Disney’s Magic In The Way You Work

This last week I spend a magical vacation at DisneyWorld with the family.  What made it magical was spending that much time with my wife and kids.  And, of course, Disney added that extra something special.

But while we were walking around, I started seeing so many correlations to the work we do inside of our companies.  No, it wasn’t the castle, or the rides or the Mickey Mouse ears.  And yet, it was.

Disney very intentionally created a specific environment.

He knew how he wanted his customers to feel so he created an environment that made it easy to feel that way.

It was in the big things, like the visual layout of Main Street, the inability to see outside of the park while in it, and the way guests are entertained while in line for an hour.

It was also in the small things, like the use of specific words by “cast members” (calling my daughters “princesses”), the lamp in the firehouse window, the bottle floating in the water during the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.  Very few people notice these small details, but they all add up to a more authentic experience.

As I started to pay attention to the details, I was amazed.  In this video, they show a little of what they do.  One person says, “The things that we do are so complex.  And yet, our goal is to make them look like magic to our guests.”

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAE_OgMrkaQ’]

Change that around a little.

“The things we do to make our company run are very complex.  And yet our goal is to make them disappear to allow our employees to focus on what they do best.”

More time needs to be spent in creating a work environment that will clear out the complex and allow employees focus on that which we hired them for.  If we could clear out the complexity, the mundane which pulls them away from getting real work done, then they can, dare we say, have magical moments at work.

We know how our employees want to work.  Let’s create an environment that made it easy for them to do so.