How to be happy at work
This monday morning, as you look forward to the work week ahead, what are you thinking?
Are you dreading the week that’s just begun, thinking about all the hard work, unpleasant encounters and unfinished business?
Or are you looking forward to doing great work and having fun with the people around you?
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Two black T-shirts and you too can be a ninja at work. Team random at work.
(Thank you Amy).
Rob Paterson tells the story of silverorange, a company that sounds like they have a LOT of fun.
From the you-did-how-much-research-to-find-this-out department: Feeling good matters at work. Well, duh!
Knowledge Sharing is hot these days, and many companies are introducing processes and technologies that allow employees to learn from each other and to collect the implicit knowledge present in any company.
And very often, it doesn’t work. Companies put a knowledge management system in place… and nothing happens. Nobody uses it. It then becomes a struggle to convince employees that knowledge sharing is good for them and for the company, based on a “what’s in it for me” approach.
And that’s because the whole Knowledge Sharing approach is fundamentally flawed, and because businesses really need to focus on something else.
That something else is Passion Sharing.
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What makes you happy or unhappy at work?
The big stuff or the small stuff. The good stuff or the bad stuff. I’d really like to know.
Write a comment.
The way most companies recruit new people is in need of some serious improvement.
Taking or not taking a job is a big decision, and yet you as an applicant are supposed to decide based on just one or two job interviews. The result is that when you show up for your first day at a new job you have little idea what the job, the manager or the co-workers are really like. You may be in for some surprises.
Also, it’s difficult for a manager to know if she’s hiring the right person, when all she has to go on is a CV, a personality test and one or two job interviews with that person. How can she know what this person is really like? Some people interview very poorly but are great to work with. Others seem charming, elouquent and competent in interviews, and then turn out to be… not so great to work with.
There’s gotta be a better way.
This is why I was very happy to hear that the good people at Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan have found a way to hire people that is both faster and better than the traditional way.
They call it Extreme Interviewing (a term they’ve trademarked, btw). It’s the coolest, most innovative way I have heard of to hire new people and the results are amazing! Read on to see how they do it.
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I had a straaaaaaange idea the other day: What if every single person on the planet who doesn’t like their job quit on the same day? Let’s call it International Quit-Your-Crappy-Job-Day.
Yeah, yeah, I know, chaos would ensue because all the bad jobs are now not being done. Garbage wouldn’t get picked up, sewers wouldn’t be cleaned, etc. etc. etc. But… many garbage men love their jobs. So do many airport baggage handlers, inner city teachers, taxi drivers and other holders of jobs that many think “must be awful”.
So maybe it’s not the jobs. Maybe it’s the workplaces, the managers, the culture, the whatever that make people hate their jobs… And maybe if all the people who hate their jobs quit at the same time, John Smith, the CEO who runs SmithCo with an iron fist and who just lost 63% of his employees would be forced to rethink his ways. Or would simply be out of business.
This would be the ultimate, very loud wake-up call for every company where employees hate the boss, hate work, are bullied, are sexually harassed, are discriminated against and/or only come in for the pay check.
And maybe on the same day where the mortuary worker quits the job he’s hated for years, that job as a park ranger becomes free and he can finally get that job outside in the fresh air he’s always dreamed about. The park ranger gets the bartending job he wanted, the bartender becomes a cab driver and the cab driver goes to work in the mortuary.
Remember: One person’s dream job is another person’s living hell. The longer you stay in that crappy job, the longer you’re keeping someone who might actually love it from getting it.
This is not an actual proposal for action. This is more of gedankenexperiment.
What do you think?
Work is much more fun than fun.
– Noel Coward
Here’s your mission this monday: Leave early for work so you have plenty of time to get there. Then smile at everyone along the way.
If you’re in a car be extra courteous to everyone around you – give some other driver a great morning.
If you commute by bike, bus or train smile at people around you and go out of your way to be helpful whenever you can.
If you’re reading this at work, it’s actually too late to do it today – you can do it tomorrow instead.
Thank you to my wonderful girlfriend for suggesting this one.
I’ve long thought that a leading cause of unhappiness at work is a stressful morning commute. You get up in the morning and almost the first thing you do is fight your way through traffic along with other grumpy, barely awake commuters equally bent on getting there five minutes faster.
If you relax and smile and focus on being helpful to others along the way the commute may take a little longer, but it will be a lot more pleasant and you may arrive at work in a much better mood.
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. Do you have a suggestion for a monday tip? Write a comment!
Dan Hersam was inspired by the recent talk of abolishing homework and of a better kind of school to post this great quote:
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the onrushing multitude.
See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for.
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I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.– Ralp Waldo Emerson
Yes!
And this applies totally to work as well. Who says we can’t create workplaces that are so inspiring, fun and challenging that we’d have to pay people to stay away?
Who says our workplaces have to be so boring, lifeless and meaningless that we can only get people to show up there by paying them to sacrifice their time and energy at jobs that don’t make them happy?
Let’s stop doing that, OK? It’s been proven time and again that both schools and workplaces can be fun, energizing affairs that draw people in voluntarily. It’s also been proven that doing this makes them more effective.
Let’s not settle for any less any more!
Here’s a scary tale from the real world:
When I was just starting out as a legal secretary, I worked for two lawyers who I referred to as Good Boss and Evil Boss.
Evil boss would never look for a file – he would yell for me to immediately find a particular FILE – which would be on his desk where he kept all of his working files.
In addition he would go through my in-box after I had left the office and rearrange the stack, move his work up and add new post-it notes with different deadline dates.
Three drafts to any document was the absolute minimum, and he often wanted to see the previous drafts for him to check my work. Consequently, my wastepaper basket was very organized.
The old leadership style of “I’m the boss, you must do whatever I say” is being challenged by a different style which is more about supporting people to let them create results.
While the old leadership style reminds me mostly of a prison warden, exercising absolute power over his wards, the new leadership role is completely different. It’s about making people like their jobs. It’s about realizing that people are in fact free to leave at any time.
In short, the new leadership style reminds me much more of the host of a party. Here’s how the two roles compare:
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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.
