The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Happy McDonald’s worker

    This is awesome – just think how many people are a little happier because of the way she interacts with her customers.

  • Announcing an extra CHO Academy, November 5-8 2019 in Copenhagen

    Graduates from the 2018 Academy in Copenhagen

    We are really excited for our next Chief Happiness Officer Academy this month. 25 participants from 16 countries are coming to Copenhagen to learn all the theory and practice of creating happy workplaces.

    Amazingly, the Academy sold out over three months ago and even has long waiting list. So we have decided to add an extra Academy this year on November 5-8 in Copenhagen.

    This is a great chance to come to one of the world’s happiest countries and learn all about happiness at work.

    Read more about the Chief Happiness Officer Academy, see the full agenda and get your tickets here.

    UPDATE: We just announced the November Academy and we already sold the first ticket :) Looks like these will be going fast too!

  • How to measure happiness at work – and how NOT TO

    How to measure happiness at work – and how NOT TO

    Most companies conduct regular job satisfaction surveys, but they often don’t work very well and fail to deliver tangible improvements to employees’ perception of their workplace. This leads to increased unhappiness among employees and from there to lower productivity and higher employee turnover.

    In this video we cover:

    • Why you absolutely should measure happiness at work
    • Why traditional job satisfaction surveys often fail
    • Better ways to measure happiness at work – ie. more often, more relevant and more valuable
    • Share specific experiences from a company that tried it
    • A very brief introduction to Heartcount – a unique new tool for measuring happiness at work

  • Wall of win at IKEA

    Last week I did a workshop on “Leading With Happiness” for all the managers at an IKEA warehouse in Copenhagen and I have to say that it was an absolute pleasure. Like any other company, IKEA is facing many challenges and changes but this international group of 40 managers were clearly completely on board with the whole idea of happiness at work.

    And while I was there, I stumbled on their wall of win – an entire wall of positive customer feedback, naming specific IKEA employees who’ve gone above and beyond.

    What a simple but great way to celebrate your employees’ good work.

  • Awesome video: Dancing construction workers

    This is AMAZING. A group of Canadian construction workers do a bhangra dance video to collect money for an autism charity.

  • Free webinar June 17: The best (and worst) ways to measure happiness at work + introducing Heartcount

    Most companies conduct regular job satisfaction surveys, but they often don’t work very well and fail to deliver tangible improvements to employees’ perception of their workplace.

    This leads to increased unhappiness among employees and from there to lower productivity and higher employee turnover.

    In this free webinar we will cover:

    • Why traditional job satisfaction surveys often fail
    • Why you absolutely should measure happiness at work
    • Better ways to measure happiness at work – ie. more often, more relevant and more valuable
    • Share specific experiences from a company that tried it
    • A very brief introduction to Heartcount – a unique new tool for measuring happiness at work

    The webinar is on June 17 from 1:00 pm-1:45 pm Copenhagen time and it’s of course free. Sign up here.

  • The 3 most important things bosses should learn from swing dancers

    The 3 most important things bosses should learn from swing dancers

    In dancing – just as in business – there are leaders and followers. But if you think this means that “The leader always leads and the follower does what they’re told” then you’re very wrong.

    Miranda van Wonterghem is an international swing dance teacher and in this amazing talk from our International Conference On Happiness at Work,  she revealed the three main things business leaders should learn from dancers to create happier and more effective leadership – AND demonstrated it with dancing.

  • Highlights from our 2019 conference

     

    2 days, 20 speakers and 200 participants from 25 countries. Here are the highlights from our 2019 International Conference On Happiness At Work.

  • Happiness at work is good for employees AND the bottom line

    There is a tremendous amount of research that shows that happiness is great for employees AND for the company’s bottom line.

    In this speech from our conference in 2017, I go through all the research and show why the future belongs to the happy.

  • 20 ways to measure happiness at work beyond the usual useless satisfaction surveys

    20 ways to measure happiness at work beyond the usual useless satisfaction surveys

    Measuring employee happiness is a great idea.

    Sure, it has its problems. Any time you measure anything, you run the risk of getting bad data, the wrong data or making bad decisions based on the data.

    But it still makes sense for two main reasons.

    First and most obviously, if you measure employee happiness right, it can actually guide efforts to improve the workplace by identifying organizational problems and strengths.

    Also, most business leaders are highly results oriented and data driven and find it hard to value things they can’t put a number on. Tracking employee happiness with hard numbers in some way can bolster organizational commitment to happiness initiatives.

    So what can you measure? This can go way beyond just an annual job satisfaction survey. It’s essential to find the metrics that are relevant to your employees, your customers and your organization.

    Here are all the potential ways we’ve come up with to measure employee happiness. Did we forget any? Write a comment if you have one we didn’t include.

    Measure employee mood

    If you want to know how happy your employees are, you can quite simply ask them. The traditional way is of course to run annual satisfaction surveys but I’m very skeptical about that approach.

    You can measure things like:

    • Happiness
    • Satisfaction
    • Engagement
    • Well-being
    • Psychological capital

    You can conduct the measurement using surveys, apps, mood boards or even just tennis balls.

    Other employee metrics

    Two other obvious employee-related metrics are:

    • Absenteeism
    • Employee turnover

    Each of these have a direct bottom line impact and are directly correlated with employee happiness.

    Hiring

    Happy organizations also attract more and better new hires. That means that you could also measure on metrics like:

    • Applications received per opening posted
    • Time to fill positions
    • Rate of acceptance of job offers
    • Rate of successful hires (how many new employees stay at least x months)

    This will be especially relevant in fast-growing workplaces or in industries where there is strong competition for the best talent.

    Customer metrics

    We know that happy employees make the customers happy. Some potential metrics are:

    • Customer happiness / satisfaction
    • Customer loyalty / repeat business
    • Brand perception

    Employee performance

    We also know that happy employees do a better job, so measuring happiness could also mean tracking metrics like:

    • Productivity
    • Quality / errors
    • Workplace safety / accidents
    • Success rate of innovation / change projects

    Negative behavior

    Given that happy employees are less likely to engage in bad behavior at work, we could also track metrics like:

    • HR complaints
    • Fraud / stealing

    Physiological measures

    This area is a little more speculative but some people have suggested measuring things like:

    • Cortisol in saliva samples
    • Blood pressure
    • Sleep time and quality

    These do raise some ethical issues around privacy and bodily autonomy.

    The upshot

    Measuring employee happiness can help efforts to improve a workplace and strengthen leadership’s focus and commitment to these efforts.

    While traditional satisfaction surveys have a long list of problems, there are many other metrics you can look at.

    No workplace should measure all of these metrics. Depending on the industry, situation and type of employees only a small subset of these will be relevant. It’s up to each workplace to define which are the most relevant and to find a good way to track and act on these metrics.

    How best to measure employee happiness

    We have collected all our best insights and experiences on this topic and developed a tool called heartcount which allows any team or workplace to measure happiness at work simply and in a way that generates actionable insights. Read all about it here.

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