The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Take five

    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.

  • Neuroscience on the job

    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.

  • Voxpop

    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.

  • Better meetings

    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!

  • Art and fear

    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.

  • Lord of the rings

    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)

  • Quote

    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…

    – The Dalai Lama, quoted in The art of happiness

    I could not agree more. Our nature is to be happy and peaceful and to work together for mutual benefit.

  • Book review: The story factor

    I believe, that the ability to tell a good story is one of the most important tools available to leaders (and remember: We’re all leaders). Stories have the ability to bring a point across without forcing the issue. Where rational arguments fail, stories can contain boths sides of a dilemma and can illuminate an interesting paradox without having to solve it. You might argue that stories open, where facts close.

    “The story factor” by Annette Simmons is the best book on storytelling that I’ve read. It contains all the reasons why stories are good tools as well as a list of situations where you can use stories effectively (and how). Finally there’s a lot of info on how to find the good stories and how to tell them. And of course the book itself contains loads of stories, most of which are highly entertaining, and useful for many situations.

    As an example, here’s a story that I heard recently, and immediately incorporated into the “happy at work” workshops. It’s the story of the ostrich who learned to fly. Normally ostriches can’t, and this ostrich wanted to share his new knowledge with all the other ostriches, so he arranged a flying conference in Africa. Other ostriches walked in from all over Africa, and over the course of a couple of days, he taught all of them to fly. Then on the last day, he stood and watched, as all the ostriches walked home.

    I use this story to illustrate the gap between learning and action, and it illustrates the point in a funny and interesting way, without browbeating people about how difficult it is to translate learning into doing. It sets the stage perfectly for the “planning the future” part of the workshop.

    Compared to one of the seminal works on storytelling, Stephen Denning’s “The Springboard”, Annette Simmons’ book is much more useful and contains more tips that will get you started as a storyteller. If you’re at all interested in the potential and practice of storytelling, this is the book for you.

  • Gratitude

    2003 has been a wonderful year for me. Here’s a list of some of the things that I’m really grateful for in 2003, in no particular order:
    * The company of the wonderful and innovative people at Arena. Thomas, Ole, David, Valdemar, Peter, Tine, Guan, Niels and many more. We rock!
    * Moving to an appartment on the 7th. floor. Great sunsets!
    * Meeting Traci, Justin, Christine, Mike and the other wonderful people at the World Dynamics CEO round table.
    * Seeing Seattle with Pam.
    * Seeing the happy at work project take off like it has, and being able to make people happy.
    (more…)

  • Happy at work in 2003

    For those of you who read danish, I wrote this summary of the “Happy at work” project in 2003.

    The short version in english: It’s been one hell of a year. In january it was just me and a few loose ideas, and none of the methods had been tested. Now, there are lots of interesting, skilled and dedicated people working on it, we’ve proven that our methods work, and there are lots of exciting projects coming out of it.

    A HUGE thank you to everyone who participated. I can’t wait to see what we’ll do in 2004, I KNOW it will be wild.