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Below are five articles reprinted from Science Daily on how keeping your employees happy improves your customer's satisfaction and your business's bottom line.  It's proof of the old business saying, " your employees will treat your customers the way you treat them ."  ~ Jim 1.  To Boost Customer Satisfaction, Pay Attention to Employee Job Satisfaction Science Daily, June 1, 2011 — Previous studies have shown that customer satisfaction plays a key role in the health and future success of any company. When customers are satisfied, they keep coming back to the same store and invite their friends to do the same. Now, a new study from the University of Missouri has found that CEOs who pay attention to employees' job satisfaction are able to boost both customer satisfaction and the number of customers that intend to purchase products from the store. "You might think that as an owner, you only need to pay attention to the customers, providing them with...

Science Daily, Feb. 20, 2013 :   Any manager or business owner will deal with an employee whose performance starts slipping, especially after what others see as a “failure” when performance can just drop like a rock.   Counseling often fails to get the employee back on track.   How to handle this? New research conducted by the University of Exeter in SE England, Amherst College in Massachusetts and the University of Stirling in south central Scotland offers a simple method you can use to help someone.    The research, to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, shows that " while criticism from team members sends individuals into downward performance spirals, external criticism can be a trigger that boosts performance as people try to prove the outsiders wrong ." To paraphrase lead author Dr Tim Rees of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter, “ Careful management of performance following failure by encouraging a 'them and us'...

The headline stopped me cold: A Stupidity-based Theory of Organizations Wow.   Two academics, Mats Alvesson of Lund University in Lund, Sweden, and Andre’ Spicer of City University London, published the results of their in-depth research into “Functional Stupidity” offering a theory of. . .   " Ah, ha, the truth is finally out ,” I chortle with smug glee.   “ All those dolts and troglodyte managers I suffered under those 46 miserable years of wage slavery,   finally, their hockey-puckedness is exposed for the world to see ." Then I read the paper published in the November 2012 issue of the Journal of Management Studies.   Oh.   Well, now.   On second thought I have to accept the authors’ conclusion that Functional Stupidity may be a bad thing but may also be a good thing, an important concept that leads to predictable functioning and efficiency.    So what is Functional Stupidity? It’s quite straight forward, really.   As Alvesson a...

Source:  crasstalk.com I t’s always reassuring when a new bit of research is published that documents something I’ve observed and written or talked about for years.   Case in point:   What I call the “Puppy Love” syndrome.   Now the Harvard Business School has published research documenting this in what the authors call the “IKEA Effect”.   In short, the researchers had subjects assemble origami projects or assemble kits from IKEA.   They documented that most people give their creation a higher grade than even those assembled by professionals.   The message is that people tend to fall in love or have higher opinions of things they have worked on themselves, often ignoring obvious flaws in their creation. This description is from an article I wrote some years ago. *   *   *   *   * The Puppy Love Syndrome               Do you remember the first great love of your life, ...

 Ms. Chiara Amati M ost business management books and classes teach that good leaders and managers are authentic, open and honest. Now a study published January 10, 2012 reports that many managers "fake it" and put on positive, encouraging emotions to ensure employees perform well in their jobs.  This is the key finding of a doctoral study conducted by psychologist Chiara Amati of Edinburgh Napier University.     " Faking it seems to be part of good people management ," Amati reports. According to Amati, "Managers who spoke to me reported feeling obliged to monitor their public displays of emotions in order to manage staff performance and maintain good working relationships with their team. It is more important for managers to deploy influencing skills to get people to do things; they simply do not have the authority to command unconditional respect." A further finding of the study suggests that female managers may need to contrive their emotional disp...

Do you or your employees depend at least in part on tip income? As a prospective or current small business owner you should know about the “Rule of Reciprocity,” and the effect of waitresses wearing the color red.  Both work seperately to increase the amount of a tip that customers leave. First, the Rule of Reciprocity:  What is this rule?   Well, it works like this:   if someone gives you something, you feel obligated to give something in return, right?   Research by sociologists find this rule operating in every society on Earth. " If someone gives something to us, we feel obligated to repay that debt. This rule operates not only with people you know, but also with strangers .” - Steve Martin, co-author of “Yes!: 50 secrets from the science of persuasion”   Yes!: 50 Secrets From the Science of Persuasion by Professor Robert B. Cialdini   Here’s how reciprocity works for a business.   Behavioral scientist David Strohmetz found that including a ...