Quitting a job you don’t like is a tough call, and it’s made even tougher by some very persistent myths.
These myths keep us stuck in bad jobs and give bad leaders and toxic workplaces much more power over us than they otherwise would’ve. Let’s change that.
Here are the top five myths about quitting a bad job.
There are four different kinds of motivation. Only one of them works and unfortunately, many managers focus exclusively on the other three. Kinda silly, huh?
Many people don’t feel motivated at work, and there’s a very simple explanation for this: The motivational techniques used by most managers don’t work.
In this video I show why most bosses fail to motivate staff and what actually does work.
More and more CEOs are hell-bent on forcing employees back to the office full time.
For a long time I have been really confused about why, but now a brand new study reveals the answer – and it is NOT any of the reasons they normally give like productivity or collaboration – it is something much more sinister.
There haven’t been a lot of positive outcomes from the COVID pandemic but the widespread flexibility to work from home is one. Maybe the only one.
Workers love it because they experience more flexibility, better work-life balance and higher productivity but over the last couple of years, a growing number of CEOs have been doing their best to roll it back and force everyone back into the office full time.
Well, now for the first time we have data! A fascinating new research article just gave the answer: It’s about protecting and boosting the egos of narcissistic CEOs.
In this video I go through the results of the study and how it applies in our workplaces.
This is AWESOME. A practice football field in Canada has hired two border collies to keep geese away – and they clearly LOVE their jobs!
This is AWESOME. This fifth grade teacher in North Carolina has a personalized handshake and greeting for each of his students. What a great start to the day.
While this might be a little too much for the average workplace, one thing we teach many of our clients is the value of actually saying “good morning” to your coworkers/employees in the morning.
There are several approaches to saying good morning at work:
Level 0: You ignore people completely
Level 1: A somewhat unintelligible grunt
Level 2: Saying good morning without looking at people
Level 3: Make eye contact as you say good morning
Level 4: Also say something more than just good morning, e.g. “How are you?” or something more personal.
Level 5: Also touch the other person – e.g. a handshake or a pat on the shoulder. You can even hug, but only if you and the other person want to.
Specifically, we recommend the “Level 5 Good Morning.” What you see in the video above with the teacher is probably more of a level 6 or 7 :)
It’s a small thing. It takes no time and costs no money, but it makes people happier at work – in our opinion because it reinforces good workplace relationships between coworkers and between managers and employees.
And it works. Here are two examples:
I once worked for a bank in Germany (well these are two locations in which you would not normally expect “personal affection” ;-)).
The team was large, about 40 people worked in one open space office. It surprised me a lot that every morning, whoever arrived, walked through the whole office and greeted everybody with a handshake and some personal words. It did not matter if the team members came, the bosses from higher up or anybody from another department. It was known everywhere that here you greet everybody personally.
For the first week, I found that very strange and a bit intimidating. Also, it cost a lot of time all in all. Yet afterwards, I really enjoyed it. It gave everybody the chance to get to know the colleagues a bit better, to hear what they are off to or to realize that somebody is not in or just returned from a trip or vacation. There was no need to e-mail weekly lists on who is out when. We just knew it.
Btw, when I moved on to another job, I sort of missed it.
And this one is great too:
Actually the level 5 good morning is working a treat – which is why I’ve kept it up!
I have a new team member that I supervise who sits next to me, and Mihaly also sits with us in the same section, which can be a bitdaunting for a new team member!! The three of us collaborate really well together, and I think the level 5 good morning has helped our new team member feel comfortable…
In fact, the three of us just worked on an urgent roll-out of our new website, and we had a great team dynamic – everyone knew their role, trusted one another, communicated perfectly. It was great.
I think the level 5 good morning was a big contributor to that… It’s hard to measure though isn’t it, you sort of just ’feel’ the effect. Anyway, thanks for the invaluable advice!
The opposite is also true: If someone comes into the workplace and says good morning and gets no real reaction, that can lead to people feeling isolated, ignored and lonely – which makes some people really unhappy at work.
So say “good morning” at work. It works!
What does a truly happy workplace actually look like? One of the highlights of our Chief Happiness Officer Academy is always when we take the group on a site visit to one of the happiest Danish workplaces we know.
It’s great for them to see how this is done in practice and how employee happiness contributes to the bottom line.
Last week we took the group to Airlog Group’s Copenhagen office where their co-founder and CEO Allan Geert Nielsen explained their strategic approach to happiness at work and how it helps them succeed in the challenging market of global shipping and logistics.
Here are some of his major points:
My favorite story is how they recently acquired a group of people in Sweden who joined them because they’d heard that working for Airlog is fun. This group has now brought in millions in new business.
Another thing that really inspired the visitors was Airlog’s 15-minute pledge where they promise to follow up on all customer requests in less than 15 minutes inside their business hours. They had 1,000 fifteen-minute hourglasses made and give them away to clients and contacts as a symbol of the promise.
But crucially, it’s not something they measure or criticize employees for not living up to – it’s mostly a source of pride for Airlog’s people that they can serve their customers quickly and competently.
But my all time favorite Airlog story is about the time they transported the batmobile. No kidding!
Airlog is an inspiration for me and real proof that happiness at work is the main driver of company growth and profits. And you should come to our Chief Happiness Officer Academy yourself and learn exactly how it’s done!
Last week we held our Chief Happiness Officer Academy in Copenhagen and we had an absolute blast with the participants – including 5 from 5 different companies in Serbia.
They came from companies in Tech, Logistics, Science, Hospitality, Child Care and Finance and can now take a massive amount of new knowledge and tools back to their companies to make them happier and more successful.
They all took the exam at the and and I’m proud to announce that they all passed! Kudos!
These Academies are my favorite thing to teach and a great chance to really cover all the crucial theory and practice of happiness at work over three days.
The Academy is happening again in November 2026 and June 2027. Read more and sign up right here.
WOOHOO! Our newsletter about happiness at work is so good, it was just featured as a case story by MailerLite – the platform we use.
They were especially impressed that the newsletter is:
Valuable – we share all our best tools freely
Effective – people actually read the email
Not pushy – we’re not just trying to sell stuff
I’m already super proud of our newsletter because our main focus is to share everything we know about happiness at work and inspire people to take action, and this case story just makes me even prouder!
And it really seems that the more materials we share openly and freely, the more attention and business we attract.
Also, if you’re looking for a platform for your newsletters, MailerLite is great – it has every feature you could want and it’s really easy to use!
Read the case story here. It has a ton of tips for using email effectively to spread your message.
And you can sign subscribe to our newsletter here – it’s FREE!
I once did a workshop for a client in Copenhagen whose main problem was that they were just way too busy.
They’re a trade union and new legislation meant that they got an influx of new government-mandated tasks but budget constraints meant they couldn’t hire more people.
That meant they were increasingly falling behind on their work, through no fault of their own. They have an internal IT system that tracks every open case and they were currently 3.000 cases behind.
Even though this was due to circumstances outside of their control, knowing that they were behind made everybody stressed and irritable. They also felt a responsibility towards their members – every late case meant that one of their union members was waiting for an important answer or potentially weren’t being paid money they were owed.
This situation is becoming familiar in many workplaces where there is simply more work than resources. Typically management will bombard employees with information showing the current lag, which only serves to make people frustrated and unhappy at work.
So what can you do instead? Here’s what we did in our workshop with this client.
I pointed out the fact that they were currently behind by 3,000 cases. Everybody had heard that number – it had been sent out en emails and mentioned in countless meetings. I then gave the group 30 post-its notes and told them that each post-it represented 100 open cases.
I asked them to stick those post-its on the wall. It looked like this:
I asked how looking at that made them feel and they said things like “I feel hopeless,” “I feel like we’re failing our members,” and “I don’t see how we can ever catch up.”
Then I gave them 900 more post-it notes and asked the group to stick them on the wall next to that. It looked like this:
I told them that I’d checked their IT system and in the last 12 months they had completed 90,000 cases. Each post-it represents 100 cases – hence 900 post-its.
I asked how they felt looking at this and they said things like “I feel proud,” “I feel like we’re making a difference,” and “I feel hopeful.”
Interestingly, the year before that they’d processed 73,000 cases so they had actually become much more productive, but had never focused on that. Instead their focus was only ever on how much they were falling behind.
This gave them renewed energy to tackle their increased case load. They also came up with their own way to track progress, using a whiteboard in their cafeteria:
They use it to track monthly completed cases. They’d set a goal for March of 1,000 cases – and reached it on March 17th. Note how they had to extend the scale upward with a piece of paper because they completed much more work than planned.
In short, focusing on the work they completed (instead of how much they were falling behind) allowed them to catch up over a period of a few months.
And crucially, they were ably to catch up without feeling stressed or hopeless along the way.
Sadly, many workplaces do the exact opposite. When teams fall behind, they are constantly told exactly how much. I’ve seen workplaces send out weekly emails with red graphs showing the current lag. I’ve seen the same graphs hanging in offices, cafeterias and being presented in every department meeting.
The problem is of course that this makes employees frustrated, hopeless and unhappy. The work of Harvard professor Teresa Amabile has shown that the most important factor that makes us happy at work is perceived meaningful progress in our work and that the absence of progress makes us unhappy.
And of course we know from the research that happy employees are more productive, creative and resilient.
In short, this means that many workplaces set up a vicious cycle:
So that’s my challenge to your workplace: How can you highlight and celebrate the work that gets done, instead of only feeling bad over the work that’s not yet completed?
Here’s the problem: There are so many happy workplaces and great leaders out there but we rarely hear about them. Instead, we keep hearing about the stressful workplaces and the jerk bosses who make everybody’s work lives miserable.
When we overfocus on the negative cases, we reinforce the notion that happiness at work is impossible or at least unrealistic. It makes people give up in advance rather than try to make their workplaces better.
I think it’s much more productive to look at the positive cases and try to learn from what they’re doing right. And make no mistake about it: they can be found in every country and in every industry.
There are two advantages to looking at the happy workplaces:
At the Chief Happiness Officer Academy in Copenhagen on June 2-5 you will hear about a ton of these happy workplaces and we will even go on a site visit to one to see it for ourselves.
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November 3-6 2026 in Copenhagen
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The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. You get a comprehensive understanding of the latest research, tons of effective practical tools and learn how to use them in your own business.