The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • 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?

  • Effective, easy, fun things to make yourself happy at work

    Happiness at work comes from the things you and I do here and now. Not from whitepapers, committees or corporate mission statements.

    There are so many things you can do – the important thing is that you do something.

    This chapter has plenty of things you can start with, and focuses especially on things that are:

    1. Basic – so they work for most people in almost any job
    2. Important – so they make a difference
    3. Easy – so they don’t stress you out
    4. Effective – so they give you quick results
    5. Contagious – so they spread once a few people start doing it
    6. Fun – so you’ll actively enjoy doing them

    Imagine the opposite: A book that tells you, that the road to happiness at work is long, difficult and unpleasant. It would be best to drop such a book very quickly indeed.

    With that in mind here are some great, easy, effective and above all fun places to start.
    (more…)

  • Monday tip: Start meetings with a positive round

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsPsychological 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 critical 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 discusion and on whether or not the group will eventually reach consensus.

    Ah – meetings. The most energizing, creative and fun activity in the workplace. What’s that you say? They’re not? Well they can be. In fact they should be. Here’s a monday tip that can help your group take a step in that direction.
    (more…)

  • People are talking about “the customer is always right”

    TalkingMy post listing the Top 5 reasons “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong has spawned a lot of great comments in the post itself and one some other websites including these:

    Kinkoids Unite (a site for Kinko’s employees)
    “In my region, when an employee is mentioned in a customer complaint, he/she has to apologize to all 11 center managers in a conference call whether they were wrong or wronged.”

    Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..?

    Digg
    “One of the consistent back up statements of “The Customer is Always Right” is the amount of dollars it costs to replace a customer. It costs more to replace a customer than to retain one most times. However, it also costs a lot more to recruit, hire, and train a new employee than it does to keep one happy.”

    Excellent point – I never even though of that one.
    (more…)

  • A model for happiness at work

    A simple model for happiness at work

    A simple 3-step model shows what it takes to make a workplace happy, and it’s shown in the figure below.

    Happy model

    The model has three layers, three areas which make a difference to people’s happiness at work. Each of these layers are important, but one is often ignored – and it happens to be the most important one.
    (more…)

  • Jerks at work – and five ways to deal with them

    Guard dog

    CEO Hal Rosenbluth was once about to hire an executive with all the right skills, the right personality and the perfect CV. His interviews went swimmingly and he’d said all the right things, but something about him still made Rosenbluth nervous, though he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.

    His solution was genius: He invited the applicant to a company softball game, and here he showed his true colors. He was competitive to the point of being manic. He abused and yelled at both the opponents and his own team. He cursed the referees and kicked up dirt like a major league player.

    And he did not get the job.

    (From Hal Rosenbluth’s excellent book The Customer Comes Second).

    Jerks at work and how to lose them

    Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: The vast majority of people in any given business are nice. They’re helpful, sympathetic, likable and quite simply good people. Only a tiny, tiny minority are consistently unpleasant or abrasive.

    You sometimes hear in business that “nice guys finish last” ie. that in a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog (hence the picture above) business climate you need to be something of a jerk to get results. Consequently people with difficult or abrasive personalities are tolerated (or even celebrated) in many organizations because “they may not be likeable but they get results”.

    I beg to differ. Jerks have no place in the modern business world and cause much more damage than they’re worth. This is not a matter of namby-pamby, soft-shoe “why can’t we all be nice” thinking; it comes down to the fact that jerks are bad for the bottom line! Luckily, many people and companies are starting to realize this and are doing something about it.

    This blogpost presents five different anti-jerk approaches that every workplace might consider.
    (more…)

  • An entire people who refuse to bust their butts

    Lazy dogCaterina Fake has been reading a new book called Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell and loved it. She quotes this passage from the book which talks about the difference between work and play:

    The Kpelle people of Liberia, to name one, scarcely make the distinction at all, allowing for a difference between arduous “forest work” and lighter “town work” but generally avoiding all work that can’t be done playfully, amid song and dance and jest. It’s not that they’re slackers. On the contrary: Diligent rice farmers, they organize their lives around the constant activity of cultivation. But when government advisors pressured them to switch from dry rice farming to more productive paddy-based methods, they resisted–not because they had no interest in making more money, but because they had no interest in working joylessly. The techniques of paddy-rice farming might be more efficient, the anthropologist David Lancy has explained, but they would reduce the Kpelle’s daily activity to “just plain work”, bereft of “the vital leavening of gossip, singing and dance” that makes Kpelle work worth doing.

    An entire people who are happy at work and refuse to bust their collective butts – excellent! This makes a great followup to Fred Gratzon’s refusal to bust his butt.