The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Wanna win? Have fun!

    The Olympic winter games this year offered an extremely rare event in sports history: An athlete won gold in two separate sports.

    Czech snowboarder Ester Ledecka shocked everyone by winning gold on skis in the Super-G event and then went on to also win gold in  snowboarding parallel giant slalom.

    That’s amazing in itself, but what I love even more is her attitude towards her profession:

    “For sure I want to win every race, but the first thing is to enjoy and to have good fun with what I’m doing and my sports.”

    Her coach agrees, saying:

    “The joy that she has for riding, the joy that she has for training and working hard is unmatched.”

    What a refreshing change from the “Winning is all that matters” mentality.

  • Congratulations to the graduates from our Chief Happiness Officer Academy in NYC

    We just completed our 6th Chief Happiness Officer Academy. This one took place in NYC and had participants from 6 countries. One person even flew in from Tokyo to attend!

    We had a wonderful three days with the group, where we explored the theory and practice of creating happy workplaces.

    The participants loved it – the average feedback rating is a solid 10 out of 10. Here are some of their comments:

    “THANK YOU! This was really fantastic.”

    “The message was clear and the tasks were helpful. Group work kept engagement high and time for reflection was important.”

    “I took away so many good ideas about creating happiness at workplaces and a theoretical background about happiness at work.”

    If you want to be a Chief Happiness Officer, our Academy is perfect for you. See the upcoming dates here.

  • The CEO of WD-40 Company: People Must Come First

    In this video Ken Blanchard and Garry Ridge, the CEO of WD-40 Company, explain why employees must come first. What a wonderful, enlightened vision for corporate leadership.

    Garry will talk much more about that at our International Conference on Happiness at Work in Copenhagen in May.

  • CEO Rich Sheridan explains how he created a joyful workplace

    This is awesome: Rich Sheridan, the CEO of Menlo Innovations explains why he created a joyful workplace and how joy has business value.

    Rich will talk much more about this at our International Conference on Happiness at Work in Copenhagen in May. See the program and get your tickets here.

  • DHL’s CEO: Increasing revenues is meaningless. Motivate employees by creating a better world.

    Solar charging station in Taiwan

    Financial Times has a great interview with Frank Appel, the CEO of Deutsche Post DHL the clearly outlines his philosophy for motivating employees: Increasing revenue is a meaningless goal. When company goals are mainly financial, purpose is lost. The best companies are “driven by making the lives of customers easier by highly engaged employees.”

    Appel has set up three initiatives for his 522,000 staff:

    1. Go Teach, where DHL staff educate disadvantaged young people
    2. Go Help, where they work with the UN to use the company’s logistics expertise to respond co humanitarian crises
    3. Go Green, where they work to reduce emissions to zero

    Appel sums up his message like this:

    “We cannot say, listen, ‘Our strategy is to make money and if we have time left then we’ll do something which is good for the society’,” he says.

    “Our job is to do something good for the society, and to do that we have to make money, otherwise we can’t continue to invest.”

    This is AWESOME. It’s a clear articulation of a philosophy where a company aligns the quest for financial goals with a clear mission to create a better world.

  • Two of the funniest ways to create a happy workplace

    There are many ways to create a happier workplace but this short video has two of the funniest I’ve ever come across: “Sexy Powersuit Day” and “The Lift of Love.”

    This is from our International Conference on Happiness at Work where Tim Dorsett explained how he makes Innocent Drinks a happy workplace. You can see Tim’s full speech here.

    If you want more inspiration and tools to promote happiness at work, you should come to our next conference on May 17+18 2018 in Copenhagen – it’s going to be AWESOME.

  • WD-40 Company keeps growing – and their happy tribe is why

    One of our speakers at the 2018 International Conference on Happiness at Work is featured in an article called WD-40 Company Keeps Growing in This $1 Billion Market which lists the phenomenal results they’ve gotten recently:

    If you look at the numbers, though, this is a fantastic business with high rates of return well suited for long-term investors.

    This past quarter, the company continued to grow both the top and bottom lines and showed that it’s doing well at exploiting its most promising growth opportunity.

    WD-40 is in a relatively mature market, so it’s remarkable that management continues to find avenues to grow sales and earnings.

    At our conference, WD-40’s CEO Garry Ridge will explain the main reason behind this success: They’ve built a culture that is characterized by a sense of belonging, communication, having shared values, and continual learning between elder tribal leaders and younger tribe members.

    Yes – they don’t see themselves as a team but a tribe, where employees don’t just work – they belong.

    Garry is a truly inspiring speaker and what they’ve achieved at WD-40 is definitely worth learning from.

    See the full conference program and get your tickets here.

  • Celebrate your mistakes

    We’ve previously written about why it’s a good idea to celebrate mistakes at work. Here’s one guy who does it in a really fun way :)

  • How Pret promotes random acts of kindness

    I just learned that the Pret cafés have a really cool thing going: They let their employees do random acts of kindness by giving away free coffees.

    Pret’s CEO Clive Schlee explains it like this:

    A couple of years ago, Pret decided to channel the cash we could have spent running loyalty card programmes into a fund for each shop to spend on rewarding its customers. It was as simple as that. We didn’t tell our team members whom they should favour. We let them decide. They could welcome a new customer, cheer up somebody having a bad day or recognise a regular. They could use it to solve a problem. Like everything in Pret, it’s just about lots of individual human relationships, day after day after day.

    I love that. Not only is it likely to make customers happy, it will also make employees happier at work because (as research clearly shows) when you do do nice things for others, makes you happier yourself.

    As Schlee puts it:

    Pret employees tell me that the freedom to give a free coffee is immensely empowering. It injects a random act of kindness into the day. It gives delight and hurts not.

    What an incredibly simple but brilliant policy.

  • We JUST announced our 2018 International Conference on Happiness at Work

    I could not be more excited – we have just announced our ninth annual conference on happiness at work and this year’s program is better than ever.

    We have 11 international speakers and experts to share the theory and practice of creating happy workplaces.

    See the full program and get your tickets here.

    And you can see 5 of the best speeches from our previous conferences here.