It’s Friday. Take a moment to enjoy a couple of these epic office pranks.

Here’s my favorite:

My post on why “The Customer is Always Right” is wrong has generated an amazing amount of attention. It’s been read by 100,000s of people and been mentioned all over the blogosphere. It even got picked up in The New York Times.

But most of all, it gets a LOT of great comments. Here are some examples.

Chris wrote:

I run a small company with about 20 employees. One day I heard commotion coming from the reception area. I hear a man yelling “I am the customer, you work for me and the customer is always right!”. I immediately went up and said, “No sir, you can’t get away with what you get away with at Walmart here. This young lady works for me and no matter what you think you were right about, you raised your voice and are no longer welcome.”

He needed our services and wrote a letter of apology for his ‘cranky mood’.

You raise your voice and you are out. No exceptions.

That’s it in a nutshell.

Grant wrote:

I read this post the other day and it was hiding in the back of my mind then this past Thursday I had a job interview. The interviewer asked me, “What do you feel about the statement, ‘The customer is always right’?” I remembered this post and mentioned these points as well as embellished to make it more appropriate to the job description.

After I answered that, the interviewer told me that I was the first person all day to answer that question correctly (she had already interviewed 6 people). Today I got a call offering me the position. I’d like to think that it had something to do with this blog post.

Thanks :)

SEE MOM! BROWSING THE INTERNETS IS A GOOD THING!!!

I’ve told Grant that I take full credit for him getting the job and given him an account number where he can deposit 10% of his first year’s salary :o)

Marie wrote:

We recently had a customer who bounced a check, and had the audacity to call my customer service manager with a tirade of yelling & profanity (before she could explain what had happened). She was calm and waited for him to settle down and tried to explain… He continued to use profanity, only to stop when my CS Manager politely told him that if he didn’t quit, she would hang up… Later, he emailed a complaint to the corporate office stating how rude and unprofessional she had been…

The customer DOES NOT have the right to harass my employees. I just happened to be in the office that day and could hear him screaming at her over the phone. I think she handled it WONDERFULLY; I took her out to lunch!

I don’t believe that a customer has the right to verbally assault my employees and I have trained them not to take that type of abuse from anyone.

SueBob writes:

I worked at a print shop where my manager would occasionally fire customers. In four years, I think it was 3 people. He told one person, “I won’t have you abuse my employee.”

I would have crawled through broken glass for him. It was one of the best employment experiences of my life.

These comments show that there are many companies out there that realize that putting the employees first actually results in better customer service. The formula is simple: Happy employees = happy customers.

But of course not everyone gets it. Yet.

Anonymous writes:

I work in a call center and showed this article to my boss. I’m told that senior managers view the ideas presented here as “silly.” Is it any wonder employees think our company is out to get them?

Customers are allowed to verbally abuse our employees and this is supposed to be a sign of great customer service. All the while, lower level managers are directed to keep turnover down. The company doesn’t understand that people are not satisfied in a job where the company supports abuse towards them.

Get a clue.

Sheeesh!

One of the regular readers and commenters on this blog is Eric Deniau, who’s VP of Engineering at Enensys in France. The really cool thing about Eric is that he doesn’t just stop at reading about happiness at work – he does something about it, and has tried a lot of things to make himself and his employees happy.

Eric recently told me about some of the things he’s been up to:

Some news about what is going on in my company.

Let me first say that I do have your book on my desk, and I refer to it quite often in my day to day activities. I must confess that while I adhere 150% to its content and look permanently for ways to make people happier in their jobs, I still feel some difficulty to implement concretely a happy plan. Putting in place concrete actions to make the workplace more fun is not that easy: work can be a fun place, it is still work and too far-fetched ideas could be seen out of place given our culture, in my opinion. But I may be too shy and can be wrong on that point…

That said, I have some interesting things to mention that happened recently, without a « real » happy plan in place:
– most employees bring eating or drinking stuff (we are in France, after all) for their anniversary and employment birthday: croissant, home made cakes, crepes, etc… I personaly offered a drink and buffet before lunch for my first year in the company; this creates regular occasions to gather everybody in a friendly way;

– small and soft rugby balls have been introduced in the lab following the world cup; when I see one around, I throw it to the next office as everyone else would do;

– a lot of people have a lunch break onsite, and some like to play to a network game after. Instead of looking with a black eye at the screens I see when walking around, I smile and asks who wins (I do not personally enjoy network game player).

– when coming back from a business trip to Switzerland before easter, I brought back easter eggs;

– Our IT manager is the last one to present during company meetings: as he is a fun guy (unusual for an IT manager, I know, but it happens !), it is now the tradition that he displays a joke at the end of his slides and hence the monthly company meeting, ranging from funny YouTube videos to an automatic tool generating weirdo product names.

Also, it has become a joke to say « happy plan ! » when a fun or simply nice idea comes to the mind of my close collaborators, as a kind of motto.

Now, when the situation is more tense due to unhappy events occuring (it happens!), this kind of things have to be handled with more care: it’s not easy and sometimes not fair to have fun in that occasions. Recent exemples I have include stopping a contract of an under-performing employee, or the announcement of poor financial results. The good point I noticed is that this kind of “happy plan” behaviours comes back quite rapidly after several days, when re-initiating the thing a little bit.

I will soon poll people again to know if they are happy at work. Personnaly, I am definitely Yeah++.

More to come…

As I wrote in my book (and constantly harp on in the blog) happiness at work comes mostly from doing a lot of small, easy and fun things regularly, preferably daily and Eric is definitely on the right track with easter eggs and foam rugby balls.

But notice that he doesn’t stop there – he’s also not afraid to tackle difficult situations, like terminating an underperforming employee.

That is a fine balance for a leader to walk – and a great way to create a happy workplace. Kudos, Eric!