Getting On Well With People You Work With The Most Fulfilling Part of a Job

"Positive working relationships and feeling good while at work are really important when looking at overall employee health and well being."

Good Morning Folks,

Just under half (42%) of workers felt positive relationships helped them to feel good at work, compared with a mere 14% for hitting their targets.

In the survey of more than 1,400 workers by HR Magazine in the UK, "having a good work/life balance was the second (40%) most common reason for feeling good at work, followed by receiving praise (26%) and earning the trust (16%) of their boss."

The survey also revealed only 4% of workers felt team activities including 'away-days' made them feel good at work.

Organizations with healthy, happy employees can find they see improvements in productivity and results. The survey results demonstrate how looking out for each other's well being and having a good work / life balance is essential."

Ar FSO, It’s to the credit of our fast-paced and results-oriented environment. Our team members are all energized by our growth, leadership position in the marketplace and the integral role they play in our success. At FSO, every team member matters. In fact, due to the very nature of our business, without our people and their unique skill sets and perspective, FSO would not be the leader that it is today.

The FSO culture celebrates the differences of our people and what we all collectively bring to the table. One of our most important characteristics is the diversity of our team members… our backgrounds… the way we think… the way we see the world. All of these different perspectives are critical to our success and speak directly to the culture here.

Clients also say that our company excels at attracting people with a great work ethic and an upbeat attitude. “They are very positive and incredibly helpful, considerate and kind,” said the COO of New York-based media giant, who uses FSO to staff the mailroom and front desk and fill administrative posts. “The first candidate they send me usually nails the criteria I’m looking for, so my time isn’t wasted meeting five people in order to hire the right one.”

This is what underlies the difference between the happiest jobs and the most hated jobs. One set of jobs feels worthwhile, while in the other jobs, people can’t see the point.

The problems in the most hated jobs can’t be solved by job redesign or clearer career paths. Instead the organizations must undertake fundamental change to manage themselves in a radically different way with a focus on delighting the customer through continuous innovation and all the consequent changes that are needed to accomplish that.

We believe in lavishing praise, giving sincere thanks, looking for the best in everyone, never criticizing and catch ‘em being good! We set the precedent, telling people what they are doing right, and specifically why they are of value— raising the bar to a higher level.

The result of this philosophy is happy customers, workers who can see meaning in their contributions and soaring profits for those clients who place their trust in us.

In the spirit of the season.... CHEERS!

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

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"Not happy with their job? Then let me have it. I just want to work."

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It's Your Career.

"No one is going to serve you a career on a silver platter. Your career will be what you make it. No more, no less."

Good Morning Folks,

Often I hear candidates say they want to leave a job, because their current employer is not ‘looking after my career’.

Sure, it’s important to work for a company like FSO where you can thrive, but you must above all understand this:

The person who will always care most about your career is you!

All of which reminds me of this post I saved from a recruiter I know...

==>  You Own Your Career, No-One Else! By: Alexey Fursov

The biggest mistake you can make in your work life is leave your career to your employer, or anyone else. You have to work at your career goal, plan it, and drive it where you want it to go.

Please understand that just having the qualifications is not enough anymore. Gone are the days where ‘getting the right degree will set up your career’. A degree just gets you the chance to get on the field, not win the game.

Ponder this. Success in your career will never be just a matter of qualifications or skills. It will always be a matter of motivation.

No one is going to serve you a career on a silver platter. Your career will be what you make it. No more, no less.

And so, as clichéd as it sounds, the starting point is to find what you like doing.

A career without passion and enthusiasm will have no meaning, no joy, and little hope of long-term success.

Indeed, does your career goal keep you awake at night?

If not, maybe you need to start to worry. You have 30 more years at work, and trust me on this.

No one else is having sleepless nights about what happens to your career.

So that means no one is steering your career ship.

Bottom line: You are always afforded a career, not just a job at FSO. But it's not a free ride.  Whether you have the motivation to apply and invest in yourself to learn and grow into future opportunities, is your part of the deal.

So, just a quick good morning. Great inspiration and motivation. Thanks for listening. Have fun and love life folks. We have lots to be thankful for. 

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer  

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"If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time."
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Uncovering Your Company's True Culture

"Invest in individual mastery and market value . . . culture is to attracting high impact talent as a great product is to attracting good customers."

Good Morning Folks,

As you know I am a firm believer in continuing education by asking my team to read business books. Tom Peters is one of my favorites.

But now, thanks to the Internet, there are much shorter reads with just as powerful takeaways.

Here are a few I found in my library to share with the leaders among us this morning:

Jack Welch: Star Wars: When to Let a Top Performer Walk

How to Get Employees to Embrace Social Media

How To Uncover Your Company's True Culture

The Most Powerful Habit You Can Imagine

The Future of Work

Some thoughts on the culture article: Give me a team I can bring together in person now and then and watch the synergy pay off. 

As an people / talent professional, I have been astounded by how often senior leaders don’t “get” that culture is a living thing, unique to a company or organization. I once heard a fairly new leader describe the corporate culture of our organization to candidates but what he described was the culture of his previous company. He truly thought that if he said it, it would be so. As hard as I tried, I could not convince him that one organization’s culture could not simply be grafted onto a new organization and its employees.

The article linked above proffers that "... many companies have tried to adopt, say, the Zappos culture or the Google culture… but in most cases those attempts fail because culture is something that can be mimicked but almost never successfully copied."  

Within every organization, decision making drives performance. Every employee comes to work every day and makes decisions that impact performance.   The workplace has many temptations that employees must resist, from the petty impulse to claim credit for someone else's work, to the unscrupulous lapse of lying in a negotiation, to the criminal act of misrepresenting financial numbers.   

These decisions, at every level of the organization, define the corporate culture and drive performance.   

In 2008, Harvard Business School Professor Robert S. Kaplan and his Palladium Group colleague David P. Norton wrote The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage.   There are ten (10) steps to define the corporate culture and drive performance, including:  

Step 1: Visualize the strategy.   

Step 2: Communicate the strategy. 

Step 3: Identify strategic projects.   

Step 4: Align projects with strategy.   

Step 5: Align individual roles and provide incentives.  

Step 6: Manage projects.   

Step 7: Make decisions aligned with strategy.   

Step 8: Measure the strategy.   

Step 9: Report progress.  

Step 10: Reward performance.  

To make change, leaders must identify behaviors that are in line with the desired culture and find ways to reward or reinforce them

I will like to say these idea is common among young growing companies regardless of years in existence, they are still learning, but when they get to certain points in their growth, they begin to value employees much as the value the customer, quite really, they realize that the employees also make the hearth of the company much as the customer do, it's a matter of time, if the company as a future or big dreams.

Industry training, incentives, rewards, recognition and a TRUE career path sit at the heart of a successful company culture centered on service. At FSO, our Future Leaders Program (FLP) identifies and develops business leaders across the FSO enterprise and ensures a strong bench to fill our national expansion

Have a GREAT day. Love LIFE!

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

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“Never, never, never give up.” – Winston Churchill
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Giving Thanks, With Love and Warmth, From Your Friends at FSO

ERIC HOFFER once said: 

"The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings."

Good Morning Folks,

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

These words remind us that this Thanksgiving we have lots to be thankful for.

In the spirit of the season.... CHEERS!

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

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"Kindness it is that brings forth kindness always."
-- Sophocles (447 BC)

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Link Up Thursday: "How Would You Motivate Employees"

"You've now seen all these people. Which one would you fire?"

Good Morning Folks,

Today I am sharing some great articles I stumbled up in social media this week.

LinkedIN in keeping their influencer series fresh, relevant and exciting, is asking each superstar influencer to write a short essay on what is their favorite interview questions. In one piece linked below, there is a story about the forgotten demographic working in the hotel service industry, and a brilliant interview question posed to a management candidate, "How Would You Motivate Employees like the Dishwasher. Fascinating read.

In a second piece below Wall Street "corporate raiders" share their favorite question: 

"Let's say you're interviewing for a big job. You've talked with a bevy of senior executives. You've made your high-level strategy proposals.

Everyone seems to like you.

Then, you sit down with the final decision maker, who throws out this curve ball: "You've now seen all these people. Which one would you fire?"

How do you respond? Well, it helps to be prepared and that's the benefit I promise you from checking out some of the links below.

Corporate Raiders Reveal Their Favorite Interview Questions

Why millennials still live at home (short video)

The Best Job Interview Question Ever 

Lou Adler's Interview Questions Part One (Brilliant)

Five Ways To Be Amazing At Work

Building Middle-Manager Morale

Great Expectations for Female Lawyers

Behold the power of the Internet. Those of us on the senior leadership team were thinking about how life would have changed had we had this type of access to mentorship back in the day.

Have a GREAT day. Love LIFE!

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

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"Nothing stops an organization faster than people who believe that 
the way you worked yesterday is the best way to work tomorrow"
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LinkUP Thursday: 10 Simple, Science-Backed Ways To Be Happier Today and more...

"Our commute to the office can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to do this twice a day, five days a week, makes it unsurprising that its effect would build up over time and make us less and less happy" from... 10 Simple, Science-Backed Ways To Be Happier Today

Good Morning Folks,

Please enjoy these articles that got the most likes and great comments when I shared them on social media.

Can You Be Found? Why You Must Personally Invest in Social Media

Coveting Not a Corner Office, but Time at Home

8 ways to turn passion into success

Superhero or Sidekick: Which One Are You?

Five Ways to Change Someone Else's Mind

10 simple, science-backed ways to be happier today

How to stop doing so much busy work

Thanks again for your amazing energy and support that is fuelling the FSO fire across the country. FSO did not get to this place by luck. With the market on our side, we have recognized the opportunity for limitless growth.  

Folks, there is so much awesome “stuff” happening in our great company. We have awesome leaders; awesome people; and a market that is in love with us and competitors that just cannot keep up! 

Good luck and feel it folks. It is real. Thanks for reading, sharing and supporting.

Have a GREAT day,

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

Learn more about what DIFFERENTIATES FSO here

LinkUP Thursday: Leadership's Biggest Challenges

"Invest in individual mastery and market value . . . culture is to attracting high impact talent as a great product is to attracting good customers."

Good Morning Folks,

As you know I am a firm believer in continuing education by asking my team to read business books. Tom Peters is one of my favorites.

But now, thanks to the Internet, there are much shorter reads with just as powerful takeaways.

Here are a few I found to share with the leaders among us this morning:

Jack Welch: Star Wars: When to Let a Top Performer Walk

How CEOs Can Transform HR into a Revenue Driver

How to Get Employees to Embrace Social Media

How To Uncover Your Company's True Culture

The Most Powerful Habit You Can Imagine

The Future of Work

Some thoughts on the culture article: Give me a team I can bring together in person now and then and watch the synergy pay off. 


As an people / talent professional, I have been astounded by how often senior leaders don’t “get” that culture is a living thing, unique to a company or organization. I once heard a fairly new leader describe the corporate culture of our organization to candidates but what he described was the culture of his previous company. He truly thought that if he said it, it would be so. As hard as I tried, I could not convince him that one organization’s culture could not simply be grafted onto a new organization and its employees.

The article linked above proffers that "... many companies have tried to adopt, say, the Zappos culture or the Google culture… but in most cases those attempts fail because culture is something that can be mimicked but almost never successfully copied."  

Within every organization, decision making drives performance. Every employee comes to work every day and makes decisions that impact performance.   The workplace has many temptations that employees must resist, from the petty impulse to claim credit for someone else's work, to the unscrupulous lapse of lying in a negotiation, to the criminal act of misrepresenting financial numbers.   

These decisions, at every level of the organization, define the corporate culture and drive performance.   

In 2008, Harvard Business School Professor Robert S. Kaplan and his Palladium Group colleague David P. Norton wrote The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage.   There are ten (10) steps to define the corporate culture and drive performance, including:  

Step 1: Visualize the strategy.   

Step 2: Communicate the strategy. 

Step 3: Identify strategic projects.   

Step 4: Align projects with strategy.   

Step 5: Align individual roles and provide incentives.  

Step 6: Manage projects.   

Step 7: Make decisions aligned with strategy.   

Step 8: Measure the strategy.   

Step 9: Report progress.  

Step 10: Reward performance.  

To make change, leaders must identify behaviors that are in line with the desired culture and find ways to reward or reinforce them

I will like t say these idea is common among young growing companies regardless of years in existence, they are still learning, but when they get to certain points in their growth, they begin to value employees much as the value the customer, quite really, they realize that the employees also make the hearth of the company much as the customer do, it's a matter of time, if the company as a future or big dreams.

Have a GREAT day. Love LIFE!

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

.........................................................................
“Never, never, never give up.” – Winston Churchill
..........................................................................

Monday Musings: Stop Holding Yourself Back

The takeaway: "When it comes to meeting their leadership potential, many people unintentionally get in their own way."

Good Morning Folks,

You know I'm a big fan of books about leadership and those authors have been my own mentors over the years before the Internet. 

But this weekend I stumbled upon another great take on leadership and you can download it for less than $7 from Harvard Business Review and be putting it's guidance to work for you before the end of the day.

After working with hundreds of leaders in a wide variety of organizations and in countries all over the globe, the authors found one very clear pattern: When it comes to meeting their leadership potential, many people unintentionally get in their own way. 

Five barriers in particular tend to keep promising managers from becoming exceptional leaders: People overemphasize personal goals, protect their public image, turn their competitors into two-dimensional enemies, go it alone instead of soliciting support and advice, and wait for permission to lead. 

Troy, a customer service manager, endangered his job and his company's reputation by focusing on protecting his position, not helping his team; when a trusted friend advised him to change his behavior, the results were striking. Anita's insistence on sticking to the tough persona she'd created for herself caused her to ignore the more intuitive part of the leadership equation, with disastrous results-until she let go of the need to appear invulnerable and reached out to another manager. 

Jon, a personal trainer who had virtually no experience with either youth development programs or urban life, opened a highly successful gym for inner-city kids at risk; he refused to be daunted by his lack of expertise and decided to simply "go for it." 

As these and other examples from the authors' research demonstrate, being a leader means making an active decision to lead. 

Only then will the workforce-and society-benefit from the enormous amount of talent currently sitting on the bench.

Check it it on: http://hbr.org/product/baynote/an/R1101P-PDF-ENG?referral=00505

Have a GREAT day as I look forward to seeing all of you soon.

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

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"People may not always remember what you said, 
but they will always remember how you made them feel."
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LinkUP Thursday: New on LinkedIn Influencers’ “How I Hire” Series

"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail"

~~George Bernard Shaw

Good Morning Folks,

The secret to our success at FSO is that we zig while all of our competitors are out zagging. 

We don't do things because "that's the way it's always been done" nor listen to people who laugh off new ideas with a 'that will never work." 

At FSO, integral to our core values is "Believe It. Deliver It." (re)IMAGINE it! WE (re)IMAGINE possibilities and be ahead of the curve. We embrace change and innovation with open arms. We never accept the status quo and take pride in out-of-the-box thinking and execution. And in that spirit we hope you take up on some of today's advice.

So while others "throw back" Thursday, we move forward by Linking you up to future success.

With that in mind, his week is chock-full of knowledge you won’t find anywhere else! LinkedIn has curated a one of a kind feed for you: "How I Hire", featuring stories from over 80 CEOs, thought leaders and more on how they choose their next team member. 

From LinkedIn Today Editor Francesca Levy: “For those seeking a job, the rigorous application and interview process can be harrowing. But spare some sympathy for the hiring managers. Sifting through resumes and coaxing out revealing insights in interviews is its own exhausting grind. And what’s at stake is a company’s most important asset: its talent. More than 80 of LinkedIn’s Influencers — thought leaders and experts across industries who write original content for LinkedIn — had lots to say about this topic.”  Some of my favorites:

How I Hire: You Can't Build a Team With All Point Guards 

How I Hire: Sell Me a Pen. Now

How I Hire: There Is No Lone Genius; Hire a Team With these Four Types

How I Hire: You're Not Interviewing For the Job You Think You Are

How I Hire: 6 Ways I Find and Hire Hardworking Millennials

Visit LinkedIn for access to the whole series.

Behold the power of the Internet. Those of us on the senior leadership team were thinking about how life would have changed had we had this type of access to mentorship back in the day.

Have a GREAT day as I look forward to seeing all of you soon.

Mitchell D. Weiner Chief Happiness Officer ..................................................................................... " If you want to change who you are, change what you do" ......................................................................................

Very Special LinkUP Thursday: It's Career Day At LinkUP

"More than 11 million Americans are unemployed, yet 4 million job openings remain unfilled. These companies want to hire, but are struggling to find the right people."

Good Morning Folks,


What skills are the hottest with employers and what forces are driving those career trends? What courses in college are the ones with the best change of landing a high-paying job?Unemployed or underemployed, what websites can I turn to see jobs not advertised anywhere else?

We spanned the world of web to find industry experts to help out. One way to increase your brand to employers is to learn new skills. But choosing the ones that offer the most bang for the buck is challenging. Below we share the story of seven recent college grads bucked employment trends and landed great jobs after graduation. 

To help you better understand the market, we hope you check out the advice linked below and see how they did it:

10 Jobs to Do at Home

16 IT Skills in High Demand in 2013


World’s Top Employers for New Grads

10 hard-to-fill jobs

How I found a job after graduation

5 steps to find (and keep) young stars


The Top 100 Websites For Your Career

Our goal was to assemble a comprehensive guide to smart and engaging sites. We hope we’ve come up with a thorough list of online destinations for interns, job seekers, business owners, established professionals, retirees, and anyone else looking to launch, improve, advance, or change his or her career. 

Of course you may want to start your job search right here. FSO is always looking for Personal, Passionate and Productive professionals who are experts in their field. We continue to grow by leaps and bounds and are actively hiring today and welcome your interest in joining us.

Our onsite outsourcing staff love what they do and come to work with a twinkle in their eye, fire to their belly and skip to their step! JOIN US

Have a GREAT day as I look forward to seeing all of you soon.

Mitchell D. Weiner Chief Happiness Officer ..................................................................................... " If you want to change who you are, change what you do" ......................................................................................