Happy Hour is 9 to 5 by Alexander Kjerulf

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Happy Hour is 9 to 5

Learn How To Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt at Work

By Chief Happiness Officer Alexander Kjerulf

Alexander Kjerulf

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What can managers do Complete this sentence: Our company puts the _______ first. Hal Rosenbluth made a provocative decision: As CEO and owner of Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency employing 6,000 people, he decided that his company would put the employees first. Where other companies aim to satisfy customers and investors first, Rosenbluth made it their first priority to make their employees happy. The results were spectacular: record growth, record profits and, most importantly, customers loved the exceptional service they got from Rosenbluth’s happy employees. Hal Rosenbluth explained the company’s approach in a book whose title elegantly sums up his philosophy: Put The Customer Second - Put Your People First And Watch ‘em Kick Butt. A company’s commitment to its values is most thoroughly tested in adversity, and Rosenbluth got its share of adversity right after 9/11. Overnight, corporate travel was reduced to a fraction of its former level, and it recovered more slowly than anyone predicted. Rosenbluth tried everything in their power to avoid layoffs. They cut expenses. Staff took pay cuts and so did managers and executives. But in the end they had to face facts: Layoffs were inevitable, and they decided to fire 1,000 of their 6,000 employees. How do you handle this situation in a company that puts its people first? In his book’s most moving chapter, an epilogue written after 9/11, Hal Rosenbluth explains that though layoffs certainly don’t make employees happy, not laying people off and then going bankrupt at a later date would have made even more people even more unhappy. Hal Rosenbluth recounts how he wrote a letter to the organization explaining the decision and the thinking behind it in detail. The result was amazing: People who’d been fired streamed into Hal’s office to tell him they understood and to thank him for their time at the company. Rosenbluth’s letter also contained a pledge: That those remaining at the company would do everything they could to bring the company back on track so they could rehire those who’d been fired. Six months later, they’d hired back 500 out of the 1,000, and the company was well on its way to recovery. This chapter is for leaders at all levels who want to spread some happiness in their team, department, division, or even across the entire business. I hope the book so far has convinced you that happiness at work is a good thing in itself, that it will get your organization better results, and that it will make your job as a leader easier and more fun. This chapter has a roadmap to happiness at work for your organization: Get yourself happy. Make time for your people. How happy are your people? Visualize your happy organization. Create the business case for happiness at work. Put happiness first. Make a happy plan. You can find worksheets for each of the exercises at the book's website at www.positivesharing.com/happyhouris9to5. Get yourself happy A 2005 study of health care workers by researchers from the University of Minnesota found that: Managers who were enthusiastic positively affected their employees’ emotions. Employees of unhappy managers experienced less happiness, enthusiasm and optimism, and experienced a slight increase in irritation, anger and anxiety. A manager’s leadership behaviors affect employees’ emotions throughout the workday, even when the employees are not interacting with the managers¹. When everything a manager does signals “Man, I hate my job,” this attitude infects the employees. Why? Because managers have their people’s attention. Whatever a manager does or says is sure to be seen and heard, and sets the tone in the organization. As a manager you must start by making yourself happy at work. Not at the cost of others’ happiness, which is bound to fail, but in concert with others. All the tips in the previous chapters apply equally to employees and managers. Start there. While you’re working to become happy at work yourself, you can also begin to spread a good mood inside your organization and make other people happy. Make time for your people Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, knows how important it is for employees to have a place to go with their questions, ideas, doubts and suggestions. That’s why she sits in her office every day from 4 to 5:30 ready to answer any question or listen to any idea from employees. There’s a sign-up sheet on the door and couches and laptop-power outside the office for the people waiting to see her. Many leaders have their focus exclusively on their own work, to the point where they don’t have time for their employees. These leaders ignore the fact that what really matters as far as happiness at work is concerned is the day-to-day interactions they have with their people. This, more than anything, means that managers must be willing to spend time with their people. Leaders who don’t do this sacrifice their employees’ efficiency to enhance their own, and they send an unmistakable message that their employees aren’t valued. Here’s an example: My new manager seems to do his best to make his people unhappy. During our weekly department meeting, one of my co-workers asked to make an appointment with him to talk about his job. He’s not happy in his job, his job may end anyway, so he wanted to discuss these issues. The manager answered: I won’t have time for you the next four weeks, I’ve got other priorities. All of us felt punched in the stomach… —Comment on positivesharing.com On the other hand, managers who take time for their people make them feel appreciated, understood and motivated, creating a bond of trust. Here’s how you can do it: I used to worked at a bank and my boss liked to celebrate when a goal was met in a very special way. He would take you to lunch or just talk to you in his office and tell you how important your achievement was. But the nice thing about the whole thing was that he explained to me just how significant my change had been to the bank operations. For example, I’m a network and security administrator. By the time we’d rebuilt the network and I’d optimized the communications with the remote offices he told me, “Thanks to you the number of credits the bank can handle remotely has increased 200%”, and that actually made me feel great. I was making a difference for this institution. —Comment on positivesharing.com This manager took the time to personally and specifically thank employees who’d done good work, and the impact on their happiness and motivation was huge. It’s impossible for managers to not take time to do this. Also, spending time with your people is the only viable way to know how happy they are at work. Do you know how happy or unhappy your employees are? How happy are your people? One of Denmark’s most successful small banks is from a small town called Middelfart. As a kid I lived there for a few years, and the name always caused uncontrollable giggles in my American relatives. I still have no idea why—it’s a perfectly respectable name for a Danish town… Anyway, this bank, called Middelfart Sparekasse—stop laughing, this is serious!—has chosen an inspiring mission statement: 1: We will treat our customers in such a way that they stay with us and also recommend us to people who are not yet customers with us. 2: We will treat our employees in such a way that they look forward to coming to work every day, and are proud to tell others where they work. 3: We will make enough money to fulfill the first two statements. How happy is your organization, or your corner of it? This question is typically handed over to HR, who can then distribute a job satisfaction survey that results in a lot of statistics which can be sliced and diced in any number of ways to produce any number of results. Which always reminds me of how Mark Twain defined three kinds of untruths - “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Any leader worth their salt knows how happy their people are. This is a leader’s most basic responsibility, and you shouldn’t need to see a bunch of pie charts—you should already know from your daily interactions with your people. In fact, I challenge you to a simple exercise: Make a list of all the people who report directly to you. If you can’t make the list because you don’t know all their names, that’s a good place to start! Next to each person, write how happy you think that person is at work: Argh, Meh or Yay (as defined on Page 188). Next to each number write what made you choose that score. What have you observed that person doing or saying, not doing or not saying, that led you to that particular score? Here’s an example of such a chart:
	Name	Rating		Reasons for rating
	Anna F.	Yay		Always sounds positive at meetings, continually praises co-workers, greets everyone with a loud, cheerful “Good morning” every day.
	Lisa N.	Meh		Very quiet in meetings, never volunteers for anything, seems disengaged.
	Phil G.	Argh		Looked sad at lunch last week, has called in sick often last three months.
	Mia J.	?		Good question. Never complains but never looks particularly happy.
	Mike W.	Yay		Always smiling, arranged that great picnic a month ago. Customers rave about him.
There’s a worksheet to help you at the book's website. Can you do this exercise for all of your people or only for some? If you’re not reasonably confident of all your scores, or if you’re unable to rate some of your people’s work-happiness, add step 4: Observe your people for a few days to gather more data. Don’t tell them what you’re doing and don’t ask them directly, just observe them. Don’t be weird about it—just take a closer look at each of your people to find out how happy they are. Once you have more data, update your chart. Then comes the last step: Verify your scores. Have a fifteen-minute chat with each of your people to find out how happy they are. Ask them to rate themselves from Argh to Yay. Also, ask them what makes them happy at work and what could make them happier. And don’t forget to ask them what they think of how you’re doing your job. Do this exercise now and then repeat it periodically. Every three months is great. You may feel that you don't have the time for this exercise in your busy schedule. The truth is, you don’t have time not to do it. This might cost you 15 minutes per employee every three months but it will save you enormous amounts of time in the long term. You’re installing an early warning system that tells you when things are starting to go badly for any of your people, instead of only realizing it when they finally blow up. You’ll be helping to make them happier at work, and everyone will reap the benefits. Don’t view the time spent on this exercise as an expense—view it as an investment that’s bound to repay itself many times over through increased productivity, and lower absenteeism and employee turnover. However, there is one thing that you need to be prepared for: You may be told things about your leadership that you didn’t know and won’t enjoy hearing. The key here is to be open to whatever criticism or praise you receive. The definition of a great leader is not one who does everything right, but one who is always willing to learn and improve their leadership style. Receive any input openly and constructively. Ask follow-up questions to make sure you’ve understood the criticism fully, and then thank the person for their honest feedback. Then you need to act on the feedback to show people that you’re committed to improving as a leader and that you’re truly listening to their suggestions. Visualize your happy organization Knowing your goal is a great help in achieving your goal. Not just knowing it mentally and rationally, but also visually and emotionally. What does your goal look like? What will it feel like, once you achieve it? This exercise will give you a very clear picture of just that. It mirrors the exercise in the last chapter where you learned what your personal work happiness would feel like. Imagine that you’ve done it. You have made your department, team or organization totally happy. Everybody there is engaged and motivated. People love their jobs. They come in excited and leave proud. Meetings are fun and energizing. Creative ideas are thrown about constantly, and many of them are carried out. While your people are definitely having a lot of fun, they’re also doing amazing work. Customers rave about the service they get from your people, and productivity and quality have never been higher. Try to really put yourself into that future. See what you would see, and feel what you would feel if you were really there. Then, look at the following questions and write down your answers: You’re at home early in the morning, just before you leave for work. How do you feel about the day ahead of you? You walk in the door and meet some of your people. How do they greet you? How do you greet them? You’re in a meeting with some of your people. What do their voices sound like? What are they saying? What does your voice sound like? A new employee is starting in your organization today. How do you receive them? What is their first impression of you? Of the workplace? Of the people working there? One of your employees has done some spectacularly good work. What do you do? How does that employee receive it? You need to give an employee some negative feedback. How do you do it? How does that employee receive it? Your organization has done some great work. How do you celebrate? How does it make you feel? How do your people look and sound as you celebrate you results? Your organization has failed to reach one of its goals. How do you react? How do your people react? You walk through your organization and see your people working. How do they look? What expressions are on their faces? How do they sound? What sounds dominate the workplace? You come home from work. Someone asks you how your day was. What do you say? How does your voice sound as you say it? How do you feel as you say it? A worksheet and downloadable mp3 for this exercise are available at www.positivesharing.com/happyhouris9to5. There are three great things about doing this exercise: Knowing what your goal will look, sound and feel like gives you a specific target to aim for. Knowing just how great achieving your goal will feel gives you the energy to take action. You focus on what you want to achieve (not on what you want to avoid), which programs your subconscious mind to achieve it. The next step is to develop the arguments for doing something. Why exactly will your workplace be better when it’s happy? Create the business case for happiness at work People would ask me when I was talking at a business school or to an analyst group, “Which comes first, your employees, your customers or your shareholders?” And you know for a long, long time, many decades, I’ve been telling them that it isn’t a conundrum. That if you treat your employees right, they’re happy and proud and participative with respect to what they’re doing. They manifest that attitude to your customers and your customers come back. And what’s business all about but having your customers come back, which makes the shareholders happy? —Herb Kelleher, ex-CEO of Southwest Airlines² Southwest Airlines has always known that great results come only from people who love their jobs, as the quote from Herb Kelleher shows, but what is the business case for happiness at work in your corner of the organization? How will more happiness, motivation and energy improve results and the bottom line? Take a minute to imagine, as in the previous exercise, that you’ve made your part of the organization happy at work. Your people come into work totally energized, happy and motivated. They’re creative, feel appreciated, take good care of the customers, and help each other out whenever they get the chance. They communicate well, praise and appreciate each other, work well as a team, and find their work meaningful. Once your organization, or your corner of it, is this happy, how will it change:
	Area		Time savings		Money savings
	The way you spend your time in a typical week
	Productivity and efficiency
	Customer satisfaction and loyalty
	Employee turnover and recruitment costs
	Absenteeism
	Communication
	Quality and errors
	Sales
	Change initiatives
	Creativity and innovation
	The bottom line
In each area, try to be as specific as you can about the effects of making your organization happy. If there are cost or time savings involved, try to estimate them. You can download a spreadsheet for this at the book’s website at www.positivesharing.com/happyhouris9to5. Take a look at your results and add up the savings in time and money—this will give you your business case for happiness. Now it’s time to commit to happiness at work. Without this commitment, any action is likely to be hollow and ineffective. Put happiness first Google recognizes that the key to their success is to consistently attract and hold onto the best people, and their philosophy for how to do it includes these wonderful points: Life is beautiful. Being a part of something that matters and working on products in which you can believe is remarkably fulfilling. Appreciation is the best motivation. Work and play are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to code and pass the puck at the same time. Boldly go where no one has gone before. There are hundreds of challenges yet to solve. Your creative ideas matter here and are worth exploring. You’ll have the opportunity to develop innovative new products that millions of people will find useful³. When Google announced their IPO in 2004, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that they would keep treating their employees exceptionally well. Investors who did not like this approach were kindly requested to take their money elsewhere. In other words, Google put their people first. As a leader, are you ready to put happiness at work first? Or do you want to see your best employees defecting one by one to companies that do? The traditional ways of motivating and engaging employees—raises, promotions, bonuses, incentives and titles—simply don’t work, as we saw in Chapter 3. They can even be harmful and make people less happy and motivated. What you need to do is both simpler and harder. Simpler, because it doesn’t require you to set up complex bonus systems and results tracking. Harder, because it requires more of you as a human being. More than anything you must want positive relations with your people. You must want them to be happy. Putting happiness first is a bold statement and might not sit well with the executives, the board, or with investors. Too bad. This is where leaders need to step up and show their conviction that happy employees is a great thing in itself and the best way to a better bottom line. This is how Southwest Airlines, Rosenbluth, Irma, Google, Middelfart Sparekasse and many other great organizations get their amazing results, and they’ve done it by taking these three steps: 1. Put happiness at work first Which of these two statements do you think would inspire and energize your people the most: 1. Our most important goals are to increase profits by 15%, increase stock prices by 12%, grow our market share by 8%, create 3 new divisions, and increase overseas sales by 20%. Oh, right—and to make our people happy at work. or 2. Our most important goal is to make our people happy at work and nothing beats that priority. This is how we as a company will reach our goals together. It’s really no contest, is it? There is no way that leaders can make a company happy on their own. We need everybody on board for that, and the only way to get the employees involved is to demonstrate a heartfelt, genuine, inspiring commitment to happiness at work. That is why you must put happiness first, not a distant 5th place to other business goals. 2. Announce these priorities in the organization There’s no reason to keep this intention a secret—quite the contrary. People need to know that this is going on so that they can get involved. This also creates accountability so that people can hold management to it, and people can get involved in making the organization happy. 3. Stick to these priorities This is the difficult part—announcing that you’ll put happiness first and then drifting off track when it gets too hard is worse than doing nothing. It results only in cynicism and a depressing sense that, “Yeah, management announces a lot of fancy new programs but nothing ever comes of them. We just carry on as usual until it blows over.” A clear vision of your goal and knowing exactly why this is good for you, good for your people and good for the company will help you hang onto that commitment. It’s a great idea to periodically go back and review your answers to the exercises in order to boost your faith in and commitment to happiness at work. Make a happy plan Of course, the very best way to boost resolve and commitment in anything is to get some results from your efforts, preferrably results that are fast, tangible, positive and inspiring. For that, you need a plan. But not just any plan—you need a happy plan!