The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Happy At Work

How to be happy at work

  • Designing democratic workplaces

    WorldBlu ListOver at the WorldBlu blog, Traci Fenton has another great post – this one on how we design our organizations.

    Traci does amazing work in creating democratic workplaces, and she increasingly sees companies introducing democracy in the workplaces:

    …entrepreneurs and business leaders take note — you need to spend as much energy and time thinking about the design of your employee experience as you do about your next big idea.

    When I talk about good workplace design I’m not talking about open floor plans in offices or traditional this-is-what-makes-a-great-place-to-work programs. I’m talking about designing an employee experience that engages people body and soul in meaningful interactions and meaningful work. The traditional design of business — call it command-and-control, authoritarian, hierarchal, etc. – can’t, by design, achieve this goal. But workplace democracy does, which is why I believe democratically designed organizations are future of work.

    Democracy at work! I love it! If democracy is so great in society, then why are many businesses still run like third-world dictatorships?

    But what is democracy at work? Here’s a quote from Traci’s recent op-ed article in the Christian Science Monitor:

    What is a democratic workplace? It’s one that uses freedom rather than fear, peer-to-peer relationships rather than paternalism, engagement rather than estrangement. Beyond giving employees a vote, it’s about giving them a real voice in the decisions that impact their job and the organization.

    This isn’t some keep-your-fingers-crossed-and-hope- they-make-the-right-choice way of working; it’s understanding that democracy is the way you tap the full creative potential of your employees to solve the problems you created your organization to fix. It’s understanding that the traditional hierarchical workplace structures that operated on disengagement and the delusion of control are now a recipe for defeat in today’s collaborative world.

    Go check out WorldBlu some more and seriously consider whether your company should be on the WorldBlu list of democratic workplaces.

  • A question for the Americans out there

    QuestionI’m spending this week in Atlanta and Orlando studying how some major American Corporations do business – especially in regards to customer service.

    I’ve already talked to employees and managers at Coca-Cola, CNN – and Hooters :o) You can see pictures from my trip here.

    And here’s something I’ve noticed: Everywhere I go, I ask the same question, namely “what makes people happy at work here.” And I’ve noticed that the answers are never about work itself. People talk about career opportunities, they talk about salary and benefits, they talk about getting free concert tickets.

    No one (so far) has said “Well, I really like my job because what I do is fun, and I get to work with some really nice people.” The closest was Dimitri Shreckengost of Coca-Cola who said that he has many friends at work, and indeed, Coca-Cola looked like a fairly happy workplace.

    So here’s the question: Is that typical? Is that really how most Americans view work – as a means to an end rather than something that could (and should!) be pleasant in itself? What do you think?

  • Det

    Last Tuesday I spoke at The Power of Passion conference in Stockholm which is an annual event arranged by the wonderful people at 4good. I gave the last presentation – after (among others) Pigge Werkelin, a famous Swedish entrepreneur and Renata Chlumska, a lady who has circumnavigated the entire lower 48 American states in a kayak and on a bicycle.

    After I gave my presentation (which was very well-received, if I do say so myself) I was interviewed by journalist Jennie Sjöström who asked some great questions about happiness at work.

    Jennie also brought along a photographer who was determined to get some especially happy looking photos.

    Hence this:

    An article about me in a Swedish newspaper

    You can read the entire article here (it’s in Swedish though).

  • A happy call center? Who knew!

    Pouline AndersenI recently visited the City Call Center here in Copenhagen Denmark, and they’re a bit of a novelty: A call center where the employees are actually happy to work.

    Call centers are not known as the world’s best workplaces and many are plagued by high levels of absenteeism, stress and extremely high employee turnover. In some call centers, new employees typically last only a few weeks before moving on.

    But Pouline Andersen, the founder of City Call Center, decided from the beginning to create a happy workplace and the results speak for themselves. As she puts it:

    “We must be doing something right because revenue has grown by 30% annually the last five years running and we’re about to move to a new office that’s 15 times as big as our current one. Also, our employees say for 1.2 years on average, which is far higher than the industry average.”

    Here’s a video of a chat I had with Pouline where she explains why she chose to make her company happy, and how she does it.

    Part 1:

    Part 2:

    Pouline also sent me some additional comments on how she makes her employees happy, which you can find below. They’re in Danish though :o)
    (more…)

  • This is how I make myself happy at work

    QuestionsTwo weeks ago I had a day that I was NOT looking forward to. I had two speaking gigs on a Saturday (which is great!) but they were in opposite ends of Denmark. I had to get up disgustingly early to make the drive to the first one and then there was barely enough time to finish that and drive 350 km to the next one. After that, it was another 300 km drive home.

    It’s starting to get cold here, so there was no way I could ride my motorcycle that day. That meant renting a car, and I was not looking forward to driving that far in some anonymous Ford or Toyota.

    Which made me think of a question I often get: “So Alex – you make other people happy at work. What do you do if you have a bad day?”

    And of course I have bad days too – everyone does. Happiness at work does not mean being utterly ecstatic every moment of every day. As Emma Thompson says in my favorite movie: “There was always going to be a totally shit moment.”

    But in this particular case, I found the perfect solution. One that transformed the long drive from a chore to a pleasure. To something I almost couldn’t wait to do.

    Here’s my trick:
    (more…)

  • Wanna meet up? In Orlando!

    DisneyI’m going to the US next week to meet with and study some American companies and their approach to customer service. You may know some of them… where was that list… Oh, yeah: There’s Coca-Cola, Delta, Capital Grill and some place called Disney or something like that… Ever heard of them?

    I have some free time in Orlando so if you want to meet and talk happiness at work – or if you know someone in the area that I should meet – just contact me. I have some free time on Wednesday Nov. 14 and Thursday Nov. 15. in the evenings.

    Also, if your company is in Orlando and you need a dose of happiness at work, this is a great chance to book me to speak without having to pay my travel costs, since they’re covered already! You can read all about my speaking gigs here.

  • Get a daily reminder to be happy at work

    Happy at work remindersWhat does it take to make us happy at work? What’s one simple, easy, fun thing that we can all do – that works!

    Well I’ve found one that seems way too simple to work, but does anyway: A daily reminder.

    I’ve recently been working with a division of a Danish insurance company that were seriously in need of some happiness at work. They were stressed out, they were woefully understaffed, they had way too much work AND half the people there were new hires.

    During my work with them, I found that giving them one small idea, action, thought or exercise every day to remind them about happiness at work was surprisingly effective.

    This works because it helps you focus on happiness at work. If you don’t, it’s easy to have every intention of making yourself and others happy at work – and then forget all about it because we’re all so busy at work.

    That’s why I’ve set up a new tool that you can use to make yourself and others happy at work. I’ll be using a website called Twitter to send out tips, ideas, quotes, thoughts and challenges as well as the occasional update about what I’m currently up to.

    If you want to get these updates, you must sign up at Twitter.com and then sign up to follow my account. You decide whether to receive the messages as email, via IM or as text messages on your mobile.

    I’ll be sending messages out daily (more or less) and it’ll always be something simple, easy and above all fun. You can of course stop receiving them any time, if you don’t like’em.

    So sign up now, and see how it works for you!

    Thanks to Tom Nixon for the idea and for convincing me to try it.

  • Top 10 signs you’re unhappy at work

    Unhappy at work

    How do you know that you’re unhappy at work? That something is not right and that it’s time to either make some changes at work or move on to a new job?

    In my work, I talk to a lot of people who are not happy with their jobs. Here are the top ten symptoms of unhappiness at work that I’ve observed. How many apply to you?

    1: You procrastinate
    You really, honestly try to get some work done. But somehow you never really get around to it. Or you only do it at the last possible moment and then only do a half-baked effort.

    Many people view procrastination as a personal weakness. To me, it’s one of the strongest warning signs of unhappiness at work.

    2: You spend Sunday night worrying about Monday morning
    “I never sleep on Sunday night very well because I’m worried about going to work on Monday morning. My job is very stressful and you kind of have to gear up for Monday and getting back into that.” (source)

    One of the worst things about being unhappy at work is that the unhappiness bleeds over into your free time. If you’ve had a lousy day at work, it’s difficult to go home and have a great evening. If your week sucked, it’s hard to have a fun, relaxed, carefree weekend.

    3: You’re really competitive about salary and titles
    You don’t like the job itself, so you focus much more on salary and perks. Knowing that someone in a similar position is paid more than you, or is promoted when you’re not, really eats at you.

    When we’re unhappy at work we get a lot more competitive, for one simple reason: When work doesn’t give us happiness and enjoyment we want to get something else out of it. And what else is there but compensation and promotions.

    4: You don’t feel like helping co-workers
    Your colleagues may be struggling. But you don’t really feel like lending a hand. Why should you?

    One very interesting psychological study started by putting subjects in either a good mood or a bad mood. They were then asked to go down the hall to another room where the experiment would continue. In the hallway the real experiment took place – the subjects passed a man holding a big box struggling to open a door. Would the subject help that person? The experiment showed, that when we’re in a bad mood, we’re much less likely to help others.

    5: Work days feel looooong
    The first thing you do in the morning, is calculate the number of hours until you can go home.

    Ironically, this makes the work day feel even longer.

    6: You have no friends at work
    Friends at work? They’re mostly all jerks anyway.

    Gallup have found in their studies of workplace engagement, that one of the strongest factors that predict happiness at work is having at least one close friend at work.

    7: You don’t care. About anything.
    Things can go well or they can go badly for your workplace. Either way, you don’t really give a damn.

    When you’re unhappy, you care mostly about yourself and not so much about the workplace.

    8: Small things bug you
    Small annoyances bug you out of all proportion. Like someone taking up too much space in the parking lot, someone taking the last coffee without brewing a new pot or someone talking too loudly in the next cubicle.

    When you’re unhappy you have much thinner skin and a shorter fuse. It takes a lot less to annoy you.

    9: You’re suspicious of other people’s motives
    No matter what people do, your fist thought is “what are they up to?” Good or bad, big or small, all decisions and actions made by your co-workers and managers are seen in this light.

    Studies show that we’re also more suspicious of others when we’re unhappy.

    10: Physical symptoms
    You suffer from insomnia, headaches, low energy, muscle tension and/or other physical symptoms.

    Studies show that when you’re unhappy at work you’re more prone to experience these physical stress symptoms.

    Your take

    How many of these apply to you in your current job? Did I leave any important symptoms of workplace unhappiness out? Please write a comment. I’d really like to know your take!

    Related posts:

  • The top 5 reasons why most team building events are a waste of time

    Team building

    Here’s how some companies do team building:

    Employees [of Californian home security company] Alarm One Inc. were paddled with rival companies’ yard signs as part of a contest that pitted sales teams against each other, according to court documents.

    The winners poked fun at the losers, throwing pies at them, feeding them baby food, making them wear diapers and swatting their buttocks.

    The good news: The company got paddled in court when an employee sued them and had to cough up 1.7 million USD.

    The bad news: A lot of team building events borrow elements from this approach, setting up artificial (and often meaningless) contests pitting coworkers against each other.

    This is especially ironic because companies today want their employees to cooperate more, to work well in teams, to share knowledge and to work to achieve success together. That is why it makes absolutely no sense to send them on trainings that are mainly competitive in nature. Even when these events let people work together in smaller teams, competing against other teams, the focus still ends up being on competition, not cooperation.

    There’s a simple reason why these events are almost always competitive: Competition = instant passion. Setting up a competition activates a primal urge in many people to win at all costs, making them very focused and active – which looks great to the organizers.

    But there’s a huge downside to this – which means that not only are many team building events a huge waste of time, they can be actively harmful to teams.

    Here are the top 5 problems with competitive team building events.

    1: Competition does not create an experience of success
    Yes, someone will win – most people won’t. If the entire focus is on competing and winning, most participants will leave with a sense that “we weren’t good enough.” That’s not really a good feeling to have created in your employees.

    2: Competition brings out the worst in people

    CEO Hal Rosenbluth was just about to hire an executive with all the right skills, the right personality and the perfect CV. His interviews went swimmingly and he’d said all the right things, but something about him still made Rosenbluth nervous, though he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.

    Rosenbluth’s solution was genius: He invited the applicant to a company softball game, and here the man showed his true colors. He was competitive to the point of being manic. He abused and yelled at both the opponents and his own team. He cursed the referees and kicked up dirt like a major league player.

    And he did not get the job.

    (From Hal Rosenbluth’s excellent book The Customer Comes Second).

    Competing brings out the inner jerk in some people, making them manic and abusive. Some even try cheating in order to win. This is not exactly a great basis for future cooperation – it might be better if people left the event liking each other more than before because they’d seen each other at their best and most likable.

    3: People learn less when they’re competing
    Studies show that we learn less when we compete and more when we cooperate. Here’s an example from education:

    In a comprehensive review of 245 classroom studies that found a significant achievement difference between cooperative and competitive environments, David Johnson and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota reported that 87 percent of the time the advantage went to the cooperative approach.

    In visiting classrooms where cooperative learning is used, I like to ask students to describe the experience in their own words. One ten-year-old boy thought a moment and replied, “It’s like you have four brains.” By contrast, a competitor’s single brain often shuts off when given no reason to learn except to triumph over his or her classmates.

    – Alfie Kohn (Source)

    4: Competition lowers performance
    And contrary to what most people think, most of us perform worse when we’re competing. This is especially true for complex tasks that require us to work with and learn from other people.

    5: Waste of time
    These events focus more on finding and rewarding winners than on making sure that people learn something that might actually be useful at work.

    This creates a sense that the events are a waste of time, and employees come to resent them because they keep them from doing real, actual, useful work.

    How to do team building that actually builds teams

    Here’s what the result of a good team building event should be:

    • A deeper understanding between co-workers
    • Co-workers like each other better than before
    • An experience of having performed well together
    • A feeling that “we’re good at what we do”
    • An increased desire to cooperate and help each other out
    • Specific learnings that can be applied at work
    • And maybe most of all: A sense that the event was “time well spent.”

    This would actually be easy to achieve. We’d just have to change the event so that:

    1. The event has common goals for all participants, making people cooperate, not compete
    2. The event rewards those who get good results but also those who help others get good results and those who help make it a nice experience for everyone
    3. You take plenty of time to let participants reflect on how the learnings from the event can be applied in their work

    You may not get the same hectic moody you get from those intensely competitive events – but that’s actually a good thing.

    What you would get instead is an event that is more fun for more people – and much more useful. That has to be a good thing!

    Your take

    What’s the best team building event you’ve ever tried? Or the worst? How did it help or hinder your team? What would your ideal team building event look like?

    Please write a comment, I’d like to know what you think.

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  • The pleasure principle

    NewspapersHey – guess who’s quoted in this article on fun at work in the New York Post? (Hint: It’s me!)

    Take note, though, before you run out to buy a pingpong table, or bean-bag chairs for the conference room (as Motley Fool did): If you’re begrudgingly throwing your employees a bone, it’s not going to work, notes “Happy Hour is 9 to 5″ author Kjerulf. There must be a genuine desire to create a fun workplace.

    “If you just do it because it’s good business it’s likely to feel forced and unnatural to people,” he says. “Fun has to be real, or it’s no fun.”

    The article itself is great – and explains how companies like Motley Fool, search engine makers Hakia.com and many others introduce some fun and games to the workplace.

    My favorite example from the article:

    Desiree Gruber, president of Full Picture, a public relations and event planning firm, brings her two dogs to work daily. Mookie and Sam roam around to greet visitors and play ball with staff.

    “We can never take ourselves too seriously when we have the dogs around,” says Gruber. “Without fail they make the office a more lively, warm, and spontaneous place.”