No workplace is perfect. Even the happiest workplaces in the world have problems. But great workplaces are good at finding and solving their problems.
If we want to build happy and successful workplaces, we can’t only focus on doing good things for employees, we need to be focused and strategic about identifying and fixing any problems employees see.
In this free webinar we showed how to do it. Content includes:
Why it’s not just enough to do more good things for employees – we need to address their problems too
How to identify and solve problems in the workplace
How to handle problems without losing sight of the good things in the workplace
Great examples from happy workplaces around the world
What is a title other than a relic from a former age? An instrument of power invented to create hierarchy. A symbol that we have given more power than it deserves.
We have deluded ourselves that our titles say something about who we are. That we’re worth a little more when it says something fancy on our business cards and LinkedIn profile. But titles don’t serve us well. They boost our ego and self-image – not our self-worth and self-respect. Titles are empty calories that say nothing about the person we are.
Even without a title, you can still advance in your career at Clever and have plenty of chances to get more responsibilities both in your profession and as a leader.They call it career growth forward, not just upward.
I could not agree more. I have previously written about job titles and how they usually say nothing about what people actually do at work but often cause a lot if infighting among employees:
How do we make remote work work? What are the most effective ways to ensure that employees can still do great work and connect with each other even though they’re not in the office in person all the time?
And how do we convince company leadership that remote work is good for business in a time where many companies are forcing people back to the office?
I talk about that in this video, including:
Great examples from happy remote workplaces from around the world
The most relevant research around remote work and employee happiness and productivity
How to define and preserve the company culture when people are not in the office full time
The latest Gallup Workplace report has a ton of bad news for US workplaces. They open with this depressing statement:
Employees across America are feeling increasingly detached from their jobs. They are seeking new job opportunities at the highest rate since 2015, while overall satisfaction with their employer has returned to a record low.
This is important for US companies to know and act on and I commend Gallup for pointing it out.
But then it seems they try to spin their own numbers in a couple of cases to make it look like remote work is part of the problem and not (as is actually the case) part of the solution.
One headline reads “Exclusively Remote Employees Feel Least Connected to Organization’s Mission or Purpose” but the actual differences are tiny with 29% feeling connected for remote workers and 31% for fully in-office workers. You can’t tell me that is not within the statistical margin of error for this study.
I have recently seen people cite this particular finding as an argument against remote working, so people are taking the wrong lessons from this.
It’s also worth noting that the group that is most connected to the company’s purpose is hybrid workers. If being in the office is so great, how do you explain that?
Another headline is “Few Employees Believe Virtual Meetings Are More Effective Than In-Person Meetings” but the data shows that most employees actually believe remote meetings are as effective as in-person meeting.
The also cite “Hybrid and remote growing pains” as one of the factors making American workers less engaged when it might as well be the fact that US companies are now forcing people back to the office in large numbers:
What is causing people to detach from their employers? Hybrid and remote growing pains: Hybrid work entails switching work locations throughout the week and often results in team members working different schedules, which naturally challenges communication and coordination. The physical distancing inherent to remote work can also create an emotional distance. Gallup research shows that fully remote workers are consistently less connected to their organization’s mission or purpose compared with their hybrid counterparts.
It basically seems to me that they chose to put a negative spin on remote work in a couple of cases even though studies show that remote workers are more effective and happier compared to their in-office counterparts.
Even Gallup’s own report confirms that in-office workers are the least engaged – this time by a significant margin! How do you get from that to “remote growing pains are making workers less happy?”
The lesson here really should be that US workers are hurting and remote work is part of the solution, not the problem.
But don’t take my word for it – read the report for yourself and let me know what you think. Is remote work a major factor making US workers unhappy or is it something else… and what might that be?
June 4: How To Keep Remote Workers Happy And Productive
How do we make remote work work? What are the specific, effective ways to ensure that employees can still do great work and connect with each other even though they’re not in the office in person all the time?
June 18: How To Solve Problems To Build A Happy Workplace
No workplace is perfect. Even the happiest workplaces in the world have problems. But great workplaces are good at finding and solving their problems.
If we want to build happy and successful workplaces, we can’t only focus on doing good things for employees, we need to be focused and strategic about identifying and fixing any problems employees see.
It was written in Danish, so unless you’re Danish, you would not have seen it – but you definitely should, so here is my translation of the key parts:
We do not have a goal of retaining employees! Instead, we focus on creating happiness at work and thus make people want to stay.
In Arbejdernes Landsbank, we make an effort to make it fun to go to work!
This is a prerequisite for succeeding with our ambitions for employees, the customer experience and, not least, strengthening the bank’s position.
For me, the most important success criterion is “Taking responsibility and doing the right thing”!
This requires that we do not just lend a helping hand as leaders. But that we also make an effort to make it easy to do the right thing for our employees.
When this succeeds, work makes sense.
And that makes people want to stay!
In Arbejdernes Landsbank, several years ago, we did away with meaningless target metric regimes. Instead, we focus on what effort we should make for each other and for the customers!
Why? Because it creates the right conditions for us to always put the customer at the center – and deliver the attentive and competent advice that customers should expect.
Close to 50% of new hires in the sector are gone after five years. Unfortunately, these are facts in yesterday’s article in FinansWatch with Finansforbundet as a source.
In my view, this is not an employee problem. It is a management responsibility – which we have already taken to heart!
Let’s once and for all drop retention as a focus area but instead focus on making it worth it to stay. This means that we automatically show up with positive energy and courage for the changes we need to succeed with.
It is no coincidence that customers have chosen us as the Danes’ preferred bank for 16 years in a row!
When employees are thriving, customers can feel it.
Do you also seek a workplace with the right focus on your well-being and development Please contact me on or visit our website for vacancies.
How awesome is this. No performance metrics, just a focus on helping customers and coworkers. No direct focus on retention, just a focus on making employees happy. Kudos, Jonas.
Here’s another detail I liked: Jonas’ LinkedIn profile lists his title as “Regionsdirektør I Mennesket først!” which translates to “Regional Director of Humans first!”
I was invited onto a podcast called Mindful Management and I really love the conversation we ended up having about happiness at work. You can watch the whole thing here.
Last week I attended the annual conference on happiness at work here in Copenhagen and as usual it was a fantastic day with some great talks by researchers in the field and people from some of Denmark’s happiest workplaces who shared how they do it in practice.
One of the overall themes this year was how to stay focused at work or in broader terms, how to make a brain-friendly workplace.
That’s an important theme. I don’t know about you but I feel increasingly distracted these days. It’s become harder and harder for me to stay focused on whatever I’m doing and not succumb to the temptation of pulling out my phone and scroll social media, news or other sites. Reddit is my biggest vice! Or YouTube. Probably both!
The central misunderstanding
The speakers offered a lot of suggestions for this issue but some of it missed the mark a little bit.
For instance, one speaker referenced research that showed that smelling rosemary helped a person maintain focus longer. Other similar advice included:
Go for a walk
Look at nature
Stare at a fixed point without moving your eyes for 2 minutes
Be physically active
Look at something beautiful
Each of these are probably great, but here’s my problem with this type of solution: It takes what is most likely a workplace problem and makes it an employee problem.
Let’s say a lot of employees in the workplace find it hard to maintain focus. Before we start pumping rosemary or other scents into the office (yes, this is actually a thing) we should probably ask WHY employees are so easily distracted. Here are some common problems I often see:
Processes and workflows are inefficient or unclear
Meetings take up significant portions of everyone’s workweek
Everyone is overworked and the ensuing stress is making it hard to focus.
Employees find their tasks meaningless because no one has ever told them why their work makes a difference.
Employees feel overlooked because no one ever appreciates their good work.
Bosses micromanage their employees making them feel completely disinterested in their work.
People are constantly interrupted and are expected to respond instantly to every email, text message or call.
I promise you, if any of these is the problem (and it might even be several of them or all of them) then sniffing rosemary is going to do very little to improve focus and concentration.
In fact, telling employees to fix their own focus issues with rosemary might make things worse because it take something that is a workplace problem (the workplace is treating employees badly) and makes it an individual problem that employees must fix themselves.
This can serve to absolve management from their mistreatment and shift the blame and responsibility onto employees themselves.
Why this does not work in isolation
And it’s important to point out that this individual approach does not work. I did a video with Louise Lambert where we talk about a huge British study that looked at the effectiveness of individual-level workplace interventions like stress trainings or yoga classes and concludes that they do not make employees any happier.
Of course, there are ways for each of us to boost our own concentration and we should each figure out what works for us and do that.
Personally, I find I need structure and overview to function well. Nothing drains my focus faster than a vague sense that there is some task somewhere that I’ve forgotten to do and someone is waiting for. I also need to know that my work matters and that everything I do makes a difference.
That’s why I need an organized calendar, a clear email inbox and a comprehensive to do-list. Without these, I would get nothing done.
I also take into account my daily rhythms. I find that I am much more creative in the mornings, so I save those times for writing, thinking and planning ahead. It is 9:37 as I write this sentence. I use the afternoons for everything else like meetings, emails, etc.
These are just some of the things that I’ve found over the years help me stay focused and productive. What works for you? Write a comment, I’d love to know.
BUT!!! You could use every focus hack in existence and it still wouldn’t work if the real problem is a micromanaging toxic boss or stress caused by an overwhelming workload.
And that’s my problem with many of the workplace happiness approaches I see speakers and experts promote. It goes for individual solutions to systemic problems.
What to do instead
So what should we do instead? Many of the speakers at the Happiness At Work Conference offered specific solutions that they’ve used in their workplaces.
My favorite examples was the Danish law firm Molt Wengel. Their CEO Anne Katrine Schjønning explained that they have gone through a 6-month long process to redesign how they work.
This was their mission:
”We want to look forward to going to work and at Molt Wengel we believe that we can create a work life where where we end the work day with more energy than when et began.”
Specifically they:
Focused on making the work meaningful to each employee so everyone knows why their work is important
Redesigned their workflow to make it more clear and efficient
Created well-defined roles in projects so everyone can work to their strengths
Work in sprints to create focus and a clear sense of progress
Use the pomodoro technique to create periods of uninterrupted focus time
This has worked so well that they now work fewer hours and still get more work done than before. The company has also massively increased revenue and profits.
Astonishingly, they are now so efficient that they can all start their weekends at noon on Fridays so everyone has an extra half day off every week. If you know law firms, you know just how uncommon this is.
And I think this is the way to go. Let’s look at HOW we work together in order to boos focus and concentration and minimize interruptions and distractions.
Another speaker at the conference was Michael Hedemann who works in HR at Middelfart Sparekasse, a Danish bank that has ranked among Denmark’s best workplaces for 20 years. One of their specific initiatives was to encourage all employees to turn off email and Teams notifications on their computers as well as all notifications on their phones. He told me that the only thing that pops up on his phone to interrupt his workflow are actual phone calls.
That’s how you do it.
Some specific ideas
Here are some other specific ways to make our workplaces more focused and productive:
If he workplace is not willing to do any of this, shifting the burden of responsibility onto employees is never going to work.
The upshot
Yes, we are all finding it harder to focus – both at work and in our private lives. We can all blame the increasingly addictive nature of social media or the faster pace of the modern world or the increasing political insecurity in the world, but either way, the problem is real.
But addressing it in the workplace requires addressing any systemic issues at work that sap our concentration. If course it would be easier to just tell employees to go for a walk but that is, at best, a band-aid and at worst a way for the company to shirk its responsibility and shift the responsibility onto the employees.
Fortunately, there are companies that have cracked this already and it turns out that these steps are not just great for helping employees be more focused they also boost productivity and the bottom line.
Your take
What is your best focus hack? Or conversely, what destroys your focus and concentration at work? What has your workplace done to help people work with more focus? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.
This is brilliant. Herb Kelleher, the legendary CEO who made Southwest Airlines a huge success, explicitly says that leadership should not be about control but about creating an environment where people truly participate. THAT is not only the kind of leadership that makes people happy at work it is also the kind of leadership that sets people free to innovate and go above and beyond for the company.
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