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
Category: Happy At Work
How to be happy at work
-
Quote
-
Does he or doesn’t he?
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:
- Positive attention – notice what’s already good and what has worked previously
- Positive intention – make a positive intention that focuses on what you want more off, not what you want to avoid
- Positive action- do something positive to fulfill your intention
Let’s starts with attention.
(more…) -
Monday tip: Take five
Work 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…) -
About the Happy at Work Book
About the book
The book aims to convince you that:
- Each and every one of us can be happy at work
- Being happy at work will not only make work more fun, it will also improve your quality of life outside of work and make you more successful
- Happy businesses are much more efficient than unhappy ones so happiness makes great business sense
- Happiness at work is not rocket science – what it takes to make yourself and your workplace happy is simple to do
Structure
The book is structured around the three basic questions we must remember to ask about any important topic:
- What – What is happiness at work anyway
- Why – Why does happiness at work matter to you and me and to our workplaces?
- How – So, how exactly can we make ourselves and others happy at work. What works, what doesn’t?
-
Work less achieve more
The idea that working more does not necessarily mean achieving more, and that we need to end the cult of overwork, seems to be cropping up all over the place these days.
Here are a few great, recent sightings.
Fred Gratzon lists the Top 10 signs you’re made to be an entrepreneur, including “You are unemployable” and “You have the uncanny ability to get other people to do all the work”.
In Spend less time working, get more done Adam Wiggins follows up on my post on why seat time does not equal productivity. Excellent!
Impact of overtime on productivity is on overwork in software development, but applies to all fields.
A common effect of putting teams under pressure is that they will reduce their concentration on quality and focus instead on “just banging out code”. They’ll hunker down, stop helping each other so much, reduce testing, reduce refactoring, and generally revert to just coding.Interview with vacation advocate Joe Robinson
What is a gross national product when you don’t have a life? A few years ago, the Norwegians found that they were 14 percent more productive than we [Americans] are. So they elected to take more time off.Tom Hodgkinson tears apart some recent bad business books
The books under review recommend all sorts of immoral actions. In the old days, greed and covetousness were seen as sinful; now they are encouraged. Jack Welch’s Winning sets the tone. The author grins manically from the cover – despite the silver hair, manicured nails and perfect teeth, he looks like Beelzebub incarnate. -
Top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong
When the customer isn’t right – for your business
One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.
She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.
Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’
In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’”
The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:
- Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
- Convince employees to give customers good service
Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.
Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.
-
Monday tip: Five things that made you happy at work today
This monday tip is about reminding yourself what’s good about your job.Your monday mission: Today before you go home, grab a piece of paper and write down five things that made you happy at work today. Big or small, doesn’t matter, as long as it made your day a little better. Meat loaf day at the cafeteria. Making a deadline. Talking to a co-worker. Anything.
Make the list just before you leave work. If you can’t come up with five items for the list, that’s fine, write down as many as you can. If you can’t think of a single one, then either it’s been a bad day, or it’s time to look for a new job :o)
Why is this a good thing? Well, let’s say you’ve had ten good experiences at work today and one bad one. If you go home, thinking only of the bad one, you will remember this as a bad day. It will even feel as a bad day. And most people do have a tendency to remember negative experiences better than positive ones. This makes it a good idea to take extra care to remember good experiences, eg. by writing them down.
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.
-
Today’s danish language lesson: Arbejdsgl
I’ve been going on about how there’s a danish word for happiness at work, the word arbejdsglæde.John of uneasy rhetoric had the great idea to put up a pronunciation guide and here it is, today’s lesson in danish: The word arbejdsglæde and how to pronounce it. (2 Mb mp3 file, 2 minutes).
In english it would be something like: Ah – bites – gleh – the.
-
A question for you about the Happy at Work Book
The Happy at Work Book is now half finished. It took me eight days of writing, writing only before lunch to get this far. I can’t believe how fast I’ve been writing or how much fun it’s been. I literally have to force myself to take days off from writing on it once in a while :o)I’m going on vacation next week, so new chapters are coming the week after that. What I’ve covered so far are the basics: The introduction, What is happiness at work, why is it important for people and businesses and who is responsilbe for happiness at work.
I would like to thank everyone who has read and commented on the book so far – it has been both encouraging, motivating and a great help to read your comments. Thank you! If you’d like, you can read the book and leave feedback here.
The next part of the book is about How to make people and businesses happy, and this is where I have a question. You see, the things you can do, the options available to you are fairly different depending on your position at the company. If you’re an employee there are some things you can do, mid-level managers have some other options available to them and top-level execs and business owners some different ones again.
Everything in the book up till this point is relevant for everyone with a job (and everyone who wants one), but now things diverge a little.
The question is this: Should I try to write one book that combines these three viewpoints or what would be the best way to do it? My chief ambition is to keep the book interesting, fun, useful and fairly short.
Please let me know what you think.
