The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy companies

  • 10 simple things the CEO can do to create a happy workplace

    10 simple things the CEO can do to create a happy workplace

    happy org chart

    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.

    10: Regular lunches with employees

    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.

    9: Random acts of workplace kindness

    medis 1

    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.

    8: Celebrate accomplishments

    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.

    7: Encourage bad news

    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.

    6: Meet with new employees

    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.

    5: Solve problems

    Overall Board

    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.

    4: Give employees time for family

    Here is a letter that US vice president Joe Biden sent to his staff in 2014:

    biden

     

    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.

    3: Say good morning

    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.

    2: Celebrate mistakes

    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:

    Make mistakes faster

    1: Walk the halls and meet people


    One day, the IKEA store in Gentofte, Denmark was a hive of activity. Not only was there a European executive meeting taking place, but the company founder, Ingvar Kamprad himself, was in the house. That’ll make most employees straighten up and put in a little extra effort.

    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.

    The point

    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:

    1. It must flow from a genuine care for the employees. If the CEO doesn’t honestly care about her employees, she shouldn’t try to fake it. But I’ve always said that if you don’t care about people, you have no business leading them.
    2. Executives must WANT to do things to make employees happier. It’s OK to go a little outside of your comfort zone but if you do things you actively hate, that fact will shine through and it probably won’t work.
    3. Actions must match words. You can’t on the one hand make pancakes or hug employees and on the other hand introduce large-scale organizational changes with no regard for how employees feel. They will see right through that.
    4. Consistency over the long term is mandatory. If you do this for a short while or only do it some of the time, it will be recognized as fake.

    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.

    Your take

    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?

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  • IKEA UK voluntarily raises wages for lowest-paid workers

    IKEA UK voluntarily raises wages for lowest-paid workers

    This announcement from Pernille Hagild, Ikea’s HR Manager in the UK and Ireland, is beyond awesome:

    We will adopt the Living Wage (as defined by the Living Wage Foundation) from the 1 April 2016. This means all our co-workers across the UK will receive a minimum of £7.85 per hour and £9.15 per hour within London. The Living Wage is a hot topic in the press at the moment so we feel it’s important to explain why we have made this decision.

    Ikea has seen that the UK minimum wage of GBP 6.75 is too low to allow many of their employees to live well and have therefore decided to voluntarily raise salaries to follow the recommendations of the Living Wage Foundation.

    Why? Because Ikea’s values are not only about doing good for the customer but also extend to the employees. Pernille puts it like this:

    Ikea is a values-driven company. We are guided by a vision “to create a better everyday life for the many people” and this vision includes our co-workers as much as our customers and the communities touched by our business. Providing a meaningful wage to all of our co-workers, that supports their cost of living, is an important part of our values which are fundamental to who we are.

    Of course this is not cheap:

    The initial £7.5million investment is a big one for us and will benefit over half of our co-workers here in the UK. We have been discussing this for the past year and the thought behind our decision is pretty simple: it is the core of our values to treat people equally and decently. We believe in paying a fair wage for all co-workers regardless of how old they are and that also takes into account where they live.

    Will it make employees happier?

    It does however raise the question of whether this will make employees happier. Do salaries matter?

    Here’s what we think: Wages have the power to make us unhappy if we perceive them to be unfair or if they are so low that we spend a lot of time and energy worrying about our finances.

    Once salaries reach the point where they are fair and allow us to live comfortably, further raises do not increase happiness.

    This move specifically addresses those issues and can take away much potential unhappiness for many of Ikea’s employees.

    That being said, it’s also noteworthy that Ikea UK does this voluntarily and out of a genuine desire to improve their employees’ lives. This means that the move might have an actual positive effect beyond just reducing financial unhappiness because it strengthens the relationship between employees and employer, by showing that the company cares about them.

    It’ll be really interesting to see how this plays out.

    I love everything about this. I strongly believe that if your business can’t afford to pay the employees a living wage, then you don’t deserve to be in business.

    The fact that Ikea is a long-term client of ours and that Pernille Hagild is a friend of mine who helped introduce a similar move in Ikea Denmark years ago only makes it MORE awesome :)

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  • How Toyota Gothenburg moved to a 30-hour workweek and boosted profits and customer satisfaction

    The video has English subtitles. If you don’t see them, press the  subtitles button in the video.

    Could a 30-hour workweek work?

    It not only could, for the mechanics at Toyota Center in Gothenburg Sweden it has worked incredibly well for over 10 years, leading to happier employees, happier customers and higher growth and profits.

    In this short 13-minute speech, CEO Martin Banck of Toyota Center Gothenburg explains why they made the transition from a 40-hour workweek to 30 and what the results have been.

    One outcome: Their mechanics now get more work done in 30 hours a week, than other mechanics do in 40. Not only is productivity higher (which you would certainly expect), their actual total output is higher!

    In fact, several workplaces in Sweden are now trying it out, including hospitals and nursing homes.

    I fully realize that many people are going to dismiss this out of hand. They are stuck in the cult of overwork and totally committed to the idea that working more hours always means getting more work done, even though the research shows that permanent overwork leads to poor health and low performance.

    It seems counter-intuitive that you could work fewer hours and get more done, but here’s another example:

    One executive, Doug Strain, the vice chairman of ESI, a computer company in Portland Oregon, saw the link between reduced hours for some and more jobs for others. At a 1990 focus group for CEOs and managers, he volunteered the following story:

    When demand for a product is down, normally a company fires some people and makes the rest work twice as hard. So we put it to a vote of everyone in the plant. We asked them what they wanted to do: layoffs for some workers or thirty-two-hour workweeks for everyone. They thought about it and decided they’d rather hold the team together. So we went down to a thirty-two-hour-a-week schedule for everyone furing a down time. We took everybody’s hours and salary down – executives too.

    But Strain discovered two surprises.

    First, productivity did not decline. I swear to God we get as much out of them at thirty-two hours as we did at forty. So it’s not a bad business decision. But second, when economic conditions improved, we offered them one hundred percent time again. No one wanted to go back!

    Never in our wildest dreams would our managers have designed a four-day week. But it’s endured at the insistence of our employees.

    We need to fundamentally change how we think about time in the workplace and Toyota Gothenburg is a great example to learn from.

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  • Being a human at work

    Any workplace that fosters and celebrates this kind of behavior in their people is OK by us.

    Watch this video and ask yourself if an employee who did something similar in your workplace would be encouraged or punished.

  • Two simple ways to surprise and delight your staff

    Innocent Drinks want to surprise and delight their staff. Learn about two hilarious ways they’ve done that: Sexy Powersuit Day and The Lift of Loooooove.

    Learn more about happiness at Innocent Drinks here.

  • Book review: Everybody Matters by Bob Chapman

    em-cover

    This is simply one of the best new business books I’ve read in a LONG time.

    What if you ran your organization based on actually, genuinely caring for every single person in it? How would that inform strategy and leadership and how would it affect employees and the bottom line?

    Bob Chapman’s leadership at Barry Wehmiller shows what that looks like and it is amazing.

    Barry Wehmiller is essentially in the business of buying struggling production companies around the world and making them happier and more productive by introducing their processes and culture. They have 8,000 employees in 100 locations around the world in a large variety of businesses and they’re profitable and growing fast.

    In this short speech, Bob Chapman explains their leadership philosophy:

    The book contains a ton of powerful lessons that any workplace could learn from, but for me, these were the 2 most powerful things in the book.

    1: Performance focus – with people first.
    Of course the company cares about performance, but they realize that people come first. Chapman shares the story of what happened when a lean consultant came to do a presentation:

    We scheduled a kickoff meeting in Green Bay with a group of senior leaders to learn about Lean and begin our continuous-improvement journey.

    On the first afternoon, a consultant gave an opening presentation on Lean. After forty-five minutes, I stood up and walked out of the room in frustration. The presentation was all about justifying bringing Lean tools into an organization because they help add to the bottom line and get more out of people. “This will help you get more out of people.”

    That’s when I left the room.

    Brian followed nervously after me, glancing back to see if the presenter was still speaking.

    “So, what’s going on?”

    With fire in my voice, I said, “Brian, we are never going to have a Lean journey like that in our organization. We are not going to suck the life out of people and take advantage of them in that way. We are going to build a Lean culture focused on people or we’re not going to do it at all.”

    I had made it clear that our version of Lean was to be about people.

    Too many CEOs would never even catch that. They are steeped in the idea that results come first and processes like Lean are used as a tool for that purpose.

    At Barry Wehmiller, Lean has become a tool to make work more fun and meaningful for the employees. And that in turn drives better results, than a direct results focus.

    2: No layoffs
    Your values are tested in hard times. It’s a lot easier to be nice and appreciative and people focused when the business is profitable but when revenue takes a hit and your company is losing money that’s when you get a chance to show if you take your values seriously of if they’re just pretty words that you don’t really mean.

    In the book’s most interesting chapter (for me at least) Chapman discusses what happened when the recession hit them in 2008. They lost a large amount of business and were faced with massive pressure from their bank to cut costs.

    Most companies around the world would not hesitate for a second before enacting layoffs. It’s just what you do, despite the fact that evidence shows it’s actually bad for business.

    Chapman instead worked hard to come up with a plan that would ensure the company’s survival without laying off a single person – which they did.

    The upshot

    I HIGHLY recommend this book. It’s a great read and shares not only a great business case but also Chapman’s personal story which is interesting in itself.

    The book shows that happy workplaces can exist in any industry (even production) and that you can systematically transform bad, failing workplaces into happy successful ones. Provided you do so with some good structure, great leadership and the basic idea that people deserve to be treated well at work.

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  • Welcome. Coffee?

    2015-08-06 11.00.05

    This is not a coffee shop – this is the reception at one of our clients in Denmark.

    They can greet you, get you a visitor’s badge and notify the employee your meeting with. And while you wait for them to come meet you, they can also whip up an excellent cappuccino or a flat white.

    Employees can also have informal meetings in the café and buy coffee cheaply using their ID cards or an app on their phones.

    I saw something similar at the Coca-Cola HQ in Atlanta.

    I like this kind of thing because it breaks down the formality of the reception area and makes it more welcoming and interesting. It gives visitors a better first impression and provides employees with a more relaxed setting.

    Does your workplace have something similar?

  • Tim Dorsett: Top 10 Tips from Innocent Drinks

    Tim Dorsett: Top 10 Tips from Innocent Drinks

    Last week we had our annual conference on happiness at work and it went insanely well.

    As always we will share the speeches online and here’s the first one. Tim Dorsett works at Innocent Drinks. His titel is Office MANgel and his job is to make sure that people at Innocent Drinks do great work and go home happy.

    In his inspiring presentation he shares the top 10 things he’s done to make sure that happen.

  • Herb Kelleher: I think people should have fun at work

    I stumbled on this interview with Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines and it is all kinds of awesome.

    From the interview:

    Well, I think people should have fun at work. It should be an enjoyable part of their life. They should gain psychic satisfaction from it.

    I think most of us enjoy fun, and why not at work as well as at play? And so we’ve always encouraged people to be themselves, not to be robotic, not to be automatons. We don’t expect you to surrender your natural personality when you join Southwest Airlines. We want you to have some fun, we want you to have psychic satisfaction from your job. It’s not just about money, it’s also how you feel about what you’re doing.

    We want people to be recognized, participated, diligent and creative. And you can’t ask people to be someone other than themselves and have that kind of creativity and dedication and participation. So, we liberate people at work.

    Go see the whole thing.

  • The CEO who made pancakes

    From the workshop

    A few weeks ago I did a workshop for a pharmaceutical company in Iceland called Medis as part of their 30 year anniversary and strategy kick-off. As you can see, they kinda liked it :) The guy in the front row in the blue suit is their CEO Valur Ragnarsson.

    Now, as we all know a workshop itself changes nothing so we always work with our clients to come up with a plan that will actually make a difference in the workplace. As part of that plan, I challenged Valur to come up with something he could do that would be fun, easy and visible – just to show people that he is committed to creating a happy workplace.

    And a few days later he sent me these pics where he’s making fresh waffles and pancakes for his employees:

    medis 1

    medis 3medis 2What an awesome idea :)

    I asked Valur how he liked the experience and here’s what he said:

    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 bysurprise….. now it will boil down to a plan and team supporting this (which we have in place already btw).

    The only problem was that the smoke alarm kept going off, so they had to temporarily disable it :)

    medis 4

    Well done, Valur!

    Just to be clear: We’re not saying that you can turn an unhappy workplace into a happy one, by having the CEO make pancakes :)

    What we’re saying is that upper management can support the process of creating a happy workplace by doing something fun and unexpected that shows employees that they are committed to the goal and willing to go a little bit outside of their comfort zone.