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Read my brand new book: 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
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Read my brand new book: 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
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Looking for happiness in all the wrong placesThere are three things that we traditionally strive for at work. The bad news is that they simply do not work, and pursuing them relentlessly may even be harmful to your work happiness. They are:
As long as we look to these three things to make us happy at work, we will get nowhere, and happiness at work will remain beyond our grasp. It’s NOT about moneyIKEA sell a lot of furniture! They employ 90,000 people in 44 countries, and their revenue in 2005 was 14.8 billion euros. It has even been estimated that one in ten new Europeans are conceived in an IKEA bed. In 2004, IKEA in Denmark did something completely unexpected. They decided, out of the blue and without negotiations or union pressure of any kind, to give their entire checkout staff a 25% raise. A typical salary of 16,000 Danish Kroner (around US$2,500) suddenly became 20,000 Kroner (around US$3,100). Was this expensive? Sure. While cashiers aren’t highly paid, IKEA has more of them than any other group of employees. The raise meant a sizeable increase in total monthly payroll expenses. So why did they do it? Because it made the checkout staff happy—and IKEA knows that happy employees create results. A high salary does not make people happy at work. Nor does a raise, a bonus, a prize, or any other kind of financial reward. When a person gets a raise there is a brief spike in happiness at work, but this happiness quickly settles back to its previous level. When IKEA initiated the 25% raise for its checkout staff, they expected results in return—it was very much a business decision. The raise got results:
IKEA found that the raise paid for itself within six months!
Secondly, the raise gave people recognition. IKEA clearly stated that the reason the staff received the raise was because they are the most important group of employees. Although there are sales staff available inside IKEA’s stores, most customers help themselves, meaning that the only IKEA employee that customers are likely to talk to is sitting at the cash register. This made the checkout staff feel valued and trusted—and that made them happy. And lastly, it’s about fairness. Psychological business studies show that people don’t judge their salary based on the absolute figure, but by comparing it to their colleagues, peers and the market average. The checkout staff were suddenly paid as well as other IKEA employees, and far above the market average. The truth about salary is this: The salary just makes it possible for us to show up at work every day. It has no lasting effect on how happy, motivated or productive we are. It's not the status symbols and rewards eitherAlfie Kohn, author of the excellent and provocative book Punished by Rewards, has this to say about status symbols: The idea that dangling money and other goodies in front of people will “motivate” them to work harder is the conventional wisdom in our society, and particularly among compensation specialists. Rewards are not merely ineffective but actually counterproductive. Subjects offered an incentive for doing a task (or, in some of the studies, for doing it well) actually did lower quality work than subjects offered no reward at all. As University of Texas psychologist Janet Spence put it after discovering this surprising effect in an early study of her own, rewards “have effects that interfere with performance in ways that we are only beginning to understand.” Kohn’s book is meticulously researched and collates results from hundreds of psychological studies. This thoroughness is essential in order to communicate Kohn’s message, which is totally at odds with the way that businesses traditionally motivate employees, by throwing money and rewards at them. A small town in the US wanted to promote reading among school children, so during the summer vacation they set up a program where children earned points for checking out books from the local library. Those points could be redeemed for free pizza at the local Domino’s Pizza. While the program ran, it was a success and the children who participated read a lot of books—and presumably got very fat on pizza. But after the program ended, these kids now read fewer books. Their own natural motivation to read books had been replaced by the external motivation of free pizza, and when the promise of pizza went away, so did the motivation. Kohn’s research found that rewarding people reduces motivation. This seems counter-intuitive at first, but Kohn’s explanation is simple: Every time you reward people for doing something, you motivate them externally, an act which inevitably reduces people’s inner motivation. Inner motivation is the only guarantee of quality and performance in the long term. Businesses and leaders struggle so hard to motivate their people using the promise of rewards like titles, promotions, larger offices and other corporate status symbols—but this actively lowers people’s motivation. If rewards don’t work, what is the alternative? Kohn’s advice is to pay people fairly and then do everything possible to not focus on rewards. Incentives, bonuses, pay-for-performance plans, and other reward systems violate that last principle by their very nature. Businesses need to stop focusing so much on offering rewards, and employees need to stop chasing them. Job securityI work in the government sector in Denmark as a tjenestemand, a type of civil servant, virtually immune to being fired. No matter how incompetent or obnoxious I get, I can’t be fired without a huge hassle for my government department. Though the public sector is moving away from hiring people on these terms, many people still have them. No matter what they do, they won’t lose their jobs. It’s the ultimate job security. It’s terrible! People end up stuck in a rut. Their world gets smaller and smaller, their focus gets more and more narrow. They also resist any and all change, no matter how small or how innocent. I hate to say this, but in many cases I really feel that firing that person would actually help him, because it would force him or her to move on. In studies that ask people what makes them happy at work, job security often figures high on the list. It’s obvious that spending each workday in fear of being fired will make you desperately unhappy. However, the kind of job security that means you’re almost certain to hang on to your job no matter what happens is also bad for people’s happiness at work. Rosenbluth International, a US corporate travel agency that employed 6,000 people, faced this very dilemma. As an organization, they had decided to put their people first and make their employees’ happiness the company’s top priority. But, if you’ve put your people first, how can you fire them? CEO Hal Rosenbluth did not see this dilemma. To him, putting your people first entails a responsibility to fire people who don’t fit in. Employees shouldn’t be fired at the first sign of trouble—training, coaching, guidance, or a new position inside the company could help to motivate them. However, when these things don’t work, a commitment to your employees’ happiness means that you have to fire employees that don’t fit in. Too much job security will actively make an organization a less happy place to work. When people stay working in jobs where they don’t fit in, you get:
Allowing an employee to stay in a job that doesn’t make that employee happy is not only bad for the employee, but for everyone around that person. The unhappy employee will perform poorly, and their unhappiness at work will spread like a contagious disease. Too little job security makes us unhappy at work because it leads to fear, avoidance of conflicts and stress. However, surprisingly, too much job security is also bad, leading to apathy, cynicism and resistance to change. |
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Like what you've read so far? Why
not buy the book so you always have access to it. |
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If
a raise doesn’t make people happy at work, then why did it work
for IKEA? For three reasons. First of all, the raise gave people
a significant increase in their standard of living. The checkout
staff were the least well paid in IKEA, so a 25% raise made a
palpable difference to their quality of life.
Lower
performance.