The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

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  • The top 5 ways NOT to praise people at work

    In 2011 we conducted a study of 1,000 Danish employees from a wide variety of workplaces to try to find the biggest factors that make people unhappy at work. Our study found that the second biggest driver of dissatisfaction at work was a lack of praise and recognition. Too many Danish employees are unhappy and demotivated at work because, even though they do great work, they hardly ever receive any positive feedback and I’m willing to bet good money that this applies in most other countries too.

    That’s a damn shame because studies confirm that workplaces that have a culture of recognition are happier, have lower absenteeism and are more successful.

    So we need more praise at work, sure, but that’s not enough. It’s also about better praise. We won’t create a viable culture of recognition in a workplace simply by increasing the amount of praise given, we must also improve the quality of the praise.

    It is actually possible to praise employees and co-workers in ways that make them less happy at work.

    Here are the top 5 ways NOT to praise people at work. Do you recognize any of these from your workplace?

    1: Obligatory praise
    Never praise people just because you feel you should. Praise has to be meaningful and earned. This means you can only praise others when there is a good reason to do so – which fortunately is quite often.

    Praise given because you have to and not because you feel the person has earned it makes no one happy at work. It will also undermine all future praise, because people can’t trust it to be honest.

    Also, some people will only give praise and tend to avoid giving negative feedback, possibly in an attempt to avoid unpleasant conversations and conflict. That won’t do. Our study showed that people long for feedback at work. They want to know what they do well but they also want to know what they can do better.

    2: Sarcastic praise
    Imagine this said in a wildly sarcastic tone: “Wow, you just did an awesome job on that, didn’t you?”

    That’s not very likely to make anyone happy at work.

    3: Praise mixed with criticism
    Have you ever heard that you should preface any criticism with praise? Some people argue that the best way to give negative feedback is to wrap it in praise, i.e. you should praise, criticize and then praise again at the end.

    I disagree completely with that approach. I say if you have negative feedback, say so. If you have praise to give, do it. But don’t feel like you have to mix the two.

    The problem is this:

    • The praise you do give seems fake – it’s just a preamble to the real message.
    • It seems like you think people can’t take criticism since you wrap it in praise to soften the blow.
    • In the future when you praise people, they’ll just be waiting for the hammer to drop.

    4: Praising some – ignoring others
    If some people get tons of praise while others are consistently ignored, this is highly demotivating since it give the praise-less a feeling of unfairness and of being overlooked.

    A classic example would be a company where the salespeople get all the praise for getting new customers while the people working in the backoffice, who make the sales possible, are routinely ignored and taken for granted.

    Unfortunately it’s easy to end up praising only those people who get the most visible results and ignoring the people backstage. Its also tempting to only praise the people who are most like you, who do work you immediately understand and who do it the way you would have done it. Therefore we should all make an extra effort to appreciate the people who are not like us.

    This is not to say that praise should be handed out evenly so everyone gets the exact same amount of recognition. In any workplace, there will be people who shine and it’s perfectly alright if they get more praise. But it’s important that everyone gets noticed and praised for the good work they do.

    5: Trivial praise
    I once talked to a woman who got lots of praise from her male supervisor at her last job… but only ever for her looks. This was both creepy and utterly meaningless. She’s a highly skilled professional and she wants to be recognized for that – not for something as trivial as how she looks.

    So make sure you praise people for things that actually matter to them and not for superficial matters and trivial accomplishments.

    Your take

    Have you ever been praised in a way that made you less happy at work? Does your workplace have a good culture of recognition? What’s the best way you’ve ever given or received praise at work? Write a comment, we’d love to know your take.

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  • Tiger Oil Memos

    Have you seen the Tiger Oil memos? Whoah, Nelly!

    It’s “…a total of 22 enormously entertaining memos; all sent by, or on behalf of, the firm’s incredibly amusing, painfully tactless, and seemingly constantly angry CEO — Edward ‘Tiger Mike’ Davis — to his staff.”

    Here’s are some of my favorites.

    On gossip:

    Idle conversation and gossip in this office among employees will result in immediate termination.

    Don’t talk about other people and other things in this office.

    DO YOUR JOBS AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!

    I can swear – you can’t:

    I swear, but since I am the owner of this company, that is my privilege, and this privilege is not to be interpreted as the same for any employee. That differentiates me from you, and I want to keep it that way. There will be absolutely no swearing, by any employee, male or female, in this office, ever.

    No celebrations:

    Per Edward Mike Davis’ orders, there will be no more birthday celebrations, birthday cakes, levity, or celebrations of any kind within the office. This is a business office.

    If you have to celebrate, do it after office hours on your own time.

    Source.

    I can’t believe that company isn’t around anymore :o)

    Hat-tip to Peter Billingham for telling me about these!

    Also – it made me think of this classic Simpsons moment:

  • Work is punishment

    I keep wondering why so many people put up with bad workplaces, bad bosses and bad jobs. Why are many people desperately unhappy at work (up to 50% according to some studies) but accept this as normal?

    Here’s why: We’re carrying massive cultural baggage. Through much of Western history, there has been a sense that work is hard and unpleasant and that’s why we get paid to do it.

    This is expressed most clearly in Max Weber’s biblically-based work The Protestant Work Ethic, which was used by Protestant preachers to preach that hard labor was good for people, good for Christian society, and a salve for original sin.

    According to Christianity, humans used to live in the Garden of Eden, where everything was perfect. But because of original sin we were ejected and, according to Genesis 3:19, this is our situation now:

    “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

    According to Hebrew belief, work is a “curse devised by God explicitly to punish the disobedience and ingratitude of Adam and Eve.” The Old Testament itself supports work, not because there’s any joy in it, but because it is necessary to prevent poverty and destitution.

    The ancient Greek word for work is ponos, taken from the Latin poena, which means sorrow. Manual labor was for slaves, while free men were supposed to pursue warfare, large-scale commerce, and the arts, especially architecture or sculpture1.

    So, according to our cultural roots, work is a curse, a punishment for original sin, and only for slaves. In short, life is hell—or “nasty, brutish and short,” as Hobbes put it—work is hell, and we must endure it because we’re all sinners but don’t worry, we’ll get our reward once we’re dead! Any questions?

    It’s time to put that particular view of work behind us! Richard Reeves has this to say in his excellent book Happy Mondays:

    Anybody who thinks work should be miserable simply because it is work or that there should be a cordon sanitaire between “work” and “life” needs to find a time machine, key in the year 1543, and go and join Calvin’s crew. They’ll feel more at home there. In the meantime, the rest of us will get on with enjoying our work, and our workplaces.

    But we can never forget that we’re going up against thoughts and beliefs that have been part of our culture for centuries. This is why we need a conscious revolution in workplaces all around the world and why those of us who have chosen to break with the old attitude to work need to support each other.

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  • The 10 most awesome things from Valve’s employee handbook

    I recently had a chance to read the employee handbook from video game company Valve and it’s the single most inspiring such document I have ever seen.

    I play some video games myself (the Bioshock and Dead Space franchises are my favorites), but if you don’t partake you may never have heard of Valve so here’s the skinny from Wikipedia:

    Valve Corporation is an American video game development and digital distribution company based in Bellevue, Washington, United States. Founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, Valve became famous from its critically acclaimed Half-Life series. It is also well known for its social-distribution network Steam; and for developing the Source engine.

    Valve is privately owned so few financial figures are known but they have 300 employees and Forbes estimates the company’s worth at $3 billion.

    Their employee handbook was recently released on the web and it explains how they’ve become so successful. Here are the top 10 most awesome things from the document.

    1: Valve has no hierarchy

    Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily.

    But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.

    That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager.

    How cool is that?

    2: Pick your projects

    We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100.

    Heh :o) Screw Google and their “20% time to work on your own projects.” Valve turned that dial to 11!

    3: Don’t forget the long term

    Because we all are responsible for prioritizing our own work, and because we are conscientious and anxious to be valuable, as individuals we tend to gravitate toward projects that have a high, measurable, and predictable return for the company.
    …
    This sounds like a good thing, and it often is, but it has some downsides that are worth keeping in mind. Specifically, if we’re not careful, these traits can cause us to race back and forth between short-term opportunities and threats, being responsive rather than proactive.

    So our lack of a traditional structure comes with an important responsibility. It’s up to all of us to spend effort focusing on what we think the long-term goals of the company should be.

    In many, many workplaces where employees are unhappy and frustrated because their workdays are entirely taken up with putting out one fire and then the next, leaving no time for long-term planning of any kind. Valve try not to fall into that trap.

    4: Don’t stress over the things you don’t do

    It’s natural in this kind of environment to constantly feel like you’re failing because for every one task you decide to work on, there will be dozens that aren’t getting your attention. Trust us, this is normal. Nobody expects you to devote time to every opportunity that comes your way. Instead, we want you to learn how to choose the most important work to do.

    At most workplaces there is a huge and unrelenting focus on the things employees haven’t done. Almost every meeting, email and phone call are intended to remind people of the next deadline and how far away they are from reaching it. Valve try to take the pressure of employees so they don’t stress over the things they don’t do.

    5: We test ourselves

    …rather than simply trusting each other to just be smart, we also constantly test our own decisions

    Yes. Don’t believe your own hype. Test your decisions and adjust as needed.

    6: Overwork is bad

    While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication.

    This is a brilliant slap in the face to all members of The Cult of Overwork, ie. everyone who believes that the key to succes is simply to work more hours.

    7: Enjoy yourself

    Sometimes things around the office can seem a little too good to be true. If you find yourself walking down the hall one morning with a bowl of fresh fruit and Stumptown-roasted espresso, dropping off your laundry to be washed, and heading into one of the massage rooms, don’t freak out. All these things are here for you to actually use.

    And don’t worry that somebody’s going to judge you for taking advantage of it—relax! And if you stop on the way back from your massage to play darts or work out in the Valve gym or whatever, it’s not a sign that this place is going to come crumbling down like some 1999-era dot-com startup.

    If we ever institute caviar-catered lunches, though, then maybe something’s wrong. Definitely panic if there’s caviar.

    In short, you should feel good during your work day.

    8: You’re free to screw up

    Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake.
    …
    Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company — we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors.

    Yes! I cannot stress enough, how important it is to let employees make mistakes.

    In fact, we should celebrate mistakes at work.

    9: It’s not about growth

    We do not have a growth goal. We intend to continue hiring the best people as fast as we can, and to continue scaling up our business as fast as we can, given our existing staff. Fortunately, we don’t have to make growth decisions based on any external pressures — only our own business goals. And we’re always free to temper those goals with the long-term vision for our success as a company. Ultimately, we win by keeping the hiring bar very high.

    Yes! Way too many businesses are slaves to growth goals that are arbitrary, unrealistic and ultimately meaningless.

    As Ricardo Semler put it:
    There is no correlation between growth and ultimate success. For a while growth seems very glamorous, but the sustainability of growth is so delicate that many of the mid-sized companies which just stayed where they were doing the same thing are much better off today than the ones that went crazy and came back to nothing. There are too many automobile plants, too many airplanes. Who is viable in the airline business?

    10: Hiring

    Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing.

    So when you’re working on hiring … everything else you could be doing is stupid and should be ignored!

    Again, this is brilliant. Nothing undermines a strong positive company culture faster than hiring people who don’t fit in.

    In short, this is a fantastic document and one of the coolest things about it is that it’s maintained by the Valve employees themselves, who are free to edit it on their intranet.

    You can find the whole Valve Employee Handbook here – read it, read it, read it :)

    Your take

    What do you think of these 10 points? How does this document compare to your workplace’s employee handbook? Is there anything in your employee handbook that inspires you?

  • Why your boss thinks criticism is more effective than praise… and is wrong!

    PraiseI just discovered a great article by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback on why criticism seems more effective than praise in the workplace… but isn’t.

    From the article:

    This is one of those areas where the lessons of experience aren’t obvious — and can even be misleading.

    Your observation that criticism is more often followed by improvement is probably accurate. But what’s going on isn’t what you think. In fact, it’s something called “regression to the mean” and if you don’t understand it, you and your people will be its victims.

    Basically, the article argues that we all have an average performance level over time but actual performance varies from day to day and task to task. But we tend to forget this:

    If you track someone’s performance task by task, you’ll discover that a great performance, one that’s far above the person’s average or mean, is usually followed by a less-inspiring performance that’s closer to the mean.

    It works the same the other way. A terrible performance is usually followed by something better. No one’s making or causing this to happen. It’s part of the variability built into human activity, especially when doing something even moderately complex.

    Consequently, when someone performs worse than their own average and you criticize them for it, they will tend to perform better afterwards, simply because they return to their own average. They would have done so, even if you had said nothing.

    For the same reason, when someone performs better than usual and you praise them for it, their next performance will tend to be worse.

    And this means that:

    Even if you don’t notice these apparent connections consciously, you’re aware of them intuitively. And the most likely consequence will be that you criticize far more than you praise.

    This is a brilliant insight and the lesson is that we must shift our focus from increasing performance on individual tasks to raising people’s average performance. And this is done more effectively by focusing on what people do well.

    A lot of evidence suggests that positive reinforcement — identifying and building on strengths — will produce better results than a relentless focus on faults. This is important.

    To improve, people need positive feedback. It’s just as important to recognize and reinforce their strengths as it is to point out where they’re falling short. And you need to understand why praise can seem dysfunctional, so you don’t withhold it.

    Read the whole article – it’s brilliant and it reinforces the point we’ve made again and again that praising people for their good work makes them happier AND more effective.

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  • Top 5 tips to beat the post-vacation blues at work

    Aaaahhh… Summer vacation. Depending on your fancy it’s time to lie on the beach with a good book, wear out your shoe soles exploring a strange city or scream your head off skydiving or in some other adrenaline-driven pursuit.

    But invariably the vacation ends and you go back to work, and that transition can be a little rough.

    Do you know that feeling? You come back to work happy and full of energy – but by the end of the first work day, you’re already feeling tired an unhappy. It’s almost like you didn’t have a vacation at all.

    So here are a five tips to help you stay happy when you get back to work.

    1: While you’re away, get away

    Don’t take the company mobile and laptop on vacation. Don’t check your voice mail and email.

    The point of a vacation is to get away and go to a different mental space, and if you’re preoccupied with work, chances are you’ll both enjoy your vacation less and get less relaxation out of it.

    2: Let yourself get behind

    When you get back from your vacation, you will invariably have fallen behind and have a lot of work to catch up on. There will be a ton of voice mails, emails and tasks that need your attention. THAT’S FINE!!! It’s unavoidable and it’s not your fault.

    Look at it this way: If you can leave the company for two weeks and there’s no work waiting for you, you’re not really needed there.

    So don’t expect to have a clear desk on your first day back – allow yourself to be behind and to catch up steadily.

    3: Start with some easy tasks

    When you get back to work, don’t immediately throw yourself at the toughest, hairiest most complicated tasks you have. Ease into work by doing something easy and simple – something you know you can do. Once you’re back in full swing you can go at the tough tasks.

    4: Don’t overwork to catch up

    It can be really tempting to work long hours to catch up after your vacation. DON’T!!! Work regular hours and stick to point 2 above.

    5: Ask for help if you need it

    If you find it difficult to catch up, don’t be afraid to ask your co-workers or manager for help. It’s important for you to be aware of any outstanding tasks that may have become critically late in your absence, and if you could use some help – it’s your responsibility to ask for it! It also greatly increases the chance that you will actually get help.

    If you use these tips, you may find that your vacations feel more like vacations and that you can be even happier at work.

    But on a fundamental level, there is something wrong with the idea that work drains you of energy and weekends and vacations recharge you. I know that this is how most people feel – but that’s not how it should be.

    If work typically drains you of energy – if every week ends up draining you of life so you barely make it to Friday afternoon where you can finally relax – then something’s wrong. Don’t accept that state of affairs just because everyone else does.

    When you’re happy at work, work can actually be a regenerative activity that leaves you with more energy so you leave the workplace with a spring in your step most days!

    And THAT is the ultimate way to beat the post-vacation blues: Have a job you actually like!

    Your take

    Do you ever get the post-vacation blues? What do you do to beat’em? Have you also noticed that vacations these days seem to be more tiring than work (as this article says)?

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  • Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work

    Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work

    Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh recently tweeted this:

    “$1.6 million mistake on sister site @6pm.com. I guess that means no ice cream for me tonight. Details: http://bit.ly/blfLnF”

    Apparently an employee had made a mistake while updating the prices on the web site, which meant that for a whole day, no item could cost more than $49.95. Some of their items cost a lot more. Ouch!

    Now what do you do? In many organizations a mistake like this would be the starting point for a witch hunt. Who is responsible? How did they screw up? What would be an appropriate punishment?

    But this is not how they do business at Zappos. At the link above, Tony Hsieh writes:

    To those of you asking if anybody was fired, the answer is no, nobody was fired – this was a learning experience for all of us. Even though our terms and conditions state that we do not need to fulfill orders that are placed due to pricing mistakes, and even though this mistake cost us over $1.6 million, we felt that the right thing to do for our customers was to eat the loss and fulfill all the orders that had been placed before we discovered the problem.

    PS: To put an end to any further speculation about my tweet, I will also confirm that I did not, in fact, eat any ice cream on Sunday night.

    This is not soft or wishy-washy, it’is a great way to handle mistakes in a business. Rather than stigmatizing failure, we should acknowledge and even celebrate it.

    Yes, that’s right, I said celebrate our mistakes. I’ve long argued that we should celebrate success at work, but we should also celebrate mistakes, failure and fiascoes. Here are the top 5 reasons why this is a good idea.

    1: When you celebrate mistakes, you learn more from the mistakes you make

    In one company, the CEO was told by a trembling employee, that the company website was down. This was a big deal – this company made most of its sales online, and downtime cost them thousands of dollars an hour.

    The CEO asked what had happened, and was told that John in IT had bungled a system backup, and caused the problem. “Well, then,” says the CEO “Let’s go see John!”

    When the CEO walked into the IT department everyone went quiet. They had a pretty good idea what wass coming, and were sure it wouldn’t be pretty.

    The CEO walks up to John’s desk and asks “You John?”

    “Yes” he says meekly.

    “John, ” says the CEO, “I want to thank you for finding this weakness in our system. Thanks to your actions, we can now learn from this, and fix the system, so something like this can’t happen in the future. Good work!”

    Then he left a visibly baffled John and an astounded IT department. That particular mistake never happened again.

    When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes.

    2: You don’t have to waste time on CYA (Cover Your Ass)

    Huge amounts of time and energy can be wasted in organizations on explaining why the mistakes that do happen are not my fault. This is pointless.

    3: When mistakes are celebrated, you strengthen creativity and innovation

    Randy Pausch, was a college professor who became famous after giving his “last lecture” when he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

    In his classes, Pausch would give out an award called The First Penguin to the team that took the greatest risk – and failed. The award is inspired by that one penguin out of a whole flock up on dry land who is the first to jump in the water, knowing full well that there may be predators just below the surface. That penguin runs a risk but if no one jumps in first, the whole flock will starve on land.

    And check out this sign that hangs in the offices of Menlo Innovations, an IT company in Ann Arbor, Michigan:

    Make mistakes faster

    Yep, it says “Make mistakes faster”. They know that mistakes are an integral part of doing anything cool and interesting and the sooner you can screw up, the sooner you can learn and move on.

    4: Failure often opens new doors

    Also, failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Closing your eyes to failure means closing your eyes to these opportunities.

    Just to give you one example: Robert Redford was once an oil worker – and not a very good one. He once fell asleep inside an oil tank he was supposed to clean. But failing at that, opened his way to movie stardom.

    5: When you celebrate mistakes, you make fewer mistakes

    I know that a lot of people stick to the old saw “Failure is not an option”. But guess, what no matter how many times you repeat this maxim, failure remains an option. Closing your eyes to this fact only makes you more likely to fail. Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because:

    • People who work under pressure are less effective
    • People resist reporting bad news
    • People close their eyes to signs of trouble

    This is especially true when it’s backed up with punishment of those who make mistakes.

    The upshot

    Peter Drucker provocatively suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting. Admitting that mistakes happen and celebrating them when they do, makes mistakes less likely.

    James Dyson says this:

    I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative…

    We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually.

    So my challenge to you is to start celebrating your failures. Next time you or someone on your team messes up, admit it, celebrate it and learn from it. Tackle the situation with humor (as Tony Hsieh did) rather than with fear and shame.

    Your take

    How does your workplace handle mistakes? Is it more like a celebration or a witch hunt? What has been your most spectacular screw-up at work so far? How did you handle it and what did you learn from it? Please write a comment, I’d like to hear your take.

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  • The top 5 new rules of productivity

    We all want to increase productivity and get more done with our working hours.

    There’s just one problem: Most people’s view of productivity comes from the industrial age. This leads to some fundamental misconceptions about work, including these:

    • If you work more hours, you get more work done.
    • Adding more people to a project means you can finish sooner.
    • Productivity is more or less constant and can be reliably predicted and scheduled.

    For knowledge workers, i.e. anyone who works with information rather than physically producing stuff, these beliefs are not only wrong, they’re actively harmful.

    So here is my suggestion for 5 new rules of productivity for knowledge workers.

    1: Productivity varies wildly from day to day. This is normal.

    In an industrial setting, production and output can be planned in advance barring accidents or equipment failure. Basically you know that if the plant operates for X hours tomorrow you’ll produce Y widgets.

    For knowledge workers you can’t possibly know in advance whether tomorrow will be a day where you:

    • Reach a brilliant insight that saves you and your team weeks of work.
    • Work tirelessly and productively for 12 hours.

    Or the day where you:

    • Spend 8 hours gazing dejectedly into your screen.
    • Introduce a mistake that will take days to find and fix.

    This variation is normal – if a little frustrating. It also means that you shouldn’t judge your productivity by the output on any given day but rather by your average productivity over many days.

    I have never seen this more clearly than when I was writing my first book. Some days I’d sit myself down in front of my laptop and find myself unable to string two words together. Some mornings I banged out most of a chapter in a few hours. Writing is a creative process. I can do it when I’m in the mood. Trying to write when I’m not, is a frustrating exercise in futility. On the days where I couldn’t write, I’d go do something else. Probably wakeboarding :)

    The result: I wrote the book in record time (a couple of months all told), the book turned out really well AND I enjoyed the writing process immensely.

    Three things you can do about this:

    1. Don’t make project plans based only on your maximum productivity days. Not every day will be like that. Base your schedules on your average productivity.
    2. Don’t beat yourself up on the low-productivity days. It’s normal, it’s part of the flow and these days have value too. I like to think that on these days, my subconscious mind is working on some really hairy complicated problem for which the solution will suddenly appear fully formed in my mind.
    3. If you do have a day where you get very little done, why not go home early and relax or get some private chores done?

    2: Working more hours means getting less done

    Whenever we fall behind, it’s tempting to start working overtime to catch up. Don’t! Instead, commit this graph to memory:

    Regular overwork decreases productivityIt comes from this excellent presentation on productivity. Read it!

    Here’s another data point:

    In 1991, a client asked me to conduct a study on the effects of work hours on productivity and errors…

    My findings were quite simply that mistakes and errors rose by about 10% after an eight-hour day and 28% after a 10-hour day…

    I also found that productivity decreased by half after the eighth hour of work. In other words, half of all overtime costs were wasted since it was taking twice as long to complete projects. After the study was done, a concerted effort was made to increase staffing.

    (Source)

    This may be counter-intuitive but it’s important to grasp: For knowledge workers there is no simple relationship between hours worked and output!

    Three things you can do about this:

    1. Don’t work permanent overtime. In fact, some studies indicate that knowledge workers are the most productive when they work 35 hours a week.
    2. Take breaks during the work day and make sure to take vacations.
    3. Experiment to find out what schedule works best for you. Five eight-hour days? Four longer days and a long weekend?

    3: Working harder means getting less done

    In an industrial environment, you can most often work harder and get more done. An increase in effort means an increase in productivity.

    For knowledge workers, the opposite is true. You can’t force creativity, eloquence, good writing, clear thinking or fast learning – in fact, working harder tends to create the opposite effect and you achieve much less.

    Three things you can do about this:

    1. Take the pressure off yourself and your team. Even if you make a mistake or miss a deadline the world probably isn’t going to end. Less pressure means higher productivity.
    2. Schedule a work load equivalent to only 80% of your work week. Trust me, you won’t be wasting your remaining 20% – but you will be more relaxed and more creative.
    3. In the words of Fred Gratzon: “If it feels like work, you’re doing it wrong”. If you find that most of what you do is a struggle, this is a sure sign that you are not at your most creative and productive.

    4: Procrastination can be good for you

    In an industrial setting, any time away from the production line is unproductive time – therefore all procrastination is bad. Search for procrastination on google and you’ll find a massive number of articles on how to stop procrastinating and get stuff done.

    They will tell you that there is only one reliable way to get stuff done:

    1. Check todo-list for next item
    2. Complete item no matter what it is
    3. Go to step 1

    They’ll tell you that if only you had enough willpower, backbone, self-control and discipline, this is how you would work too.

    Well guess what: Knowledge workers don’t work that way. Sometimes you’re in the mood for task X and doing X is ridiculously easy and a lot of fun. Sometimes doing X feels worse than walking barefoot over burning-hot, acid-covered, broken glass and forcing yourself to do it anyway is a frustrating exercise in futility.

    Sometimes procrastinating is exactly the right thing to do at a particular moment. This is largely ignored by the procrastination-is-a-sign-of-weakness, the-devil-finds-work-for-idle-hands crowd.

    Three things you can do about this:

    1. Procrastinate without guilt. Do not beat yourself up for procrastinating. Everybody does it once in a while. It doesn’t make you a lazy bastard or a bad person. If you leave a task for later, but spend all your time obsessing about the task you’re not doing, it does nothing good for you.
    2. Take responsibility, so that when you choose to procrastinate, you make sure to update your deadlines and commitments. Let people know, that your project will not be finished on time and give them a new deadline.
    3. Remember that “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted” (according to John Lennon).

    5: Happiness is the ultimate productivity enhancer

    The single most efficient way to increase your productivity is to be happy at work. No system, tool or methodology in the world can beat the productivity boost you get from really, really enjoying your work.

    I’m not knocking all the traditional productivity advice out there – it’s not that it’s bad or deficient. It’s just that when you apply it in a job that basically doesn’t make you happy, you’re trying to fix something at a surface level when the problem goes much deeper.

    Three things you can do about this:

    1. Get happy in the job you have. There are many things you can do to improve your work situation – provided you choose to do something, rather than wait for someone else to come along and do it for you.
    2. Remember to appreciate what is already good about your job. Often we forget, and overfocus on all the annoyances, problems and jerks. This is a natural tendency called negativity bias, but it also tends to keep us unhappy because we forget what works.
    3. If all else fails, find a new job where you can be happy. If your current job is not fixable, don’t wait – move on now!

    The upshot

    The industrial age view of productivity has serious limitations when applied to knowledge workers – but it remains the dominant view and still informs much of our thinking and many of our choices at work. Let’s change this!

    This is not without it’s challenges. The old view of productivity may no longer apply, but it does give managers an illusion of control and predictability. The new rules are… messy. Less predictable. They rely less on charts and graphs – and more on how people feel on any given day.

    It ultimately comes down to this: Do we want to stick with a model that is comforting and predictable but wrong or are we ready to face what REALLY works?

    Your take

    What about you? When are you the most productive? What is your optimal number of working hours per week? What stimulates or destroys your productivity? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.

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  • A note from the boss

    Note to new employees

    Imagine it’s your first day in a new job. You sit down at your desk for the first time, and waiting for you there is a note from your new boss.

    In the note your boss bids you a warm welcome to the company, and then says this:

    1: My most important priority is your happiness and productivity at work. If there’s anything I can do to make you happier and more efficient – tell me right away. This isn’t idealism, it’s good business, because happy people are more productive.

    2: I will not burden you with endless rules and regulations. You’re an adult – I trust you to use your best judgment.

    3: You have my full permission to screw up, as long as you own up to it, apologize to those affected and learn from it.

    4: Please tell me when I screw up so I can apologize and learn from it.

    5: Please make sure to hunt down people who do great work and praise them for it. I will do this as much as humanly possible, but I can’t do it alone.

    6: If I get it right occasionally, I’d love to hear about it from you, too :o)

    7: I will always have time for you. My calendar will never be so full that my next free time to talk to you is three weeks from next Friday.

    8: I want to know about you as an employee AND as a human being. I DO care about your private life, about your and your family’s health and well-being.

    9: Life is more than work. If you’re regularly working overtime, you’re just making yourself less happy and more stressed. Don’t join the cult of overwork – it’s bad for you and the company.

    10: I expect you to take responsibility for your own well-being at work. If you can do something today to make yourself, a co-worker or me a little happier at work – do it!

    This post was inspired by Michael Wade’s post over at ExecuPundit called Note from boss to employees. I liked his tips but I found the tone of them a little defensive. Michael’s tips had an undercurrent of “business is hard and being a leader is tough but we can slog it out together.”

    I disagree – work is great fun (or at least it could and should be).

    How would you like a note like this from your new boss?

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  • Five simple ways to STFU in meetings

    If there’s one problem that plagues most business meetings it’s that a few participants are doing most of the talking. If you’re one of those people who tend to talk a lot, here are 5 tips to help you shut up and listen when you need to.

    1: Put your hand over your mouth

    You can put one hand over the lower part of your face and your mouth. To an outside observer you will look thoughtful and observant. In reality your holding your mouth forcibly shut. It’s a simple physical reminder to yourself to not speak right now.

    2: Ask some great questions

    People find you very intelligent and persuasive when you let them talk. For instance, the most successful sales meetings are the ones where the customer does almost all the talking. A great way to get them talking, and still feel that you’re contributing, is to ask great questions.

    3: Keep track

    Have a piece of paper in front of you and make a mark on it every time you speak. Notice how many marks you get up to during a meeting.

    4: Notice how you feel when you’re quiet

    In my case, I get real antsy when there’s something I’m itching to say. My body tenses up, I tend to hold my breath and I feel generally very uncomfortable. This pressure eventually forces me to speak up.

    How about you – how do you feel when there’s something you really want to say?

    5: Ask yourself a simple question

    Before you speak, ask yourself this: “Is what I’m about to say something I need to say or something the other participants need to hear?” Those are often not the same.

    The upshot

    Remember: good meetings are not characterized by the amount of talking but by the amount of listening going on.

    If you’re a habitual talker like me, I’m sure that you will find that learning to say less and listen more will be a huge boon. People will find you more sympathetic, they will respect you more and even though you may end up saying less, what you do say will be received more appreciatively and have much more of an impact.

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