Category: Happy At Work

Cat Sacdalan, a graphics designer, was unhappy at work. Not only that, her father had been sick, and the fact that she’d been working at home a lot to be with him didn’t sit well with some of her co-workers.

Cat wrote me that:

For 8 months I’ve been postponing my resignation. I’m guilty of some of those top 10 bad excuses. It’s amazing; it’s like you wrote down everything I felt (and more).

I finally decided to quit when, last week, my boss told me that people have come up to him, complaining that I shouldn’t be compensated for working outside the office. My boss says he appreciates my work but he wants to get rid of the complainers by heeding their request.

So Cat quit. And this is how she quit:

It takes guts to quit and even more guts to quit in crayon. I love it!

You can see more of Cat’s work here.

Related posts

• Top 10 bad excuses for staying in a crappy job.
• How do you know when to quit?
• Never stay in a bad job. Fix it or leave.

Happy at work in Philly

The whole company (all 4 of us) were in Philadelphia for the ippa conference on Positive Psychology and we had a blast.

This was the world’s leading conference on the topic with tons of speakers and 1500 attendees and we got to see all the big-wigs in the field, including Seligman, Zimbardo, Cooperrider, Csikszentmihalyi and Diener. Both Dieners in fact :o)

My personal favorite of all the sessions was Ed Diener, who had the most new findings to offer AND was also an excellent speaker – something of a rarity at this very academic event.

Here are some of the best quotes from the event, taken from my twitter stream:

“Awe is what moves us forward.”
– David Cooperrider quoting Joseph Conrad.

“Business must be a force for good in the world.”
– David Cooperrider.

“Homeless people in India and USA missed the Maslow memo.” (Meaning they can be happy even in a bad situation.)
– Robert Biswas-Diener

“Being healthy makes you happy and vice versa, but the link from happiness to health is twice as strong.”
– Ruut veenhoven

“Puritanism is the dreaded suspicion that someone somewhere is happy.”
– Sir Richard Layard quoting H.L. Mencken

“To flourish in life, aim for at least 3 positive emotions for every negative one.”
– Barbara Frederickson

“The top 2 motives for murder are… 1) love, 2) work.”
– Michael Frese

“Being too happy is bad for you. 8 on 1 10-scale is just right. Eg. cancer patients are more likely to survive if they’re at an 8 instead of 9 or 10.”
– Ed Diener

“It’s a myth that lottery winners are no happier after they win the money or that quadriplegics are no unhappier after their accident – your circumstances do matter!”
– Ed Diener

“You look a little down – go do something nice for someone else.”
– Martin Seligman

Follow me on twitter.

Clare over at “Thoughts from the C train” tells the story of one seeeeeeriously abusive customer:

I got called that one time. Swear. Say it: Phenomenal Cesspool of Incompetence. It’s brilliant! I mean seriously, who can come up with that shit? Well I’ll tell you who . . . kind of.

A little background. I’m a career banker, and I’ve always been on the operations side. Kind of a nuts and bolts of banking girl. I’ve also always managed people, which means the ugly situations get elevated to me.

Once I had a customer who would send absolutely hideous messages through the internet banking department. Let’s say, for example, he could not get his updated balance at three in the morning because we had not yet finished processing. This would throw him into a Rage so Fearsome that the email he sent would kind of burn your eyes out of your head. He never called, he never showed up to any branch, he would just send these awful messages from the safety of his little computer in the wee hours of the morning. Yes, coward.

Go read the whole story – it just shows how important it is to fire customers who are not good for your business.

Related posts

• Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong.
• The time I learned to say “No” at work.
• Fire that client.

In just 9 hours we (the whole company, ie. all 4 of us) fly to America to attend the ippa World Congress on Positive Psychology. After that we have some time in New York to meet with cool people and take in the city.

2009 has been amazing so far and there is much to celebrate – and a trip like this is a great way to do it.

And remember, celebrating your victories is really, really important:

Though of course it is possible to overdo it :o)

Try it yourself: Go to google, type in “my job is ” and look at the suggestions. Here’s what I got:

Yikes!

I don’t mean to be hasty here, but maybe – just maybe – there’s room for improvement in some workplaces :o)

Related posts

• Top 10 bad excuses for staying in a crappy job.
• How to know it’s time to quit.
• Top 10 signs you’re not happy at work.
• Google loves Denmark.

Today I spoke about happiness at work and innovation at the FutureNext conference in Copenhagen. This event was arranged in part by the internationally famous Danish business leader Lars Kolind.

After my presentation, Lars was kind enough to give me his honest opinion of it:

Thanks, Lars – I’m blushing here :o)

Related posts

• Harvard Business School study: Happy employees are more creative.
• 3 reasons why happy workplaces change and innovate more effextively.
• The Feel Factor – why no workplace can afford to ignore how people feel.

One of the most popular posts on this blog is still the one about how not to manage geeks, which lays out the top 1o mistakes managers make in leading tech people. The post has been translated into several other languages, and now you can also read it in German: Wie man Geeks NICHT führen sollte.

A great big thank you to Peter Köves for the translation!

Here are the other translations of the post:

• Portuguese: Como NÃO liderar geeks, translated by Cesar Cardoso.
• Spanish: Como NO liderar geeks, translated by Matías Agustín Bellone.
• Italian: Come NON dirigere i geek, translated by Marco Bertola.
• Persian translation by Nasser Ghanemzadeh: Part 1, Part 2.
• Danish: Hvordan man ikke leder nørder, translated by Flemming Laugaard.

The London Sunday Times had an article yesterday about happiness at work and why it’s great to like your job. They’re asking many different experts in the field, and I’m quoted as well:

The biggest single step that individuals can take is to choose to be happy, said Alex Kjerulf, chief happiness officer at the Happy at Work Consultancy and the author of Happy Hour is 9-5. “Rather than settling for a job that’s not too bad, say to yourself ‘I want to be happy at work’,” he said. “You can be happy as a bus driver, as a mortuary worker, as a doctor . . . but a lot of people don’t seem to want to be.”

There’s lots more – read the entire article here.

Speakers at Arbejdsglæde Live! 2009, our annual conference about happiness at work.

Last week has been the best week ever in the history of our company. It’s fun to be able to look back at and go “whoah – I’m glad we don’t rock that much every week :o)”

Here are a few highlights from the week:

We had our conference about happiness at work on Tuesday. 12 speakers from Denmark and USA and a great audience made this the happiest conference on Danish soil this year.

You can read more about the conference here (In Danish).

Here’s Steve Shapiro, our morning keynote speaker, giving his take on the day:

My new book (Hurra, der er krise / Hooray, there’s a crisis) debuted on the Danish non-fiction top-10 bestseller list. I was mostly edged out of the top spot by sudoku books and cook books:

The book was also reviewed in JyllandsPosten (a major Danish newspaper) and receieved 5 out of 6 stars for usability and 6 out of 6 for entertainment value. Some choice quotes:

Every time you finish a page, you just want to read another one. One of the most relevant books on the shelves right now. Read it and get happy.

You can see the review here (In Danish).

To cap off the week, I went to London to speak at London Business School. I was a guest speaker at Dr. Srikumar S. Rao’s class on Creativity and Personal Mastery and I had a blast with them. I also really enjoyed the previous day’s guest speaker Ben Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic.

So here’s to a great week – and here’s hoping that not every week has to be this intense :o)

As I previously blogged about (and some commenters took waaaay too seriously) it’s good to be a Dane, because Google likes us :o)

Here are two more reasons why Danes are really lucky:
If you’re getting tired of all this talk of recession and crisis, we have a new web site out in Danish called www.hurradererkrise.dk (which translates to “Hooray, there’s a crisis” – trust me, it sounds a lot better in Danish :o).

You can test yourself to see how the crisis affects you, you can test your workplace or you can join our Facebook group. Aaaaaand you can read all about my new book which comes out on May 14. In Danish. Check out www.hurradererkrise.dk.

And then there’s our fantastic conference about happiness at work on May 26 in Copenhagen. No less than 14 great speakers will inspire us about how to achieve happiness at work – even in a recession.

Read all about the conference and sign up here.