Attitudes at Work

I had an interesting revelation this week. I realized that the happiest and most pleasant people in my building at TTU are the people with some of the least desirable jobs.

Our custodians, for example, are responsible for keeping the building clean despite the fact that hundreds of students, faculty, and staff are apparently working hard to make the building dirty each day. Nevertheless, Linda and Rosemary are always smiling and always willing to help when needed.

The secretary in my department spends a great deal of time dealing with student problems, putting out fires, and fixing other people’s mistakes. But I’ve never seen Rachel without a smile and she always asks what more she can do to help.

So why is this a revelation? Because the conventional wisdom in human resource management is that people’s attitudes are driven by the work they do and the money they make. In my building, it appears to be just the opposite.

To be honest this shouldn’t be so surprising. We all know people who would be satisfied in any job and we all know people who would be dissatisfied in any job. What is surprising is the fact that so few organizations realize it and take advantage of it.

Southwest Airlines is one exception to this rule. If you’ve ever flown on Southwest, you know that there’s something different about their flight attendants. They seem like they’re actually having fun at work.

The employees at Southwest are different because of the company’s hiring philosophy. The company readily admits that they “Hire for attitude and train for skills.”

Southwest realizes that they can teach someone the safety procedures they need to know and they can train someone to hand out drinks and peanuts. But they also realize that they can’t train someone to be happy. So the entire selection process is driven towards finding fun, team-oriented people.

In service-oriented companies like Southwest, employee attitudes rub off on customers. Happy, entertaining flight attendants make customers happy. Happy customers make Southwest one of the few continuously profitable airlines.

So how can companies predict which job applicants will be happy and satisfied on the job? There’s some amazing (and perhaps frightening) research that shows that our adult job attitudes are actually correlated with our childhood personality characteristics.

In other words, grumpy children are more likely to grow up into grumpy employees.

Other research shows that our job attitudes tend to be pretty stable even as we move from job to job.

All of this evidence leads to the unpleasant conclusion that some people will be dissatisfied no matter what their organization does for them or to them. So if an organization wants pleasant people, the hiring process may be as important as the compensation practices.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the most important things an organization needs from its employees are things that can’t be trained. Things like attitude, integrity, and the ability to learn need to be part of the selection process.

I’m not sure if TTU had this in mind when they hired Linda, Rosemary, and Rachel. I think we just got lucky.