An excellent article by James Surowiecki in The Newyorker shows that retail stores that have more and happier staff are more profitable.

In fact, a study found that:

…every dollar in additional payroll led to somewhere between four and twenty-eight dollars in new sales. Stores that were understaffed to begin with benefitted more, stores that were close to fully staffed benefitted less, but, in all cases, spending more on workers led to higher sales.

The reasons for this aren’t hard to divine… Customers’ needs are pretty simple: they want to be able to find products, and helpful salespeople, easily; and they want to avoid long checkout lines. For a well-staffed store, that’s no problem, but if you don’t have enough people on the floor, or if they aren’t well trained, customers can easily lose patience.

One of the biggest problems retailers have is what is called a “phantom stock-out.” That’s when a product is in the store but can’t be found. Worker-friendly retailers with more employees have fewer phantom stock-outs, which leads to more sales.

And happy workers tend to stick around, which saves the costs associated with employee turnover, like hiring and training.

The article also cites a few counter-examples:

In 2007, Circuit City fired more than three thousand of its most experienced salesmen, replacing them with newer workers whom it could pay less. Its sales dropped, and it was bankrupt within a couple of years.

When Bob Nardelli took over Home Depot, in 2000, he reduced the number of salespeople on the floor and turned many full-time jobs into part-time ones. In the process, he turned Home Depot stores into cavernous wastelands, with customers wandering around dejectedly trying to find an aproned employee, only to discover that he had no useful advice to offer. The company’s customer-service ratings plummeted, and its sales growth stalled.

Read the whole thing here.

So: Keep your retail staff happy and you will sell more. This ain’t exactly rocket science :o)

In fact, we did some work for IKEA in Denmark in 2010, to help them become happier and more profitable, and the results were exactly as predicted by this article: Higher employee happiness, higher customer satisfaction, lower employee turnover, lower absenteeism, higher sales and higher profits.

Here’s Rowan Manahan, my favorite Irishman and one of the funniest people I know, explaining how PowerPoint can be used to enhance any kind of story – even a fairy tale. Though he may be sarcastic, I’m not sure :o)

In any case, it’s 5 minutes of pure hilarity. Check it out:

Incidentally(!), Rowan is also one of the speakers at Arbejdsglæde Live! our annual conference on happiness at work on May 24 in Copenhagen. Read all about it and sign up here.

Mark Cuban just wrote a blog post, advising people to forget their passions and just invest more hours into whatever they doo:

I hear it all the time from people. “I’m passionate about it.” “I’m not going to quit, It’s my passion”. Or I hear it as advice to students and others “Follow your passion”.

What a bunch of BS. ”Follow Your Passion” is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get.

Why? Because everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than 1 thing. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel.

Instead, Mark says you should look at where you spend your time, because:

1. When you work hard at something you become good at it.
2. When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.

That’s basically telling all the people working 80-hour weeks in soul-sucking jobs, that if they hate hate what they do, the solution is simply to put more hours into it.

Looking more closely at the two statements above, it’s clear to see that they’re both flat-out wrong. In fact:

1. Plenty of people work looooong hours at jobs they are not very good at.
2. I know some very successful, highly paid people who are stellar at what they do… but don’t particularly like it. Many people are good at what they do, yet don’t ultimately enjoy it, precisely because they have no passion for it.

I maintain (and the science backs me up on this) that if you choose (or create) a job which makes you happy, you are more likely to be successful at it.

Now, I’m not knocking effort. Effort is crucial and being happy at work does not mean your work days will always be fun, easy and effortless. Being happy at work is also about working really hard on tough challenges. Especially if those challenges are meaningful to you.

It’s really about finding the intersection of these three areas:

1. Something you’re passionate about
2. Something you’re good at
3. Something people will pay you to do

Telling people to ignore their passions in this equation is common-place but misguided, because it simply leads people to slave away at jobs they ultimately don’t care about.

Companies are more productive when they stick to a 40-hour week. This article explains why.

From the article:

Unions started fighting for the short week in both the UK and US in the early 19th century. By the latter part of the century, it was becoming the norm in an increasing number of industries. And a weird thing happened: over and over — across many business sectors in many countries — business owners discovered that when they gave into the union and cut the hours, their businesses became significantly more productive and profitable.

Even Henry Ford, who was definitely some kind of socialist, profited from this knowledge:

By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe, and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.

Basically, it seems that this was accepted knowledge for decades – until some time around the 80s when constant overwork became seen as a sign of passion and a desirable tendency in employees.

Go read the whole thing – it is excellent.

Your take

What about your workplace? Are people allowed to work 40 hour weeks or is overtime more or less mandatory? What is your optimal number of working hours per week? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.

Related posts

• Don’t let The Cult of Overwork ruin your work life.
• The top 5 new rules of productivity.
• How to procrastinate effectively.

This is not only one of the best recruitment videos I’ve ever seen it’s a stirring tribute to employees everywhere:

It’s from Indian IT company HCL Technologies. Read more about the video here – you can even give them your company name and logo and generate a version of the video specific to your company.