“You’d be amazed what happens once people are empowered to make decisions.”
Here’s a great article from CNN on how Denmark’s happiest workplace became so happy: they gave their employees freedom and responsibility.
This is the moment they won first place in the Danish Great Place to Work ranking:
Det lykkedes! Danmarks bedste arbejdsplads 2016. #dkfinans #GPTW_DK pic.twitter.com/yxgGjdYbDh
— MiddelfartSparekasse (@midspar) November 15, 2016
How do you best promote learning and development in a company?
As Chief Happiness Officer of the Czech IT company Avast, Michal created the Growshop – an internal academy where coworkers could teach each other relevant skills and share their passion.
Learn how he did it and how it made coworkers a little happier and smarter.
Call centers are notoriously tough workplaces.
But City Call Center in Copenhagen is different. Very different. They were recently named one of Denmark’s best workplaces in the Great Place to Work Survey and people love working here.
In this interview, their founder and CEO Pouline Mangaard explains how she has created the (nearly) impossible: A happy call center.
If you don’t have a good relationship with your manager, you will never be happy at work. But how can a workplace ensure that every employee has the right manager – someone they trust, like, respect and communicate well with?
London-based training company Happy have come up with a radical but simple solution: Let every employee pick their own manager.
That way, anyone who is not happy with their boss can simply pick a new one. Incidentally, bad bosses quickly find themselves without employees, eliminating that particular problem.
In this inspiring speech their founder Henry Stewart shares how they do it along with two other great practices that have made Happy so… happy :)
Michal Srajer, one of our Partners in Prague, is currently travelling the world and interviewing many different people for his podcast about happiness at work. His first interview was with me and you can hear it here.
His second podcast features Søren Lockwood, the CEO of SEB Pension in Denmark, who took his company of 300 serious financial professionals in dark suits through a transformation that has resulted in happier employees, lower absenteeism, happier customers and better results.
You can hear the podcast here:
https://soundcloud.com/happinesspodcast/02-happiness-at-seb-pension-with-soren-lockwood-ceo
Søren Lockwood also spoke at our conference this year in Copenhagen, where examined the classic question of whether you can prove that happiness at work is good for the bottom line. He gave the best answer EVER:
Complete this sentence: “When it rains, the price of umbrellas goes __.”
If you guessed up you’d be right in most places. But at IKEA stores, you’d be wrong.
Here’s how they price their umbrellas depending on the weather:
Yes, on rainy days, umbrellas are cheaper :o) What a nice way to make customers happy.
This is no coincidence – happiness matters at IKEA. Their founder, Ingvar Kamprad, once said this:
Work should always be fun for all colleagues. We all only have one life. A third of life is work. Without desire and fun, work becomes hell.
To me, this attitude only makes sense. Making your employees happy makes the business more profitable and making your customers happy keeps them coming back.
It ain’t rocket surgery, and fortunately more and more companies are figuring this out and committing themselves to happiness at work.
This is just too cool: Every month, financial-services company Motley Fool selects a random employee who gets 2 weeks off and $1,000. Their mission is to spend those two weeks on whatever they want with zero contact with the office.
They do this to show employees that it’s OK to balance work and life and not overwork yourself to death.
Genius!
This CEO has a cheeky (and awesome) 45-second answer to the question “Can you prove that happiness at work improves business results?”
If only all CEOs shared his thinking :)
PS: The video has subtitles in English. If you don’t see them, press the cc button in the video player.
I’m currently in Chile to do 2 speeches for Transbank, a credit card transaction company that is already #1 on Chile’s Great Place to Work ranking.
After my first speech, Christian Castro of Transbank sent me this video to show me a woman here in Chile, who is clearly very happy at work :)
I’m speaking at Transbank’s annual employee retreat. This year, to really recognize the importance of emotions at work, they’ve themed the event after Pixar’s awesome Inside Out movie.
I quickly grabbed the chance to dress up as my favorite character from Inside Out:
Happiness at work starts from the top. This is one of the fundamental truths of happy workplaces.
In any organization where people consistently love to work, you will find a CEO and executive leadership team that places employee happiness among their top strategic priorities and act accordingly.
One of our favorite examples of a CEO who truly gets this is Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines (since retired), who put it like this:
When I started out, business school professors liked to pose a conundrum: Which do you put first, your employees, your customers, or your shareholders? As if that were an unanswerable question.
My answer was very easy: You put your employees first. If you truly treat your employees that way, they will treat your customers well, your customers will come back, and that’s what makes your shareholders happy.
So there is no constituency at war with any other constituency. Ultimately, it’s shareholder value that you’re producing.
If, on the other hand, you have top brass who don’t give a damn about anything but the bottom line and their own bonuses and stock options, I can flat-out guarantee that you will create an organization with very little happiness but with a lot of fear, stress and frustration. And, ironically, with poor bottom line results.
So top executives MUST make employee happiness one of their most important goal. Both because it’s the right thing to do for the sake of their people, but also because it will actually make the company more successful. Studies consistently show that happy workplaces make more money.
But how does a CEO or top executive practice this on a daily basis? What can they do to make their organization happier?
Here are 10 great real-life examples that we’ve seen work really well in workplaces around the world.
During a speech in Istanbul, I met an executive of a huge Turkish organization who has had a monthly lunch with 10 randomly picked employees for years now. Every month 10 employees get a chance to have a nice lunch and over the course of a couple of hours get to ask any question they want and air any concerns or complaints.
They also get a chance to meet him in an informal setting and get a sense of who he is as a person.
Some CEOs enjoy doing little random things to surprise and delight their staff. Here’s an example from Medis, one of our clients in Iceland, where the CEO decided to make fresh pancakes and waffles for anyone passing by.
He even had a great time himself:
I thoroughly enjoyed it – the biggest joy I actually got out of observing the reaction of the colleagues !
FYI we did not announce anything but simply showed up in the corridor without notice and took people pleasantly by surprise.
The Danish Competition and Consumer Authority is a government agency whose 200 employees work to enforce consumer regulations and keep markets competitive.
Every month they have a breakfast meeting where important information is shared with all employees. At this meeting, the director Agnete always shares 2-3 successes that the organization has had since the last meeting. She’ll highlight how they’ve completed a big project or won a court case and make sure that the people who worked on that are recognized and celebrated.
One CEO we know had a strong desire to receive all bad news as soon as possible. He knew bad things happened (they do in all workplaces) but he also knew that some employees were to afraid of reprisals to come out and directly say that they might miss a deadline or have to disappoint a client.
So he has trained himself and his managers to always receive bad news with a smile and a phrase like “Thank you for telling me that.” This took some practice.
That way bad news come out early and can be dealt with before it turns into a disaster.
One fast-growing company of ours has a tradition where the CEO hosts a monthly afternoon tea at his home for all new hires that month.
It’s a completely informal gathering that serves two functions: He gets to meet all the new people and get a sense of who they are and he takes some time to talk about the company’s history and vision which is a powerful way to show the new hires the values and purpose of the organization.
South African social media agency Quirk has a process in place that encourages employees to bring about any problems they see to the attention of the executive team. The process gives all employees a voice and guarantees action from the executives in two weeks at the most.
You can read about their process here.
Here is a letter that US vice president Joe Biden sent to his staff in 2014:
He explicitly tells them that it’s OK to prioritize important family events over work. Appreciating staff and giving them time for family makes them happier – and happy staff are more productive. It also combats the ubiquitous cult of overwork.
Carsten and Karsten, two sales managers at Danish company Solar, wanted to do something nice for their employees.
Early one Monday morning, they stood at the entrance and greeted every employee with a cheerful “good morning” and a breakfast they could take to their desks.
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.
In many workplaces, employees who do good work are rarely recognized but anyone who makes a mistake is immediately and harshly punished. This is dumb.
When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes. And that’s why top executives should help employees celebrate mistakes.
As an example, IT company Menlo Innovations in Michigan has this banner hanging in their office:
The execs wrapped up at 6 in the evening and Ingvar then took a stroll through the entire store as if this was the most natural thing in the world, kindly greeting each and every employee. He encountered two female employees talking to each other and approached them with a smile and the words: “And what are you two lovely ladies talking about?” – following up with big hugs for both of them.
I love this because it shows a genuine interest in the employees and because Kamprad is clearly happy himself and not afraid to show it.
We know from psychological studies that emotions are contagious and top leaders can spread a lot of happiness simply by being happy themselves.
This list is by no means exhaustive and it’s definitely not meant to be prescriptive. We’re not saying all executives should do these things.
What we are saying is that top executives play a huge role in creating happy workplaces. They do this in the big stuff – by making sure that the strategies, plans, goals and values they set for the organization are defined with the employees’ well-being in mind.
But they also do it in small, daily, interpersonal ways where they can show that they genuinely care about their people, can build relationships with employees and can let employees see them as real human beings.
However, this can only work under a few conditions:
Understanding this and acting on it gives the executives in a workplace huge leverage to make their employees feel valued professionally and personally – thus increasing happiness, engagement and motivation as well as productivity.
Not doing this – and let’s face facts, most executives don’t – means failing your employees, your customers and your investors.
Do you think executives should care about the happiness of their employees? Do the executives in your workplace honestly care about their people? How do they show it / not show it?
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.
