How to be happy at work
A great big thank you to:
I’m now back in Copenhagen after a nice, sunny flight home from Istanbul. Most of the way, I could look down on a snow-covered Europe which looked amazingly beautiful from 10 km up.
The conference was a great experience which touched on the many themes that are (or are becoming) central to HR, such as:
I went out to dinner thursday evening with a group of other speakers and we ended up talking about what the common, unifying theme of the “new HR” might be.
It will probably surprise noone, that I believe that unifying theme to be happiness at work. The basic challenge of modern business is to activate the full potential of the people who work there. For this to happen, peope need to be happy. It’s that simple.
This makes happiness both a goal and a tool, and it is my claim that happiness at work will become the most important strategic goal of modern businesses over the next few years.
I also predict that we will see a trend, where happy companies will put unhappy companies out of business, simply because happy businesses are much more efficient and profitable. It’s no contest.
What does this mean for the future of HR? I think it mainly requires a new focus, namely this:
The role of HR is to make people happy
If businesses make this conceptual leap and start prioritizing accordingly, we will see HR becoming an even greater asset than it already is and we will see many workplaces change for the better. And it’ll help the bottom line.
A big thank you to everyone who participated! If you have any comments or questions, please write a comment here and I will try to answer.
I’m writing this from the VIP room at the MCT HR conference in Istanbul (it’s good to be a speaker). The conference was kicked off by some good presentations:
After a very nice lunch, there are several sessions to choose from this afternoon – we’ll see who wins the race.
And of course the best part of any conference is making new friends and having great conversations – and this conference certainly doesn’t disappoint. More updates later.
A short while ago I spoke at one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to: The WorldBlu Forum on Organizational Democracy. Previous coverage here, here, here and here.
The organizers have put up podcasts with many of the speakers including Dan Pink, David Weinberger and … me (7 min., 8 Mb mp3) being interviewed by the charming and delightful Susanne Goldstein. I somehow manage to go all the way back to Aristotle and the Dalai Lama and then talk about happiness at work and how it relates to democratic workplaces.
eXtreme Programming is a process used to structure software development projects. It is radically different from more traditional methods, in that it defers more of the detailed planning till later in the project. Most traditional methods try to answer all the big questions up front. This makes it less susceptible to changes that occur during the project – something that can otherwise seriously disrupt software projects.
eXtreme Programming, or XP, is based on a set of principles that at first may seem awkward and counter-intuitive, but which actually support each other nicely, resulting in a process that is:
Since I switched from the IT business to making people happy at work, I’ve used some of the XP principles in many other situations, where they have proved to work just as well. Here is my list of which XP principles translate to non-IT projects, and how to utilize them:
Rather than spending a long time building up to one huge release, find a way to divide your project into several smaller releases. This means that your product makes contact with the real world sooner, and allows you to better incorporate feedback from actual customers/users. in XP, you want to release something every 2-3 weeks, which is certainly preferable to working on a project for 6 months, delivering it to the customer and THEN learning that it doesn’t fulfill their needs. And don’t tell me this never happens.
This means breaking the current goals down into tasks that are small enough to be accomplished in 1-3 days. Based on these estimates, the teams decides which tasks to include for the next deliverable. This means that the work immediately ahead gets broken down into small, manageable pieces and you can easliy track progress.
Rather than assigning fixed roles to each person, let people switch roles. This enhances knowledge sharing and learning and also helps avoid information bottlenecks. XP also lets people choose for themselves which part of the project they want to work on.
You’ll be amazed how much faster meetings go, when people can’t sleep in their chairs. in XP projects every day starts with a stand-up meeting to coordinate the days work.
That way you don’t have to guess what the customer wants/intends/needs. You can easily and quickly ask.
This means that no work is done by one person alone – each and every task is tackled by at least two people. This may seem inefficient at first, but experience shows that people do better work when working together and it also enhances cross-training and team-work.
Choose the simplest solution that could possibly work. Don’t get fancy when simple will do.
If you’re faced with a difficult choice, don’t analyse it to death, trying to look for the right solution. Instead create spike solutions – quick tests that allow you to try various possible solutions out. This gives you fast, specific, real-life data to let you choose and helps avoid paralysis by analysis.
Everybody owns the whole project. This helps avoid bottlenecks and that unpleasant situation where people feel that they own a part of the project and seem reluctant to share knowledge or accept criticism on their “property”.
Period!
I believe that these principles can be applied to many kinds of projects and I have done so myself with considerable success. Are they always applicable? No. Read the XP entry on when to apply XP for some inspiration on when to use XP – and when not to.
The Holllywwod way of organizing a movie is by using only contract labour. The vast majority of movie people, from grips and gaffers to high-paid actors, are in essence self-employed and are hired for one movie at a time.
Pixar goes against this trend, by focusing on people:
Contracts allow you to be irresponsible as a company. You don’t need to worry about keeping people happy and fulfilled. What we have created here – an incredible workspace, opportunities to learn and grow, and, most of all, great co-workers – is better than any contract.
…
We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people.
Says Randy S. Nelson, the dean of Pixar University.
Among the advatages cited are:
* People learn to work more efficiently together through long-term collaborations
* People can better support each other through difficult creative processes
* A culture of learning
* People have more fun
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?
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.
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
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