The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Meetings: Hell or heaven?

    We recently developed a product in the Happy at Work Project to create better meetings – or in our parlance happy meetings. We tested it on a few organizations and one group of leaders told us, that they normally have 20-30 hours worth of meetings a week. I was flabbergasted.

    Our product aims at making meetings more fun, productive and dynamic by distributing ownership and responsibility for the meeting’s content from one person (typically the manager) to the entire group. When everyone is involved in setting the agenda and prioritizing items, meeting participants become more focused, engaged and creative.

    And now The Guardian reports on a study on meetings which found that:

    1. The more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects
    2. The more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects
    …
    The results speak volumes. “It is impressive,” Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, “that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee’s level of fatigue and subjective workload was found”. Their central insight, they say, is the concept of “the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals”.

    Notice that it is not meetings per se that are annoying people – it’s bad meetings. I’m pretty sure that fun, engaging, productive meetings would simply make people happier at work.

    Here’s my question to you: What do you think it takes, to make meetings fun and productive rather than boring and stressful?

  • Turkish Q&A

    I’m speaking at an HR conference in Istanbul next month, a leading turkish newspaper wanted to do an interview by email about happiness at work. They sent me some great questions, which I answered as best I could. The best part about great questions is that they leave you and the questioner wiser.

    Below are the questions and my answers, which contain some of our basic thoughts on happiness at work.

    (more…)

  • Quote

    Really cool quote:

    What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said, “Blessed is the man who has found his work”? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work–not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

    – Mark Twain

  • Google gets silly

    It’s nice to know, that there’s still time to goof around at Google:

    Not long ago, I walked by the desk of software engineer JJ Furman, and saw that he had made an interesting addition to his desk: a large blob of Silly Putty, about the size of a grapefruit. Intrigued, I asked how he’d gotten so much of the stuff. The answer? A bulk order directly from the manufacturer! Of course.

    I knew then that I wanted some, and it dawned on me that I probably wasn’t the only one. So I set out to place a really, really big bulk order. An email went out to cohorts. Their orders came in. Three weeks later, I had an eighth of a ton of Silly Putty delivered to my desk.

    I honestly believe that this is a sign of a healthy company, when employees have the creativity, freedom and time to do stuff like that.

    Of course, this begs the question: What happens if you drop a 25 kg. ball of silly putty from a height of 20 meters. MAN, I love the internet :o)

  • VW’s sci-fi car plant

    Solange de Santi’s excellent book Life on the Line about her experience of working under cover (she’s a journalist) for 18 months in a GM van plant gave me the sense that car factories are noisy, dirty, dangerous places.

    Apparently they don’t have to be – they can also be amazing, beautiful, friendly, ergonomic and high-tech. Check out these amazing pictures from the Volkswagen plant in Dresden. I think I could live comfortably and in high style inside that building :o)

  • The story so far

    Roosevelt Finlayson (of the Festival in the Workplace) called me from the Bahamas yesterday to catch up. During our talk we discussed my future plans (among many other things) and he challenged me to document the process I’m currently going through. That’s a great idea and what better place to do it than right here on the blog.

    And what better way to start than by telling the story so far. So here it is, the story of the geek who:

    • Co-Founded a very different kind of IT-company
    • Went from trying to grok tech to trying to grok people
    • Left IT and found his calling
    • Founded possibly the world’s strangest company/organisation/movement
    • Gave 3 years of his life to make people happy at work
    • Worked for free for 3 years, and calls at i huge success :o)
    • Is now leaving this project and has no idea what’s next

    (more…)

  • Imagination research

    The Imagination Lab Foundation is an independent, non-profit research institute founded in 2000 and operating from Lausanne, Switzerland.

    Its raison d’étre is to develop and spread actionable ideas about imaginative, reflective and responsible organizational practices. The Foundation’s underlying philosophy is to value imagination as a source of meaningful responses to emergent change and play as an effective way to draw on this human capacity.

    Go visit them and be sure to check out their amazing collection of articles. Grrrreat stuff!

  • Not your regular office christmas party

    What is the christmas office party like, when you work for the Happy at Work Project? Well, it might go a little like this:


  • I got a gig in Istanbul

    I’ll be speaking at the 11th. human resources conference in Istanbul on February 22nd and 23rd 2006. The conference has a very interesting theme called Manifesto: A Fresh Look into Organisations, People and Leadership. The themes are:
    * Discovering successful organizations with unconventional management approaches in place
    * Exploring complexity science and its relationship to organisations
    * Bringing a different look into organisational development, human capital management and work culture
    * Changing our minds about our firms: human corporations, companies as living systems, adaptive enterprise
    * Redefining leadership

    Sounds cool to me :o)

  • Death to PowerPoint

    Creating Passionate Users is the best blog I’ve found recently, and Kathy Sierra’s post on how not to use PowerPoint is very funny and smart.

    Sometimes the best presentation is… no presentation. Ditch the slides completely. Put the projector in the closet, roll the screen back up, and turn the damn lights back on!

    Especially if the slides are bullet points. Or worse… paragraphs.
    …
    The second you dim the lights and go into “presentation mode” is the moment you move from a two-way conversation to a one-way lecture/broadcast. It’s hard to be interactive when you’re behind your laptop, at a podium, watching your slides on the small screen.

    Read it!