The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • 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.

  • Quote

    Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by people who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family.

    – Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, in his excellent book Let My People Go Surfing

  • Does he or doesn’t he?

    Lazy dog

    Some of Fred Gratzon’s readers refuse to believe his claim that he’s the laziest man in North America. If he is, then how could he have created two successful multi-million dollar businesses? Fred’s answer is classic:

    I did not do it with hard work. I did not do it by busting my butt. I did it by having fun – so much fun that people were attracted to that fun. I then picked the most competent attractees to be on my team and off we went. Whatever “hard work??? there might have been, I had long since turned into a game and we had fun “playing??? it.

    Read Fred’s post – it’s excellent.

    That’s a blueprint for happiness at work and success right there! I agree 100% and wrote a post a while back on why laziness is the major force behind my success and happiness. Also read my review of Fred’s brilliant book The Lazy Way To Success.

  • How to make yourself happy at work: Attention, Intention, Action

    So you want to be happy at work. What should you do?

    There are certainly enough things on the menu. Should you read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Or maybe the Getting Things Done system is right for you. You could focus on Personal Excellence or develop Brand You. Is coaching what you need? Or to learn to coach others? Assertiveness? Maybe some anti-stress training. Or some conflict mediation. Career counselling? Or developing your communication skills, your presentation skills or your…

    The options are almost endless and most of them are even pretty good. But it’s better to start somewhere else. With something even simpler. Something more basic.

    The best model I know for creating positive, effective change is attention, intention, action. And in the case of happiness we have to it positively, so the model becomes:

    1. Positive attention – notice what’s already good and what has worked previously
    2. Positive intention – make a positive intention that focuses on what you want more off, not what you want to avoid
    3. Positive action- do something positive to fulfill your intention

    Let’s starts with attention.
    (more…)

  • Monday tip: Take five

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsWork has become quite hectic for most of us. Emails, phone calls, meetings, deadlines, questions, customers all vie for our attention. If we want time for reflection and calm at work we have to create it for ourselves. That’s the point of this Monday Tip.

    Your mission: Take five. At some point during the day, take five uninterrupted, quiet minutes to relax. Here’s how it works:
    (more…)