The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • 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:

    1. What – What is happiness at work anyway
    2. Why – Why does happiness at work matter to you and me and to our workplaces?
    3. How – So, how exactly can we make ourselves and others happy at work. What works, what doesn’t?

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  • 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

    The customer is always right?

    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:

    1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
    2. 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.

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  • Monday tip: Five things that made you happy at work today

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsThis 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.

    Previous monday tips.

  • Today’s danish language lesson: Arbejdsgl

    Danish flagI’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

    QuestionThe 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.

  • Who is responsible for happiness at work?

    The order of the elephant
    The Order of the Elephant. This little guy helped turn around a childrens hospital ward from an unhappy workplace to a very happy one.

    Helle Schier, a soft-spoken, engaging woman in her mid-twenties was excited. She’d just graduated from nursing school, and had already gotten her first job as a nurse at Odense University Hospital.

    But when she told a friend that she was going to work at H4, a childrens ward, her friend’s reaction was “Well, I’m not sure if I should congratulate you.” It turned out that H4 had quite a reputation. The nurses rarely helped each other out. The doctors disliked the nurses and that was very much mutual. The nurses disliked the administrative staff who in turn didn’t feel their work was being appreciated. It was not a happy place to work.

    Helle still started working there with a positive attitude, but was soon forced to agree: It was a horrible place, and working there was getting her down. She didn’t like her job at all, didn’t feel productive and started to question whether being a nurse was right for her at all.

    But Helle wouldn’t put up with it and she wouldn’t quit. She decided she would do something about it.

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  • The happy at work book – Introduction

    Happy at work.

    Happy? At work?

    Happy… at work?

    Is it possible to be happy at work? Can we go to work and be energized, have fun, do great work, enjoy the people we work with, have fun with our customers, be proud of what we do and look forward to our monday mornings? Can we create workplaces where happiness is the norm?

    Or must we simply accept that work is unpleasant and tough and that is why we get paid to do it?
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  • Monday tip: Praise a co-worker

    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsFor my very first monday tip, I’ll start with something really, really simple but extremely powerful: Praise.

    Your monday mission: Praise someone.

    Pick a co-worker and give that person positive feedback. It can be on something he or she has done recently (“I really enjoyed your idea about developing the Hansen account”) or on what you generally appreciate about that person (“I really like the way you always add great ideas to our project meetings”).

    Don’t make a big production out of it, just go up to a colleague, deliver your praise and then get back to work. Do not hang around waiting to be praised back :o) Also do not add a “…but you really need to improve your…” after the praise :o)

    Remember that whatever praise you choose to give has to be genuine. You can’t praise just to praise, so think about something you truly appreciate about that person.

    For extra bonus points:

    • Praise someone you don’t talk to often. It’s a great way to establish contact.
    • Praise your manager. Managers often hear very little praise from their employees. But: Don’t kiss butt – only genuine praise counts.
    • If you really want a challenge, praise someone you don’t like much or someone you’re currently having a conflict with. It can be a great way to get un-stuck. Can’t think of anything positive about that person? Try again – there’s always something.

    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.

  • What makes people unhappy at work

    Unhappy at workWe’ve looked at what we think makes us happy at work but doesn’t. We’ve looked at what actually does work.

    But what actively makes people unhappy at work? What are the most important things to avoid? Let’s take a look at that.
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