Just Imagine...

Happy at work.

Happy? At work?

Happy… at work?

I want you to imagine waking up early on a Monday morning. Picture yourself as you turn off the alarm clock, and lie in bed for a moment before getting up. Your bed is comfortable and warm and you really want to enjoy that feeling just a little bit longer, but just thinking about the workweek ahead of you is making you smile and get ready to jump out of bed.

You just know it’s going to be a wonderful week. You will get to do great work you can be proud of. You will get to make a difference, as you did last week and every week before that.

You look forward to having fun with your co-workers. You will help them whenever you can, and they will help you whenever you need it. You know you will be spending the day with people you like and can talk to. People who appreciate you for who you are and what you do.

You look forward to working with your boss, a peson you truly admire for her skills, her amiability, and the way she brings out the best in others.

You can’t wait to interact with your customers and clients. You’ve been told so many times now that your attitude of fun and competence is an inspiration to them—many of them continue to return because of you.

And more than anything else, you look forward to making a positive difference. You know that with the person you are and the skills you have, you will do work that you can be proud of.

You also can’t wait to come home in the evening, all fired up. Though you spend your workdays focused and concentrated, you have so much fun doing your job that it actually leaves you with more energy than when the day started. You look forward to sharing that energy and positivity with your friends and family after another great workday.

Imagine for a moment how it would feel to lie in bed on a Monday morning going “YES! I get to go to work this week!”

Is it possible to be this happy at work? Can we go to work and be energized, have fun, do great work, enjoy the people we work with, wow our customers, be proud of what we do, and look forward to our Monday mornings as much as some people long for Friday afternoon? Can we create workplaces where this level of happiness is the norm, not the exception?

Or must we simply accept that work is unpleasant and tough and that is why we get paid to do it?

This book is here to tell you that yes, you can be that happy at work, and when you are, it’s great for you and great for your job, your company and your career, because you get:

More drive and motivation.
Better relations with co-workers.
More success.
More creativity and good ideas.
More energy.
Better health.
Less stress.
Much more fun.

Your life outside of work gets better too because work becomes a source of energy and good experiences rather than a stressful, painful, frustrating obligation.

And it’s not just good for people. More and more businesses are finding that things go better with happiness and that happy companies have:

Higher productivity—happy people achieve better results.
Higher quality—because happy employees care about quality.
Lower absenteeism—people actually want to go to work.
Less stress and burnout—happy people are less prone to stress.
The best people—people want to work for happy companies.
Higher sales—happy people are the best salespeople.
Higher customer satisfaction—happy employees are the best basis for good service.
More creativity and innovation—happy people are more creative.
More adaptability—happy people are much more adaptive and open to change.
Better stock performance and higher profits—for all of the above reasons.

Simply put: Happy companies are more efficient and make more money. And they make people happy, which is of course a goal in itself.

The flip-side

Most of us have probably been on the flip-side, and have been unhappy at work. I once spent a long year being unhappy at work, and I hated every second of it.

After graduating with a Masters in computer science in 1994, I worked as a developer and consultant, and then co-founded a software company called Enterprise Systems with some fellow geeks in 1997.

When we started the company we had one huge advantage: We had no idea how to run a business. The three founders—myself, Patrik Helenius and Martin Broch Pedersen—were all happy geeks with great tech skills and almost no business experience. We did have some pretty good notions of how NOT to do it from our previous jobs, but mostly we had a passion for doing things RIGHT and for creating a workplace that people would actually like. This protected us from repeating “business as usual”, and freed us to try many untraditional approaches.

It worked. In our company:

People did excellent work.
All employees took responsibility and action when needed.
We made good money. Not obscene, just good.
We focused on constant education and training.
Everyone was involved in leading the company.
Everyone was motivated and engaged.
People didn’t work too much—40 hours a week or less.
We had massive amounts of fun.

But nice as it was, after about three years I began to feel constrained and locked in. I wanted to do something new, and there was no room to do this inside our company. I thought long and hard about leaving the company, but didn’t get around to actually quitting. That was a mistake.

During my last year at the company, I was desperately unhappy. Most mornings when I woke up I looked for some reason to stay home. At work I got very little done, and spent most of my time counting the hours until I could leave.

And here’s the worst part: I could barely recognize myself. I’m normally energetic, positive and fun. I became tired, negative and bitter, not only at work but also outside of it. I was depressed and annoyed at everything and everyone.

Normally I’m a very creative person who comes up with ten new ideas a day, but during that period my creativity dried up. I couldn’t come up with a good idea to save my life, and every idea other people presented to me sounded horrible. I was in a perpetually negative state.

Finally, in June 2002, I quit. I decided not to look for a new job straight away and to just take some time to decompress. Those summer months with uncharacteristically great weather (for Denmark) slowly brought me back to my old self. I spent zero time thinking about my next job, reading job postings or starting a new company.

Then one fine summer day at the beach, the idea came to me: Happiness at work. That’s it! That’s what I’m passionate about. That’s what I want to work with. This idea became the Happy At Work Project, and we have been making people happy at work since early 2003. Leaders and employees at companies like IBM, Lego, DaimlerChrysler, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Pfizer and many others are happier at work after trying our methods.

I can safely say that there is no greater job than making other people happy! It’s continually fun, exciting and rewarding. And when you think about it, isn’t that really the true purpose of most jobs—to make people happy? You must make the customers happy. Or your co-workers. Or the boss. Or the shareholders.

A nurse who makes the patients happy and healthy is better than one who only makes them healthy. A boss who makes his employees happy and efficient is better than one who only touts efficiency. A teacher who can make his students smarter and happier is better than one who only passes on knowledge.

Choose this approach to work and business: Make people happy—as many people as possible as often as possible, inside and outside your company—and you can’t fail. And you will have a great time doing it!

The future is happy

I have great news for you: Happiness at work is coming to almost all workplaces. It is inevitable. There is a massive tendency in the business world to focus more and more on making work a positive experience, and while it is not yet felt in every country or in every workplace, it soon will be.

The reason is simple but powerful: Today, customer service, efficiency and innovation are an organization’s prime success factors. It doesn’t matter how efficient a company is at producing yesterday’s goods if it doesn’t have the creativity to invent tomorrow’s. Nobody cares how efficient its business processes are if it can’t give its customers a good experience.

Studies consistently show that happy companies are way more productive, creative and service-oriented than unhappy ones. Therefore, the happy companies will beat the pants off the unhappy ones in the market place. The future of business is happy! It’s inevitable.

However, if we choose to do something constructive about it now, we can become happy at work sooner rather than later. Our workplaces can reap the benefits, human and financial, this year rather than in five or ten years.

That is the thought that gets me out of bed, happy and smiling, almost every single Monday morning!

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