The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Top 5 business maxims that need to go – Part II

    Same same

    It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
    It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
    – Josh Billings

    Much well-known business advice is sadly obsolete but can still be found in articles, business books and, not least, in daily use in the workplace. It seems that some companies are still guided by thinking that is sadly out of date – if it was ever true to begin with.

    The worst of these old maxims are not only wrong, they’re bad for people and bad for business. Businesses who use them are making their employees unhappy and are harming the bottom line.

    I recently wrote a post about the Top 5 Business Maxims That Need To Go, listing 5 horrendous examples. I also asked people to contribute the maxims they would like to get rid of, and got some great suggestions, so here are 5 more pieces of bad business advice that are making people unhappy at work and harming the bottom line.
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  • Ask the CHO: Dealing with uncertainty at work

    A reader sent me this question:

    The company I work at “went global”. That means horrible things like many people fired and so. Thus, people are afraid to lose their job, even when I directly asked a manager I trust and he said that “no one from your department will lost his job”. People don’t trust management. Some are cynical, some are afraid, but I think, at different levels, all are unhappy with the situation. I like these people very much, and I would like to do something to confort them, but so far, listening was the only thing I was able to do.

    Additionally, the people from another site are also unhappy, because even when most of them are very capable professionals, they are being threated like… uhm.. incapable kids (not to mention the fact that they know that they were hired because they are “cheaper”).

    Any suggestions to improve the situation?

    First of all thanks for a great question which describes a situation that is found in many workplaces today: A workplace goes through large-scale changes and people wonder “what will it mean for me?” Management may or may not try to create some certainty, but may fail because of a lack of trust.
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  • Monday tip: Ask a co-worker for advice

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsIf you have a question or a challenge at work that’s been on your mind for a while, this monday tip is for you: Ask someone at work for advice.

    We often hold back from asking for help because we’re afraid to disturb or annoy others, but in reality most people like to be asked for their opinion. It makes them feel appreciated, valued and shows that they can make a difference.

    It can also be a great help for you. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a seemingly unsolvable problem at work that I’ve banged my head against for hours, but which is solved in five minutes by co-worker I bring in to ask for help. Now that’s annoying :o)

    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.

  • Tournament theory – the worst argument ever for overpaying executives

    Overpaid

    The executives in your company may be paid way more than they’re worth, but don’t worry – it’s for your own good.

    That’s the point of a recent Forbes article defending overpaid executives which contains the single most disingenuous and illogical argument it has ever been my misfortune to see in a business context. From the article:

    The ugly truth is that your boss is probably overpaid–and it’s for your benefit, not his. Why? It might be because he isn’t being paid for the work he does but, rather, to inspire you. In other words, we work our socks off in underpaying jobs in the hope that one day we’ll win the rat race and become overpaid fat cats ourselves. Economists call this “tournament theory.”

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  • Top 5 reasons to make your startup a great place to work – and how to do it

    Happiness leads to profits

    When I co-founded an IT company back in 1997 we had many dreams, but one overarching ambition: We wanted to make it a happy place to work.

    We’d tried working for organizations that cared only about sales, billable hours and profits and we were determined to break away from this mentality and make our company a place where people had fun, did great work, constantly learned and developed and had time for their private lives and families.

    It turned out that we were right on the money. The company became happy and successful and four years later when the dot-boom happened and the company’s very survival was threatened, that is what saved us – the fact that everyone at the company loved working there and were willing to go extraordinary lengths to save it.

    Quite simply, happiness at work saved our startup.
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  • Why job descriptions are useless

    Job description

    Let’s do a quick reality check on job descriptions. Ask yourself these three questions:

    1. When was the last time you read your job description?
    2. Do you remember what it says?
    3. When was the last time you did something at work that you could not have done without your job description?

    If your answers are 1) When I interviewed for the job, 2) Ehmmmm… not really and 3) I don’t think that has ever happened – then maybe it’s time to rethink the value of job descriptions.

    I say job descriptions as they exist today amount to little more than organizational clutter and could easily be dropped altogether. Here’s why we should lose’em and what to do instead.
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  • Comment roundup on secret salaries vs. open

    Everybody hates open salaries

    When I wrote my post on why secret salaries are a baaaaaad idea I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. On most other posts I’ve written, 3 out of 4 commenters agree – in this case 3 out 4 thought that open salaries are a really baaaaaaaad idea. How many a’s are there in baaaad anyway?

    There’s about 60 comments on the post itself, 50 on reddit, 80 on digg and more on other sites, most of which, as mentioned, are dead set against the idea of open salaries.

    Interestingly, the comments from people who have tried open salaries are overwhelmingly in favor of the idea – many cite great benefits. I still think open salaries are a great idea for employees, businesses and the bottom line.

    I’ve summed up the major arguments from the comments against secret salaries and my arguments against these arguments below, not so much because I want the last word (well, that too :o) but mostly because most of the arguments are really good arguments, many of which I hadn’t thought about before.
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  • Dilbert: “Reduce employee turnover… Check!”

    Today’s Dilbert strip is pretty funny :o)

  • The time I learned to say “No” at work

    Nyet!

    It was only my second job out of university, working as a software developer for a small consulting company in Copenhagen. I was 26 years old, dressed in a suit and tie that still felt like a halloween costume to me, having meetings with the customer’s VP of finance, trying to find out exactly what the IT system we were developing for their new factory should be capable of.
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  • The six practices of happy, succesful workplaces

    This chapter is not yet finished – but I really need your help, so I’m posting it now.

    Am I on the right track? It kinda feels like the advice here is either too simple or too complex to be useful. I want people to read this chapter and be inspired by what other great companies are doing. To get ideas they can implement themselves.

    Is it working? What do you think?

    How to make your business happy – in practice

    What can a workplace do to make its people want to be happy there? Given that raises, bonuses and perks don’t work what are the things that do? We could start from scratch and invent some methods and tools, but it makes much more sense to learn from the best practices already out there. What is it that the best, happiest and most successful companies do to reach high levels of happiness, excellence and profits? What makes their people consistently choose to be happy at work and lets employees and leaders work together to create great workplaces?

    And let’s not just look at what they do, let’s look at what they do that can readily be stolen implented in your workplace. Let’s focus on practices that are:

    • Generic – so they apply to almost any workplace, big or small, private or government
    • Effective – so they make a real difference
    • Fun – so they make people happy
    • Good for business – so they’ll get you more results

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