Category: Happy At Work

I’ve just come across one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever seen on the net.

Background: A photographer is taking some pictures of huskies in the snow in northern Canada. The huskies are chained to stakes in the ground (as they normally are). Then a huge, wild, male polar bear appears and heads straight for one of the huskies.

At this point in the story I was thinking “so long, husky. Nice knowing ya.” And then something astonishing and beautiful happens.

Watch the slide show and tell me if this isn’t one of the strangest things ever.

Here’s what I take from this video: If the husky had met the polar bear with aggression, he’d have been toast. Or served on toast. But by meeting a huge(!) danger with a playful attitude it became a moment of fun instead of violence.

I think this can work often in life. It’s not the way you meet an oncoming, jackknifed tanker truck – they don’t respond well to a playful attitude.

But in many other situations, meeting risk or sticky situations with an invitation to play can in itself make a huge difference. At least, you’re not escalating a bad situation yourself.

This is of course contrary to common wisdom, where you should always “expect the worst”. Well, sometimes expecting the worst, brings about the worst.

Have you ever tried meeting a tricky situation at work with a playful attitude? How did you do it? Write a comment, I’d really like to know!

What do you do about co-workers or employees who don’t pull their weight? Sheila Norman-Culp has taken a look at that situation and interviewed a few experts, including yours truly.

In the American workplace these days, teams are the hot commodity. And where there’s a team, there’s always one person whom others feel is not pulling their own weight.

So should the lazy worker be put on notice? Get more training? Be promoted? Be fired? Don’t laugh — experts say every one of those solutions could work.

I’m quoted as saying that the only cure for lazy employees is to fire a few of them, to put the fear of God into the rest. Or something like that – it’s been a while I since I talked to Sheila, I honestly can’t remember.

Read Sheila’s article here.

Related posts:

• How to procrastinate effectively
• The cult of overwork
• The cult of overwork revisited
• Book review: The Lazy Way to Success by Fred Gratzon
• My lazy life – how laziness made me a better student, developer and leader

I’m having a massively interesting week here. Monday I did a workshop for The Danish Union of Librarians. The workshop focused on making the libraries happier workplaces and on promoting better cooperation between management and union reps.

In my opinion, the one place where management and unions can always meet and work together is happiness at work. On all other areas, like salaries, policies, vacations, leadership, etc. they can easily end up on different sides. But everyone can agree that happiness at work is a worthy goal that serves both employees AND the workplace and that makes it a great place to start to improve working relations.

Today I’m going to Estonia to do a workshop for a new company called Arigato. Arigato is the newest, shiniest fitness center in the Baltic and a company with huge ambitions. Simply put, they want excellent customer service, and they’ve realized that the only way to achieve it is to have happy employees. That’s where I come in :o)

As you may know if you’ve watched Shogun as avidly as I have, domo arigato means thank you very much in Japanese, and one of the company’s core values is indeed gratitude. It’s very difficult to come up with new corporate values (everyone seems to end up with some variation of respect, openness, excellence, quality and trust) but gratitude is new to me. It’s a great idea though – as studies show that gratitude is a key to happiness.

After the workshop my wonderful girlfriend and I will be relaxing for a few days in Tallinn. I’ll be back on Monday, but I’ve set up a few posts to appear for the rest of the week, so things won’t have to go quiet here on the blog.

My post on whether you can be happy working for a bad corporation got some great comments, including these:

Michael Clarke writes:

One incident that’s stuck in my mind was an interview I had 24 years ago for a financial consultancy. The interviewer talked about money, about wealth, about owning yachts.

Then he began to talk about the losers, the [sorry, but I’m quoting] c**** who didn’t recognise money and its importance, that in five years you could walk away, that you could have other people doing the work for you. That the world had two kind of people – people like him and the “stupid c****” who didn’t understand. He went on and on. It was like talking to low-end devil.

Finally, he let me get a word in. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m one of the c****.” And I walked out. One of the more terrifying experiences of my life.

Karen writes:

Like many in the Washington, DC area, I worked for a company whose largest clients were government contractors. Namely, a company that is the largest weapons manufacturer in the world. I hated the idea that my salary came from our contracts with them, even though I knew that we, as a company, were not at all related to the weapons industry.

Several years later, I was looking for a job, and got about a million calls from headhunters to work for this very same government contractor. I said no in the nicest way I could. They kept calling. Finally, I called them (in the middle of the night, so I didn’t have to talk to a person) that I was in no way interested in working for a company that is the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, was part of supporting the war in Iraq, and asked them not to call again.

And Scott M writes:

I was offered a very high paying job (4x salary increase) to work for an oil company in Alaska. When I told the person making the offer that I could not work for the oil industry (she was a headhunter) she acted like I was such an idiot…as if no one these days does that.

I still need to sleep tonight and anyone who appreciates the life this planet sustains needs to work for their conscience.

Happiness at work starts with not taking that job that looks good on the surface but which goes against what you stand for and I applaud anyone who has the guts to say NO in these situations.

According to an article in The New York Times, I.B.M. has been trying out a new vacation policy, in which fixed vacation rules are replaced by informal agreements between employees and their immediate supervisor. The guiding principle is that the work must get done. As long as this is the case, employees can take as much vacation as they want, even on short notice.

It’s every worker’s dream: take as much vacation time as you want, on short notice, and don’t worry about your boss calling you on it. Cut out early, make it a long weekend, string two weeks together — as you like. No need to call in sick on a Friday so you can disappear for a fishing trip. Just go; nobody’s keeping track.

The company does not keep track of who takes how much time or when, does not dole out choice vacation times by seniority and does not let people carry days off from year to year.

It’s not all peaches and cream and the article also mentions some downsides to this flexibility:

• Peer pressure to not take too much vacation
• Checking email and voice mail while on vacations
• Managers sometimes ask employees to cancel days off to meet deadlines

On the whole, I.B.M. employees like the arrangement and according to an internal survey, it is one of the top three reasons why employees choose to stay there.

This kind of arrangement is a sign of the times and we’ll be seeing much more of it. Just to mention a few examples, Californian software company Motek has done it for years, Best Buy are experimenting with ROWE, a Results Only Work Environment where only your results are measured – not the number of hours you work and the Brazilian company Semco let employees set their own working hours.

But is this much flexibility a good thing or a bad thing? Does it increase employees’ freedom or does it simply make it easier for bosses to manipulate and abuse their serfs?

That depends on who you ask. Richard Reeves in his book Happy Monday comes out completely in favor of it. Whereas Richard Sennett in The Corrosion of Character describes it as a terrible situation that is ruining our work lives.

Here’s my take: Happy companies naturally embrace this flexibility. In happy companies there is enough trust between managers and employees that it will the flexibility will be used to make people happy at work, and not to make them work more.

It’s true that it does put more responsibility on employees’ shoulders to actually take some vacation time, but seriously – we’re adults here, right? We should be able to tell when we need one/want one and do something about it.

Like I always say, if you want to be happy at work you must:

1. Know yourself. If you don’t know yourself well enough to tell when it’s time for a vacation, then who will?
2. Speak up. If there’s something you need, say so. Don’t passively wait for your boss to figure it out.
3. Do something. Act on it!

In bad, abusive workplaces however, things are not that simple. Here it is normal to create all kinds of explicit and implicit pressures on people to work more and more, and in this case, flexibility simply becomes a license to abuse employees. Here, setting vacations according to contractual obligations or union rules offers way less flexibility, but it at least ensures that you get some vacation time at all.

It’s also true that different people like different levels of flexibility. Some people like to leave vacation planning completely open, others prefer to have it fixed years in advance. A truly flexible system accommodates both kinds of employees.

I do believe that flexibility is a good thing in and of itself and it’s a hallmark of all the happy companies I know that they offer very high levels of flexibility. I think flexibility comes from mutual trust and trust comes from being happy – as psychological studies confirm.

So if you want to have high levels of flexibility in a company, make sure you have high levels of happiness and trust first.

Your take

How much flexibility does your workplace give you? Is that a good or a bad thing? What makes it good or bad? Please write a comment, I’d really like to know.

Related

• How do you find time for vacations?
• Ask your co-workers about their best vacation ever

I was challenged by Susanne Goldstein of The Social Age to write something about happiness at work and social software.

The question is: do all these fancy, new ways of interacting on the web like blogs, youtube, forums etc. make us happier at work and in life?

Instead of writing something, I made a short video-riff exploring the question with Thomas Madsen-Mygdal who is very much an expert on social software.

You can see the resulting video on Susanne’s excellent blog here: Does Social Software make us happy?