The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Month: November 2003

  • Incentives do not work

    If you want your employees to perform well, conventional wisdom says that you must give them lots of incentives. Stuff like free phone calls, company cars, gold stars, employee of the month awards are necessary, right? Wrong! Incentives, and the ensuing competition, actually make matters worse, and remove peoples attention from their work. This makes employees less motivated about their work.

    According to this article by Alfie Kohn, you should in stead:
    * Pay people well.
    * Pay people fairly.
    * Then do everything possible to take money off people’s minds.

    Notice that incentives, bonuses, pay-for-performance plans, and other reward systems violate the last principle by their very nature.

    I could not agree more. The whole notion that you can motivate anybody is wrong, and money is certainly not the way. People can motivate themselves, and businesses can create environments in which it is easy or hard for them to do so. Incentives make it harder!

  • Dust devils

    I found this quote from my favourite book, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, on Chris Corrigans website.

    Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu experiements on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of getting bounced of the grille of a shrieking Buick once when he chased a roughly shopping-cart-sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into the centre of it. He knew they were both fragile and tenacious. You could just stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot, or swirl around it, and keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch one in your hands, it would vanish — but then you’d look up and see another one just like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and yet indisputably self-perpetuating and fairly robust systems sort of gave Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.

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  • Conference coming up

    We’re hosting Denmarks (the worlds?) first conference on happiness at work. We’ve been working on it for a while now, generating ideas, lining up speakers, preparing the material, and here are the basic facts:
    * Thursday January 29, 9-6
    * Held in N?rrebrohallen
    * 4 speakers before lunch
    * Lots of workshops after lunch
    * 300 participants

    This will be a fun, inspiring, energetic and innovative day, focused on why happiness in the workplace is a benefit to both organizations and employees, and how to do something about it. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll be sure to inform you when the conference website is up.

  • Book review: All hat and no cattle

    This book is the story of Chris Turner, and her work to bring change, learning and empowerment into Xerox. It’s a highly entertaining book, right from this first line: “My family never did hold much with organized religion. The fact is, we ended up in Texas because my great-grandfather roughed up a priest in Arkansas. Seems the good father didn’t want to bury a nonbaptized child the Catholic cemetery, and my great-granddaddy took offense at such malarkey… Given this background you’ll understand how I came by my habits of challenging rules and dogma. Questioning the status quo is something I have done all my life.”

    And reading these “tales of a corporate outlaw” you’re left with little doubt that the status quo needs to be questioned. And here’s a tip: When you read the book, imagine it in a thick southern drawl – that makes it even better.
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