How to be happy at work
Today on May 1st it’s fitting to celebrate how much workplaces have improved, thanks in large part to unions and worker movements.
These are the factory rules for an 1800s Manchester cotton factory. Scary today, but perfectly normal back then! Without strong organized labor, it might still be acceptable to treat workers like this.
In 2015 we started the Woohoo Inc Partnership and we now have partners promoting happiness at work in 30 countries.
We are incredibly proud to be supporting these amazing people. Here are some examples of the fantastic work they do.
Grupo Aukera in Buenos Aires did a teambuilding workshop for a big international insurance company where the teams had to work together to assemble bicycles.
But there was a surprise:
While the teams were working, they all thought that the bicycles would be drawn by the participants or that they would be left for the winning group.
The surprise was that by the end of the game when the bicycles were finished, the real “clients” were poor children who received help from an NGO and used bicycles not only for playing but also to go to school or to the dining room where they they served food daily. In this way the concept of “Results” came up very clearly, understanding the meaning of our work.
What a great idea – and one that lead to a 50% improvement in that division’s satisfaction surveys.
Randa Farah of I have Learned Academy arranged a conference on happiness at work in Beirut and over 300 people came and saw some great local and international speakers at a very creative and fun event.
Tryangle are currently running a program which consists of a hybrid pack of webinars and keynotes on how to become happier at work with a focus on teamwork and communication. Griet Deca from Tryangle noted that:
Everybody in the department can enroll in their activities and for the first webinars we had a lot of participants. They were actively engaged creating a lot of interaction. And that made Kim, who did the webinar, also happy!
Hybrid learning tracks help to a) balance the budget and b) keep the happiness-idea alive all through the year. The fact that the participants of the webinars will meet the webinar animator is a big added value according to the feedback we get.
The public sector needs more happiness at work and doing a blend of online and physical learnings helps make the training more effective and affordable.
Many Central and Eastern European countries have no tradition for focusing in happiness at work so getting attention can be tough. But Kasia Kern has been very successful in changing the conversation using a combination of social media, webinars and physical meetups.
I put together 1 hour webinar called “10 ways to become happier a work”. I remember that I posted it in the network and I literally went for vacation with my family. While sitting on the beach, I couldn’t believe what was happening, I was getting one email after another notifying me that another person register on my webinar.
When I came back I did my first webinar for 100 people, much more than I expected. So I repeated it several times and there was a similar audience each time.
I then decided to organize a few free of charge meetings in the biggest cities in Poland, to share more on Happiness at Work and included local companies to share their best practices. These events have also been sold out and attracted a lot of attention.
She will also be doing Poland’s first conference on happiness at work later this year!
Our partners in the Czech Republic have done an annual conference on happiness at work for 4 years. It started out small with 70 participants but the latest edition had over 500 attendees, making it the biggest conference about happiness at work anywhere in the world.
Sarah Metcalfe of Happy Coffee Consulting in the UK gave the closing keynote at a conference called When Digital Becomes Human. She got awesome feedback, lots of questions and a 4.5/5 speaker rating.
Petra and Maja of Paleta Znanj managed to get workplace happiness into some of the major business publications in Slovenia:
We prepared two articles on happiness at work for two professional magazines and they will be published in April and May. First will be an article for Direktor (a magazine focusing on development of managers) with more focus on long term and strategic advantages of H@W and leading with happiness. The second one comes out in May for an HRM magazine (focused on HR professionals) about happiness at work and its importance for a positive organizational culture.
Both magazines have a reach of few thousands, which is quite a lot for our country.
Games are a great path to learning and PlusConsulting in Israel have launched one that is focused on strengths and happiness at work:
FINDING THE PLUS is an interactive fun game that boosts happiness and enables participants to learn tools and solutions from the sciences of happiness at work and positive psychology.
“Finding the PLUS” game, will help you learn to implement and practice the positive perspective in a fun and engaging way. Through the game the players will get familiar with the four aspects of positive psychology: mental, emotional, physical and social. They will learn and practice new techniques that will enable them to increase their happiness level, become more empowered, improve their performance as well as their wellbeing.
How awesome is that!
People 3.0 arranged their country’s first ever conference on workplace happiness with local and international speakers and 100 participants.
There are many, many more great things coming from the partner network. They are, without exception, smart people with great skills who are doing amazing work. If you’re looking for a local speaker or consultant to make your organization happier and more successful, you can see the whole list of partners here.
Are you interested in becoming a partner? Read all about the partnership here.
Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Chinese tech company Alibaba, has come out in favor of the so-called 996 rule, i.e. that you should work from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week if you want to have a successful career. For anyone doing the math that’s 72 hours of work a week. Add a 1 hour commute on top of that and there’s very little time left for your family, kids, hobbies, exercise and life in general.
“I personally think that 996 is a huge blessing,” he said. “How do you achieve the success you want without paying extra effort and time?”
He also added that you can only achieve business success through suffering and sacrifice.
I realize I may be wasting my time here by going up against a belief that is so prevalent among business leaders, but there’s no way I can let that kind of nonsense pass and not point out exactly why it’s wrong. Here are 5 quick reasons:
1: Pointing to successful people that achieved success by working 72 hours a week proves nothing. What about all the people that worked just as hard but failed?
2: Many of the mental qualities that make a person successful at work are lost when people are overworked, tired, stressed and unhappy, including networking, creativity and effective decision making.
3: Permanent overwork kills people. For instance, those working a 55-hour week face 33% increased risk of stroke.
4: Permanent overwork doesn’t result in increased output.
5: Many people believe that success can only be achieved through suffering, but they’re wrong. In fact, employee happiness leads directly to higher performance and business success.
So permanent overwork does not lead to increased results and success – in fact it hurts people AND profits.
It’s easy to point to Alibaba and say “But they work really long hours and the company is successful. Check mate!” But that’s just correlation; where is the proof that they are profitable BECAUSE OF the long working hours? Maybe they would’ve been even more profitable if their employees were happy, relaxed and had lives outside of work too? The research certainly indicates that.
So why do so many people still believe this nonsense? As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman noted, it’s difficult to change people’s minds. Look at this picture:
Every horizontal line is perfectly straight. Don’t believe me? Hold up a ruler to your screen and check. OK, now that you know the horizontal lines are straight, what does your mind see? Bendy lines.
Kahneman notes that cognitive illusions are even more stubborn than visual illusions and the business leaders he has worked with almost never changed their beliefs no matter how much evidence they were presented with.
Fortunately, there are also many enlightened leaders out there:
And US Vice President Joe Biden wrote an awesome memo to his staff that said in part:
I do not expect, nor do I want any of you to miss or sacrifice important family obligations for work.
There is strong evidence that permanent overwork hurts people and performance. Let’s stop promoting such a dumb and dangerous idea.
When is your next meeting? Tomorrow? This afternoon? Or are you already late for your next meeting?
We spend a lot of time in work meetings and they don’t seem to make us very happy.
So here’s a simple tip you can try very easily: Open your next meeting with a round where each person shares something positive. You can pick one of these questions and let everyone share:
Don’t spend a lot of time on this, just give each participant about 30 seconds to share something positive. If the group is bigger than 10-12 people, let people share in pairs and then let 3 or 4 people share with the whole group so it doesn’t take more than a few minutes.
It really works wonders for a meeting. One person told me this after trying it out:
Hi Alexander,
I have been reading your work for a few days now, and I cannot get enough.
We have 4 analysts on our team, who touch many if not all groups in our company. Our role often means our view is black and white in order to deliver results, which is often received in a bad light.
So, I tried starting a meeting with something positive. It was like the Jedi mind trick for convincing others to lobby for our interests!
My Sr Analyst was struggling to keep her jaw from dropping. No more than a simple ask of what is the funniest thing your kids have said to you lately. Everyone had a story, and we all laughed for a quick 2 minutes before getting to the agenda.
Just wanted to say, “Thank you,”
All the best,
-Grant
And it’s not only fun, it will also make your meeting more effective as this experiment shows:
Psychological experiments can be very devious, and this one was certainly no exception. The focus was meetings and the format was simple: Groups of people were asked to discuss and reach consensus on a contentious topic.
Here’s the devious bit: Unbeknownst to the other participants one member of the group was an actor hired by the researchers. The actor was told to speak first in the discussions. In half the experiments he would say something positive while in the other half he would start by saying something critical. After that he simply participated in the discussion like the other group members.
The experiment showed that when the first thing said in the meeting was positive, the discussion turned out more constructive, people listened more and were more likely to reach consensus. When the first statement was negative the mood became more hostile, people were more argumentative and consensus became less likely.
The researchers concluded that the way a meeting starts has a large impact on the tone of the discussion and on whether or not the group will eventually reach consensus.
Try it out and let me know how it works for you.
Last week I spoke at the first Italian conference on happiness at work arranged by our awesome partners People 3.0.
One of the other speakers put up this quote by Adriano Olivetti, son of the founder of the Olivetti company in the original Italian. To the best of my knowledge, this quote has not previously been translated, so here it is in English for the first time.
I met a manager recently who claimed in no uncertain terms that companies should forget all about employee happiness and focus only on engagement. He argued that people can be happy at work without performing well, whereas employee engagement leads directly to better performance.
I’ve actually heard this claim a few times recently, but it is still wrong. In this article we’ll look at why.
But first let’s define the two terms. Both can be defined in many different ways, which will confuse any discussion, so here are the definitions I will base my argument on.
This is the first result that comes up when you google “employee engagement definition”:
Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization, and put discretionary effort into their work.
And this is the definition of happiness at work that we use:
Happiness at work is the extent to which employees feel good about their jobs.
Both are clearly emotional at their core (the word “feel” appears in both) but the key difference is that engagement is more about the work and less about the person. It’s not really about how you feel in general, it’s how passionate you feel about your job, how committed you are to the workplace and how much extra effort you put in.
Happiness at work, as we define it, is how work makes you feel more broadly. It’s not about feeling good every second of every work day, but it is about experiencing mostly positive feelings about your job.
Just to make it clear: We think employee engagement is a useful concept and we are not arguing against it. We just want to argue that of the two, it is much more effective for a company to focus on making their employees happy than on making them engaged. Here are the four main reasons why.
Whether you’re looking to create employee happiness or engagement, you need your employees to be active partners in the process. This is not something you can do to them without their active and willing participation or (even worse) against their will.
Employee engagement, being directly related to commitment and effort, is a very easy sell to managers and companies. Every manager wants employees who are passionate about their work and go above and beyond to do a better job.
But seen from the employee side, it’s a much harder sell. When a manager states that they want their employees to “be more engaged in their work” or “give more discretionary effort” it can easily come off as if they are simply demanding more passion and work from people, without giving anything back.
On the other hand, when a manager sets a goal to create a happy workplace, the benefits are immediately clear to employees and it’s much easier to engage them in the process.
Ironically, happiness can be a harder sell towards managers, many of whom are skeptical of “all that happiness crap”. This video covers their most common objections and why they’re wrong:
How engaged can someone really be if they’re unhappy at work?
This happens. One of our International Partners, Sheona McGraw of Cloud 9 to 5 in Canada has seen it first hand:
Having worked in a number of charities, non-profit orgs and social enterprises, I can tell you that most of these employees are passionate and committed about their org’s cause but unfortunately a lot of the orgs don’t have a very happy work environment and it’s not uncommon at all to find super engaged yet super unhappy employees working in these orgs.
This is something I talk a lot about in my discussions with potential clients. I myself have been in this circumstance a number of times, being super engaged but miserable. And while I performed satisfactorily, had I been happy I would have blown the job out of the water.
A person can be incredibly passionate about their work and totally committed to the workplace, but still be miserable at work. I’ve seen this happen for instance when people are treated badly by their coworkers or manager or when they can’t do their job in a way that satisfies their own professional standards.
In this case, two things can happen:
So even if you want an engaged workforce, you still need to focus on making them happy because engagement without happiness is not sustainable.
Sure, engagement leads to better performance – but given the definition above that includes commitment and extra effort, that’s almost a tautology.
Furthermore, we know from a large amount of research, that happy employees perform much better. Ed Diener, one of the world’s leading happiness researchers summed it up like this:
In the workplace we know that happiness causes more-productive and more-creative workers.
If you know academics, you know how careful they are about using the word “causes.” In this case, we know that happiness at work causes higher:
So employee happiness has been shown to directly cause increased performance.
You’ll notice that both loyalty and discretionary effort were part of the definition of engagement that we presented above.
Given that (as we saw in the previous section) happy employees are more loyal and are more likely to go the extra mile, it’s clear that happiness doesn’t only cause better performance – happiness also directly causes engagement.
Of course, the effects are circular and engagement and happiness will cause each other. But given the results above as well as the fact that engagement cannot last in the absence of happiness, it seems clear to me that happiness causes engagement more than engagement causes happiness.
Gallup does a lot of great work on employee engagement and their Q12 survey is one of my favorite metrics. They also acknowledge that many factors play into engagement, including happiness / well-being, writing:
Leaders have to think about everything from culture to well-being to purpose and meaning — and make it all come to life in a personalized way for employees.
Engagement is a great concept but ignoring employee happiness in the pursuit of engagement makes no sense.
At the very least, sustainable engagement requires happiness at work, meaning you can’t ignore the happiness aspect.
When do people feel “passionate about their work, committed to the workplace and give discretionary effort?” When they’re happy at work!
So if you want engaged employees, focus on making them happy and engagement will follow.
Most managers have realized by now that happy workplaces are more productive, more creative, attract better talent and make more money.
So if you were a well-meaning manager or HR person looking to capitalize on this and create a happier workplace, you might be tempted to start by asking your employees some version of this question:
“What would make you happier at work?”
It seems like a great place to start. To make people happier, ask them what they want and them give them that. Right?
Wrong.
Here’s why: We know from the research that people are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy.
Stop random people on the street and ask them what would make their lives happier and a lot of them will reply “Winning the lottery.” But studies of lottery winners show that they are actually only marginally happier than all of us non-lottery millionaires.
Similarly if you ask employees what will make them happier at work you will most likely get responses like:
But while all of this sounds perfectly reasonable (indeed, you might give some of the same answers if asked the same question), we know from the research that these factors don’t make employees any happier at work. Just to be clear: We cannot ignore them when making workplaces better, because these factors can absolutely make people unhappy when they’re unfair. But once they are fair, increasing them further does not increase happiness at all.
This explains why many organizations spend a ton of time and money on every perk imaginable and employees are still not happy.
Quite simply: giving employees what they ask for is doomed to fail, if they don’t know what to ask for. And they don’t.
What we need to do instead, is help people discover for themselves what really makes them happy at work and there’s a much better question for that:
Tell me about a recent good experience at work that made you happy.
This may look like essentially the same question as the one above so why is this one better? With the previous question (What would make you happy at work) we only get at the things people think will make them happy.
With the latter question, we ask about specific previous experiences that caused happiness. This means that we get directly at what really works.
I have used this question in hundreds of speeches all over the world and never once has anyone told a story of getting a raise, a promotion or a perk. Never once has anyone said “I was really happy last Thursday because I got a free apple.”
The one exception was when I did a workshop at Lego and an employee shared this example:
Every week our team gets a new box of fruit and there’s always only one banana in it. If I get there in time to get that one banana, it makes me really happy!
I’m 98% sure he was kidding!
Invariably, when people reflect on this question their stories fall into two categories.
They either talk about doing good work, achieving great results or making a positive difference for others. This includes things like:
I had a complicated problem on a project and found a really creative solution for it.
A customer liked my work so much they sent me an email with tons of positive feedback.
I helped a coworker by sharing advice and knowledge.
Or they talk about moments of personal connection at work, like:
I came back to the office from parental leave last week and so many people on my team welcomed me back with smiles and hugs.
I had a bad day and my manager noticed and did her best to help me.
We celebrated a team member’s birthday last week with cake and coffee and had a great time together.
Very often their stories contain both elements. That’s why we talk about results and relationships being the two main sources of happiness at work.
Don’t ask your employees what will make them happy – because they probably have completely the wrong idea and giving them what they ask for won’t work. Instead, help them connect to past positive experiences because those are a much more reliable predictor of future happiness. And then work on doing simple daily actions that promote a feeling of results and relationships.
You will often see Denmark listed as one of the “happiest countries on the planet.” Interestingly Danes are not only happy at home, they’re also happy at work and according to most studies of worker satisfaction among nations, the happiest employees in the world are in Denmark.
Here’s just one data point: Gallup found that 18% of American workers are actively disengaged, meaning they are “emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive.” The same number for Danish workers is only 10%.
But why are Danish workers so much happier than their counterparts around the world? Here are five fundamental differences that explain what’s going on.
I once talked to an American who had gotten a job as a manager at a Danish company. Wanting to prove his worth, he did what he had always done and put in 60 to 70 hours a week. After a month, his manager invited him to a meeting. He was fully expecting to be praised for his hard work, but instead he was asked “Why do you work so much? Is something wrong? Do you have a problem delegating? What can we do to fix this?”
Some non-Danes wonder if Danes ever work. Not only do Danes tend to leave work at a reasonable hour most days, but they also get five to six weeks of vacation per year, several national holidays and up to a year of paid maternity/paternity leave. While the average American works 1,780 hours and the average South Korean 2,024 hours per year, the average Dane only works 1,408, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics. Danes also have more leisure hours than any other OECD workers and the link between sufficient leisure and happiness is well established in the research.
The difference to other countries is stark. Many companies around the world celebrate overwork as a sign of commitment. “You have to put in the hours” is the message in the mistaken belief that the more hours you work, the more work you get done. We call this “The Cult of Overwork.” Danish companies, on the other hand, recognize that employees also have a life outside of work and that working 80 hours a week is bad for both employees and the bottom line.
In many countries, if your boss gives you an order, you pretty much do what you’re told. In a Danish workplace, extremely few direct orders are ever given and employees are more likely to view them as suggestions.
Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede has quantified the culture in more than 100 countries on several parameters, one of which is “power distance.” A high power distance means that bosses are undisputed kings whose every word is law. Danish workplaces–with a score of 18-have the lowest power distance in the world. Just for comparison, Belgium has a power distance of 65, China clocks in at 80 and Malaysia holds the world record at 100.
By law, any Danish workplace with more than 35 employees must open up seats on the board for employees. This means that Danish employees experience more autonomy and are more empowered at work. Here’s just one example: By law, any Danish workplace with more than 35 employees must open up seats on the board for employees, who are elected to the board by their peers and serve on an equal footing and with same voting powers as all other board members.
In Denmark, losing your job is not the end of the world. In fact, unemployment insurance seems too good to be true, giving workers up to 90% of their original salary for two years. In the U.S., for instance, losing your job can easily lead to financial disaster and loss of health insurance. This leads to job lock i.e. staying in a job you hate because you can’t afford to leave.
Simply put: If you’re a Dane and you don’t like your job, you can quit that job without risking serious financial problems, forcing companies to treat their employees well or risk losing them.
Since the mid-1800s, Denmark has focused on life-long education of its workers. This policy continues to this day, with an extremely elaborate set of government, union, and corporate policies that allow almost any employee who so desires to attend paid training and pick up new skills. It’s called an “active labor market policy,” and Denmark spends more on these types of programs than any other country in the OECD.
This lets Danish workers constantly grow and develop and helps them stay relevant (not to mention stay employed) even in a changing work environment. It also makes their jobs richer and more interesting.
Here’s a word that exists only in the Scandinavian languages: Arbejdsglæde. Arbejde means work and glæde means happiness, so arbejdsglæde is “happiness at work.” This word is not in common use in any other language on the planet.
Many people around the world hate their jobs and consider this to be perfectly normal.
For instance, where we Scandinavians have arbejdsglæde, the Japanese instead have karoshi, which means “Death from overwork.” And this is no coincidence; there is a word for it in Danish because Danish workplaces have a long-standing tradition of wanting to make their employees happy. To most Danes, a job isn’t just a way to get paid; we fully expect to enjoy ourselves at work.
In other countries, the attitude towards work is often very different. A few years ago I gave a speech in Chicago, and an audience member told me that “Of course I hate my job, that’s why they pay me to do it!” Many people around the world hate their jobs and consider this to be perfectly normal. Similarly, many workplaces around the world do little or nothing to create happiness among employees, sticking to the philosophy that “If you’re enjoying yourself, you’re not working hard enough.”
I’m not trying to paint Danish companies as utopias for workers and their international counterparts as tyrannical hellholes. There are bad Danish workplaces and stellar non-Danish ones–Zappos and Google are two that I’ve personally visited and studied.
But studies have uncovered a number of systemic and cultural differences between Denmark and the rest of the world that serve to explain why Danish workers are on average so much happier.
This goes far beyond happiness. We know from any number of studies that happy workers are more productive and innovative and that consequently, happy companies have happier customers and make more money. This may help explain why Danish workers are among the most productive in the OECD and why the Danish economy continues to do so well.
This flight attendant is funnier than most stand up comedians. I just love how his coworkers can’t help but laugh along.
If you want to build a happy workplace, you have to take happiness seriously – paradoxical as that may sound. You must make sure to include happiness in every aspect of the company.
In this presentation from our latest Conference on Happiness At Work, I share 10 ways that some of the world’s best and most successful workplaces have built happiness into their DNA by making it one of their top strategic priorities, including things like:
Our next conference is in May in Copenhagen. See the full program and get your tickets here.
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.