Last laughs last longest
By Jim Bright | smh.com.au | 13 June
To engage staff, aim to get the satisfaction levels as high as possible and monitor changes to try to keep them high.
F
ollow Shakespeare's lead and leave your employees wanting more.
I was in Woolworths the other day and decided to try out an alternative career as a check-out chap using their self-service system. I came away mystified and marvelling mystified as to how to open those flimsy plastic bags provided for your shopping and marvelling that the professional check-out jockeys manage this feat with elan. More importantly, I came away with colonoscopies firmly forced right up into the forefront of my mind.
Parting may be sweet sorrow for Juliet but whoever programmed the self-service's parting comments at Woolies has evidently heard of neither William Shakespeare nor, it would seem, Nobel laureate Dr Daniel Kahneman.
There is nothing sweet about the parting shot from the Woolies self-service. Shoppers leave with: "Please take your items ... " ringing in their ears. Sounds fair enough until you detect in the intonation that something is missing at the end of this phrase. I find myself adding "and stick them up your ... ". Thus I leave my local grocer miffed and colonoscopy-focused. Which brings me to Danny Kahneman ...
Kahneman famously studied colonoscopy procedures to see how the patients registered pain during the invasion and how they subsequently remembered their pain. Memory is important here because when we make decisions about most things in life, we rely on, to quote more Shakespeare, remembrance of things past.
So if our memories of an event are aversive, we are less likely to voluntarily repeat the experience.
Kahneman showed, counter to intuition, that longer colonoscopy procedures were not necessarily recalled as more painful than shorter procedures.
The memory of the pain was associated most strongly with experiences of pain in the last few minutes of the indignity. So regardless of length, if you had a shocker in the last few minutes this tended to outweigh any fun had to that point.
In other words, whether it is your local grocer or a professional wielding a camera that goes where reality television normally lives, if you want to engage the customer or patient for a voluntary repeat experience you need to leave them laughing or at the very least, not howling. The final interaction will colour our memories disproportionally.
The same principle applies right across career development. For instance, Andrew Clark and Yannis Georgellis from London's Brunel University found that current job satisfaction is an inadequate measure for predicting whether folks will leave a job.
It turns out when you ask someone whether they are satisfied in their job, they interrogate their memories and memory throws up a response that is disproportionally biased towards current feelings.
They found that if you want to predict who will leave, measure job satisfaction regularly and average across the peak level of satisfaction found over time and the most recent level of satisfaction. In fact, peak satisfaction was twice as important as recent satisfaction in their predictions. The amount of change in satisfaction predicted quit decisions as well.
So to engage staff, aim to get the satisfaction levels as high as possible and monitor changes to try to keep them high. Don't get complacent; if the latest levels have dropped a lot, it could spell trouble.
More generally, the leave-them-laughing principle applies to relationships and networking. Those who are good at these skills are conscious of leaving interactions meetings, calls, emails, texts or Twitters on a high note. So Woolies, consider adding "and thanks for your business".
With this principle in mind, thanks for reading this and until we meet again, I wish you peak career satisfaction for the week ahead.
First published by Smh.com.au on June 13 2009
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