Of course, viewing staff as customers doesn’t mean that leaders should cater to every employee whim or that they should consent to do whatever employees want. Leaders sometimes have to make tough decisions for the greater good. In those situations, effectively serving employees means showing respect for their concerns and interests, and thoughtfully explaining the rationale behind what might be an unpopular decision. The key point is simply this: with every interaction in the workplace, leaders have an opportunity to show their staff what a great customer experience looks like. Whether you’re a C-suite executive or a frontline supervisor, that opportunity must not be squandered.

untapped need. Give employees three weeks to develop proposals, and then have them evaluate one another’s ideas, advancing the most original submissions to the next round. The winners receive a budget, a team, and the relevant mentoring and sponsorship to make their ideas a reality. 2. Picture yourself as the enemy. People often fail to generate new ideas due to a lack of urgency. You can create urgency by implementing the “kill the company” exercise from Lisa Bodell, CEO of futurethink. Gather a group together and invite them to spend an hour brainstorming about how to put the organization out of business—or decimate its most popular product, service, or technology. Then, hold a discussion about the most serious threats and how to convert them into opportunities to transition from defense to offense. 3. Invite employees from different functions and levels to pitch ideas. At DreamWorks Animation, even accountants and lawyers are encouraged and trained to present movie ideas. This kind of creative engagement can add skill variety to work, making it more interesting for employees while increasing the organization’s access to new ideas. And involving employees in pitching has another benefit: When they participate in generating ideas, they adopt a creative

Nor should this practice be limited to formal events that require official support. Simply allowing employees to host clubs and associations is a low-cost way to encourage external networking. We do recommend that any employee who hosts a meeting in the company offices make it open to any other employee who wants to attend (which hopefully helps develop even more new relationships).

Think of each employee as an individual scout picking up data from the outside world—from articles, books, and classes, but most important, from other friends inside and outside the industry. Each employee can receive and decipher intelligence from the outside world that helps the company adapt. For example, what’s a competitor doing? What are key tech trends? It’s the manager’s job to recognize and encourage the power of each of these scouts. A more networked workforce generates more valuable intelligence, and when your employees share what they learn from their networks back into your company, they help solve its key business challenges

If we can’t go back to the age of lifetime employment, and the status quo is untenable, it’s time to rebuild the employer-employee relationship. The business world needs a new employment framework that facilitates mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. An ideal framework encourages employees to develop their personal networks and act entrepreneurially without becoming mercenary job-hoppers. It allows companies to be dynamic and demanding but discourages them from treating employees like disposable assets.

So don’t treat tweeting on the job like an infraction—encourage it! Ask your employees to expense lunches with interesting people. By helping employees invest in their individual networks, you build an environment of trust and reciprocity. And when you ask employees to tap their own networks on behalf of the company, they’ll be more likely to respond favorably.

Greg Peters, who replaced Neil Hunt as chief product officer in 2017, is one example. Greg gets to work at the normal hour of 8:00 a.m. and leaves the office by 6:00 p.m. to be home for dinner with his children. Greg makes a point of taking big vacations, including visiting his wife’s family in Tokyo, and encourages his staff to do the same. “What we say as leaders is only half the equation,” Greg explains. “Our employees are also looking at what we do. If I say, ‘I want you to find a sustainable and healthy work-life balance,’ but I’m in the office twelve hours a day, people will imitate my actions, not follow my words.

Since then, every time I feel I’ve made a mistake, I talk about it fully, publicly, and frequently. I quickly came to see the biggest advantage of sunshining a leader’s errors is to encourage everyone to think of making mistakes as normal. This in turn encourages employees to take risks when success is uncertain . . . which leads to greater innovation across the company. Self-disclosure builds trust, seeking help boosts learning, admitting mistakes fosters forgiveness, and broadcasting failures encourages your people to act courageously.

When removing travel and expense policies, encourage managers to set context about how to spend money up front and to check employee receipts at the back end. If people overspend, set more context.

businesses had a genuine interest in their employees’ happiness, perhaps the single biggest thing they could do would be to encourage them to unionize. Wide-scale research shows that union membership is a large and significant predictor of happiness, with union members consistently reporting far greater well-being than their nonunion peers, independent of income.)

In typical Koch fashion, the company developed a specific strategy to grow, one that came complete with its own vocabulary. The framework was called the Value Creation Strategy, or VCS. Every Koch business leader was expected to create their own Value Creation Strategy. They needed to look for new companies to buy, new plants to build, and expansion projects for existing plants. This wasn’t exactly new—growth was ingrained in Koch’s DNA from the beginning, when Sterling Varner encouraged his employees to keep their eyes peeled for investment opportunities. But the VCS regimen was different. Business leaders knew that Charles Koch would cut or increase their bonus pay based on the Value Creation Strategies they delivered. Expansion was once applauded; now it would be required. This change rippled out through the ranks.

Koch’s oil gathering division delivered a steady flow of cash and profits into the company. This money gave Charles Koch a chance to put his management theories to the test. He encouraged his employees to look for new growth opportunities and to act like entrepreneurs. He wanted to lead by example. In his first years as head of Koch Industries, Charles Koch put together one of the most brilliant and profitable deals in the history of Koch Industries. The deal involved an oil refinery. Since the late 1950s, Fred Koch had owned a minority share in the Great Northern oil refinery outside of Minneapolis, near the Pine Bend Bluffs natural reserve. The other shareholders in the refinery were an oil tycoon named J. Howard Marshall II and the Great Northern Oil Company. In 1969, the refinery didn’t look like a gold mine. Competition in the sector was fierce, with new refineries being put into production monthly. But the Pine Bend refinery, as everyone called it, had a secret source of profits. And this source of profits could be traced to exactly the kind of government intervention that Hayek hated most. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower capped the amount of oil that could be imported into the United States, in one of the federal government’s many ploys to protect domestic oil drillers. (Imported oil was often cheaper than domestic oil, so US drillers wanted it kept out.) But there was a loophole in that law that allowed unlimited imports from Canada. As it happened, Canada was the primary source of oil processed at the Pine Bend refinery. Pine Bend was one of only four refineries in the nation that was able to buy cheaper imported oil in unlimited quantities, giving it a huge advantage over firms that were forced to buy mostly domestic oil.

We measured transformational leadership using survey questions adapted from Rafferty and Griffin (2004):1 My leader or manager: (Vision) ​–​Has a clear understanding of where we are going. ​–​Has a clear sense of where he/she wants our team to be in five years. ​–​Has a clear idea of where the organization is going. (Inspirational communication) ​–​Says things that make employees proud to be a part of this organization. ​–​Says positive things about the work unit. ​–​Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities. (Intellectual stimulation) ​–​Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways. ​–​Has ideas that have forced me to rethink some things that I have never questioned before. ​–​Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work. (Supportive leadership) ​–​Considers my personal feelings before acting. ​–​Behaves in a manner which is thoughtful of my personal needs. ​–​Sees that the interests of employees are given due consideration. (Personal recognition) ​–​Commends me when I do a better than average job. ​–​Acknowledges improvement in my quality of work. ​–​Personally compliments me when I do outstanding work.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have encouraged employees to make more mistakes. —Thomas Watson, IBM

They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? 4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? 5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? 6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development? 7. At work, do my opinions seem to count? 8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? 9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? 10. Do I have a best friend at work? 11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? 12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

We may not always know why we’re in a certain place or position, but God knows. It may involve being a virtuous wife, mother, or employee, but it could also involve interceding for a lost soul or encouraging someone who has lost all hope and given up on life.

made a discovery: Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? 4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? 5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? 6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development? 7. At work, do my opinions seem to count? 8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? 9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? 10. Do I have a best friend at work? 11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? 12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Recognition is largely about behavior. “Catch them doing what you want and recognize it,” the books say. Appreciation, conversely, focuses on performance plus the employee’s value as a person. Recognition is about improving performance and focuses on what is good for the company. Appreciation emphasizes what is good for the company and good for the person (which may sometimes mean helping them find a position that is better for them than their current role). The relational direction of recognition is top-down, coming from leadership.

The failed launch left many SpaceX employees shattered. “It was so profound seeing the energy shift over the room in the course of thirty seconds,” said Dolly Singh, a recruiter at SpaceX. “It was like the worst fucking day ever. You don’t usually see grown-ups weeping, but there they were. We were tired and broken emotionally.” Musk addressed the workers right away and encouraged them to get back to work. “He said, ‘Look. We are going to do this. It’s going to be okay. Don’t freak out,’” Singh recalled. “It was like magic. Everyone chilled out immediately and started to focus on figuring out what just happened and how to fix it. It went from despair to hope and focus.

I have long held the belief—and encouraged it in my students and employees—that failures are an essential part of exploration and creativity. If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life. The designs of our products and services must also follow this philosophy. So, to the designers who are reading this, let me give some advice:        •  Do not blame people when they fail to use your products properly.        •  Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved.        •  Eliminate all error messages from electronic or computer systems. Instead, provide help and guidance.        •  Make it possible to correct problems directly from help and guidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress—help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over.        •  Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way.        •  Think positively, for yourself and for the people you interact with.

When relationships are not nurtured by a sense of appreciation, the results are predictable:   • Team members will experience a lack of connectedness with others and with the mission of the organization.   • Workers will tend to become discouraged, feeling “There is always more to do and no one appreciates what I’m doing.”   • Often employees will begin to complain about their work, their colleagues, and their supervisor.   • Eventually, team members start to think seriously about leaving the organization and they begin to search for other employment.

One way to make sure you test your intuition is to create and encourage a culture of dissent. By promoting strong people who will stand up to you and say no, you can create an environment in which your intuitions have to run the gauntlet of constructive criticism. For example, there was one veteran employee at the Haifa design center who was challenging me all the time. To be honest, I had extremely ambivalent feelings about this individual. It’s no fun to be constantly challenged and criticized. Yet in the end I was glad he was there. He kept me on my toes.

A Tale of Two Parking Requirements The impact of parking requirements becomes clearer when we compare the parking requirements of San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco limits off-street parking, while LA requires it. Take, for example, the different parking requirements for concert halls. For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, fifty times more parking than San Francisco allows as its maximum. Thus the San Francisco Symphony built its home, Louise Davies Hall, without a parking garage, while Disney Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, did not open until seven years after its parking garage was built. Disney Hall's six-level, 2,188-space underground garage cost $110 million to build (about $50,000 per space). Financially troubled Los Angeles County, which built the garage, went into debt to finance it, expecting that parking revenues would repay the borrowed money. But the garage was completed in 1996, and Disney Hall—which suffered from a budget less grand than its vision—became knotted in delays and didn't open until late 2003. During the seven years in between, parking revenue fell far short of debt payments (few people park in an underground structure if there is nothing above it) and the county, by that point nearly bankrupt, had to subsidize the garage even as it laid employees off. The money spent on parking shifted Disney Hall's design toward drivers and away from pedestrians. The presence of a six-story subterranean garage means most concert patrons arrive from underneath the hall, rather than from the sidewalk. The hall's designers clearly understood this, and so while the hall has a fairly impressive street entrance, its more magisterial gateway is an "escalator cascade" that flows up from the parking structure and ends in the foyer. This has profound implications for street life. A concertgoer can now drive to Disney Hall, park beneath it, ride up into it, see a show, and then reverse the whole process—and never set foot on a sidewalk in downtown LA. The full experience of an iconic Los Angeles building begins and ends in its parking garage, not in the city itself. Visitors to downtown San Francisco have a different experience. When a concert or theater performance lets out in San Francisco, people stream onto the sidewalks, strolling past the restaurants, bars, bookstores, and flower shops that are open and well-lit. For those who have driven, it is a long walk to the car, which is probably in a public facility unattached to any specific restaurant or shop. The presence of open shops and people on the street encourages other people to be out as well. People want to be on streets with other people on them, and they avoid streets that are empty, because empty streets are eerie and menacing at night. Although the absence of parking requirements does not guarantee a vibrant area, their presence certainly inhibits it. "The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages," Jane Jacobs argued in 1961, "the duller and deader it becomes ... and there is nothing more repellent than a dead downtown.

Sustain a positive outlook. Cultivate a can-do spirit, and you will be an inspiration to employees. And, when that's a tall order, fake it until you make it! • Be known as a fair person. Employees want to be treated fairly, and you must take the necessary steps to make sure they feel that is the case. • Keep an eye on morale. Morale at the workplace can be affected positively or negatively by an incident that, although it might seem insignificant to you, might be very important to your employees. A contented group of employees will do more and better work than an unhappy group. • Set an example. If you want your employees to work hard and succeed, then set an example by doing so yourself. Be a spectacular role model! • Take responsibility for your actions. If something goes wrong and it's your fault, step up to the plate and acknowledge whatever it is that went wrong and why. • Maintain your sense of humor. Don't take yourself too seriously, and don't be in such a hurry that you haven't got time to tell or listen to a positive (tasteful) story. Studies suggest laughter and good humor go a long way in helping employees function well in the workplace. • Acknowledge good work through praise. Everyone wants to hear “well done” now and then, so make sure you acknowledge good work. Say it privately and say it within earshot of others, too. • Give credit for ideas. If one of your employees comes up with a great idea, by all means give that person the credit he or she deserves. Don't allow anyone to take an employee's idea and pass it off as his own. (Managers are sometimes accused of stealing an employee's idea; be scrupulous about avoiding even a hint of such a thing.) Beyond the basic guidelines listed above, a good manager must possess other positive qualities: • Understanding: Conventional wisdom dictates that you walk in someone else's shoes before you judge her. Keep that in mind when dealing with people in the workplace. • Good communication skills: Keep your communication skills in good working order. You might want to join speaking organizations to learn how to be a better public speaker. But don't stop there. You communicate when you send a memo, write e-mail, and lead a meeting. There's no such thing as being a “perfect” communicator. An excellent manager will view the pursuit of this art as a work in progress. • Strong listening skills: When was the last time you really listened to someone when he was talking to you? Did you give him your full, undivided attention, or was your mind thinking about five other different things? And when you are listening, do you really know what it is people are trying to tell you? (You might have to ask probing questions in order to get the message.) • Leadership: Employees need good leaders to help guide them, so make sure your leadership skills are enviable and on-duty. • Common sense: You'll need more than your fair share if you expect to be a good manager of people. Some managers toss common sense out the window and then foolishly wonder what happened when things go wrong. • Honesty: Be honest and ethical in all of your business dealings — period! • A desire to encourage: Encouragement is different than praise. Encouragement helps someone who hasn't yet achieved the goal. Employees need your input and encouragement from time to time in order to be successful, so be prepared to fill that role.

We encouraged our employees to keep notes on guests’ preferences, so that when the vice president of a national organization checked in to a room at Four Seasons Ottawa, she was greeted by a flower arrangement in her favorite colors. Not only was this a pleasant surprise, she also felt recognized and special.

Every time you open your mouth, you influence the culture of the workplace. You have the opportunity to change and improve employee morale, engagement, and productivity. You can affirm worth and potential by providing encouragement and showing support for your people. You can ignite a fire within people. To

The simple way to keep recruiting in everyone’s job description is to measure it. Count referrals and interviews. Measure how quickly people fill out interview feedback forms. Encourage employees to help with recruiting events, and track how often they do. Then make these metrics count when it comes to performance reviews and promotions. Recruiting is everyone’s job, so grade it that way.

Amazon has adopted something similar for fulfillment-center workers called Pay to Quit. In an employee’s first year of work, the offer is $2,000. It goes up by $1,000 every year after that until it hits $5,000. The idea, writes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in his 2014 letter to shareholders, is “to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.

Having a team that’s afraid of admitting failure is a dangerous problem, particularly because the symptoms are not immediately visible. What appears on the surface to be a well-functioning unit may, in fact, be a group that’s too paralyzed to admit its own flaws. In contrast, teams that freely admit their errors are better able to learn from one another’s mistakes. They can also take steps to prevent repeating those mistakes by tweaking their process. Over the long term, encouraging employees to acknowledge mistakes is therefore a vital first step to seeing improvement.

Companies should design the product and the marketing strategy to set and meet reasonable customer expectations—what he calls doing it right the first time. Part of this strategy is to identify possible areas of customer disappointment or areas where customers may perceive that they are not receiving full value from the product. Companies must then proactively reach out to customers to educate or even to warn them of product limitations. The best defense is a good offense. 2.   Customers must be encouraged to seek assistance when they have questions or problems—a silent, unhappy customer is a less profitable customer. Companies must provide effortless communication channels for customers seeking assistance. 3.   Companies need to create an empowered service system that allows employees to fully handle a problem, educate the customers on how to receive the most value from the product, and create inexpensive emotional connections. 4.   Companies must build a voice of the customer process that gathers information from across the entire customer lifecycle from multiple data sources and that integrates the process into a single, unified picture of the customer experience. To ensure impact and the secure resources needed to deliver a strong customer experience, the process must quantify the revenue and word-of-mouth impact of problems and opportunities. For

It is hard to find many better examples of values-first leadership than Ventura, California-based outdoor clothing company Patagonia. For more than 30 years, the company has defied conventional wisdom by building its brand as much around environmental responsibility as on quality products and service. How many businesses would run a marketing campaign encouraging customers to not buy new products but repair the old ones instead in order to reduce their environmental footprint? Only companies interested in creating a “lovability economy” would prioritize sustainable growth for themselves and the world and take a long-term perspective. They see themselves as stewards of meaningful relationships and understand that mutually positive interactions and exchanges of value are lasting. Patagonia has even made its supply chain public with an online map showing every farm, textile mill, and factory it uses in sourcing its materials and manufacturing its products. Anyone who wants to can see where their Patagonia products come from and verify that the company is walking the walk — using sustainable materials and producing apparel in facilities that are safe for workers. That is transparency that breeds trust. Founder Yvon Chouinard’s vision has also led to a culture that is not only employee-friendly (the company even encourages employees at its corporate headquarters to quit early when the surf is up) but attracts people whose values align with the company’s. This aggressively anti-profit, pro-values approach has yielded big dividends. The privately-held benefit corporation is tight-lipped about its revenues, but two years after it began its “cause marketing” campaign, sales increased 27 percent, to $575 million in 2013.7

Learn about Public Service Loan Forgiveness The PSLF Program (Public Service Loan Forgiveness) encourages people to proceed and continue their participation in public service careers. In this program, eligible individuals are entitled for forgiveness of their remaining balance that is due on their federal student loans. However, they may only qualify if they were able to make 120 payments on these loans, which are under a particular repayment plan. These individuals also have a full-time employment status from public service companies, so they may qualify for the PSLF. Let’s discuss Public Service Loan Forgiveness with The Student Loan Help Center Team. How to Obtain Remaining Balances on Direct Loans If you want to have remaining balances on your direct loans forgiven through the PSLF, you must be able to make 120 monthly payments on direct loans. Furthermore, these payments should be full and made on time. Another important qualification is securing the payment after October 1, 2007. When you make these monthly payments, keep in mind that you should be a full-time employee at any accredited public service company. Important Details about Eligible Loans for Forgiveness As The Student Loan Help Center CEO Bruce Mesnekoff Said Loans that are eligible for the PSLF program are those you have received from a direct loan. On the other hand, Perkins Loans, Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) and other types of student loans are not valid for PSLF. If you have an existing Perkins loan or FFEL, you have the option to consolidate these into direct consolidation loans, so you may avail of the outstanding benefits offered by the PSLF. Make sure, though, that the payments made on the new loan will be counted toward your payment requirement, which will last for 120 months. Facts about Qualifying Repayment Plans You will be able to maximize your benefits from the PSLF by repaying loans on the IBR (Income Based Repayments) or the ICR (Income Contingent Repayments. These plans enable you to qualify for the PSLF program. The 10-year repayment plan also qualifies you for the PSLF, as well as other plans where the monthly payment you make is equivalent or more than what you are required to pay under the standard 10-year repayment scheme. Before you decide on the best repayment scheme for paying off your direct loans, make sure you are aware of the costs and implications of such decision. When you extend the period in securing your payments for PSLF qualifying payments, you can reduce the remaining balance on your loan when you satisfy all the eligibility requirements for the PSLF program. Moreover, you will have zero balance on loans to be forgiven when you are able to make all 120 monthly payments through the 10 year standard repayment scheme. You can expect a great reduction on your monthly payments under the ICR or IBR plans, as compared to other qualifying repayment options for the PSLF program. Moreover, the repayment term is likely to extend. With a longer period in repaying your loans, you can expect additional interest to accumulate on your loan. Keep in mind, though, that your inability to meet the PSLF requirements will entitle you to pay off the entire loan balance, as well as the accrued interest.

One of the particularly striking things about the middle class proclivity for authenticity is that it significantly blurs the boundaries between public and private life. It involves projecting the internal search for authenticity into ever more public spaces. Almost any aspect of social life, even the most apparently inauthentic, becomes a potential zone for articulating our true self. For instance, employees seek to express and explore their authentic identities in their place of employment (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011). This encourages employees to bring what had previously been considered as private sentiments such as love, desire, and emotions into the workplace (Illouz, 2006; 2008). At the same time, we also witness the extension of the workplace into all aspects of our private lives (see also Fleming and Spicer, 2004). This can mean the number of hours and effort devoted to work time is radically extended. Many of the activities such as socializing, undertaking leisure activities and even romance become implicated with work. As our private life shifts into the public sphere it becomes denuded of intimacy and subjected to forms of cold instrumental calculation. Moreover, our public life becomes increasingly infused with emotive and highly personal expressions that had once been curbed by reason, rationality and due process.

The solution to encourage creativity is to maximize use of employee’ brainpower.

The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names. It’s a variation of the lesson learned by Target and radio DJs: to sell a new habit—in this case exercise—wrap it in something that people already know and like, such as the instinct to go places where it’s easy to make friends. “We’re cracking the code on how to keep people at the gym,” Lazarus told me. “People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. Getting people to exercise in groups makes it more likely they’ll stick with a workout. You can change the health of the nation this way.

How do you minimize the awkwardness in that moment? What are some of the conversations starters you've used to open, encourage, and support enjoyable and beneficial conversations?

Many hospitality companies follow the "5 and 10 Rule," whereby when a customer is within ten feet of the employee, they should provide acknowledgement with eye contact and a genuine smile. When the customer is within five feet, it is encouraged to provide a warm welcome, sincere greeting, a friendly gesture, and offer to help, or to engage him or her in conversation.

Rather than using these pages for a boring English lesson, I will simply encourage you to become keenly aware and pay close attention to your articulation and grammar.

In his book, The Four Agreements, Miguel’s Ruiz encourages us to “not take things personally; people behave for their reasons, not ours.” Our personality differences and life experiences shape how we perceive, engage, react, and respond.