How to be happy at work
One problem with electric scooters is that they’re just too silent – other people have no idea you’re coming. Fortunately, you can fix that problem, advertise your business AND make people laugh at the same time.
Here’s how:
What would your company’s motor-sound be like?
WorldBlu, an American company dedicated to promoting democracy in the workplace, have just released their 2012 list of the world’s most democratic workplaces – and we’re on it again.
On this year’s list you’ll see companies like Davita, HCL and many other great companies who have based their organizations on freedom and democracy instead of command and control.
If you scroll through the list, you will find our company sandwiched between WD-40 and Zappos.com. That’s what I call a place of honor :o) You can see the entire list here.
This marks only the second year that you’ll find any Danish companies on the list, and you’ll find no less than three! Apart from us, there’s also our good friends at Podio, makers of the coolest collaboration software I know and Valtech, a large IT consulting company.
The reason why we run our company democratically is simple: Democracy makes people happy and happy people do a better job. Because we run democratically, we are much better at fulfilling our vision of making many more people happy at work around the world.
I’ll talk more about this at WorldBlu Live in Denver in May 2013, where I’ll be speaking along with many fascinating and cool people. I have been to every single one of WorldBlu’s conferences and they are the very best business conferences I’ve been to. They even beat the TED conference for the sheer energy, inspiration and cool people you meet. You should sign up for the WorldBlu Live conference right now or you will miss out on something amazing.
How about you? Is your workplace democratic? Are you involved in making decisions that impact you? Would you like it to be?
I got an email from Kim, who finally decided to quit her job:
I was pushed to the limit at work today with the final act occurring when I was berated by my boss in front of the whole office.
I’ve disliked my job for a while but was using most of your excuses; i.e. I’m not a quitter, things might get better, health care, it may look bad, etc. I actually googled “resignation letter” and was prompted to your page.
I will be submitting my resignation letter tomorrow but felt I was letting down myself, family, the people who work for me, etc. After going through your website I do feel better about proceeding.
I have worked for great companies and great bosses so I know what it SHOULD be like and this is not it. Thank you for reinforcing what I already knew which is that I deserve better.
I asked for a follow-up and got this back:
Thank you Alexander, I did resign today and I feel so relieved.
It couldn’t have gone better and I was asked how they can improve the culture based on my leaving as they recognize there is an issue.
Firs of all: Kudos to Kim for finding the courage to do the necessary and leave that job.
Secondly: I often think that one of the main causes of unhappiness at work is our unwillingness to quit. People stay way too long in unhappy workplaces, under jerk bosses or in bad jobs. And this serves to perpetuate a bad situation.
I’m not saying that quitting a job is easy, in fact it may be one of the hardest decisions a person can make. But I do think that if people quit bad jobs more readily, they’d be happier at work.
So if you’re thinking of quitting, these articles might help:
Update: I just got another email from Kim, who writes:
Thank you for sharing my story. I wanted to follow up with you and let you know that I quickly found a new job wtih a better company, what appears to be a better culture (Start Monday) and with a 17% increase in pay over the bad job I was holding on to.
Even better :o)
An excellent article by James Surowiecki in The Newyorker shows that retail stores that have more and happier staff are more profitable.
In fact, a study found that:
…every dollar in additional payroll led to somewhere between four and twenty-eight dollars in new sales. Stores that were understaffed to begin with benefitted more, stores that were close to fully staffed benefitted less, but, in all cases, spending more on workers led to higher sales.
The reasons for this aren’t hard to divine… Customers’ needs are pretty simple: they want to be able to find products, and helpful salespeople, easily; and they want to avoid long checkout lines. For a well-staffed store, that’s no problem, but if you don’t have enough people on the floor, or if they aren’t well trained, customers can easily lose patience.
One of the biggest problems retailers have is what is called a “phantom stock-out.” That’s when a product is in the store but can’t be found. Worker-friendly retailers with more employees have fewer phantom stock-outs, which leads to more sales.
And happy workers tend to stick around, which saves the costs associated with employee turnover, like hiring and training.
The article also cites a few counter-examples:
In 2007, Circuit City fired more than three thousand of its most experienced salesmen, replacing them with newer workers whom it could pay less. Its sales dropped, and it was bankrupt within a couple of years.
When Bob Nardelli took over Home Depot, in 2000, he reduced the number of salespeople on the floor and turned many full-time jobs into part-time ones. In the process, he turned Home Depot stores into cavernous wastelands, with customers wandering around dejectedly trying to find an aproned employee, only to discover that he had no useful advice to offer. The company’s customer-service ratings plummeted, and its sales growth stalled.
So: Keep your retail staff happy and you will sell more. This ain’t exactly rocket science :o)
In fact, we did some work for IKEA in Denmark in 2010, to help them become happier and more profitable, and the results were exactly as predicted by this article: Higher employee happiness, higher customer satisfaction, lower employee turnover, lower absenteeism, higher sales and higher profits.
I just discovered a great article by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback on why criticism seems more effective than praise in the workplace… but isn’t.
From the article:
This is one of those areas where the lessons of experience aren’t obvious — and can even be misleading.
Your observation that criticism is more often followed by improvement is probably accurate. But what’s going on isn’t what you think. In fact, it’s something called “regression to the mean” and if you don’t understand it, you and your people will be its victims.
Basically, the article argues that we all have an average performance level over time but actual performance varies from day to day and task to task. But we tend to forget this:
If you track someone’s performance task by task, you’ll discover that a great performance, one that’s far above the person’s average or mean, is usually followed by a less-inspiring performance that’s closer to the mean.
It works the same the other way. A terrible performance is usually followed by something better. No one’s making or causing this to happen. It’s part of the variability built into human activity, especially when doing something even moderately complex.
Consequently, when someone performs worse than their own average and you criticize them for it, they will tend to perform better afterwards, simply because they return to their own average. They would have done so, even if you had said nothing.
For the same reason, when someone performs better than usual and you praise them for it, their next performance will tend to be worse.
And this means that:
Even if you don’t notice these apparent connections consciously, you’re aware of them intuitively. And the most likely consequence will be that you criticize far more than you praise.
This is a brilliant insight and the lesson is that we must shift our focus from increasing performance on individual tasks to raising people’s average performance. And this is done more effectively by focusing on what people do well.
A lot of evidence suggests that positive reinforcement — identifying and building on strengths — will produce better results than a relentless focus on faults. This is important.
To improve, people need positive feedback. It’s just as important to recognize and reinforce their strengths as it is to point out where they’re falling short. And you need to understand why praise can seem dysfunctional, so you don’t withhold it.
Read the whole article – it’s brilliant and it reinforces the point we’ve made again and again that praising people for their good work makes them happier AND more effective.
Here’s Rowan Manahan, my favorite Irishman and one of the funniest people I know, explaining how PowerPoint can be used to enhance any kind of story – even a fairy tale. Though he may be sarcastic, I’m not sure :o)
In any case, it’s 5 minutes of pure hilarity. Check it out:
Incidentally(!), Rowan is also one of the speakers at Arbejdsglæde Live! our annual conference on happiness at work on May 24 in Copenhagen. Read all about it and sign up here.
Mark Cuban just wrote a blog post, advising people to forget their passions and just invest more hours into whatever they doo:
I hear it all the time from people. “I’m passionate about it.” “I’m not going to quit, It’s my passion”. Or I hear it as advice to students and others “Follow your passion”.
What a bunch of BS. ”Follow Your Passion” is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get.
Why? Because everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than 1 thing. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel.
Instead, Mark says you should look at where you spend your time, because:
- When you work hard at something you become good at it.
- When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.
That’s basically telling all the people working 80-hour weeks in soul-sucking jobs, that if they hate hate what they do, the solution is simply to put more hours into it.
Looking more closely at the two statements above, it’s clear to see that they’re both flat-out wrong. In fact:
I maintain (and the science backs me up on this) that if you choose (or create) a job which makes you happy, you are more likely to be successful at it.
Now, I’m not knocking effort. Effort is crucial and being happy at work does not mean your work days will always be fun, easy and effortless. Being happy at work is also about working really hard on tough challenges. Especially if those challenges are meaningful to you.
It’s really about finding the intersection of these three areas:
Telling people to ignore their passions in this equation is common-place but misguided, because it simply leads people to slave away at jobs they ultimately don’t care about.
Companies are more productive when they stick to a 40-hour week. This article explains why.
From the article:
Unions started fighting for the short week in both the UK and US in the early 19th century. By the latter part of the century, it was becoming the norm in an increasing number of industries. And a weird thing happened: over and over — across many business sectors in many countries — business owners discovered that when they gave into the union and cut the hours, their businesses became significantly more productive and profitable.
Even Henry Ford, who was definitely some kind of socialist, profited from this knowledge:
By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe, and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
Basically, it seems that this was accepted knowledge for decades – until some time around the 80s when constant overwork became seen as a sign of passion and a desirable tendency in employees.
Go read the whole thing – it is excellent.
What about your workplace? Are people allowed to work 40 hour weeks or is overtime more or less mandatory? What is your optimal number of working hours per week? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.
Someone sent me a link to this Forbes article about The Gospel According to Wells Fargo
There’s some good stuff in it, but my favorite has to be this:
We believe shareholders come last. If we do what’s right for our team members, customers and communities, then—and only then—will our shareholders see us as a great investment.
More and more companies subscribe to the same philosophy and have realized that they make more money and serve their investors better by putting investors last.
This is not only one of the best recruitment videos I’ve ever seen it’s a stirring tribute to employees everywhere:
It’s from Indian IT company HCL Technologies. Read more about the video here – you can even give them your company name and logo and generate a version of the video specific to your company.
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