THERE IS A HELL! - - - IT IS CALLED RETAIL THERE IS A HELL AND IT IS CALLED RETAIL! | Page 17

17

Is it possible for employees who are underemployed and uninterested in a long-term retail
career to still be happy in a retail workplace?
"Especially great question," was the response from Scott Crabtree, a cognitive scientist who
started the Happy Brain Science consultancy based in Portland, Oregon. "Yes, some in retail
may not be working at their 'calling.' But happiness is largely social. So retail employees can
choose to have more happiness by focusing completely on every social interaction they have
each day," Crabtree says. "They can go out of their way to be kind to every person they deal
with, spreading happiness and building their own happiness with each interaction."
That may sound like a page out of the Touchy Feely Management 101 book, but an
important premise behind Crabtree's work is the scientifically proven fact that real happiness
is a function of the brain and resides with the individual. In other words, there is not a cause
and effect relationship between work conditions and happiness. Rather, as Abraham Lincoln
has been quoted as saying, "Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be."
Anybody who's been a frontline retail manger for more than a week knows this to be true.
Some employees take their happiness with them wherever they go, and other employees
(seemingly a much larger number of them) take their miserable-ness with them wherever
they go.
More than one retail leader is right now mentally crafting an e-mail to store-based employees
which opens with that Lincoln quote and concludes with a strongly worded mandate about
bringing your happy brain along with your name tag and corporate ID when you come to
work every day. If only it was that simple.
Unfortunately happiness in the workplace can't be mandated, and it can't be bought either.
5