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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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:
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?
You have to do it and keep doing it. This is hardly surprising.
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:
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.
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.
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.
The video has English subtitles. If you don’t see them, press the 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!
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.
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.
In 1988 she became the leader of a troubled nursing home in Copenhagen called Lotte.
She had no budget to change things but with lots of heart, a deep commitment to helping others and a healthy dose of common sense, she turned it into one of the happiest workplaces in Denmark.
In this funny and moving speech, she shares how she created a nursing home where the staff loved to work and where the residents were healthier, happier and lived twice as long as in other nursing homes in Denmark.
Positive feedback not only feels great – it also makes us more effective.
Yet another study (this one from Harvard Business School) confirms what we all know: Receiving positive feedback makes us happier at work, less stressed and more productive. From the study:
In the study, participants… were asked to solve problems. Just before that, approximately half of the participants received an email from a coworker or friend that described a time when the participant was at his or her best.
Overwhelmingly, those who read positive statements about their past actions were more creative in their approach, more successful at problem-solving and less stressed out than their counterparts.
For instance, participants had three minutes to complete Duncker’s candle problem. Fifty-one percent who had read emails prior to the task were able to successfully complete it; only 19% of those who did not receive “best-self activation” emails were able to solve it.
Those who received praise were also significantly less stressed than the control group.
The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions suggests that positive emotions broaden one’s awareness and encourage novel, varied, and exploratory thoughts and actions. Over time, this broadened behavioral repertoire builds skills and resources.
Essentially we now know that when you experience positive emotions, your mind functions in a broader and more open way. This is also confirmed by the research performed by Teresa Amabile who found that:
If people are in a good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day.
There seems to be a cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover, an incubation effect, to the next day.
This is crucial. It shows that being happy is not just about feeling good – it has a large measurable effect on our work performance in many different way. Creative thinking is just one – happy people are also more productive, more resilient, more empathetic and make better decisions – just to mention a few effects.
Praise is rare in the workplace
Giving positive feedback is an interesting way to create more happiness at work for two reasons: It’s incredibly effective (as the Harvard study showed) but it’s also sorely lacking from most workplaces.
Lack of praise or recognition for the work I do (37%)
Not only is a lack of praise and recognition a major cause of unhappiness at work, the top two might even be lessened if people felt more appreciated
Why praise matters: Results AND Relationships
Our model of what makes us happy at work says that it comes from two main factors: Results and Relationships. Or to put it another way doing great work together with great people. Here’s a video on that.
We’ve always said that praise at work is important because it shows people that they do good work, make a difference and get results. This gives us a feeling of pride that makes us very happy at work. Praise also motivates us for future tasks.
But lately we’ve realized that there is more to positive feedback: It’s also about strengthening relationships in the workplace. When you praise someone else, it shows that you actually pay attention to them and are able to see their good work and positive qualities.
One of our most fundamental psychological needs is the need for others to see and recognize the good in us. Some sociologists argue that how others see us is in fact one of the major factors that shape our identity. And we know that people who are never seen, or only seen for the bad they do, have a much higher risk of developing mental problems over time.
Resistance to praise
We’re not saying it’s easy – far from it. In many workplaces there is no tradition of positive feedback. Many managers in particular have developed a notion that praise is trivial or ineffective – they’re completely wrong, of course. I’ve even heard managers argue that “we shouldn’t praise employees – they’re just doing their jobs.” How incredibly narrow-minded.
Some workplaces even have a strong culture of negative feedback, so that good performance is met with silence but even the slightest mistakes are punished harshly.
Not only does the current absence of praise in the workplace make it harder, it might even mean that praise is initially met with scorn or suspicion. Over time, people will come to realize that the praise is genuine and not just an attempt to butter them up for something else :)
I have always believed that the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers, and that people flourish if they’re praised.
What is good praise
Good praise is:
Genuine – only praise people if you mean it
Meaningful – praise people for something worth praising
Specific – tell them what was good
It’s also worth remembering that we can praise others for what they do (their work or their results) but we can also praise others for who they are, i.e. the personal qualities we see in them.
So get praisin’. Positive feedback takes no time and costs no money and is one of the most effective ways to make a workplace happier and, apparently, more productive.
And anyone can praise anyone else. Of course bosses should praise employees, but employees can also praise each other, praise the boss or even praise customers. Why not?
We can all start with ourselves. Could you become the kind of person who is really good at seeing the good in others and telling them about it? This is a great thing to do, not just at work but also in your family, with your friends or even with random strangers on the street.
When you praise others, you don’t have to make a big production out of it. You can simply go up to someone and quietly and give them positive feedback. You can send the praise in an email, you can write it on a post-it note and stick it on their desk, you can praise people in meetings in front of their coworkers or in a million other ways.
Here are 5 specific suggestions for how to praise others at work:
We would suggest making it a daily challenge to give at least one other person at work positive feedback of some kind. This can help develop a habit around it and get to the point where it’s something you do naturally.
And if all else fails, there’s always the self-praise machine :)
Your take
Does your workplace have a culture of positive feedback? Are you good at praising others? What’s a time that you praised someone else at work, where you could see it meant something to them? What does it do to you, when others appreciate you at work? Write a comment, we’d love to hear your take.
The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. You get a comprehensive understanding of the latest research, tons of effective practical tools and learn how to use them in your own business.
button in the video.
