Don’t Try This at Work: Go Fish!

Bobby Bush

In this issue I’m here to talk about Fish!; not the band that played behind Country Joe McDonald at Woodstock, but the wildly popular training video that has been a staple of HR departments for the past decade. You probably know about it, but I’ll give you a brief summary just in case. The piece uses footage shot at Seattle’s famous Pike Place Fish Market to illustrate a four-part philosophy that says work can be fun if one approaches it with the right attitude and enthusiasm and strives to pass that energy to each customer. The employees on the screen certainly do so, repeating customers’ orders in unison, tossing fish to each other and the customers (“You just caught a big one…”), and laughing and cracking jokes at every turn. Since the medium doesn’t convey the pain of aching feet or the smell that stays with you all the way home, it’s hard to keep from wishing you could become a fishmonger yourself.

As a professional cynic, I’m ashamed to say I bought into it totally when I first experienced the video. It was the summer of 2006, and I’d been between full-time positions for a while. Do you remember the call center I told you about where the client paid our company the same amount per call whether the call had a happy ending or not? That’s where I saw it; they were showing it to all the new-hires. The full ramifications of the company’s being paid by the call hadn’t yet sunk in, and I was actually feeling pumped about getting to solve customers’ problems. Scratch a cynic and you always find a disillusioned idealist.

I thought it was pretty cool that I was finally working at a place where having fun was encouraged instead of being deprecated as unprofessional. Alas, a few weeks later when I was being told repeatedly to lie to the customer in order to get off the line and take more calls, it began to dawn on me that if those jolly, carefree piscine purveyors were having a stopwatch held on them to see how long they spent with each customer, and their interactions were being recorded for future analysis and criticism, they probably wouldn’t have been quite so jolly.

LESSON #1:

You shouldn’t put your rookies in a position to compare working conditions at your organization with those of the smiling salesmen in the video unless you’re pretty sure your employees are having as much fun as the guys on the screen.

LESSON #2:

If you have to wonder, assume they’re not.

Why does it matter if your front-line workers are happy? I’m profoundly sorry that I have to explain this to anyone, but I will. Imagine that you’re preparing for a very important presentation and you want a professional shave so you can look your best. Visualize yourself in the barber’s chair as he spreads the warm lather over your cheeks. Now imagine the sharpness of his straight razor as he touches it to your face for the first stroke. At this moment, would you rather he thought of you as: (a) a trusted friend, or (b) someone who is trying to get the most work out of him for the least amount of money?

Your hourly guys have that kind of power over you. Yes, the vulgar little fellows perform menial, mindless chores for far less than you are paid. Yes, they lead desperate little lives you’d rather not know too much about. Still, to your clients, they are the face of your organization. Like the barber, they have the power to make you look extremely good or incredibly bad.

So, how would you go about making sure your employees are happy? Changing things around without knowing what they like and dislike about the current setup is not likely to help much, and it might actually make things worse. Just walking up to them and asking is not likely to give you honest answers even in the best of situations because the dynamics of the subordinate-boss relationship can’t help but change things. Your best bet is a system of finding out how they feel that insures anonymity, probably through a multiple-choice questionnaire. You could work up one of those yourself, but guess what… I know a company that can take care of all that for you, and it just happens to be the one whose name and contact information are at the top of this newsletter.

Using our system, you won’t have to wonder “Do I need to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ more often?” or “Is it my breath?” or “Do they just want more money?” (HINT: Everyone wants more money.) You’ll be presented with a clearly delineated list of actionable problem areas, and they may not all call for earthshaking changes. Here’s some good news: even if there are large problems that can’t be easily solved, if your employees see you steadily addressing the smaller ones that our survey revealed, you’re going to look like a hero. Wouldn’t you like to look like a hero?

Oh, and one more thing about the Fish! Video: here’s a link to a five-minute YouTube segment in which an employee of the Pike Place Fish Market explains that the clerks’ demeanor drastically improved during the three days while the video was being shot and flatly states that they don’t act like that every day.

LESSON #3:

Don’t believe everything you see on TV.