How to be happy at work
A few interesting links:
World Database of happiness – An ongoing register of scientific research on subjective appreciation of life.
Learn improv – Lots of improv exercises for all occasions.
Using moral imagination for irreplicable strategic advantage – It pays to be moral according to this paper.
Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon – The statistics of happiness.
The latest idea from the Happy At Work project is a set of posters with some of our slogans on them. The posters are free of any copyrights, you can do with them whatever you want. Mail them to others, put them on your website, hang them in your office or whatever else you can think of.
There are 10 different posters, and they’re available as pdf files, jpg images, a Powerpoint presentation or even as a Windows screensaver. You can find them here. They’re in danish, but if anyone wants it, I could create a set in english..?
I made the screensaver using a nifty little piece of software called xatshow from xat.com.
I had the pleasure yesterday of speaking with Roosevelt Finlayson and Michael Diggiss who are working in the Bahamas on something they call the Festival In The Workplace. It arises from the question of:
How is it that many persons who are going at half pace or less on the job, get involved in more creative activities outside of the workplace, such as the annual Junkanoo festival, and become transformed, passionate and highly productive individuals?
In other words, how can you bring the dedication and spirit that people display when they work on eg. the Junkanoo festival or the Rio Carnival to the job? You can read their introduction to the project, it certainly brought a smile to my lips.
Talking to Roosevelt and Michael was a pleasure, and it was wonderful to discover that we share many of the same ideas and dreams. I admire their vision and dedication, and I find the mere idea of the Festival In The Workplace to be intriguing and inspiring.
The contact was made when Roosevelt happened to surf by this site and discovered that we are working on similar projects, which once again proves the value of this internet thing. I personally think it’s here to stay :o)
Can you know something, that you haven’t measured? Of course you can. I would actually argue, that by far the largest percentage of what you know about the current state of your organization was not something you measured – it was knowledge that came to you via some other process than objective metrics. A few recents posts in different weblogs have been talking around this topic.
On Intellectual Capital Punishment Sam Marshall (via Smart Meeting Design) wrote about an article in Financial Times:
What did disappoint me though, was the quote from HP’s CKO, Craig Samuel: ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. Shame on him for using such an outdated cliche. It reinforces the view that management is something you do with spreadsheets. He should be pushing an agenda that changes expectations about what information you need to manage, relying much more on trusting perceptions and qualitative evidence.
On Reforming Project Management Hal Macomber wrote that:
When a supervisor, manager, or organization declares measurements people will quickly adjust their behavior to correspond to their understanding of the measurements… But most organizations have too many measurements… the practice of establishing these measurements keeps management detached from the exactly the operations that they are interested in performing well. Try something else: forego the measurements. Get engaged instead.
Chris Corrigan took a more political perspective and wrote that:
How do I know I have four apples? I count them. This is notable because the subjective truths, the good and the true (in Wilber’s terms) are truths that only exist if you participate in them… To simply sit back and accept the measured approach (pun intended) is to give up responsibility for the truth, and to become complicit in the system that generates that truth from outside of its subjects.
I was thinking about this when a thought struck me that may be painfully obvious to everyone else, but seemed kinda interesting to me. I thought that there are two reasons why we measure anything:
1: To know
2: To become aware
Measuring something will ideally give me concrete, specific knowledge, but it will also affect whatever it is that I’m measuring. Remember the experiments they performed in the car industry (in the 50’s I think) where they modified working conditions to increase productivity? For instance, they turned up the lighting in an area, and that made the workers more efficient. They tried dimming the lights in another area and, strangely, this also increased productivity! What affected the workers’ productivity in these cases was not more or less light, it was a couple of guys with clipboards in the background constantly taking notes. (On a side note, the notion that you can’t measure anything in a system without affecting the system is also a consequence of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics.)
So metrics aren’t bad. Not at all. The problem comes mostly when metrics are seen as the only way to increase knowledge and awareness – eg. when HP’s CKO, Craig Samuel says ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’.
The question then becomes whether you will allow yourself to trust knowledge obtained without objective metrics and, frankly, I believe that not to do so is absurd. I would even take it one step further, as I did in a previous post and say that most of the important stuff that goes on in an organization is
a) Not measured
b) Not even measureable
Metrics are used to generate both awareness and knowledge, but to treat metrics as the only trustworthy source is absurd!
At the “happy at work” workshops, we always talk about the value of breaks. Of having five minutes a day, where you’re not working, talking, mailing or phoning. A non-time where you can become centered and grounded and aware of yourself and your surroundings. At the last workshop, a participant told me about the norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen who has written a book called The tyranny of the moment, in which he argues that we are loosing our pauses. He says, that it is in the silent spaces between doing things that we can take on new ideas and contemplate change.
A quote:
Thomas Eriksen argues that slow time – private periods where we are able to think and correspond coherently without interruption – is now one of the most precious resources we have, and it is becoming a major political issue. Since we are now theoretically “online” 24 hours a day, we must fight for the right to be unavailable – the right to live and think more slowly. It is not only that working hours have become longer – Eriksen also shows how the logic of this new information technology has, in the space of just a few years, permeated every area of our lives. This is equally true for those living in poorer parts of the globe usually depicted as outside the reaches of the information age, as well as those in the West.
This interview with Dr. Joseph LeDoux explains some basics of neuroscience and then goes on to examine what some of this may mean on the job.
In truth, most of what we do, we do unconsciously, and then rationalize the decision consciously after the fact. This doesn?t mean we do everything important without proper thought. Thought and emotion can both take place outside the consciousness. Consciousness is just the place where we find out about what we are thinking and feeling.
The happy at work project went out on the streets of Copenhagen and asked people “What makes you happy at work?”
The answers we got were funny and interesting, and if you understand danish you can see the best of them in this 1,5 min video clip. A big thank you to Charlotte Slemming for putting this together.
One of my passions is better meetings. Meetings can be productive, energizing, creative and fun. Or they can suck the life out of you faster than a brief stay in vacuum – without a space suit.
I stumbled upon a very simple and effective format that I’ve been using for shorter meetings with fewer people. Say 1-2 hours and up to 6 -8 people.
At the start of the meeting everybody who has a topic writes it on a piece of paper, announces it briefly, and places that piece of paper on the table. When no more topics come up, dialogue begins. We look at the potential topics, and decide where to start. People can break into groups or not as they choose, most of the time we tackle all of the topics together. Once a topic has been dealt with, you can put that piece of paper aside.
The good thing about this format is that it takes almost no time to do the agenda planning, and the agenda is visible to everyone, as is the progress since the number of outstanding items on the table keeps shrinking.
I’m not sure why, but this works much better than writing down the agenda on a piece of paper. I should probably note that I use this format with people who are already used to open space meetings – that may be part of the reason why it works for us. Try it!
Chris Corrigan links to a review of the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, from which comes the following quote:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Hehehe, I looooove that. And here’s another thought: I think art and work are approaching each other, or rather, I think that the way we work is coming more and more to resemble the way we produce art. Work used to be about producing something, and of course it still is, but increasingly work is also about self-expression and creating meaning for yourself and others, as in art.
This book is going in my shopping basket.
As you may have figured out from some previous posts, I’m a huge fan of the LOTR movies, and now I’ve found a treasure trove of info from people involved in the filming here.
My favourite quote:
On a day when it was mostly Elves, it was slightly an attention-seeking day – all the Elves needed a haircut, or their costumes had to be spotless. When it was a scene with a whole lot of hobbits, you just realized lunch got eaten a lot quicker, and there was a lot of joking going on!
– Dominic Monaghan (Merry)
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