Danish CEO Mogens Norgaard was once naked in the workplace. Not by accident but for a very specific purpose. Find out why in this video.
If you want to see the actual event, click here. Warning: It does (for obvious reasons) include nudity.
Category: Leadership
Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.
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What do you do when there’s just too much work?
Last year I did a workshop for a client in Copenhagen whose main problem was that they were just way too busy. They’re a trade union and new legislation meant that they got an influx of new government-mandated tasks but budget constraints meant they couldn’t hire more people.
Consequently they were increasingly falling behind on their work, through no fault of their own. They have an internal IT system that tracks every open case and they were currently 3,000 cases behind.
Even though this was due to circumstances outside of their control, knowing that they were behind made everybody stressed and irritable. They also felt a responsibility towards their members – every delayed case meant that one of their union members was waiting for an important answer or potentially weren’t being paid money they were owed.
This situation is becoming familiar in many workplaces where there is simply more work than resources. Typically management will bombard employees with information showing the current lag, which only serves to make people frustrated and unhappy at work.
So what can you do instead? Here’s what we did in our workshop with this client.
I pointed out the fact that they were currently behind by 3,000 cases. Everybody had heard that number – it had been sent out en emails and mentioned in countless meetings. I then gave the group 30 post-its notes and told them that each post-it represented 100 open cases.
I asked them to stick those post-its on the wall. It looked like this:
I asked how looking at that made them feel and they said things like “I feel hopeless,” “I feel like we’re failing our members,” and “I don’t see how we can ever catch up.”
Then I gave them 900 more post-it notes and asked the group to stick them on the wall next to that. It looked like this:
I told them that I’d checked their IT system, and in the last 12 months they had completed 90,000 cases. Each post-it represents 100 cases – hence 900 post-its.
I asked how they felt looking at this and they said things like “I feel proud,” “I feel like we’re making a difference,” and “I feel hopeful.”
Interestingly, the year before that they’d processed 73,000 cases so they had actually become much more productive, but had never focused on that. Instead their focus was only ever on how much they were falling behind.
This gave them renewed energy to tackle their increased case load. They also came up with their own way to track progress, using a whiteboard in their cafeteria:
They use it to track monthly completed cases. They’d set a goal for March of 1,000 cases – and reached it on March 17th. Note how they had to extend the scale upward with a piece of paper because they completed much more work than planned.
In short, focusing on the work they completed (instead of how much they were falling behind) allowed them to catch up over a period of a few months.
Sadly, many workplaces do the exact opposite. When teams fall behind, they are constantly told exactly how much. I’ve seen workplaces send out weekly emails with red graphs showing the current lag. I’ve seen the same graphs hanging in offices, cafeterias and being presented in every department meeting.
The problem is of course that this makes employees frustrated, hopeless and unhappy. The work of Harvard professor Teresa Amabile has shown that the most important factor that makes us happy at work is perceived meaningful progress in our work and that the absence of progress makes us unhappy.
And of course we know from the research that happy employees are more productive, creative and resilient.
In short, this means that most workplaces set up a vicious cycle:
- There’s too much work compared to the available resources
- Employees are constantly told that they’re falling behind
- Employees become unhappy at work
- Employees become less productive
- Less work gets done
- Back to 1
So that’s my challenge to your workplace: How can you highlight and celebrate the work that gets done, instead of only feeling bad over the work that’s not yet completed?
Related posts
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Top 5 Policies That Make Danish Workers Way More Happy Than Americans
You will often see Denmark listed in surveys as the “happiest country on the planet.” Interestingly Danes are not only happy at home, they’re also happy at work. According to most studies of worker satisfaction among nations, the happiest employees in the world are in Denmark. The U.S.? Not so much.I wrote an article for Fast Company on the 5 most important factors that explains this difference and it’s been incredibly popular. It seems the Danish way of working is attractive to many Americans.
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Happy nurses = happy patients
I’m on a train on my way to speak to 300 nurses and a bit of google research turned up this:
“Places that are good environments for nurses to work also then translate into nurses being able to do their jobs well and being able to provide good quality care to their patients.”
Simply put, the study found that happy nurses = better care = happy patients.
This just confirms that happiness at work improves business results on almost any meaningful metric.
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Creating a happy workplace
Here’s a 1-hour video of a speech I did last year for a group of South African business leaders:
This is one out of 6 speeches I did for ICAS in South Africa last year and after the speech they wrote that:
The guest speaker, Alexander Kjerulf, wowed the crowd with his charismatic charm and his pure passion for making people happier in the workplace.
If you’re thinking of booking me for a speech, this video will give you a great sense of how my speeches go. You can book me to speak in your company right here.
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“The Customer Is Not Always Right” – follow-up
My article on why “The Customer is Always Right” is wrong has generated an amazing amount of attention. It’s been read by 100,000s of people and been mentioned all over the internet. 
Call Center Magazine in the UK liked it so much that they turned it into a wall chart that is waaaaay more attractive than my original post. Download it here.But most of all the article gets a LOT of great comments. Here are some of my favorites.
I run a small company with about 20 employees. One day I heard commotion coming from the reception area. I hear a man yelling “I am the customer, you work for me and the customer is always right!”. I immediately went up and said, “No sir, you can’t get away with what you get away with at Walmart here. This young lady works for me and no matter what you think you were right about, you raised your voice and are no longer welcome.”
He needed our services and wrote a letter of apology for his ‘cranky mood’.
You raise your voice and you are out. No exceptions.
That’s it in a nutshell.
I read this post the other day and it was hiding in the back of my mind then this past Thursday I had a job interview. The interviewer asked me, “What do you feel about the statement, ‘The customer is always right’?” I remembered this post and mentioned these points as well as embellished to make it more appropriate to the job description.
After I answered that, the interviewer told me that I was the first person all day to answer that question correctly (she had already interviewed 6 people). Today I got a call offering me the position. I’d like to think that it had something to do with this blog post.
Thanks :)
SEE MOM! BROWSING THE INTERNETS IS A GOOD THING!!!
I’ve told Grant that I take full credit for him getting the job and given him an account number where he can deposit 10% of his first year’s salary :o)
We recently had a customer who bounced a check, and had the audacity to call my customer service manager with a tirade of yelling & profanity (before she could explain what had happened). She was calm and waited for him to settle down and tried to explain… He continued to use profanity, only to stop when my CS Manager politely told him that if he didn’t quit, she would hang up… Later, he emailed a complaint to the corporate office stating how rude and unprofessional she had been…
The customer DOES NOT have the right to harass my employees. I just happened to be in the office that day and could hear him screaming at her over the phone. I think she handled it WONDERFULLY; I took her out to lunch!
I don’t believe that a customer has the right to verbally assault my employees and I have trained them not to take that type of abuse from anyone.
I worked at a print shop where my manager would occasionally fire customers. In four years, I think it was 3 people. He told one person, “I won’t have you abuse my employee.”
I would have crawled through broken glass for him. It was one of the best employment experiences of my life.
These comments show that there are many companies out there that realize that putting the employees first actually results in better customer service. The formula is simple: Happy employees = happy customers.
But of course not everyone gets it. Yet.
Anonymous writes:
I work in a call center and showed this article to my boss. I’m told that senior managers view the ideas presented here as “silly.” Is it any wonder employees think our company is out to get them?
Customers are allowed to verbally abuse our employees and this is supposed to be a sign of great customer service. All the while, lower level managers are directed to keep turnover down. The company doesn’t understand that people are not satisfied in a job where the company supports abuse towards them.
Get a clue.
Sheeesh!
Related posts
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Check out my article for Fast Company’s Co.Exist website
My article for Fast Co.Exist has just been published. In it I list the 5 major differences between Danish and US workplaces that explain why Danish workers are the happiest in the world and US workers tend to be miserable.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
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Change
The keys to successful change in an organization are well known:
- Involve those affected
- Have a clear purpose
- Listen to concerns
So why do so few follow this?
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Every workplace should train employees to disagree with the boss – here’s why
The worst accident in the history of aviation happened on the Spanish Island of Tenerife on March 27 1977 when a KLM 747 taking off crashed into a Pan Am 747 that was still on the runway.
A long chain of events led up to the crash, but one of the major causes was that the captain of the KLM flight chose to ignore a crucial warning from his co-workers in the cockpit.
The KLM captain was no novice – in fact he was one of KLM’s most experienced pilots, the head of pilot safety training at KLM and featured in some of the company’s ads.
On the day of the crash the flight was already significantly delayed and any more delays would have forced the plane to stay on Tenerife overnight to comply with pilot rest requirements.
The captain, being eager to get off the ground, misheard an instruction from the control tower. He thought he was cleared for take off even though another plane was still on the runway, though he couldn’t see it in the heavy fog.
Then, and this is crucial, he ignored concerns from both his co-pilot and his flight engineer and proceeded to take off down the runway, eventually hitting the other plane. 583 people died.
As a result, “less experienced flight crew members were encouraged to challenge their captains when they believed something was not correct, and captains were instructed to listen to their crew and evaluate all decisions in light of crew concerns” (source).
This is obviously a horrific example but the learning that applies to all workplaces is that much is gained if:
- Employees can voice their disagreements with managers
- Managers can listen to their employees
However, the implicit power imbalance between employees and managers means that this is not something people do automatically. You have to explicitly train both of these aspects in order to make sure that it becomes part of the corporate culture.
There are three reasons why a company should do this.
1: You avoid mistakes
If the KLM captain had listened to his subordinates that accident would have been avoided.
How many accidents, mistakes and errors are allowed to happen daily in workplaces around the world because employees are too intimidated to disagree with the boss or are ignored when they do so?
2: You make employees feel valued
I recounted that story with great sadness, as it had been agonizing to watch my patient suffer through treatments that I believed he would not have chosen had he known the harm they could cause and the unlikeliness of being cured.
He eventually was admitted to hospice and died, but only after the chemo had left him with unstoppable and painful bleeding in his bladder, robbing him of a more peaceful and more comfortable end to his life.
This is from a NYT story written by a nurse who believed that one of her patients was receiving an unnecessary and incredibly painful round of chemo. She raised her concerns to a doctor and was promptly ignored. Reading the story makes it clear that this made her unhappy. Not only was her patient suffering needlessly but her expertise and judgment was being ignored.
The nurse goes on to write this:
Many of the nurses I know could share their own, dramatic stories of rescuing patients or catching frightening errors by other health care workers, including doctors.
3: You can weed out managers who are unable to take advice
And finally, giving employees permission to disagree and managers the obligation to listen and act on disagreement could help weed out those managers who are pathologically incapable of ever admitting error or admitting that they might not know everything already.
That kind of boss is endemic (and is even celebrated in many workplaces) but is ultimately incredibly damaging to business results.
Furthermore, when managers keep screwing up, it’s usually up to employees to keep fixing their mistakes and dealing with the fallout which clearly makes people frustrated and unhappy at work.
The upshot
There are plenty of articles out there with tips on how to disagree with your boss but most of them suffer from one fundamental problem: They take it as a given that the boss has the power, and therefore it is the responsibility of the employee to raise their disagreement in a respectful way that doesn’t bruise the bosses ego.
Also, many bosses see disagreement from subordinates as a sign of disloyalty and disrespect. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Disagreeing with what you see as a bad decision is in fact a sign of engagement and bosses should learn to appreciate that.
So I say we should turn that around and create workplaces where anyone is free to disagree with anyone else.
And this should apply not only to imminent mistakes but also to workplace practices, workloads, task assignments – everything. Every time you as an employee see something you disagree with or think is wrong you should be able to speak up and know that your concerns will be taken seriously.
Your take
Are you free to disagree with your boss at work? Will your boss listen? What if you can see your workplace doing something silly or wrong – do you know how and when to raise that?
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Why do we accept bad bosses?
A journalist once asked me why employees put up with bad bosses.
Without thinking about it I blurted out “Stockholm syndrome.”
I later realized I may have been right.
