Last week on my twitter account (click here to follow me), I hinted at this mysterious project in London that I couldn’t talk more about. Well now I finally can and it’s a really cool one :o)

CA (formerly Computer Associates) commissioned a study (called The CA 2009 Webstress Index) to look at webstress, a term they came up with to describe the frustration and unhappiness you experience when a crucial web application is not working properly.

Here I am, talking about the study:

And here are some of the key findings:

• 68% of workers say they rely on web applications more now than two years ago and 97% wouldn’t be able to do their job without them.
• 24% say that every day they have to cope with badly performing applications with an additional third 34% claiming this happens on a weekly basis.
• 81% say they have no choice but to use some business applications even when they aren’t working properly

You can see the whole study here.

This study is interesting because it confirms something I’ve seen in many workplaces: Employees are reliant on IT systems to their jobs. Increasingly, the IT systems we use are web applications, meaning they reside “somewhere on the internet”. When these systems are slow, buggy or unavailable we get frustrated and angry.

This is especially true these days, where companies are demanding ever higher levels of productivity, efficiency and customer service from their people. If companies demand this but don’t give employees the well-functioning tools they need to deliver, the result is unhappiness at work.

And of course, when employees are unhappy at work, the results are:

• Lower productivity
• Higher absenteeism
• Higher employee turnover
• Lower customer satisfaction
• Lower profits

These factors taken together can cost organizations huge sums of money.

Speaking from my own experience, my own company is absolutely dependent on web apps – all our vital IT systems run on a web server somewhere. If any of them are not working, we’re basically crippled. Fortunately, that happens very rarely or I would be suffering from seeeeerious webstress :o)

The same goes on the customer side. We all use web applications to buy books, plane tickets, movie tickets, hotels, etc. – and when these web apps aren’t working or seem too slow, there are always ten other sites offering much the same products at much the same prices.

If your company offers any kind of web application to its customers, that system should make them happy. At the very least, it shouldn’t give them webstress and make the unhappy because its, slow, buggy or even down.

I think it’s time for organizations to take webstress seriously. CA’s study confirms what I’ve seen in many workplaces all over the world, namely that badly performing web applications is a major source of unhappiness at work and in customers. And THAT’S why I am so excited about the CA study.

Full disclosure:
CA offers Application Performance Monitoring Solutions that let organizations track the performance of web applications. They are paying me to contribute to this campaign but I still mean every word :o)

Your take

What about you? Are you using any crucial web apps in your job? Have you experienced web stress?

A couple of months ago I went to London to guest speak at Srikumar Rao’s class on Creativity and Personal Mastery at London Business School. It was a fun and exciting couple of hours… and then the students in the class completely surprised me.

A mysterious package arrived with a poster which you can see above. These are pictures of the students being happy with some of my key messages superimposed. That has got to be one of the coolest things anyone has ever sent me and that poster is going up on the wall in my trophy room.

Thanks again to Srikumar’s class for a great time and a fun gift which surprised me AND made me happy!

There are many metaphors for the workplace. A company can be like a ship, sailing uncharted seas. Some workplaces aim to be like a family. Many organizations want to be like well-oiled machines.

The most traditional metaphor, that unfortunately still informs much of our thinking, is the company as a military unit with lines of command, enemies, battles and strategic objectives.

Metaphors have power. If you see your workplace and career through a certain lense it will affect your thinking and your decision-making.

Now Henriette Weber of Toothless Tiger has come up with the coolest metaphor I have ever seen for a business: The company as a rockband.

Click here to download her awesome free e-book which explains the idea in detail. It’s a quick, fun and fascinating read.

Our company is already a lot like a rock band. We do drugs, trash hotel rooms and drink tons of alcohol. And don’t even get me started on the groupies.

JUST KIDDING!! It’s more that:

• We allow ourselves to be different.
• We do work that we and our clients think is really cool.
• We inspire people with what we do and who we are.
• We have a great time and give our audience a great time.

What about you? Is your workplace like a rock band? Do you get to feel like a rock star on the job? Does what you do create admiring fans?

Or is there a different more apt metaphor for your workplace? Write a comment, I’d love to know what you think.

Related posts

• 10 seeeeeeeeriously cool workplaces.
• Top 10 signs you’re unhappy at work.
• Death to job titles.

Cat Sacdalan, a graphics designer, was unhappy at work. Not only that, her father had been sick, and the fact that she’d been working at home a lot to be with him didn’t sit well with some of her co-workers.

Cat wrote me that:

For 8 months I’ve been postponing my resignation. I’m guilty of some of those top 10 bad excuses. It’s amazing; it’s like you wrote down everything I felt (and more).

I finally decided to quit when, last week, my boss told me that people have come up to him, complaining that I shouldn’t be compensated for working outside the office. My boss says he appreciates my work but he wants to get rid of the complainers by heeding their request.

So Cat quit. And this is how she quit:

It takes guts to quit and even more guts to quit in crayon. I love it!

You can see more of Cat’s work here.

Related posts

• Top 10 bad excuses for staying in a crappy job.
• How do you know when to quit?
• Never stay in a bad job. Fix it or leave.

Happy at work in Philly

The whole company (all 4 of us) were in Philadelphia for the ippa conference on Positive Psychology and we had a blast.

This was the world’s leading conference on the topic with tons of speakers and 1500 attendees and we got to see all the big-wigs in the field, including Seligman, Zimbardo, Cooperrider, Csikszentmihalyi and Diener. Both Dieners in fact :o)

My personal favorite of all the sessions was Ed Diener, who had the most new findings to offer AND was also an excellent speaker – something of a rarity at this very academic event.

Here are some of the best quotes from the event, taken from my twitter stream:

“Awe is what moves us forward.”
– David Cooperrider quoting Joseph Conrad.

“Business must be a force for good in the world.”
– David Cooperrider.

“Homeless people in India and USA missed the Maslow memo.” (Meaning they can be happy even in a bad situation.)
– Robert Biswas-Diener

“Being healthy makes you happy and vice versa, but the link from happiness to health is twice as strong.”
– Ruut veenhoven

“Puritanism is the dreaded suspicion that someone somewhere is happy.”
– Sir Richard Layard quoting H.L. Mencken

“To flourish in life, aim for at least 3 positive emotions for every negative one.”
– Barbara Frederickson

“The top 2 motives for murder are… 1) love, 2) work.”
– Michael Frese

“Being too happy is bad for you. 8 on 1 10-scale is just right. Eg. cancer patients are more likely to survive if they’re at an 8 instead of 9 or 10.”
– Ed Diener

“It’s a myth that lottery winners are no happier after they win the money or that quadriplegics are no unhappier after their accident – your circumstances do matter!”
– Ed Diener

“You look a little down – go do something nice for someone else.”
– Martin Seligman

Follow me on twitter.

Clare over at “Thoughts from the C train” tells the story of one seeeeeeriously abusive customer:

I got called that one time. Swear. Say it: Phenomenal Cesspool of Incompetence. It’s brilliant! I mean seriously, who can come up with that shit? Well I’ll tell you who . . . kind of.

A little background. I’m a career banker, and I’ve always been on the operations side. Kind of a nuts and bolts of banking girl. I’ve also always managed people, which means the ugly situations get elevated to me.

Once I had a customer who would send absolutely hideous messages through the internet banking department. Let’s say, for example, he could not get his updated balance at three in the morning because we had not yet finished processing. This would throw him into a Rage so Fearsome that the email he sent would kind of burn your eyes out of your head. He never called, he never showed up to any branch, he would just send these awful messages from the safety of his little computer in the wee hours of the morning. Yes, coward.

Go read the whole story – it just shows how important it is to fire customers who are not good for your business.

Related posts

• Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong.
• The time I learned to say “No” at work.
• Fire that client.