Does your company have Happiness Engineers?

Posted by Jorge Bernal January 28, 2008

The answer is probably no. We don’t have one at Warp. But the folks at automattic are looking for one. I case you don’t know who I’m talking about, these are the guys behind wordpress and akismet.

The details on this position are as following:

Happiness Engineer

Our software and services are far from perfect, and when things go wrong people aren’t shy about contacting us asking for help. We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need. In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks. The customers range from the everyday blogger to VIPs like CNN, Flickr, and People Magazine. The job requires:

• Patience and grace.
• Excellent writing skills.
• Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and CSS.

It’s hard to explain how thrilled I am about the existence of a position like that, but I’ll try: it has made me hesitate. I’m one of the owners of Warp, we have recently passed our third year, we are growing, we have 20 employees and we’re close to release version 1.0 of eBox platform. I’d call this a success. But, when I read job descriptions like these, I feel the need to apply or, at least, meet these people.

I’m aware I cannot be in all places at the same time, so I have to let that one go. The good experience I get from this is collecting those details that made me want to go there and trying to make Warp a better place for all of us

Make your e-mail conversations better using happy faces

Posted by Jorge Bernal November 25, 2007

I’m sure every one who uses email frequently, has suffered more than one email discussion.

Usually you may say things in an email that you wouldn’t say in person, or reply furious about something before counting to ten. This screenshot shows my little trick:

I’m using Apple Mail with Addressbook, but most of email programs support adding pictures to your contacts.

Find a picture of every of your colleagues, or people you write most and assign it to their contact info.

Make sure he or she is smiling, or with a lovely face, or even use a picture that reminds you of the best moments you have spent with that person.

Next time you are furious with that person (no matter what the cause is) you’ll see that picture and it might help you calm down and think in positive. It works quite well for me.

Boss/employee relationships

Posted by Jorge Bernal March 03, 2007

Nacho writes about a nice article at Note from boss to employees. If you follow through the original article, you can find a comment reversing the meaning of the letter (from employee to boss).

I guess both are true. And I guess there are two conclusions to extract from the letter and the replay:

1. We are all human. We all make mistakes
2. Since we all fail, fluent communication is vital for the health of a company (or any other kind of organization)

So I think you can ask an employee some level of empathy if you aren’t offering the same, and viceversa. It’s not so difficult. Remember, just be nice. There’s always a story behind.

Update: via Lifehacker I found an article called A Manager’s Guide to Growing Happy Employees. The key points in this case are:

1. Manage people first, do your own work second.
2. Delegate your best work.
3. Help people get recognized.
4. Make projects relevant to people, not companies.
5. Align yourself with your boss.
6. Work reasonable hours.

And I think the last paragraphs summarize all the previous steps quite well

The best way to think about management is to treat everyone like an unpaid intern.

Each day, your employees ask themselves, “Am I getting enough out of this job to keep doing it?� And each day, you need to give them a reason to say, “Yes.�