How to be happy at work
I have had the pleasure of visiting some of the world’s happiest workplaces and while some people think that they’re happy because they don’t have problems, that is just not so.
And if you need a great way to identify and fix problems in the workplace, check out this article.
Look who’s coming out in favor of happiness at work:
How I wish everyone had decent work! It is essential for human dignity.
– Pope Francis I
Awsome. I especially like how he talks not just about work but “decent work.”
Danish CEO Mogens Norgaard was once naked in the workplace. Not by accident but for a very specific purpose. Find out why in this video.
If you want to see the actual event, click here. Warning: It does (for obvious reasons) include nudity.
How awesome is that: This French article calls me le gourou danois du bonheur au travail.
Vive la France :)
Last year I did a workshop for a client in Copenhagen whose main problem was that they were just way too busy. They’re a trade union and new legislation meant that they got an influx of new government-mandated tasks but budget constraints meant they couldn’t hire more people.
Consequently they were increasingly falling behind on their work, through no fault of their own. They have an internal IT system that tracks every open case and they were currently 3,000 cases behind.
Even though this was due to circumstances outside of their control, knowing that they were behind made everybody stressed and irritable. They also felt a responsibility towards their members – every delayed case meant that one of their union members was waiting for an important answer or potentially weren’t being paid money they were owed.
This situation is becoming familiar in many workplaces where there is simply more work than resources. Typically management will bombard employees with information showing the current lag, which only serves to make people frustrated and unhappy at work.
So what can you do instead? Here’s what we did in our workshop with this client.
I pointed out the fact that they were currently behind by 3,000 cases. Everybody had heard that number – it had been sent out en emails and mentioned in countless meetings. I then gave the group 30 post-its notes and told them that each post-it represented 100 open cases.
I asked them to stick those post-its on the wall. It looked like this:
I asked how looking at that made them feel and they said things like “I feel hopeless,” “I feel like we’re failing our members,” and “I don’t see how we can ever catch up.”
Then I gave them 900 more post-it notes and asked the group to stick them on the wall next to that. It looked like this:
I told them that I’d checked their IT system, and in the last 12 months they had completed 90,000 cases. Each post-it represents 100 cases – hence 900 post-its.
I asked how they felt looking at this and they said things like “I feel proud,” “I feel like we’re making a difference,” and “I feel hopeful.”
Interestingly, the year before that they’d processed 73,000 cases so they had actually become much more productive, but had never focused on that. Instead their focus was only ever on how much they were falling behind.
This gave them renewed energy to tackle their increased case load. They also came up with their own way to track progress, using a whiteboard in their cafeteria:
They use it to track monthly completed cases. They’d set a goal for March of 1,000 cases – and reached it on March 17th. Note how they had to extend the scale upward with a piece of paper because they completed much more work than planned.
In short, focusing on the work they completed (instead of how much they were falling behind) allowed them to catch up over a period of a few months.
Sadly, many workplaces do the exact opposite. When teams fall behind, they are constantly told exactly how much. I’ve seen workplaces send out weekly emails with red graphs showing the current lag. I’ve seen the same graphs hanging in offices, cafeterias and being presented in every department meeting.
The problem is of course that this makes employees frustrated, hopeless and unhappy. The work of Harvard professor Teresa Amabile has shown that the most important factor that makes us happy at work is perceived meaningful progress in our work and that the absence of progress makes us unhappy.
And of course we know from the research that happy employees are more productive, creative and resilient.
In short, this means that most workplaces set up a vicious cycle:
So that’s my challenge to your workplace: How can you highlight and celebrate the work that gets done, instead of only feeling bad over the work that’s not yet completed?
I’m doing a book giveaway on goodreads.com – sign up below to get a chance to win a copy of my book :)
Giveaway ends July 21, 2014.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
It’s no secret that I am deeply sceptical of job satisfaction surveys. In fact, here’s my article on the top 10 reasons why they’re usually a waste of time.
But as the saying goes, it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, so we are working on a completely new and different kind of tool to measure happiness at work.
It’ll be ridiculously simple:
We now need 25 teams/departments from around the world who would like to be the first to try this.
Here are the requirements for teams who’d like to participate:
If your team would like to be the first to try this, fill out the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible to arrange your participation.
UPDATE: Holy moly, 50 teams from around the world have signed up and the beta test will start soon. We can’t accept any more teams into the test.
You will often see Denmark listed in surveys as the “happiest country on the planet.” Interestingly Danes are not only happy at home, they’re also happy at work. According to most studies of worker satisfaction among nations, the happiest employees in the world are in Denmark. The U.S.? Not so much.
I wrote an article for Fast Company on the 5 most important factors that explains this difference and it’s been incredibly popular. It seems the Danish way of working is attractive to many Americans.
We have just expanded our team with a couple of great new people. Sofia and Nanna (3rd and 4th from the left) are our new interns who will be helping us on 2 massively important projects: Studying our impact on clients and helping us analyze the results from all the happiness surveys we’ve done in various workplaces.
Interestingly, we wanted to avoid the traditional process of doing job interviews (’cause job interviews suck) so we used a variation of Menlo Innovations’ Extreme Hiring process and it worked out beautifully.
I’m on a train on my way to speak to 300 nurses and a bit of google research turned up this:
“Places that are good environments for nurses to work also then translate into nurses being able to do their jobs well and being able to provide good quality care to their patients.”
Simply put, the study found that happy nurses = better care = happy patients.
This just confirms that happiness at work improves business results on almost any meaningful metric.
The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. Get an in-depth background in happiness at work, hear about the latest research in the field and learn how to use this in your own business.