The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • More stuff from the happy-at-work conference

    We’ve received some more follow-up material on the happy-at-work conference. Suna Christensen is an anthropologist who participated, and has now written a short report on the conference. It’s fascinating reading, and here’s one of my favourite bits:
    Work life and private, personal life is traditionally two separate worlds. But through inclusion of being human on the job this conference created a connection where human life as such stretched beyond the known borders. In me an experience was created which means, that it no longer makes sense to speak of work environment as terms or conditions under which we work. In stead, we must search for (new) words and concepts that – as the conference did in practice – kan represent the (contradictory) conditions under which we work.

    Music to my ears :o) You can find the whole report here – in danish only, though.

    Merete Klussman also participated, and she wrote a personal account of her day at the conference. Her article is an excellent description of the day and what participants could get out of the conference. Read Meretes story here.

  • Book review: The art of happiness at work

    The Dalai Lama knows a thing or two about how to be happy. Not only has he studied buddhist philosophy, psychology, history etc. all his life, he’s also a terribly nice person who has devoted his life to serving others – his own people (the tibetans) as well as the rest of us. In The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living his insights into what makes people happy were paired with those of Howard Cutler an american psychiatrist, to give us a manual of happiness based on eastern and western thought and science.

    For their second collaboration, they’ve decided to look at how to be happy on the job. The Art of Happiness At Work is an exploration of the major issues confronting those of us who have jobs: Topics like stress, boredom, anxiety, meaningless jobs are given a new twist through the insights of the Dalai Lama – a man who has never held a real job. It speaks to the depth of the buddhist knowledge and his ability to apply it, that he can offer profound insights and useful advice to people in circumstances so different from his own.
    (more…)

  • Book review: The 7 habits of highly effective people

    It’s a little difficult to say someting original about this book. The 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey has been around for a long time, and has infleunced many people’s thinking on leadership and personal and professional development.

    And deservedly so. The book offers insights that make sense and can serve as the foundation for personal growth. What I found most encouraging is that I see signs that much of the thinking of the book is now commonly found in a business setting. It seems that the ideas have spread and have become accepted, especially the very foundation, namely that professional success can (or maybe even must) come from personal development. To become a better worker, become a better person is the message that’s been spread by many books, and most effectively by “7 habits”.

  • Book review: No contest

    Competition is bad. It is a determining factor shaping human interaction almost everywhere eg. in education, in the workplace in hobbies and even in our social lives, but the net result of competing is negative.

    Life for us has become an endless succession of contests, From the moment the alarm clock rings until sleep overtakes us again, from the time we are toddlers until the day we die, we are busy strugglinh to outdo others. This is our posture at work and at school, on the playing field and back home. It is the common denominator of American life.

    This is the central argument of Alfie Kohn’s excellent book No Contest, The Case Against Competition. In the book, he takes on many of the myths of competion, especially that competition is an unavoidable aspect of human nature (built into us at a biological/genetic level) and that it drives us to better performance.
    (more…)

  • Book review: The art of happiness

    The Art of Happiness starts out by defining the role of happiness in our lives:
    I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So I think the very motion of our life is towards happiness…

    Howard Cutler got the enviable assignment of sitting down for a series of meetings over a copule of years with the Dalai Lama, and the result is this book. The style is true east meets west as Cutler, a psychologist, seeks to combine his understanding of the mind with the spiritual practices of the tibetan buddhism practiced by the Dalai Lama.
    (more…)

  • What is the good life

    The Summer 2004 issue of Yes! Magazine asks “What is the good life?” Some of the articles are available online, including one by David Myers that seeks to discredit once and for all the notion that money can make you happy:
    Watch television, and you’ll learn that the good life is in a new car, a cold beer, or a new drug. Look at surveys, and Americans say they want more money. But look inside at what actually gives you joy, and the good life may be closer than you thought.

  • Happiness on the air

    Friday morning, Danish national radio had a 6 minute segment from our happy at work conference, containing interviews with participants and speakers. And right after there was a 5 minute interview with me. You can hear the entire segment here (10 Mb mp3). It is, of course, in danish.

  • After the happy at work conference

    We had the happy at work conference yesterday, and it was a great experience. All our planning and desing efforts paid of, and everybody involved had a great day. Here’s some of the feedback we got:
    Best conference I’ve attended in Denmark…

    Wonderfully inspiring and immediately useful…

    Very refreshing and different…

    A great day of happiness…

    Fun to be part of, very inspiring. See you in 2005…

    I can safely say, that we succeded in creating a space and a mood where people could explore happiness at work from many angles. All day long the participants were happy, energetic, smiling, enthusiastic and positive. And I think the key is to create an environment where people have to take charge of their own learning. This was not a day that we created for them – they had to make their own day.

    For example: As soon as the participants arrived and were registered, they had to make their own badge. Instead of those boring preprinted badges with your name, title and company on’em, we had a large tabe with paper and pens in every conceivable colour, and everybody made their own badge, exactly as they wanted it. Some people got really creative :o)

    The conference only had 5 speakers, who spoke for 30 minutes each. The topics were very different, and each had their own individual style, that added immensely to the conference. Each of them did a great job.

    We had the CEO of Denmarks best workplace, Mads Kjaer, who spoke toegether with Malene Nilsson of Kjaer Group (their people manager) on what they’ve done to create their success story. We had a doctor, Claus Hyldahl, who spoke of the significance and practice of health in the workplace. We had Jesper Bove-Nielsen, the author of Corporate Kindergarten, who talked about play and innovation at work. John Bern talked about a simple model for happiness at work, and finally the well known danish actor Jens Arentzen talked about his take on happiness, in his very own style. All of this – and it wasn’t even noon yet.

    Then we had workshops. Lots of workshops. Coaching, appreciative inquiry, conversation circles, juggling, meditation, massage, health checkups and much, much more. And the participants seemed to throw themselves into it with abandon – especially the impro theater workshop seemed to generat a lot of fun and initiative.

    One very nice thing we did was to invite some professional storytellers to tell stories. One right after lunch, and one at the end of the conference. This was a great touch, which added a lot of fun to the proceedings.

    After the workshops, we gave each participant a chance to formulate a plan for their own happiness at work, and to discuss it with the other participants. Then it was almost 6PM, and we closed the day.

    Right now I feel happy and very, very tired. Every single gamble we took paid off. Every weird idea that we put into practice work. And put together, all of it created a day that was almost magical. We rock!

  • Open Space Status and future

    Harrison Owen wrote a brilliant summation on OST on the open space mailing list, which covers the origins, history and current status of Open Space Technology.

    The ending contains a wonderful challenge to all of us who know and use open space, and has certainly started med thinking about what the next step will be. Here is the entire text.
    (more…)

  • Psycopathic corporations

    The Corporation is a Canadian documentary released last year, which has an interesting premise: Under current law, a corporation is a person. But what kind of person?

    Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a ?person? in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employs a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

    Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation?s operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

    I like the premise, and as Noam Chomsky says in the movie, you must distinguish between the system and the individual. It is perfectly likely, that most individuals in a corporation can be nice, thoughtful, compassionate people, yet the resulting system shows behaviour that is selfish, greedy and short-sighted.

    While this behaviour is certainly prevalent in some corporations, I think that more and more organizations are starting to realize, that this way of doing business is not sustainable, and are making positive changes.

    I had the pleasure yesterday of visiting the offices of IKEA in Denmark, to interview them for my book on happiness at work. About 8 months ago, they gave their entire check-out staff a 20% pay raise. They did this partly in recognition of the fact that these people have one of the hardest jobs in IKEA while getting the least amount of money, and partly because they think it will make them money in the long run. This is very far from psycopathic behaviour. It shows a creativity and maturity, based on the realization that there is no inherent oppostion between making money and doing good.

    Sample clip here.