Category: The Site

I’m introducing a new feature on the blog: I’m now taking questions.

Seriously, ask me anything related to happiness at work. Just call me the Miss Manners or Dear Abby of the workplace.

The way it works is you ask a question (either in a comment to this post or in an email) and I answer it in a post on the blog. If you want me to, I’ll anonymize your question so you won’t get caught asking for outside advice. Go ahead and ask, I’d love to help!

My post listing the Top 5 reasons “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong has spawned a lot of great comments in the post itself and one some other websites including these:

Kinkoids Unite (a site for Kinko’s employees)
“In my region, when an employee is mentioned in a customer complaint, he/she has to apologize to all 11 center managers in a conference call whether they were wrong or wronged.”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..?

Digg
“One of the consistent back up statements of “The Customer is Always Right” is the amount of dollars it costs to replace a customer. It costs more to replace a customer than to retain one most times. However, it also costs a lot more to recruit, hire, and train a new employee than it does to keep one happy.”

Excellent point – I never even though of that one.
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The Happy at Work Book is now half finished. It took me eight days of writing, writing only before lunch to get this far. I can’t believe how fast I’ve been writing or how much fun it’s been. I literally have to force myself to take days off from writing on it once in a while :o)

I’m going on vacation next week, so new chapters are coming the week after that. What I’ve covered so far are the basics: The introduction, What is happiness at work, why is it important for people and businesses and who is responsilbe for happiness at work.

I would like to thank everyone who has read and commented on the book so far – it has been both encouraging, motivating and a great help to read your comments. Thank you! If you’d like, you can read the book and leave feedback here.

The next part of the book is about How to make people and businesses happy, and this is where I have a question. You see, the things you can do, the options available to you are fairly different depending on your position at the company. If you’re an employee there are some things you can do, mid-level managers have some other options available to them and top-level execs and business owners some different ones again.

Everything in the book up till this point is relevant for everyone with a job (and everyone who wants one), but now things diverge a little.

The question is this: Should I try to write one book that combines these three viewpoints or what would be the best way to do it? My chief ambition is to keep the book interesting, fun, useful and fairly short.

Please let me know what you think.