Have Humor, Will Hire

The waitress did her job. She lifted her order pad and said, “First order. Thank you. Second order. Thank you. Next. Thank you. Next. Thank you.”

She brought the food in quick time and as ordered. It was palatable. She cleared our dishes and left the correct bill.

But may an egret nest in your hair if you believe that her technically correct performance was good service, or that Robo-waitress added one byte of pleasure to our bites.

Ms. Robo, sighted on an 11-day family vacation, did help cement an understanding of the currently popular advice to “hire for attitude.”

When you’re at the round-the-clock mercy of service workers in order to eat, sleep, see or do anything, workers’ attitudes tend to jump out at you like moving vans in the merge lane. The pleasant ones make for a smooth ride; the others put potholes in the road.

Top business consultants and executives know this. Top employees know this, too. The constant workplace challenge is to hire what one workplace trainer calls “the innately sunny.”

Thomas J. Stevenin, a Kansas City business consultant who recently met a too-early death from cancer, knew this.

“The problem with most large-scale customer service systems today is that they are set up to process people, not to please them,” Stevenin wrote in his book, “People Power.”

His prescription? “Above all, hire people with good attitudes. Why? Because you can give people knowledge and teach them a skill, but you cannot necessarily give them the right attitude.”

Herb Kelleher, CEO of the industry-leading Southwest Airlines, knows this.

“What we are looking for first and foremost is a sense of humor,” Kelleher said. “Then we are looking for people who have to excel to satisfy themselves and who work well in a collegial environment. We don’t care that much about education and experience, because we can train people to do whatever they have to do. We hire attitudes.”

Tom Peters, the author-consultant who went from “In Search of Excellence” to “In Pursuit of Wow,” knows this.

At a Kansas City seminar in February, Peters reached high decibels in his exhortations to hire for curiosity, passion, excitement and flexibility. “There can be too much training, too much brainwashing,” Peters roared. “Hire for excellence and get out of the way.”

Cheryl Womack, founder and chief executive of VCW Inc., a Kansas City company that sells insurance products to independent truckers, knows this.

Womack, whose company earns many national “best of” kudos, hires for attitude by watching for excitement in the job interview.

“If they don’t get excited or show motivation, I’m not interested,” Womack said. “If you have to work, and most of us do, why on earth would you work where you’re not happy or not interested. How could you just go through the motions?”

Furthermore, she said, “I expect employees to look in the mirror and ask, ‘Am I happy being here? And, if so, do I demonstrate that?’… I want them to see themselves as they are seen. Some have no clue as to how they come across.”

Robo-waitress didn’t need more training. She needed to like her job.

A show of hands: Even in this age of the laser-printer, penmanship still counts. Especially since many companies - although some won’t admit it - use handwriting analysis to screen potential employees, according to a Boston Globe report cited in National Business Employment Weekly.

To sleep, perchance: How far will business travelers go to catch some shut-eye while flying? Faced with longer flights to more distant destinations, and tougher work demands, many would answer, “Really far.” Melatonin, a health-store favorite that doesn’t have government approval yet, has become a staple of international business fliers desperate for sleep. The Wall Street Journal says a whole cottage industry of weird soporific gadgets has emerged, from feet-massaging socks to heated ear pads.