I was challenged by Susanne Goldstein of The Social Age to write something about happiness at work and social software.
The question is: do all these fancy, new ways of interacting on the web like blogs, youtube, forums etc. make us happier at work and in life?
Instead of writing something, I made a short video-riff exploring the question with Thomas Madsen-Mygdal who is very much an expert on social software.
My Dutch Pal Erno Mijland asks a very interesting question:
Last week I watched the film Our Daily Bread which is a documentary on how food is produced in Europe. It shows an industry in which there’s not a lot of respect for plants and animals: lots of poison, young chickens being thrown around, pigs transported in small boxes etc. etc.
Because I was a bit prepared these images didn’t shock me very much. What did shock me, were the scenes in which the workers in this industry where shown. People showing no emotion whatsoever in what they where doing, big automated halls where a worker works (and lunches) alone, people doing mind torturing repetitive work all day long.
It made me wonder: who could possibly be happy at work in these kind of conditions?
What a great question. The easy answer would be “No one. No one can be happy under these conditions.” But the truth is a little more complicated.
If you haven’t seen Our Daily Bread and you’re not squeamish, you can see a short clip from the movie here:
Interestingly, I’m currently reading a book called Gig, which simply consists of interviews with working Americans. I just read about the HR manager in a slaughterhouse, who talks about the same issue:
Last month, I hired eighty-five people and ninety-two left. That’s not uncommon. We’re bleeding people. I hire them and they leave… Some people will quit fifteen minutes after they get on the floor because it is so ugly to them.
The interview also has some graphic descriptions of employees walking around in a couple of inches of cow blood… No wonder so many people quit!
But this is not just about killing cows. Could you be happy working for a company that makes land mines? Or a company that pollutes the environment? Or a tobacco company? Or working for Microsoft? Just kidding!
The larger question is this: Can you be happy at work if you deeply believe that your workplace ultimately makes the world a worse place?
Here are some factors to take into account:
1: Mismatch between personal and company values is a huge stress factor
When your job goes against your personal values, you’re in a very difficult situation. This means, that on a daily basis you are doing things that you can’t defend to yourself.
This causes what we might call values stress – a feeling of stress that comes from a conflict of values. This can be every bit as serious and damaging as the old garden-variety stress that comes from being busy.
Even if you’re not actually making the land mines – let’s say you’re just the receptionist – this may weigh heavily on you. Every single day.
2: You can temporarily ignore this mismatch
However, you can keep yourself from dealing with this stress factor simply by ignoring it. The human mind has a fantastic ability to shut things out and adapt. If you so choose, you can simply keep yourself from realizing that this is bad.
You can focus on the good aspects on your job, have fun with nice co-workers, and even still take pleasure from doing your job well.
A lot of people certainly do this for a while, particularly when they really need the salary. But while it can enable you to be happy at work for a time, it is not a good long term strategy.
Even CEOs are not immune to this temporary blindness. Here, Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface the world’s largest manufacturer of carpets, explains how he suddenly realized that his company was bad for the environment:
…it dawned on me that they way I’d been running Interface is the way of the plunderer. Plundering something that is not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth.
And I said to myself “My goodness, a day must come where this is illegal, where plundering is not allowed. I mean, it must come.”
So I said to myself “My goodness, some day people like me will end up in jail.”
The good news is that he made this realization and that he was in a position to act on it and make Interface environmentally responsible. If you’re an employee of an evil workplace, your main option is probably to get out of Dodge and find another job you can be proud of.
3: The higher your investment in the company, the easier it is to blind yourself
And I’m not just talking stocks. You can invest money, but also time and identity in your work.
The more you have invested already, the harder it will be for you to realize that things are just plain wrong. This specifically means that the longer you stay, the harder it gets to leave.
4: Being part of a bad system changes your perception
And more than anything, the system you exist in can shape your perception. If everyone around you acts like “hey, spending your day knee-deep in cow guts is perfectly normal” or “sure it’s OK to cheat about the company finances – everybody does it” then you’re more likely to think so too.
The Milgram experiment may be the most chilling reminder of this effect. In it, subjects were lead to believe that they were part of a study in learning that required them to give another test subject electrical shocks. In reality the other person was an actor and no shocks were given.
The study showed that 65% of the subjects continued administering ever more powerful electrical shocks – even though the actor was screaming in pain and later on pretended to pass out. The subjects were never pressured – if they protested they were simply told in a calm voice that “The experiment requires that you continue” or “You have no other choice, you must go on.”
Here’s part of Milgram’s chilling conclusion:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
So when people in authority tell us to do something that we know is wrong, when the entire system just acts as if unethical, damaging behavior is just business as usual, many of us are powerless to resist. You may think that YOU are exempt from this, but in reality we’re all subject to this effect.
This is part of the reason that the Enron scandal could go on for as long as it did, even though many people inside the company ought to have known that something was rotten: everyone acted like everything was fine. As in “The company requires that you continue.”
Ultimately, it may even explain something like Abu Ghraib.
What’s your take?
Have you ever held a job in a horrible business? What did it do to you and your happiness at work?
I found this great web animation called 5.75 Big Questions. It presents some very fundamental questions that apply to all of life – but which could very well be applied to your work life.
Approaching work consciously, rather than just working because that’s what everybody else does, is fundamental to be happy at work. So go watch the movie (it’s only 5 minutes) and ask yourself those 5.75 questions about your career and work life.
I never expected that a retail job would lead to meeting the owner of a company. Literally, it was all due to treating people well and having a good attitude. I’m convinced. I was pleasantly surprised by the lengths people will go when they like you and like the way that you work.
The whole experience taught me not to take a “little” job for granted, or to take the people you work with for granted. Everything counts.
Well she now has a new, exciting job and wrote to tell me about it, ending with this gem of a motto:
Hard work, a positive attitude, thank you cards and a few bouquets of flowers and voila! I could dance I am so happy!
Just as a concert orchestra isn’t a race to the last note, life isn’t a race to some exalted state called success.
This is the point of a short talk by Alan Watts, which has been animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park. This unlikely meeting of widely differing talents is an inspiration.
You can see it here and there others to choose from here.
Last week, an editorial in one of Denmark’s leading newspapers took aim at yours truly. Here’s the introduction:
Enforced mirth
The title alone guarantees some mirth: Chief Happiness Officer – senior happiness comissioner.
The line between embarrassing and funny may be a fine one, but you certainly can’t take a title like that seriously.
Truth to tell, among many other ridiculous titles, it has to be a candidate for some award: stupidest title of the year or something like that.
(source)
It goes on at some length…
When I first spotted this editorial it made me sad. Nobody likes to be criticized – I certainly don’t – and this criticism seemed both unfair and a little malicious to me.
A blog comment like this one is another good example. They’re very rare, but they do crop up occasionally.
As I was thinking about how to react to the editorial, I remembered this graph by Kathy Sierra:
In one of her very best posts (and that’s saying something) Kathy talks about the physics of passion saying:
You don’t really have passionate users until someone starts accusing them of “drinking the koolaid.” You might have happy users, even loyal users, but it’s the truly passionate that piss off others enough to motivate them to say something. Where there is passion, there is always anti-passion… or rather passion in the hate dimension.
This means that the kind of criticism I got in that editorial is great news. It is a sign that my message is sharp enough that some people take an active dislike to it. They may not care for it – but they care!
If all I got was negative feedback it would probably be time to rethink my work in happiness, but fortunately it’s not all hate – far from it! Many, many people tell me that they enjoy my book, blog and presentations and have used them actively to become happier at work.
I think we can all use Kathy’s excellent reminder to do two things:
1: Whatever you’re doing, get yourself and others passionate about it. Your project, product, company, process, leadership, work, salesmanship – whatever you’re doing will go better with passion.
This means that your message can be anything but bland. Don’t set out to actively piss people off – that’s just crude. But if you’re pleasant, moderate, mild and soft-spoken you also run the risk of being utterly forgettable. No one will oppose you – but no one will be passionate about whatever it is you do either. That’s why you must hone your message to the point where it’s possible to be passionate about it.
2: When people get negative about you, remember that this is part of the process. As Kathy puts it:
Should you ignore the detractors? Diss them as nothing but evidence of your success? Should you just wave them off with a “just jealous” remark? Absolutely not.
Somewhere in their complaints there are probably some good clues for things you can work on. But if you start trying to please them all or even worse, turn them into fans, that could mean death. Death by mediocrity, as you cater to everybody and inspire nobody.
I don’t want their reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, …
I want “f**king cool! Period.
I want that pure sense of wonder, that kid-at-airshow-seeing-an-F16–on-afterburners-rip-by so-close-it-makes-your-soul-shake reaction, that caress-the-new-Blackberry until-your-friends-start-to-question-your-sanity experience. I want an irrational level of sheer, unfiltered, borderline delusional joy.
I was looking through Christine Kane’s wonderful blog (thx Mike) and lemmetellya, the lady can write. She’s smart and funny – and that’s in addition to being a great musician and singer.
So, the concert ends with a song called The Problem with Jazz. And we mess it up! Right at the end! Right at the last drum beat! The band falls to pieces. Not only do we mess up a song — but it’s the end of the whole evening!
Now, as you know, these things can be edited. We could’ve re-filmed it. We could’ve even cut to a different shot and taken out the sound. But I was in the editing suite, and I said, “Nah. Let’s leave it. It’s funny.”
Here’s why I left it, really: If I can screw up the ending of a show in front of 400 people and thousands of other viewers, then you don’t have to feel so bad if you mess up, say, at your office in front of five or ten or twenty-five people. Or when you give a speech. Really, it’s a way to make you feel better about yourself. Most music videos don’t offer such a raw glimpse of human foibles. They’re all edited and perfected, and so you don’t get a chance to see the human side of performing.
Well, now I’ve changed that trend! By next week, you’ll see videos of Celine Dion tripping over one of her dancers and falling face first onto the stage and then laughing it off as she hoists her sequin gown back over her left buttock. Just you wait!
That’s hilarious. And it totally sealed it for me – I had to order the DVD just to see them get it wrong :o)
Christine’s point is also a great reminder to allow ourselves to fail – and to be seen failing. This goes great at work too.
Peter Drucker’s said that companies should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because the only people who never mess up are those who never do anything interesting.
Prasad Kurian suggests we should promote people the way some ancient societies chose a new chief – pick the person with the most scars. That person has taken risks – but not enough to get killed.
Randy Nelson of Pixar says that “You have to honor failure, because failure is just the negative space around success.”
And finally, there’s my own experience from learning to wakeboard over the last two months. I’ve been getting pretty good at it (as you can see here), but it has cost me a lot of falls. Some of them very public and more than a little painful. Like last Sunday, when I got a little overconfident and steered right into a pier :o)
And yes, these days anything is an excuse for me to mention wakeboarding. I’m hooked, dammit :o)
I was contacted by the nice people who run blog action day and asked if I would like to participate – and of course I would.
The idea is simple: On one date, October 15th, all participating blogs will blog about one topic – the environment.
If you have a blog, why not be a part of this – 1400 blogs have joined so far, this is going to be massive :o)
And what, I hear you ask, does the environment have to do with happiness at work? Lots, I tell you. Many companies are finding, that when they change their business to be more environmentally sustainable, their employees experience a growing sense of pride in the company – leading to more happiness at work.
These companies also find, interestingly, that customers become proud to place their business there and become more loyal – and that consequently the company makes more money.
Two great examples are:
1: Interface (the world’s largest carpet manufacturer) who produced a line of environmentally friendly carpets that, even though they were more expensive than their regular products, became their best selling product.
Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, had a rude awakening about the way his company had been polluting, saying:
It dawned on me that they way I’d been running Interface is the way of the plunderer. Plundering something that is not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth.
So I said to myself “My goodness, some day people like me will end up in jail.”
2: Patagonia who make outdoor wear and mountain climbing gear and who donate 1% of their revenue or 10% of their profits, whichever is greater, to environmental causes chosen by their employees.
I was surprised by how very provocative this idea is to a lot of people, but I remain convinced that it’s the best way to ensure motivation, happiness and fairness.
Recently I’ve been serving as an expert at The Job Lounge, answering career related questions. If you’d like to see some of the sage advice I and others are dishing out, go check it out.
The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. Get an in-depth background in happiness at work, hear about the latest research in the field and learn how to use this in your own business.
I was challenged by Susanne Goldstein of The Social Age to write something about happiness at work and social software. 
I found this great web animation called 
I just got an email update from Pixel Peony, who, as I previosuly blogged about, found that 
Just as a concert orchestra isn’t a race to the last note, life isn’t a race to some exalted state called success.
I was looking through 
My most controversial post ever, is still the one where I support having 
Recently I’ve been serving as an expert at 
