A WOW Working Experience
Dear CEO,
What do your people feel when they wake up in the morning and have to go to work? Is it something like “I wish I could just wake up when the weekend starts”, or is it more like “oh well, I guess I have no choice, do I”? Or is it something completely different?
You probably know the term “user experience”. When you create a product, you want the user to have a good experience. You want the user to have a WOW experience. You want your users to come back for more. And you want this feeling to last. But today we are not going to talk about your users. We are going to talk about another group of people whose experience is at least as important. Have you ever considered the effect of the worker experience?
Yes, I know: “we pay our workers to come to work and do the best they can”. Well, here’s a newsflash: this is not enough! You may think your people feel good. You may count on your average (or less than average) turnover rates. But that’s not enough ether. There’s a great difference between not looking for a better job and feeling that “this is the right place for me”. Your people, like your customers, want a WOW working experience. And they want it to last.
Knowing that, some companies go out of their way to pamper their workers and create the best working experience they can. Most of them do it the only way they know how: spending money. Great food, amazing offices, the best computers, furniture and facilities, great salaries, cars… anything goes. And you know what? It works! All these things do create a WOW effect. Judging from the amount of words written about the Herman Miller Aeron Chair you’d think that it can do your work for you. The question is, does this effect last? Does your Herman Miller chair make your people happy when they have to go to work day after day after day after day?
So, back to square one: what is it that makes people want to go to work and come back for more? And how much would it cost you? (Hint: less than redecorating your offices).
People want to work in an open and honest environment, where they can speak freely and know they will be heard. People need to know they make a difference. People want to know they are trusted. They have to know they can also trust back. People need to know they are appreciated for doing good work. They have to feel what they do is important. People need to hear a good word when they deserve it. A genuine good word. They want to be part of a community — working together toward a joint vision. People want to be treated as equal human beings regardless of their rank.
If your people have all that, it doesn’t matter if your office decor is out-dated, or if you only have $100 chairs. If your people have that, they will have something to expect when they go to work every morning. They will have a warm feeling that everything is in place — that they belong. It’s not that everything is perfect. But your people will know that it can be.
***
“Is this really WOW stuff? It sounds so elementary”. Well, it is. At least it should be. Unfortunately, in the current business climate these things are much harder to find than offices with Herman Miller chairs. So, the answer is “Yes. This is WOW stuff”. If you want to recruit the best people, if you want your people to become better, and if you want them to stay and really give 100% of themselves, you’d better start working on it. And the best thing is that while none of this stuff is easy to achieve, it’s all free.
December 4th, 2006 at 8:42 am
Ask any CEO if he thinks his employees are happy working for his company, and 100% of them will say YES!
It seems that a prerequisite to be a CEO is to be delusional.
December 4th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
I haven’t had any WOW working experiences lately, thanks to the dumbing down of the industry for the cheap labor conservatives running the organizations I’ve worked for. But I know they are possible. And they have nothing to do with surroundings or perks or pizza luncheons or any of the advertising crap that clutters my desk.
One of my more interesting WOW jobs took place in a corner of a paper machine control room, jammed with about 500 volumes of Honeywell API documentation. The room ordinarily housed operating control panels and a couple of other workstations and was a shoulder-to-shoulder exercise for us extras. It was hot, noisy, and every once in a while we got sprayed with liquid toilet paper. I did good work there because I was able to see what the customer did before the “improvements” we were making.
Other wonderful working experiences were in construction trailers and the middle of tank farms. Same deal — got to talk to the customer in their environment, not ours. And not filtered by sales/marketing/legal/management spin.
December 4th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
As Kathy Sierra says:
“When people ask for the secret sauce guaranteed recipe for success, we say that it’s quite simple: just do the “duh” thing. The Big Secret is not about knowing what magical thing to do–it’s about taking the “duh” things seriously enough and actually doing them.”
- http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/09/why_duh_isnt.html
December 30th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Correct John, all CEO’s will say thet their employees are happy. Top leadership is so out of touch with reality that they actually have no other frame of reference. Surrounded by yes men and toadies who will only tell them what they want to hear, what else are CEO’s to think? Perhaps spending some quality time with the skeptics and cynics within the organization might help. Now there’s a new idea! I’ve written a book on the subject from over 30 years of midmanagement experience. “160 Degrees of Deviation: The Case for the Corporate Cynic.” All CEO’s should read it but probably won’t. I’ll just keep trying to be the voice in the wilderness.
January 8th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
This is a great post. The idea of approaching happiness at work from the angle of user experience design is excellent, especially because there’s a huge body of knowledge around that already.
March 30th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
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August 3rd, 2007 at 2:29 am
What makes me feel WOW about my work is that I find it really interesting and good for my self-education. Next, it’s important to be involved in something useful indeed. And I aprecciate honest relations and equivalent wages.
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