The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Author: Alexander

  • Homework makes kids hate learning

    Time Magazine has an article on why homework is a bad thing for school kids. They cite Alfie Kohn whose work is a constant inspiration to me both when it relates to our workplaces and schools.

    Kohn’s claim is simple: There is not one single study that shows that homework helps kids learn. At the same time kids have less and less time to just be kids – time spent on homework has gone up 50% since 1981.

    And if your first thought is “But how could you have a school without homework” you’ll be glad to hear that the Sudbury Valley schools have been doing just fine without homework for 35 years now. I previously wrote about these radically different schools and why I would love to have gone to one of them.

    You know what this fixation on homework is? It’s The Cult of Overwork forced on children. Let’s stop it.

    A big thank you to Leandro N. Camargo from Brazil for sending me the link :o)

  • Monday Tip: Praise a co-worker

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsHere’s a fun, easy thing to do, to give one lucky co-worker a great start to the work-week.

    First choose a co-worker you want to give a boost. Someone who deserves it or maybe a person who could really use it.

    Grab a piece of paper, and write “Things we appreciate about John Miller” (Or whatever his/her name is) at the top. Then write one thing you appreciate about John and sign your name underneath. Pass it on to another co-worker with instructions to do the same and pass it on.

    Do all of this without John noticing – which can be kinda fun in itself.

    When everyone has written one thing they appreciate about John, it’s time to give the paper to him. Here are some ways to do it:

    • Tack it to his PC screen when he’s not looking and let him find it there.
    • Hang it on the department bulletin board for everyone to see.
    • Go wild and let the whole department/team show up and hand it over to John in an improvised ceremony that could even include balloons, a song and a speech or two.

    You could also arrange the writing thing via email, but handwriting on paper has a nice personal touch.

    The Chief Happiness Officer’s monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.

    Previous monday tips.

  • Reddit made my blog a hit

    I can not believe how popular my blog is getting – and how quickly.

    A few months back it had less than 2.000 visitors a month. And now? Just look at this:

    Stats

    The numbers boggle my mind. 110.000 people read the blog. In august alone. Wow. And Yay!

    How did it happen? Well, the main reason is simple: reddit.
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  • EuroGEL 2006 and Festival In The Workplace

    EuroGELTuesday is your last chance to sign up for the EuroGEL 2006 conference on september 1st in Copenhagen.

    Read more and sign up. I hope I see you there :o)

    And don’t forget the pre-EuroGEL presentation on Festivals In The Workplace I’m doing together with Roosevelt Finlayson from the Bahamas and Traci Fenton from D.C. on august 31st from 4-6 PM at Café Enter in Copenhagen.

    Read all about it and send me an email if you’d like to be there. It’s free and it’s fun!!

  • How to get people to arrive on time for meetings

    ClockIt bugs me a little when meetings don’t start on time. I’m fairly punctual myself and while I have no problem waiting five minutes for a meeting to start, it pains me to see ten people waiting fifteen minutes for one or two other people who’re late. It’s particularly annoying when it’s the same people who’re late every time.

    Also, when some people are habitually late other participants start thinking “hey, meetings never start on time anyway, I’ll drop in ten minutes late.” It’s a downward slide from there :o)

    Here are three steps you can take to get your meetings started on time – including one slightly weird suggestion that works amazingly well.
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  • Friday links

    EyeRussian employers are using stressovoye, stressful interviews, to find the best candidates: Throwing a glass of water in someone’s face is said to be especially revealing: the interviewee is considered to have strength of character and leadership qualities if they react aggressively. I think this mostly reveals something about the company and the interviewer…

    Fred Gratzon explains how he lights his iner fire and sets goals: I come up with my goals in a most lazy and relaxed manner. In fact, relaxation is THE essential ingredient for this process to be successful. No sweat, no effort, no strain, no pain, no pressure, no aggravation, no commute, no bosses, no deadlines, no distractions, no work; just relaxing with a quiet desire to have a new goal. Then I play with my imagination throughout the day, every day.

    Another post also wants IT people to be lazy: For example, you want an environment where sysadmins kick back and read IT magazines occasionally, because their run-of-the-mill administrative tasks (adding users, managing disk space, etc.) are all scripted and/or automated.

    Bob Sutton writes about Lovaglia’s law and choosing CEOs: Rakesh found that when he asked corporate directors if CEOs are worth all that money, they reacted with anger and surprise, as if he had raised a taboo subject. He found that they had “virtually religious??? convictions on the subject, which led them to dismiss any evidence showing that CEO quality is not a primary and powerful cause of company performance.

  • How to handle chronic complainers

    Complainers

    Got any chronic complainers where you work? It seems like every workplace has them – the people for whom the weather is always too warm or too cold, the boss is a jerk, the food is lousy, work sucks and … you fill out the list.

    No matter how good things get they still only see the bad – and they go to huge lengths to point it out to everyone around them.

    I’m not saying we should outlaw complaining, but workplaces need to do something about the chronic complainers because they tend to make people around them unhappy at work. It’s a fact that negative people are highly contagious and one chronic complainer can easily get an entire department down.

    We try many different strategies to deal with complainers – one german IT company even bans whiners from the workplace. Yep – if you have a bad day you are not allowed to come in.

    But most of the strategies we normally use on complainers don’t help and often make matters worse. I’ve outlined these strategies below.

    And then at the end of the post, theres a simple, devious trick that works amazingly well. Try it!
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  • Traci Fenton on democracy in the workplace

    Traci FentonMy good friend Traci Fenton has an excellent op-ed piece in the paper today on democracy in the workplace. From the article:

    Command and control ways (as in, “do what you’re told because I’m the boss and I know best”) of the Industrial Age are dead. A Democratic Age demands a democratic approach to business that engages employees fully, taps their reservoir of talent, builds on their strengths, and rewards them in the process.

    She cites W.L. Gore, Semco, Whole Foods, GE Durham and Great Harvest as great examples of successful, democratic companies.

    I believe that democracy and involving employees in decisions is one of the very best ways to make them happy at work. People want to be involved and become happy, motivated and committed when they are allowed to help shape a company’s future.

    You can read more about Traci and her work with freedom-based organizations on her company website www.worldblu.com.

  • Top 5 business maxims that need to go – Part II

    Same same

    It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
    It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
    – Josh Billings

    Much well-known business advice is sadly obsolete but can still be found in articles, business books and, not least, in daily use in the workplace. It seems that some companies are still guided by thinking that is sadly out of date – if it was ever true to begin with.

    The worst of these old maxims are not only wrong, they’re bad for people and bad for business. Businesses who use them are making their employees unhappy and are harming the bottom line.

    I recently wrote a post about the Top 5 Business Maxims That Need To Go, listing 5 horrendous examples. I also asked people to contribute the maxims they would like to get rid of, and got some great suggestions, so here are 5 more pieces of bad business advice that are making people unhappy at work and harming the bottom line.
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  • Ask the CHO: Dealing with uncertainty at work

    A reader sent me this question:

    The company I work at “went global”. That means horrible things like many people fired and so. Thus, people are afraid to lose their job, even when I directly asked a manager I trust and he said that “no one from your department will lost his job”. People don’t trust management. Some are cynical, some are afraid, but I think, at different levels, all are unhappy with the situation. I like these people very much, and I would like to do something to confort them, but so far, listening was the only thing I was able to do.

    Additionally, the people from another site are also unhappy, because even when most of them are very capable professionals, they are being threated like… uhm.. incapable kids (not to mention the fact that they know that they were hired because they are “cheaper”).

    Any suggestions to improve the situation?

    First of all thanks for a great question which describes a situation that is found in many workplaces today: A workplace goes through large-scale changes and people wonder “what will it mean for me?” Management may or may not try to create some certainty, but may fail because of a lack of trust.
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