It was written in Danish, so unless you’re Danish, you would not have seen it – but you definitely should, so here is my translation of the key parts:
We do not have a goal of retaining employees! Instead, we focus on creating happiness at work and thus make people want to stay.
In Arbejdernes Landsbank, we make an effort to make it fun to go to work!
This is a prerequisite for succeeding with our ambitions for employees, the customer experience and, not least, strengthening the bank’s position.
For me, the most important success criterion is “Taking responsibility and doing the right thing”!
This requires that we do not just lend a helping hand as leaders. But that we also make an effort to make it easy to do the right thing for our employees.
When this succeeds, work makes sense.
And that makes people want to stay!
In Arbejdernes Landsbank, several years ago, we did away with meaningless target metric regimes. Instead, we focus on what effort we should make for each other and for the customers!
Why? Because it creates the right conditions for us to always put the customer at the center – and deliver the attentive and competent advice that customers should expect.
Close to 50% of new hires in the sector are gone after five years. Unfortunately, these are facts in yesterday’s article in FinansWatch with Finansforbundet as a source.
In my view, this is not an employee problem. It is a management responsibility – which we have already taken to heart!
Let’s once and for all drop retention as a focus area but instead focus on making it worth it to stay. This means that we automatically show up with positive energy and courage for the changes we need to succeed with.
It is no coincidence that customers have chosen us as the Danes’ preferred bank for 16 years in a row!
When employees are thriving, customers can feel it.
Do you also seek a workplace with the right focus on your well-being and development Please contact me on or visit our website for vacancies.
How awesome is this. No performance metrics, just a focus on helping customers and coworkers. No direct focus on retention, just a focus on making employees happy. Kudos, Jonas.
Here’s another detail I liked: Jonas’ LinkedIn profile lists his title as “Regionsdirektør I Mennesket først!” which translates to “Regional Director of Humans first!”
I was invited onto a podcast called Mindful Management and I really love the conversation we ended up having about happiness at work. You can watch the whole thing here.
Last week I attended the annual conference on happiness at work here in Copenhagen and as usual it was a fantastic day with some great talks by researchers in the field and people from some of Denmark’s happiest workplaces who shared how they do it in practice.
One of the overall themes this year was how to stay focused at work or in broader terms, how to make a brain-friendly workplace.
That’s an important theme. I don’t know about you but I feel increasingly distracted these days. It’s become harder and harder for me to stay focused on whatever I’m doing and not succumb to the temptation of pulling out my phone and scroll social media, news or other sites. Reddit is my biggest vice! Or YouTube. Probably both!
The central misunderstanding
The speakers offered a lot of suggestions for this issue but some of it missed the mark a little bit.
For instance, one speaker referenced research that showed that smelling rosemary helped a person maintain focus longer. Other similar advice included:
Go for a walk
Look at nature
Stare at a fixed point without moving your eyes for 2 minutes
Be physically active
Look at something beautiful
Each of these are probably great, but here’s my problem with this type of solution: It takes what is most likely a workplace problem and makes it an employee problem.
Let’s say a lot of employees in the workplace find it hard to maintain focus. Before we start pumping rosemary or other scents into the office (yes, this is actually a thing) we should probably ask WHY employees are so easily distracted. Here are some common problems I often see:
Processes and workflows are inefficient or unclear
Meetings take up significant portions of everyone’s workweek
Everyone is overworked and the ensuing stress is making it hard to focus.
Employees find their tasks meaningless because no one has ever told them why their work makes a difference.
Employees feel overlooked because no one ever appreciates their good work.
Bosses micromanage their employees making them feel completely disinterested in their work.
People are constantly interrupted and are expected to respond instantly to every email, text message or call.
I promise you, if any of these is the problem (and it might even be several of them or all of them) then sniffing rosemary is going to do very little to improve focus and concentration.
In fact, telling employees to fix their own focus issues with rosemary might make things worse because it take something that is a workplace problem (the workplace is treating employees badly) and makes it an individual problem that employees must fix themselves.
This can serve to absolve management from their mistreatment and shift the blame and responsibility onto employees themselves.
Why this does not work in isolation
And it’s important to point out that this individual approach does not work. I did a video with Louise Lambert where we talk about a huge British study that looked at the effectiveness of individual-level workplace interventions like stress trainings or yoga classes and concludes that they do not make employees any happier.
Of course, there are ways for each of us to boost our own concentration and we should each figure out what works for us and do that.
Personally, I find I need structure and overview to function well. Nothing drains my focus faster than a vague sense that there is some task somewhere that I’ve forgotten to do and someone is waiting for. I also need to know that my work matters and that everything I do makes a difference.
That’s why I need an organized calendar, a clear email inbox and a comprehensive to do-list. Without these, I would get nothing done.
I also take into account my daily rhythms. I find that I am much more creative in the mornings, so I save those times for writing, thinking and planning ahead. It is 9:37 as I write this sentence. I use the afternoons for everything else like meetings, emails, etc.
These are just some of the things that I’ve found over the years help me stay focused and productive. What works for you? Write a comment, I’d love to know.
BUT!!! You could use every focus hack in existence and it still wouldn’t work if the real problem is a micromanaging toxic boss or stress caused by an overwhelming workload.
And that’s my problem with many of the workplace happiness approaches I see speakers and experts promote. It goes for individual solutions to systemic problems.
What to do instead
So what should we do instead? Many of the speakers at the Happiness At Work Conference offered specific solutions that they’ve used in their workplaces.
My favorite examples was the Danish law firm Molt Wengel. Their CEO Anne Katrine Schjønning explained that they have gone through a 6-month long process to redesign how they work.
This was their mission:
”We want to look forward to going to work and at Molt Wengel we believe that we can create a work life where where we end the work day with more energy than when et began.”
Specifically they:
Focused on making the work meaningful to each employee so everyone knows why their work is important
Redesigned their workflow to make it more clear and efficient
Created well-defined roles in projects so everyone can work to their strengths
Work in sprints to create focus and a clear sense of progress
Use the pomodoro technique to create periods of uninterrupted focus time
This has worked so well that they now work fewer hours and still get more work done than before. The company has also massively increased revenue and profits.
Astonishingly, they are now so efficient that they can all start their weekends at noon on Fridays so everyone has an extra half day off every week. If you know law firms, you know just how uncommon this is.
And I think this is the way to go. Let’s look at HOW we work together in order to boos focus and concentration and minimize interruptions and distractions.
Another speaker at the conference was Michael Hedemann who works in HR at Middelfart Sparekasse, a Danish bank that has ranked among Denmark’s best workplaces for 20 years. One of their specific initiatives was to encourage all employees to turn off email and Teams notifications on their computers as well as all notifications on their phones. He told me that the only thing that pops up on his phone to interrupt his workflow are actual phone calls.
That’s how you do it.
Some specific ideas
Here are some other specific ways to make our workplaces more focused and productive:
If he workplace is not willing to do any of this, shifting the burden of responsibility onto employees is never going to work.
The upshot
Yes, we are all finding it harder to focus – both at work and in our private lives. We can all blame the increasingly addictive nature of social media or the faster pace of the modern world or the increasing political insecurity in the world, but either way, the problem is real.
But addressing it in the workplace requires addressing any systemic issues at work that sap our concentration. If course it would be easier to just tell employees to go for a walk but that is, at best, a band-aid and at worst a way for the company to shirk its responsibility and shift the responsibility onto the employees.
Fortunately, there are companies that have cracked this already and it turns out that these steps are not just great for helping employees be more focused they also boost productivity and the bottom line.
Your take
What is your best focus hack? Or conversely, what destroys your focus and concentration at work? What has your workplace done to help people work with more focus? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.
This is brilliant. Herb Kelleher, the legendary CEO who made Southwest Airlines a huge success, explicitly says that leadership should not be about control but about creating an environment where people truly participate. THAT is not only the kind of leadership that makes people happy at work it is also the kind of leadership that sets people free to innovate and go above and beyond for the company.
You can think what you want about Trump’s tariffs. Is it a genius 4-D chess move or a colossal blunder based on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics?
Whatever your opinion, no one can deny that the tariffs have led to massive uncertainty in workplaces all over the world. Stock prices are cratering. Some countries are implementing counter-tariffs. Companies like Volkswagen have paused all exports to the US and announced layoffs.
On the one hand, this is absolutely a tough situation for many workplaces around the world in all kinds of industries. On the other hand, instability and uncertainty have become more the norm than the exception here in the 21st century where it feels like the business world lurches from one massive crisis to the next: The dot-com bust, the financial crisis, Covid and now this.
Even if the tariffs have now been postponed, are you willing to bet that there won’t come a new disruption to businesses again soon? Or maybe several in a row?
Which raises the question: How does a company best weather a storm?
And it’s clear what companies normally do: Slash costs and lay off staff. Until the crisis is over and the numbers look more reassuring, all talk of being a good workplace is put on hold and no jobs are safe.
The economic downturn we may be entering is setting off alarm bells and panicked responses in many leaders. If you can keep your head on straight, you have a unique chance to steer clear of three classic blunders that many of your competitors are planning to commit.
Blunder #1: “Times are tough, so we’re cutting back on all expenses on employees!”
You start by decimating the education budget and then you continue by cutting social events, the free coffee, and everything else that is seen as “superfluous luxuries.”
A Danish company decided to cancel the annual company Christmas party due to tough times. They saved about 100 bucks per employee, but it cost them dearly – very dearly – in hassle, negativity and trouble from employees who had been looking forward to the party. It is not difficult to calculate how much money the company saves by cancelling a party or the free coffee. But have you calculated what it might cost?
And if you are forced to save money, it does not have to be worse because it is cheaper. Accenture Denmark had a tough year in 2003 and was forced to rethink the annual company summer party. Normally it was a big affair held at some fancy restaurant or hotel. That was completely out of the question in 2003, so what could you do?
They held the party in the office instead and had the brilliant idea of having the company’s partners (i.e. co-owners) staff the bar. At first, the partners weren’t very keen on it. They were known more for their long work hours, dark suits, and business manners than for their abilities as party animals.
The party committee cornered a few senior partners and got their support, which convinced the others to give it a try. The party was a hit! Not only was it more fun than traditional parties, but suddenly the partners were available to all the employees who could just go up to the bar and order a gin and tonic from them. The employees loved it and, perhaps most surprisingly, the partners loved it. They had to be forced out of the bar when their shift was over!
So it can actually be an advantage to have to save money – as long as you put good ideas and creativity into making sure that it is still fun for your employees to go to work.
Crisis blunder #2: Layoffs
The other classic crisis blunder is mass layoffs. In the early 2000s Southwest Airlines was the third largest airline in the world and the most profitable. After September 11, 2001, the entire travel industry was extremely hard hit, and many airlines quickly laid off 20% of their staff.
This presented Southwest with a challenge. They had never had a mass layoff in the company’s history, and they would go to great lengths to avoid one. Top management held an emergency meeting at their headquarters in Dallas, where they drank buckets of coffee and analyzed potential cost-cutting plans. They first scrapped a number of growth plans, deliveries of new aircraft and a renovation of the headquarters. But they rejected any idea of mass layoffs.
Their then-CEO James F. Parker said, “We are willing to suffer damage, even to the stock price, to protect the jobs of our employees.” The result was that Southwest was the only airline in the industry to emerge from 2001 with a profit. At the same time, they created an unprecedented level of loyalty, motivation and job satisfaction among their employees, which continues to give them a competitive advantage.
Frederick Reicheld confirms this line of thinking in his book The Loyalty Effect, where he states, among other things, that mass layoffs “only deepen the crisis. They destroy employee trust, repel customers, and slow down growth.”
Southwest Airlines has since turned into a poor example. A capital fund bought a significant number of shares in the company, put their representatives on the board of directors and have now forced the company to do their first layoffs ever with totally predictable results: Employee engagement is gone and even many loyal customers are abandoning the airline.
In many companies, it’s a pure reflex: The crisis is coming, so they get rid of some people and cut back on everything that’s fun. It feels really good here and now because it gives the illusion of action, but in the long run it hurts the company’s competitiveness and the bottom line.
In this video I go over all the research on why layoffs actually make a company take longer to recover from a crisis.
Of course, sometimes a company is in such dire straits that layoffs are unavoidable. Then what do you do?
Hal Rosenbluth had made a provocative decision: As CEO of Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency employing 6.000 people, he decided that his company would put the employees first. Where other companies aim first to satisfy customers or investors, Rosenbluth made it their first priority to make their employees happy.
The results were fantastic. Record growth, record profits and, most importantly, customers raved about the service they got from Rosenbluth’s happy employees. Hal Rosenbluth explained the company’s approach in a book whose title elegantly sums up his philosophy: “Put The Customer Second – Put Your People First And Watch’em Kick Butt”.
A company’s commitment to its values is most thoroughly tested in adversity and Rosenbluth hit its share of adversity right after 9/11. Overnight, corporate travel was reduced to a fraction of its former level and it recovered more slowly than anyone predicted.
Rosenbluth tried everything in their power to avoid layoffs. They cut expenses. Staff took pay cuts and so did managers and executives. But in the end they had to face it: Layoffs were inevitable and they decided to fire 1.000 out their 6.000 employees. How do you handle this situation in a company that puts its people first?
In his book’s most moving chapter, an epilogue written after 9/11, Hal Rosenbluth explains that though layoffs don’t make employees happy, not doing the layoffs and then going bankrupt at a later date would have made even more people even more unhappy.
Hal Rosenbluth recounts how he wrote a letter to the organization explaining the decision and the thinking behind it in detail. The result was amazing: People who’d been laid off streamed into Hal’s office, many in tears, telling him they understood and thanking him for their time at the company.
Rosenbluth’s letter also contained a pledge: That those remaining at the company would do everything they could to bring the company back on track so they could rehire those who’d been laid off. Six months later, they’d hired back 500 out of the 1.000 and the company was solidly on its way to recovery.
Blunder #3: Giving up on employee happiness
Crisis blunder number 3 is very simple: Giving up. Many people believe that when a crisis hits a company, it becomes impossible to create job satisfaction.
Don’t fall into that trap. It’s precisely when a crisis hits that your company needs everyone to do their best, and studies document that happy employees are more innovative, efficient, loyal, and motivated. So cut back on everything else, but don’t cut back on employee happiness.
Of course it’s easier to be happy when everything is going swimmingly, but people can still be happy at work in a crisis. It takes determination and focus, but it can be done. Surprisingly, a crisis can make people happy at work, provided that it becomes a reason for people to focus and pull together – rather than an excuse to give up.
How do we create employee happiness in a crisis?
Economist Paul Romer has wisely said that “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Companies that can maintain their focus on employee happiness in hard times can not only weather a storm better, they can come out of tough times stronger and with even higher levels of productivity, innovation and employee engagement.
1: Create and maintain positive workplace relationships
Good workplace relationships are the foundation of happiness at work and in hard times we need more than ever to feel that the people we work with see us, support us and care about us.
We know from a tremendous amount of research than when people feel alone and isolated, it really hurts their mental health, happiness and resilience.
So in hard times it is especially important for managers to take time to check in with their employees, listen to them, help them and generally show them that they are valued.
2: Appreciate employees for the great work they do
In tough times, individual employees and teams are still doing their best and working hard. Company results are down because of the latest global crisis, not because of a lack of effort from employees.
And managers should recognize those efforts and clearly
If employees experience that their hard work goes unnoticed and unappreciated because the company is not achieving its financial goals (due to the market, not due to their work), they quickly lose all motivation and pride in their work.
3: Communicate, communicate, communicate
Employees deserve to know exactly what’s going on – the good and the bad. Leadership
That’s exactly what they did at Xilinx when they were facing the company’s biggest crisis ever.
CEO Wim Roelandts organized meetings with his entire management staff and the managers below them as well. He knew, that when employees had questions, they wouldn’t come to him or the VPs, they would come to the managers closest to them, so it was important that they knew what was happening and remained optimistic.
This is not easy, as Wim readily admits. “I didn’t know any more than anybody else what was coming and so the tendency is to close your office door and don’t talk to anybody because if you talk with someone, they can ask questions that you don’t know the answers to.
But that’s actually the wrong thing to do, you have to get out there. You have to talk with people and even more important you have to force your management to get out and talk, talk to people, tell them when you don’t know but also tell them all the things you know and good friend to give people some hope that things will get better soon.”
Incidentally, these types of events also help maintain workplace relationships because they give people a chance to connect and talk openly.
The upshot
Every single company in the world is going to face tough times. And not just once but again and again.
And when that happens, most companies fall into crisis mode and abandon all attempts to be good workplaces.
This is a mistake. Not only does that hurt employees, research shows that it actually makes the company recover more slowly. Or not at all. Losing employee loyalty and innovation can absolutely kill a workplace.
The best workplaces on the other hand find a way to keep employees happy and productive in tough times and they can not only survive a crisis, they can emerge stronger, more profitable and with more loyal and engaged employees than before the crisis.
That’s what happened at Xilinx. I asked CEO Wim Roelandty what his proudest moment in the whole process was and he said that one day, about two years after the crisis when Xilinx was back on track, Wim was just arriving at the office when he was approached by a female employee who happened to arrive at the same time.
She told him this story:
“My husband got laid off and so yesterday evening we had a family meeting with the children. We had to tell them that their father had been laid off and that we had to do some savings and had to be very careful how we spend money, to make sure that we get through this tough time until dad finds a job again.” One of my children asked ‘but mom what is going to happen if you get laid off’. and I was so proud to say that I work at Xilinx and Xilinx doesn’t lay off people.”
Your take
What do you think? How is your workplace handling the current uncertainty? Is there any attempt to keep employees happy and productive or has that been left by the wayside?
Here’s a valuable lesson in leadership from the NBA.
Buddy Hield who plays for the Golden State Warriors made a mistake in a game and missed a shot when he really should have passed the ball to the team’s star player Steph Curry who was wide open.
How should coach Steve Kerr correct this behavior?
Typically, leaders will of course offer harsh feedback or criticism. Many coaches routinely yell at their players for making mistakes like this.
But instead Kerr handled it with humor and love. He brought Buddy Hield over to Curry to “introduce” him to “the greatest shooter in the world. Wide Open.” Not an exaggeration, by the way.
And then he ended it with “I love you, Buddy.”
How do you think a player would react to and remember an interaction like this as opposed being yelled at for making a mistake?
Have you ever seen a similar way to correct a mistake in your workplace?
How do we make remote work work? What are the specific, effective ways to ensure that employees can still do great work and connect with each other even though they’re not in the office in person all the time?
And how do we convince company leadership that remote work is good for business in a time where many companies are forcing people back to the office? We’ll reveal all about that in our next free webinar. Content includes:
The most relevant research around remote work and employee happiness and productivity
How to define and preserve the company culture when people are not in the office full time
5 innovative tips that make remote work work
Great examples from happy remote workplaces from around the world
Time: Wednesday April 2nd 2025, 3PM CET / 9AM ET.
We’ll keep the whole thing snappy, informative and fun and be done in just half an hour. Read more and sign up here.
After every talk I give, I ask the organizer to rate us. Here’s the most recent rating from a talk I gave last week.
This is why I get up in the morning – it’s for the chance to spread some concepts and tools that make workplaces happier! It makes me really proud when the message resonates with both employees and leadership.
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