The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Monday Tip: Ask for feedback

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsThis monday tip comes from Marco of evenhappier.com.

    Some of us have always thought that a compliment which we ask for is never worth receiving. Maybe we think that if we ask for it, then it must be insincere.

    Is that always the case? In fact, even a compliment that we don’t ask for can be insincere and sometimes by asking for a compliment we can get an honest feedback. How can that happen? Some people are simply not accustomed to paying compliments and need encouragement. Even people very close to us might be unable to understand what kind of recognition we need unless we ask.

    So what about asking your boss for feedback on a recent project which you have successfully completed? You will make yourself happier, teaching him how to be a better manager in the process!

    I gotta say that sounds like a great idea. And why limit it to the boss? Your mission this Monday, is to ask a co-worker, team member or employee for feedback.

    Thanks Marco!

    By the way: Do you have any ideas for future Monday Tips? How do you make yourself and others happy at work in fun, simple, easy ways? I’d love to hear your suggestions, so write a comment if you have one.

    The Chief Happiness Officer’s Monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.

    Previous monday tips.

  • Happy Links

    LinksBeing nice helps you get customers. “When we asked our new client what put us over the edge, they said that of course they liked our work, but they also were impressed by the way we related to each other–cracking jokes, bantering, etc. “You guys just seem to like each other,??? they said.”

    Slow Leadership on The Road Least Taken to Happiness at Work. “Most people make decisions about their life and work based on what is generally considered “right??? and “good.??? This is living from the outside in: letting others people’s expectations, rule your life. You do what you do because that’s what you have been told to do. It’s a good recipe for frustration and stress.”

    Bob Sutton explains how The Billable Hour Turns People into Workaholics. “Once you’re paid by the hour,??? he says, “you start placing a monetary value on that hour. Lawyers watching their kids play soccer admitted to mentally ticking away lost income for each minute they stood on the sidelines.??? Ouch!

    Paul English, the CEO of travel site kayak.com, on stuff I’ve learned at work. “Jim and i were struggling for many days making a difficult decision about a reorg which would probably hurt some people. We argued with each other about the options we had. Neither of us were really sure which one would be best, and one day he said since I am not sure which one will produce the best business result, let’s choose the path that does the best for the people, and let’s hope the world works that way; I would not want to participate in a system which worked another way.”

  • Happiness for knowledge workers

    BrainYesterday I spoke at a half-day conference about stress for knowledge workers. And I kicked ass, if I do say so myself :o) That new presentation format I designed back in November is really working well!

    Knowledge workers are architects, designers, writers, programmers, etc… People whose input and output of work is immaterial, rather than physical. In recent years, these people have turned out to be very prone to stress and the mini-conference examined this phenomenon.

    Christine Ipsen presented the results of her phd study, which examines the source of this stress. Two friends of mine, Lene Thomsen and Nina Tange spoke about meaning at work and how this can reduce stress.

    The main point of my presentation was of course that we can’t be focusing on fighting stress. That only makes people more stressed. We need to focus on promoting happiness at work – when people are happy at work, they’re not stressed. I also talked about some myths about stress.

    I’ve previously blogged about the fact that happiness at work is important to all kinds of employees. It’s not limited to people in creative, high-paying or high-status jobs. But that being said, I think happiness at work is even more important for knowledge workers.

    Here’s why:
    Happy knowledge workers are more motivated
    If you’re a welder, you can probably weld even if you’re not very motivated that day. If you’re a trash man, you can still take out the trash. But what if you’re an architect trying to come up with a new design, a programmer trying to solve a tricky problem or a journalist writing a tricky article?

    When most of the work you do goes on inside your head, motivation is critical! And of course happy people are waaay more motivated.

    Happy knowledge workers learn better
    For all knowledge workers, the knowledge you have is almost never enough. That stuff tends to go obsolete real fast. You need to constantly learn new things. And all studies show, that people learn much better when they’re happy.

    Happy knowledge workers form better relations at work
    Relationships and teamwork are crucial to most knowledge workers. And you form much better relationships at work and participate much more efficiently in teams when you’re happy.

    Happy knowledge workers share knowledge
    Most companies that deal in knowledge also want employees to share that knowledge. As I wrote about previously, people only share knowledge, when they’re passionate about what they work with. People who don’t care, don’t share. Which is why so many corporate knowledge management systems fail miserably. The systems are fine – they’re simply asking people to share information they couldn’t care less about.

    As you probably know from reading this blog, I believe that everyone should be happy at work. It’s just that happiness has an even bigger impact on the productivity of knowledge workers than it does on others.

    So if you work mainly with knowledge, increase your happiness at work. If you lead knowledge workers, do everything you can to make them love their jobs.

    So how do you make knowledge workers happy? Same way as everybody else. Read all about it.

  • Interview with me at Startupspark

    MikeBen at StartupSpark.com has posted an interview with me about happiness at work. Ben asked some great questions with a special focus on startups and entrepreneurs. And then there was this one:

    Has anyone ever said to you, “Alex, you’re full of it. People just can’t be that happy at work!”

    :o) Read the interview to see my answer. And congratulations to Bronwyn R. Lewis who won the contest Ben ran as a warm up to the interview. Bronwyn gets a copy of my book.

    Say… would you like to interview me for your blog? I’d be happy to answer your questions about happiness at work – or whatever else you want to know. Send me an email with some questions and I’ll shoot the answers right back to you!

    Previous interviews with me.

  • Some more quotes from my book

    Happy Hour is 9 to 5Here are some more quotable quotes from my new book Happy Hour is 9 to 5.

    The uncontested, number-one reason why people are unhappy at work is bad management. Nothing has more power to turn a good work situation bad than a bad boss.
    —
    Some managers steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that they’re bad leaders, or even revel in the fact that they make people unhappy at work. These managers are usually beyond helping and may never learn and improve. Get away from them as fast as you can.
    —
    Let’s once and for all drop the cult of overwork and realize that it’s not the hours that count—it’s the results. More hours DO NOT equate to better results.
    —
    If you feel constantly behind and neglected, are being treated unfairly, ignored or bullied, or are going through large changes and fearing for the future, you can become stressed from working 40 hours a week. Or even 20. If this is the case, working less will not help at all. What’s more, you can’t fight stress—fighting stress just creates more stress.
    —
    Just 50 years ago people had many sources of identity. Religion, class, nationality, political affiliation, family roots, and geographical and cultural origins all went into defining who we are. Today most of these, if not all, have been subsumed by work. When you meet someone at a party, what’s the first question you typically ask them? Exactly: “So, what do you do????
    —
    What is the point of spending most of your life at a job that doesn’t make you happy? What would you feel like, lying on your deathbed, having achieved all the traditional signs of success—a huge house, flatscreen TVs in every room, lots of cars, a huge salary, a lofty title and a corner office—if your career never made you happy?
    —
    We don’t have to sacrifice happiness for the sake of success—a depressingly common assumption these days. In fact, the opposite is true: The happier you are, the more successful you will be.
    —
    So, according to our cultural roots, work is a curse, a punishment for original sin, and only for slaves. In short, life is hell—or “nasty, brutish and short,??? as Hobbes put it—work is hell, and we must endure it because we’re all sinners. It’s time to put that particular view of work behind us!
    —

    You can read the whole book free on line or buy it on paper ($29) or as a pdf ($19).

    Previous quotes from my book.

  • Review: Sumo Omni bean bag chair

    Sumo OmniA while back I got an email from Andrew at Sumo, asking me if I would review their bean bag chair for the blog.

    I struggled with the question for a while. On the one hand I was afraid to sell out. Could I maintain my integrity in the face of free stuff? On the other hand: “Yaaay, free stuff!”

    I accepted and my Sumo Omni arrived two weeks ago.

    Alexander KjerulfI’ve been thoroughly testing it and the verdict is in: It’s an insanely comfortable piece of furniture. My favorite position is to lean it against a wall and sit there with my a laptop, as I’m sitting right now writing this. It works even better if you can out your feet up on something.

    The material is cool to the touch even when you’ve been sitting in it for a while and the bag strikes just the right balance between firm and squishy. Also: The thing is huge! Further testing found that it is fine for two people watching a DVD together. Or, say, an episode or two of Dexter.

    If anything, the damn thing is too comfortable – I don’t really want to get up out of it.

    When they ship the Omni overseas, they do it without filling, so I had to order 400 liters of those little plastic pellets on line. This is what such a package looks like:

    Bean bag pellets

    And let me tell ya: They do look at your strangely at the post office when you pick up those kinds of parcels.

    Sumo OttoMy dream: Make a meeting room where all the walls are whiteboards and the only furniture is bean bag chairs in various sizes. The Omni and it’s smaller cousin The Otto would be perfect for this.

  • My take on the “top 100 workplace list”

    GoogleI took a look at this year’s list of the 100 best US workplaces, and while I don’t know many of the companies on there, many of the “usual suspects” are certainly included. Google, Container Store, Whole Foods, W.L. Gore, Starbucks, Nordstrom and others are certainly familiar cases from the books I’ve read about happiness at work. I’m not sure if this validates the top 100 list or the case literature. Or neither :o)

    However, we should remember that not every company competes here. In fact, only around 500 companies entered the competition, so making the top 100 list is not THAT impressive. Companies with less than 1000 employees can not participate – even though many of them are probably better workplaces than the big organizations.

    Also, a company’s score depends not only on what its employees say. Here’s some info from the website:

    Two-thirds of a company’s score is based on the survey, which is sent to a minimum of 400 randomly selected employees from each company and asks about things such as attitudes toward management, job satisfaction, and camaraderie.

    The remaining third of the score comes from our evaluation of each company’s responses to the institute’s Culture Audit, which includes detailed questions about demographic makeup, pay, and benefits programs, and open-ended questions about the company’s people-management philosophy, internal communications, opportunities, compensation practices, diversity programs, etc.

    All in all, I’m sure that the companies on this list are all good places to work – and I’m equally sure that there are many even better ones out there that simply didn’t compete in this particular contest.

    (A big thank you to Andrew Ferrier for asking the question that inspired this post).

    Previously:
    10 seeeeeeriously cool workplaces
    Happiness at work at Google
    Perks gone wild: SAS Institute

  • Happiness at work at Google

    Google employees have it good, as this video shows.

    (Thx Erno Mijland).

    While perks like on-site doctors, car wash, pool tables and 11 great free restaurants are nice, I still believe that those aren’t the real reasons Google employees are happy. The real reason is that they have fun, get to kick butt, work with great people and have a large degree of freedom.

    Perks help, but are not the source of happiness at work, as my previous blogpost about another master of perks, SAS Institute, shows.

  • Monday Tip: Appreciate your co-workers

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsThis week’s Monday Tip is about appreciating the people around you at work. Who do you like? Why do you like them?

    Make a list of your closest co-workers. Not necessarily the ones you like the best, but the ones you have the most dealings with. Then, for each person on your list, write down at least five things you appreciate about that person. Things they’re good at, ways they make your life easier, their personal or professional skills and qualities… as long as it’s something positive.

    That’s it. You don’t need to show your list to anyone, just take a moment to make it.

    Now, when you make that list, there may be a person on it that really annoys you. Every workplace I’ve ever been in, there’s always been at lest one person who really honked me off. The trick here is to also find five things you appreciate about that person too. As the saying goes, there’s some good in everyone and if you can’t see it, it’s because you don’t want to see it.

    And then I usually get the counter-argument: What about Hitler? (Or Stalin, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden). Is there something good in them too? And I say let’s skip that entire discussion – if you work with one of those guys, you may leave them out of the exercise :o)

    By the way: Do you have any ideas for future Monday Tips? How do you make yourself and others happier in fun, simple, easy ways? Write a comment if you have a suggestion.

    The Chief Happiness Officer’s Monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.

    Previous monday tips.

  • A question for ya: How can you go out with a (positive) bang

    QuestionMike Hoffman is in an interesting situation:

    I’m currently in one of the worst jobs of my life. The majority of my co-workers reply with a negative response when asked if they honestly enjoy coming into work. Management seems miserable (overworked, stressed, and never caught smiling). You already know what kind of environment this creates.

    I already have a contract for another job within the next 90 days. I think my co-workers are good people and I feel that I have an obligation to leave a legacy, whether this means dropping off a case of your books on the way out or writing an honest letter to management about the work environment as a whole, to make their jobs (or their mindset to find another one) that much better. I want to be direct but not insulting.

    Do you have any suggestions on the best ways to leave a job while leaving a positive impact in its wake?

    What a great idea! When you know you’re leaving, you’re free to say and do some things you might not normally be able to. The question is, what can you do that is positive and inspiring, as opposed to bitterly slamming the door on your way out.

    What could you do in this situation? I would very much like to hear your ideas!