The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Top 5 business maxims that need to go

    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 (or Mark Twain or Artemus Ward or…)

    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 It seems that some companies are still guided by thinking that is sadly out of date – if it was ever true to begin with.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.

    Here’s my pick of the top 5 business maxims in serious need of an update – with a suggested replacement for each.

    UPDATE: Now there’s also a Part II post with 5 more horrendous pieces of business advice.
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  • Ask the Chief Happiness Officer

    Ask me anything :o)I’m introducing a new feature on the blog: I’m now taking questions.

    Seriously, ask me anything related to happiness at work. Just call me the Miss Manners or Dear Abby of the workplace.

    The way it works is you ask a question (either in a comment to this post or in an email) and I answer it in a post on the blog. If you want me to, I’ll anonymize your question so you won’t get caught asking for outside advice. Go ahead and ask, I’d love to help!

  • Monday Tip: Candy for meetings

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsLast week’s tip was about creating positive meetings and so is this week’s. Only this tip is really, really simple. Ready:

    Bring a bowl of candy to a meeting today.

    That’s it. Bring candy to a meeting. And share it, obviously, I didn’t mean for you to sit there gorging yourself with everyone else looking on enviously.
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  • 5 essential steps to resolve a conflict at work

    Conflict at work

    Though Jane enjoyed working as the sales manager of Wilbey & Sons, working with Scott, the financial manager, was a constant struggle for her. At every meeting, Scott would take great care to explain why all her ideas were unworkable. Also, Scott was constantly asking for sales projections and financial data from her and always wanted it in excruciating detail. Supplying these figures was taking up a large amount of her department’s already packed schedule. Frankly she thought, he was nothing but a dry, negative perfectionist.

    Scott, on the other hand, thought that Jane was a maverick. She always had to interrup meetings with her harebrained schemes and whenever he asked her for the data he needed to keep the company finances in order, she would always stall and make him have to ask her again several times. Jane, he felt, was nothing but a happy-go-lucky, unrealistic show-off.

    It got to the point where neither of them could stand to be in the same room together. The company clearly suffered under this conflict between two of its key employees and something clearly needed to be done. Fortunately the CEO had a simple but surprising solution.

    I don’t know about you, but I hate conflicts at work. Spending my work days mad at a co-worker, trying to avoid that person and subconsciously finding fault with everything they say or do is not exactly my idea of a good time.

    I used to be an expert at dodging conflicts on the job and I’m here to tell you that it just doesn’t work! What does work is biting the bullet and doing something about it here and now. I have seen what looked like huge, insurmountable, serious conflicts go “poof” and disappear into dust when handled constructively. I have also seen an itty-bitty molehill of a problem grow into a mountain that threatened to topple an entire company.

    You can’t win a conflict at work. Winning a conflict ie. getting the outcome you want regardless of what the other person wants can be gratifying, sure, but the problem is that the underlying issue has not been solved. It will simply reappear later over some other topic. Much better than winning a conflict at work is resolving it.

    And the price of inaction is high, because unresolved, long-running conflicts result in antagonism, break-down in communications, inefficient teams, stress and low productivity. In short, unresolved conflicts make people terribly unhappy at work.

    With all of this in mind, here are five essential steps to constructively resolve conflicts at work. The steps can be applied to any kind of conflict between co-workers with maybe one exception – read more at the end of the post.
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  • Slow links

    Go slow!Slow leadership is an excellent blog and a great way to increase happiness at work. The latest post is about The Cycle of Respect vs. The Cycle of Contempt..

    The new Adam Sandler movie about a guy who gets a remote control that controls life inspired Stephen Shapiro of Goal Free Living to ask: What Is Your Slow Motion to Fast Forward Ratio.

    Denmark is the happiest nation on earth. Even though we have the highest taxes. In your face, Steve Forbes :o)

  • Make your organization happy

    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 fired 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 fired. Six months later, they’d hired back 500 out of the 1.000 and the company was solidly on its way to recovery.

    Choose happiness

    Once you’ve made yourself happy at work, it’s time to spread that good mood inside the organization and make more people there happy at work. This is obviously a bigger job but it is entirely possible and while some companies are born happy, many more are made happy somewhere along the way.

    The next few chapters are for leaders at different levels, who want to spread some happiness in their team, department, division or, heck, clear across the entire business.
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  • Think a raise will make you happy? Think again!

    Rich. But happy?

    Most people think that having a higher income would make them happier. They’re wrong!

    That is the conclusion of a study by Two Princeton professors, economist Alan B. Krueger and psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who say that:

    The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities.

    The problem is that people still act on their mistaken belief that making more money means being happier. In short they choose income over happiness:

    Despite the weak relationship between income and global life satisfaction or experienced happiness, many people are highly motivated to increase their income. In some cases, this focusing illusion may lead to a misallocation of time, from accepting lengthy commutes (which are among the worst moments of the day) to sacrificing time spent socializing (which are among the best moments of the day).

    Which is just a fancy way of saying that you may think that switching jobs to get a 25% raise in return for a 2-hour commute or a 70-hour work week or ten days a month on business travel is a good deal. You’re wrong. You’d be happier with a lower salary and more time with your friends and family.

    So if you’re trying to make yourself happy at work by chasing that raise, bonus or incentive, your strategy is doomed to fail. The same goes for managers trying to increase their employees’ happiness, motivation and productivity through the same means. It won’t work! It takes something else to make people happy at work. I wrote about more about it in these two chapters of the Happy At Work Book:

    Read more about the study here.

  • Question: What makes you happy at work?

    QuestionI’d really like to know what makes you happy at work?

    What does it take? What do you do? What is it that makes your workday better? Please write a comment to this post.

    I’m looking for inspiration for the Happy At Work Book which, incidentally, will be finished soon. I’ll write the last chapter this week or next week at the latest and I only started writing it a month ago. Sometimes I scare myself :o)

  • Best damn newsletter around

    You can make co-workers and employees happy at work – but you can also try to make customers a little happier. And don’t you think that will keep them coming back?

    Zopa is a new kind of bank that lets you lend money to or borrow directly from other people. That’s cool but it’s not the only reason I admire them. I also admire them for their funny, irreverent, different newsletters like this one:

    We try to be completely open with our members, but chances are there are still some things you don’t know about us yet. So rather than leaving you in the dark, we thought we’d fill you in on 10 things you might not know about Zopa:

    1. Lenders earn 3.25% interest from the minute we receive their money until the moment it gets lent out
    2. You can lend as little as £10 – so it’s really easy to dip your toe in the water and see what it’s like
    3. Rather unfortunately, in Russian ‘Zopa’ means ‘bottom’
    4. Lenders are protected against fraud – so if a borrower borrows fraudulently and then defaults, or if someone hacks into your account, then you won’t lose out
    5. The Zopa Member Services Team is on hand 7 days a week, and is only ever an email away (contactus@zopa.com)
    6. People from the north tend to pronounce Zopa to rhyme with ‘hopper’, people from the south, to rhyme with ‘hoper’
    7. You can transfer money into Zopa using your debit card – ring 0207 636 7712 during office hours (Monday to Friday, 10am – 6pm)
    8. Our bad debt levels currently stand at less than 0.05% across all markets
    9. By offering in many markets at once, your money will get lent out quicker and so will work a lot harder for you
    10. There is no official Zopa handshake. Yet.

    This is a great way to make you customers a little happier – and it’s great branding that helps underscore the fact that Zopa is not a traditional bank.

  • Happy at work in six minutes

    I tried something new at Reboot8: I did a PechaKucha presentation about Happiness At Work. Now there’s a video of it, courtesy of youtube:

    Press play to see me introduce Happiness At Work using 20 slides, each of which is shown for only 20 seconds. The PechaKucha format is insane and a lot of fun and I’m very happy with the way my presentation came out. It’s actually a pretty good overview of the topic in just a little over six minutes.

    You can also download my 20 slides from the presentation.

    Who’s up for a PechaKucha night in Copenhagen sometime soon?