Remember the bubble years when labor was tight, startups appeared like mushrooms on a rainy day, benefits multiplied like rabbits and companies advertised them with all the verve and pizzazz normally saved for their paying customers? Well, to some extent they’re back.

Labor is once again tight—driven by bedrock demographics as opposed to fairy dust—and companies want to retain their people. Although still far behind Europe, Corporate America is finally realizing that offering their employees benefits that lower everyday living stress will go a long way to increasing productivity. Long the poster child for excessive perks, Goggle’s success has done much to prove that there’s a giant payoff to be had from happy employees.

These workplaces are part of a growing number that are embellishing their benefits packages with “concierge services” _ everything from flower deliveries and car detailing to restaurant reservations and clothes alterations.

Perhaps no company pampers its employees as much as Internet search leader Google Inc. The Mountain View, California-based company offers a diverse menu of perquisites that include three free meals a day, plus other on-site conveniences like car washes, oil changes, massages, haircuts, dry cleaning, child care and medical care. The employees have to pay for some services while Google subsidizes others.

It’s not just tech and consulting companies doing it, either.

“It helps the employee not to have to burn up all their personal time doing all these chores,” said Wayne Wallace, director of the Career Resource Center at the University of Florida. And while Wallace doesn’t dispute that many people wouldn’t mind a bump in their paycheck, “it isn’t all about the money,” he said. “The extras are nice.”

Erin Dunn, corporate services director for General Mills, said of the cereal company’s largesse for staff at its Minneapolis headquarters: “Anything we can do to make life easier (for employees) is something we’re interested in doing.”

Helping our people isn’t rocket science, it doesn’t have to be expensive and in bootstrapped companies can even be used as a bonus. For example

• An engineering manager who each week takes his most productive employee’s car to the carwash, with the productivity voted on by the entire organization.
• The CEO of 15-person company gives four hours of babysitting away each week for the best customer service improvement suggestion. (Winners without children use the value on something else.)

If you want to do something similar, but aren’t sure what, start by asking your people what they’d really like to have, be honest about the budget and go from there.

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There’s a brain function that most of us have that I call AMS. AMS stands for

• Assumption: We think about something we’re going to do or say and decide what the outcome will be.
• Manipulation: Then we do or say it in a way that forces a given response or action.
• Self-fulfilling prophesy: This brings us full circle to back to the original assumption and we then say to ourselves, “I knew this would happen if I did/said [whatever].”

This can be a good thing when you think how much you can accomplish, the objections you can overcome, the minds you can change to flow in synch with your own and many people do use it this way (think the power of positive thinking, actualization, etc.).

But the kicker is that for some reason we tend to indulge in AMS far more often when we expect the worst.

I’ve found that AMS is a frequent contributor, if not the actual basis, for many of the miscommunications and misunderstandings that happen both in and out of the workplace.

It’s easy to say stop doing it, but how do you stop words and actions that aren’t even on a conscious plane? By heightening your awareness and bringing them up to conscious level.

• First think about the response you want and be sure that it passes a reality check;
• then think about the response you expect and see how closely it matches your want;
• if they aren’t in sync make whatever adjustments are necessary and revise your presentation accordingly.

The reality check is a critical part of the process because there’s no way to finesse an impossible outcome. If your want doesn’t pass then you need to adjust it and not use AMS as the excuse for not achieving/doing it.

If you’re getting the impression that I think it’s all in your mind—I do. At much as ninety percent of any subject is how you think about it—conscious, objective, self-aware thinking. It’s amazing how often people start by doing, and when that doesn’t work, they try thinking—kind of like the old joke, “When all else fails, read the directions.”

So although thinking may be the key to working smart the most brilliant thinking in the world is worthless without that minimum ten percent action that makes it happen.

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