Chapter 1

Danny always liked the sound of a train, off in the distance, rumbling through the cold night air. Not being able to fall asleep before midnight he often heard it around that time. With his window cracked and on a clear night it sounded like it was only a few hundred yards away. For some reason it gave him solace knowing it was there, right on schedule. He imagined the people working on it, riding the rails 24-7 in a world that never slept. It was comforting to know that railroads were still in use in our modern world. With all our high tech gadgets and innovations we still needed big old steel wheels driven by high pressure fossil fuels running along metal rails set on wood. Railroads were first used to open up the west several hundred years ago and they really hadn’t changed all that much since then. One of the first books Danny read in grade school was on the building of the transcontinental railroad. He could picture the Chinese workers employed to do most of the grunt work and wondered how many died in the process. Times were indeed tough back then. No one had trouble sleeping at night, people were kept busy just surviving and could ill afford to lay awake worrying about their problems.

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How can you ensure that your service technicians — the most public face of your company — are representing you well in the community? An old formula holds that happy technicians = happy customers. At Isaac Heating and Air Conditioning, we decided to survey our employees to find out what makes them happy. Why do people work for us? What do they like about our company? What could be improved? Why do they stay? Why do they leave?

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