It is mind boggling when you consider the "power of a simple smile". At Vernon we recently kicked of a new initiative called Get Your Smile On. This is a simple program encouraging all employees to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative in the workplace.
It has long been known that attitudes can be contagious, both good ones and bad ones. Many times in the past I have written about this while focusing on the negative attitudes.
We are only a few weeks into this company wide initiative and I am blown away by what I am calling the multiplication factor of a smile and a positive attitude. It is a special thing when two people work together on a problem or a project where they both are smiling and positive. It is even more amazing when three or four people come together. This is where you really start to see some great things happen.
We all have those negative people in the workplace. You know what I mean. Everyone knows who the person or persons are at their company....right. Everything always stinks in their mind! Everyone else is out to make their day miserable!
What happens to this person or persons when the three or four people around them are smiling and positive all day long? To be honest we are in the early days of our program but I really only see a few options.
#1 They start to think about it and they begin to change their attitude and they actually smile. This may cause you not to recognize these people and you may in fact need to be introduced to them as the contrast will be so significant that it may appear that you have a new employee!
#2 They do not change anything. Their attitude remains crappy and in fact now they have something else to complain about...all the positive people around them who appear to be enjoying their jobs. You may even hear them use the word "brown-nosers".
#3 This last option really is related to 2. Their attitude remains lousy but since they really stick out like a sore thumb one of the positive people in the department actually speaks up and calls them out on their bad attitude.
Options #1 and #3 seem to be positive to me while #2 could be problematic if the employee is not dealt with.
At this point in time I feel very fortunate to be working for a company where the majority of the people are smiling. They are genuinely positive! The kickoff of this new program has resulted in most all of us looking in the mirror, literally and figuratively, to see how we look and how we are approaching the workplace. Are we happy? Do we act it? Do we look like we are happy? We are also taking more note of how our attitude impacts others around us?
This is a real revelation to a lot of us. The prevailing thought was that what I do and how I act only affects me but we now know that to be DEAD wrong!
Vernon's Get Your Smile On Program is a simple one but a powerful one that can and will dramatically change the company in how we work with each other as well as our dealings with those outside the walls of our company.
It has me SMILING all throughout the day!
