The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Leadership

Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.

  • IKEA UK voluntarily raises wages for lowest-paid workers

    IKEA UK voluntarily raises wages for lowest-paid workers

    This announcement from Pernille Hagild, Ikea’s HR Manager in the UK and Ireland, is beyond awesome:

    We will adopt the Living Wage (as defined by the Living Wage Foundation) from the 1 April 2016. This means all our co-workers across the UK will receive a minimum of £7.85 per hour and £9.15 per hour within London. The Living Wage is a hot topic in the press at the moment so we feel it’s important to explain why we have made this decision.

    Ikea has seen that the UK minimum wage of GBP 6.75 is too low to allow many of their employees to live well and have therefore decided to voluntarily raise salaries to follow the recommendations of the Living Wage Foundation.

    Why? Because Ikea’s values are not only about doing good for the customer but also extend to the employees. Pernille puts it like this:

    Ikea is a values-driven company. We are guided by a vision “to create a better everyday life for the many people” and this vision includes our co-workers as much as our customers and the communities touched by our business. Providing a meaningful wage to all of our co-workers, that supports their cost of living, is an important part of our values which are fundamental to who we are.

    Of course this is not cheap:

    The initial £7.5million investment is a big one for us and will benefit over half of our co-workers here in the UK. We have been discussing this for the past year and the thought behind our decision is pretty simple: it is the core of our values to treat people equally and decently. We believe in paying a fair wage for all co-workers regardless of how old they are and that also takes into account where they live.

    Will it make employees happier?

    It does however raise the question of whether this will make employees happier. Do salaries matter?

    Here’s what we think: Wages have the power to make us unhappy if we perceive them to be unfair or if they are so low that we spend a lot of time and energy worrying about our finances.

    Once salaries reach the point where they are fair and allow us to live comfortably, further raises do not increase happiness.

    This move specifically addresses those issues and can take away much potential unhappiness for many of Ikea’s employees.

    That being said, it’s also noteworthy that Ikea UK does this voluntarily and out of a genuine desire to improve their employees’ lives. This means that the move might have an actual positive effect beyond just reducing financial unhappiness because it strengthens the relationship between employees and employer, by showing that the company cares about them.

    It’ll be really interesting to see how this plays out.

    I love everything about this. I strongly believe that if your business can’t afford to pay the employees a living wage, then you don’t deserve to be in business.

    The fact that Ikea is a long-term client of ours and that Pernille Hagild is a friend of mine who helped introduce a similar move in Ikea Denmark years ago only makes it MORE awesome :)

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  • New study: We know employees leave bad bosses – but maybe they also leave good ones

    bad-boss

    This is so far just a small study of employees at one company, but the results are interesting. Researchers Ravi S. Gajendran and Deepak Somaya summarize their study as follows in HBR:

    We began our study by surveying over 700 employees at a large multinational IT firm. We asked them to assess their manager’s leadership quality…

    Eighteen months later, we went through the list of survey responders to see who had left the company… and… interviewed these former employees, 128 in total, to find out why they left the firm, how their new job was different from their previous one, and — most importantly — if their perceptions of their prior employer had changed.

    These were the results:

    What we discovered was surprising. Good leadership doesn’t reduce employee turnover precisely because of good leadership.

    Supportive managers empower employees to take on challenging assignments with greater responsibilities, which sets employees up to be strong external job candidates.

    So employees quit for better opportunities elsewhere — better pay, more responsibility, and so on.

    I can already hear the lousy managers out there saying “See – I told you there was no reason to treat my people well.” :)

    But that is precisely the wrong lesson to draw here. Though the researchers themselves conclude that “Leadership does not beget retention,” I don’t think that’s warranted yet. That is too broad a conclusion to draw based on a study of one workplace.

    I’m sure there’s something to the idea, that if you lead your employees well, they’re more likely to grow and develop to the point where they are able to find work elsewhere or start their own businesses. It reminds of the old quote:

    What happens if we develop our employees and they leave?
    What happens if we don’t, and they stay?

    Other studies have shown that the quality of the leadership strongly affects  absenteeism, motivation, creativity and productivity, so even if we accept that good leadership has no effect on retention, it still improves business results.

    The study also did not take into account whether employees ever came back to their old workplace with new skills and experience.

    Finally, as I have often said, even if good leadership did not have a single proven positive effect on business outcomes it would still be the right thing to strive for, because we know that bad leadership hurts an employee’s career, health and private life.

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  • How did you lose pride in your work?

    Link sharing site reddit asked its users a really interesting question:

    What work moment made your attitude go from proud employee to “I’m just here for the paycheck”?

    The answers are incredibly interesting (if not a little depressing) and roughly fall into 3 categories. Here they are with some examples.

    The examples also bear out the research that shows that even star employees resort to bad behavior when they feel mistreated at work.

    1: Bad bosses

    When the owners and GM looked at my prostate cancer as a major inconvenience – for them.

    When they bitched about my being out for cancer surgery – and I’d been out less than two weeks.

    When I was back after two weeks wearing a fucking diaper because I was afraid of losing my job because of cancer.

    Then they expected me to be concerned whether they made a profit. Yeah, that’s likely.

    —

    For 7 years I had a boss who valued the work people did, and didn’t care how you arrived at the end product. Motivated and innovative employees were recognized and generally received additional responsibility and challenges.

    Then came the new boss, who was the text book example of micro manager, and ran the department like it was a 50’s assembly line. Watched the amount of time people took breaks, watched the minute people arrived, and the minute they left. Achievements were no longer recognized and employees were just cogs in a wheel.

    If there is no incentive to do anything more than the minimum amount of effort, the minimum amount of effort will be done.

    —

    A change of boss.

    We went from someone positive and inspiring to work for to a dolt without vision or concern for employee morale or motivation.

    2: Unfair treatment

    When the new guy who relies on me to do his job got promoted.

    —

    The company cut out a whole department and transferred their duties to my department. Now we must do two people’s jobs for a 52¢/hr raise and the strict no overtime policy remains.

    Fast forward 3 months and the company flies all the managers (3,000+) from across the US to Florida for a meeting where they rent out an amusement park and have a concert by a well known artist.

    Needless to say, I’m now the saltiest of salty employees.

    —

    Both of my mentors — two ladies who saw potential in me that I didn’t and helped me turn my life around — were fired (packaged out) within a week of each other. Fired by people who had only started a few months before and then themselves quit a few months later.

    3: Being asked to do something unethical

    When I was told to peel the ‘re-manufactured’ sticker off of the back of the ‘new’ instruments we were installing for a customer.

    —

    Found out that the product reps were giving a ton of free product to the store for the managers to distribute to the sales team.

    The reps would even give the managers the option of getting a few display-only models for customers to check out or giving products directly to the sales team for them to describe to the customers. The managers would blatantly lie to the reps and say that giving them to the sales team would help their sales the most, and then the managers would just take all of it.

    Then these same managers would blame the sales team 100% for poor numbers, at our no commission position.

    If they’re only looking out for themselves, then I’m doing that exact same thing.

    —

    At a grocery store: When for 2.5 years I warned that someone was going to slip and fall on the faulty loading dock for the trucks because a drip in the ceiling wasn’t being fixed by the company or the landlord who owned the building. On top of the the thing kept breaking.

    I griped loud enough and the solution was to send us pretty much this. Since unloading the trucks was a one person job, having one person drag this 165 pound ramp around was a hazard in itself, we just couldn’t use it.

    So, inevitably, someone slipped and fell on the old ramp. And only at that point, and some payout that was kept private, did they replace the faulty ramp we had.

    Read the whole thread here and for cryin’ out loud: Stop doing this kind of crap to dedicated employees.

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  • Is President Obama happy at work?

    Judging from this video, I’d have to say yes :)

  • How to praise yourself at work – and how NOT to

    How to praise yourself at work – and how NOT to

    i-am-awesome

    Is it OK to praise yourself at work?

    Could you tell a coworker something like “Hey, let me tell you what I just did – it was AWESOME!”

    Is it OK to send an email to the rest of your team to proudly share  that you found a creative solution to a tough problem?

    Can you take a little time in a project meeting to tell others about that task you just completed on time and under budget?

    Most people are reluctant to do that. They don’t want to seem arrogant or boastful or like they have a big head. But if you ask me, it’s perfectly OK to be proud of the good work you do AND to share that pride with others.

    Just as an example, If I’ve given a speech that I felt went REALLY well (which happens all the time these days) I share that with my coworkers. I tell them what happened and what it was that worked so well.

    However, self-praise can become really annoying if you do it wrong :) Here are 8 tips for praising yourself at work:

    1: Only praise yourself when you’ve earned it

    Just like any other praise, self-praise must be earned. You must have done something awesome before you praise yourself, otherwise it’s completely meaningless.

    2: Share the praise

    If you praise yourself for something you’ve done together with others, then you must include them in the praise. In that case you don’t say “I’m awesome,” you say “We’re awesome.”

    3: Don’t always only praise yourself

    It’s no good if you always only praise yourself and never recognize others. It’s required of all of us self-praisers that we’re especially good at acknowledging the cool things others do.

    4: Admit your mistakes too

    If you’re good at praising yourself when you rock, you should be the first to admit when you suck, apologize for your mistakes and be willing to learn from them and improve. People who can only see the good they do and completely overlook their own flaws  invite nothing but scorn and contempt.

    In fact, why not celebrate your mistakes?

    5: Praise yourself with genuine enthusiasm

    When you praise yourself, do it with an honest infectious enthusiasm. It’s OK to be proud of yourself. It’s OK to have a smile on your face, a spring in your step and pride in your voice when you share your accomplishments. In fact, it will be received more positively by others than if you do it with false humility.

    6: Moderation in all things

    It goes without saying that anything can be overdone – including self-praise. Don’t overdo it.

    7: Practice, practice, practice

    Practice makes perfect. It’s banal but true. Try it, see what works and then improve from there.

    8: Be ready to face skepticism

    Praise is sorely lacking from many workplace – including self-praise. This may lead to skepticism and resistance from others if you start doing it. If this happens, consider carefully if the criticism is because you’ve gone too far – in which case you should listen to it – or if it’s simply that people are not used to it – in which case you should continue doing it.

    Why you should praise yourself

    We can see four major advantages of self-praise. First, when you share your successes, others can learn from your best practices and maybe apply them themselves.

    Secondly, genuine enthusiasm is infectious. When you share something that made you happy, others become a little happier too.

    Thirdly, you can inspire others to also share their victories, so the whole team becomes better at sharing what works, to the benefit of all.

    And finally, if you are good at praising yourself, you’re not as dependent on receiving praise from others. As Spencer Tracy put it:

    It is up to us to give ourselves recognition. If we wait for it to come from others, we feel resentful when it doesn’t, and when it does, we may well reject it.

    And if all else fails, there’s always the self-praise machine that an employee at one of our clients built:

    Your take

    What do you think? Do you ever praise yourself at work? How do you do it? What are good ways or bad ways to do it? Write a comment, we’d love to hear your take.

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  • The 5 most important findings from the science of happiness that apply at work

    The 5 most important findings from the science of happiness that apply at work

    Happy workplaces are more profitable and innovative, attract the best employees and have lower absenteeism and employee turnover rates. Simply put, happy companies make more money.

    But how do you create a happy workplace? We believe some of the answers are found in positive psychology – a fascinating field and one of the main inspirations for the work we do with our clients around the world.

    Traditional psychology looks at everything that can go wrong with our minds – psychosis, neurosis, phobias, depression etc – and asks how it can be treated/cured. It’s an incredibly important field but positive psychology asks the opposite question: When are we happy? What does it take for people to live good lives  and thrive psychologically? The field has been especially active for the last 30 years and we are learning some really interesting and surprising things about happiness.

    Here are the five findings from positive psychology that we believe are the most relevant in the workplace.

    1: Positive emotions have many beneficial effect on us and on our job performance

    We tend to trivialize emotions in the workplace. It doesn’t matter what you feel, the prevailing thinking goes – it matters what you think.

    You should never show emotions at work and the true professional has no emotions at work. You should be like Spock from Star Trek who once said “Emotions are alien to me. I’m a scientist.”

    But this turns out to be impossible. Not only do we have emotions, those emotions affect our physical and mental well-being in many ways and, in general, positive emotions have some strong positive effects on our work performance.

    Here’s one example:

    … a number of the participants were either shown a comedy movie clip or treated to free chocolate, drinks and fruit. Others were questioned about recent family tragedies, such as bereavements, to assess whether lower levels of happiness were later associated with lower levels of productivity.

    … they found happiness made people around 12% more productive.

    So far, studies have shown that experiencing positive emotions makes us:

    • More productive
    • More creative
    • Healthier
    • Braver
    • Less stressed
    • More resilient
    • More helpful
    • Less biased
    • More optimistic
    • More intrinsically motivated
    • Faster learners
    • More likeable
    • Better team players
    • More generous

    Simply put, happy people not only feel better and thrive more, they also do better work. This helps explain why happy companies are more profitable and hence why no workplace can afford to ignore how people feel at work.

    2: Emotions are contagious

    One study in emotional contagion at work brought test subjects together for a simulated negotiation. They didn’t know that one member of the group was an actor extensively trained by the researchers to exhibit certain emotions during the meeting.

    Would the emotions of one person affect the rest of the group? The answer is yes – and when the emotions transmitted by the actor were positive, the whole group became more effective:

    There was a significant influence of emotional contagion on individual-level attitudes and group processes. As predicted, the positive emotional contagion group members experienced improved cooperation, decreased conflict, and increased perceived task performance.

    It turns out that how people around you feel rubs off on you and vice versa. Being around others involves taking on some of their emotions and transferring some of yours to them. We have all experienced this. Being around happy people makes us a little happier. Being around miserable bastards has the opposite effect.

    This is highly relevant in the workplace because it shows we don’t exist in isolation. Happiness is a social phenomenon and each of us influence, and are in turn influenced by, the people around us.

    3: Small actions can have a large effect on our happiness

    One of the coolest things about positive psychology is that it is highly research-based and the various interventions are tested in numerous studies.

    You may think that in order to become happier in life, you have to win the lottery or achieve massive amounts of success. But what they have consistently found is that simple interventions are surprisingly effective. Here are some examples of proven happiness interventions:

    • Write a gratitude letter to a person who has helped you
    • Make a list of 3 good things that happened to you today/this week
    • Perform a random act of kindness for someone else
    • Receive positive feedback

    In the workplace, this means that while organizational factors like strategies, vision, values and processes do matter, it also matters how we work together and interact in our teams on a day-to-day basis. Do managers treat their employees with respect and kindness? Do coworkers trust each other, help each other and maintain good relationships? Do people take the time to treat each other well in the workplace?

    However, the research also shows that happiness interventions only work under 2 conditions:

    1. You have to do it and keep doing it. This is hardly surprising.
    2. You have to want to do it yourself. If someone else forces you to do it, it doesn’t increase happiness. This is why you have to be careful not to mandate certain behaviors at work in the name of happiness.

    4: Unexpected things make us happy

    According to research, we become a happier when good things happen to us (duh!) but the effect is even bigger when good things happen to us unexpectedly:

    Emory University and Baylor College of Medicine researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans to measure changes in human brain activity in response to a sequence of pleasurable stimuli.

    They used a computer-controlled device to squirt fruit juice or water into the mouths of 25 research participants. The patterns of the squirting were either predictable or unpredictable.

    The researchers found that the MRI scans showed a brain area called the nucleus accumbens to be much more active when the subjects received unpredictable patterns of juice and water.

    So:

    • Something nice happens that you expect = good
    • Something nice happens unexpectedly = even better

    This is interesting in the context of happiness at work because many of the things companies do to make their employees happier are utterly predictable: Summer parties, Christmas parties, Bonuses, team events, and so on happen on an almost completely fixed schedule, which serves to diminish their effectiveness.

    This is why we advocate also doing random acts of workplace kindness. According to this research, a small well-meant surprising gesture towards an employee or a team may make them much happier.

    So what could you do, to surprise a co-worker today? Here are some examples:

    5: Making others happy, makes us happy

    It’s been shown consistently that doing things to make yourself happier has a small effect on your happiness but doing things for others, elevates their happiness AND yours much more.

    In one study, participants received a small amount of money that they could spend either on themselves or on others. Their happiness was measured before and after, and subjects who spent the money on others experiences a much larger boost to their happiness.

    This means that one of the most reliable paths to happiness at work is to focus less on your own happiness and more on making others – be it coworkers or customers – happier.

    This is not to say that you should sacrifice yourself for others, to the point where you neglect your own happiness. It just means that focusing only on your own happiness is likely to be a shallow, meaningless and ultimately unsuccessful.

    The upshot

    Happy employees are healthier and more productive and happy companies make more money.

    That’s why every company and every manager need to make happiness at work their most important strategic priority. These findings from positive psychology  help point the way on how to do it.

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  • 3 reasons why you MUST go to the WorldBlu Summit May 9-11 in Miami

    Screen Shot 2015-09-23 at 16.07.05

    If you go to only one business conference this year, make it the WorldBlu Summit on May 9-11 in Miami.

    I have been to all their previous events, they always knock my socks off and this one promises to be absolutely amazing and inspiring again.

    The theme for the event is democracy at work, ie. how do you create workplaces that are based on freedom rather than on command and control.

    Here are three reasons why you should go too.

    1: Make your company more profitable
    Freedom-based workplaces reduce unneeded hierarchy, processes, bureaucracy and red tape and set employees free to do really good work. This makes the company more innovative and profitable.

    2: Make your workplace happier
    Secondly, democratic workplaces are happier workplaces. When you grant employees trust, autonomy and freedom to make decisions, there is a much bigger chance that they will be happy at work.

    3: Meet and network with some awesome people
    The conference attracts some amazing speakers and companies that are only happy to share their ideas and best practices. I have met so many cool people at this conference and I think you will too.

    Read all about the WorldBlu conference and sign up for it here.

  • Highly effective organization without management

    You MUST watch this speech by Jos de Block from the 2015 Meaning Conference in Brighton.

    He explains how he founded an organization in Holland called Buurtzorg which delivers home care. Currently almost 10,000 employees work in self-organizing teams of up to 12 people.

    Each team has no manager – all colleagues are in charge of everything themselves, including hiring, training, work scheduling, conflict management, etc.

    The result is that employees are incredibly happy at work because they can do work their way and aren’t burdened with huge amounts of overhead or bureaucracy.

    Clients are really happy, because they get incredibly good care from people who love what they do.

    This challenges all our preconceived notions of how large organizations should be run. Maybe the best boss, is no boss.

  • How Toyota Gothenburg moved to a 30-hour workweek and boosted profits and customer satisfaction

    The video has English subtitles. If you don’t see them, press the  subtitles button in the video.

    Could a 30-hour workweek work?

    It not only could, for the mechanics at Toyota Center in Gothenburg Sweden it has worked incredibly well for over 10 years, leading to happier employees, happier customers and higher growth and profits.

    In this short 13-minute speech, CEO Martin Banck of Toyota Center Gothenburg explains why they made the transition from a 40-hour workweek to 30 and what the results have been.

    One outcome: Their mechanics now get more work done in 30 hours a week, than other mechanics do in 40. Not only is productivity higher (which you would certainly expect), their actual total output is higher!

    In fact, several workplaces in Sweden are now trying it out, including hospitals and nursing homes.

    I fully realize that many people are going to dismiss this out of hand. They are stuck in the cult of overwork and totally committed to the idea that working more hours always means getting more work done, even though the research shows that permanent overwork leads to poor health and low performance.

    It seems counter-intuitive that you could work fewer hours and get more done, but here’s another example:

    One executive, Doug Strain, the vice chairman of ESI, a computer company in Portland Oregon, saw the link between reduced hours for some and more jobs for others. At a 1990 focus group for CEOs and managers, he volunteered the following story:

    When demand for a product is down, normally a company fires some people and makes the rest work twice as hard. So we put it to a vote of everyone in the plant. We asked them what they wanted to do: layoffs for some workers or thirty-two-hour workweeks for everyone. They thought about it and decided they’d rather hold the team together. So we went down to a thirty-two-hour-a-week schedule for everyone furing a down time. We took everybody’s hours and salary down – executives too.

    But Strain discovered two surprises.

    First, productivity did not decline. I swear to God we get as much out of them at thirty-two hours as we did at forty. So it’s not a bad business decision. But second, when economic conditions improved, we offered them one hundred percent time again. No one wanted to go back!

    Never in our wildest dreams would our managers have designed a four-day week. But it’s endured at the insistence of our employees.

    We need to fundamentally change how we think about time in the workplace and Toyota Gothenburg is a great example to learn from.

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  • JJ Abrams wanted a happy set for Star Wars

    In this video legendary screen writer Lawrence Kasdan interviews director JJ Abrams about their work on Star Wars, The Force Awakens.

    At 28:10, they talk about the mood JJ Abrams wanted to create for the people working on the movie, and it sounds a lot like happiness at work to me:

    When you respect each other, it’s amazing what gets done.
    …
    It sounds pollyannaish like it’s all, you know, flowers and cookies, but it’s not that at all – it’s a lot of fucking hard work.

    Working on movies can be stressful and tough but Abrams realized that a happy set would not just make for a nicer experience for everyone involved, it would also result in a better movie.