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I’ve previously written about US online retailer Zappos and what makes them such a happy workplace.
In this video I talk to their Director of HR Hollie Delaney and Jamie Naughton who is Speaker of the House and we especially focus on the Zappos culture which permeates every aspect of running the company.
I also ask them how weird they are – but there’s a point to that :-)
Yesterday I made a massive mistake that was both awkward, stupid and painful.
I had a really important meeting with a large group of people from a client – and somehow that meeting wasn’t in my calendar. The meeting was at 1 o’clock, which I found out when one of them called me at 1:05 to ask where I was.
And this is not only a big client, this was the kick-off meeting for that project, and I forgot to go. I felt awful.
But then I remembered my own advice about celebrating mistakes.
Everyone makes mistakes at work. But rather than hide them and be embarassed, it is much better to celebrate your mistakes with others.
So let me reframe that: WOOHOO – I forgot a meeting.
This is not to say that I take forgetting my commitments lightly or that I plan to miss more meetings.
This is simply to say that mistakes are inevitable – the key thing is to learn from your mistakes, so you don’t have to make the same ones over and over. Instead, you can move on to make bigger and better mistakes.
As Samuel Beckett put it:
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
I have rescheduled the meetings with the client who took it very nicely and I do plan to be there this time. I may even bring cake to celebrate my mistake :-)
Got a mistake you’d like to celebrate? Share it in the comments.
Almost every company talks about empowering their employees, but few actually do it an any meaningful way. In many cases it becomes a sham process, where employees are encouraged to voice their opinions and those opinions are then promptly ignored.
And the best (or is that worst) symbol of fake empowerment is the suggestion box. Many workplaces have one hanging on a wall somewhere. You can stick in your idea, but then what? Who (if anyone) will read it? Will it ever be acted upon? If not, why not? If it is, who will take credit?
It’s time to kill off the suggestions box and the coolest way I’ve seen to do this comes from marketing agency Quirk based in Cape Town, Johannesburg and the UK.
They have created a process that let’s anyone in the company suggest ideas, gather support for them and then have them implemented (or not). When I visited their Cape Town HQ I had a chance to see it for myself, and I think every workplace who wants to give their employees a voice should do something similar.
This flowchart shows how it works:
The first step is to post your idea to a board that hangs in a prominent spot in the office and get 12 of your coworkers to also sign on. If you like an idea, you show your support in a very low-tech way: you put a sticker on it.
Some ideas die at this stage – there’s just not enough energy or support behind the proposal. All ideas that don’t make it for one reason or another are displayed in The Graveyard:
Here you can see each idea that failed and why.
If an idea does get the necessary support, the person behind it writes a one-page proposal which is then submitted to Quirk’s EXCO, which is basically their top leadership team.
If they approve it, the idea goes ahead immediately and is placed on the “Ideas in motion” section of the board:
Ideas that were previously approved are shown on the “It’s happening” section.
Of course, the leadership group can turn the idea down, and if they do, they must carefully explain why they don’t think it’s a good idea. They can’t just say “No” or “Maybe later.”
But as you can see from the flow chart above, even if the leadership group turns an idea down, that need not be the end of it. If a person feels that this idea is still to good to ignore, it can be put to a debate and subsequent vote inside the company. If the idea is voted through, this overrides the EXCO’s decision and the idea goes ahead anyway.
Another thing they do on the board is highlight the costs of previous ideas, so employees know how much things end up costing.
I think this process is absolutely brilliant for 5 reasons:
1: It’s visual
It’s not just a bunch of documents or lines in a spreadsheet – this is highly visual which gives you a great overview. It’s also well-designed and looks pretty, which probably helps a little too.
2: It’s low-tech
This could also be done on the intranet or in an app, but I kinda like that it’s on paper and cork board and you vote with stickers. This also makes it very flexible. Also, a page or an app is on demand – that means that people need to be proactive to access their democracy (and apathy is a killer). This board is a sort of dynamic wallpaper – it sits in front of your eyes while you butter your toast in the kitchen – you can be as passive as you like – the democracy comes to you.
3: It’s fast
The process is fast. The leadership group have committed to addressing each idea at their next meeting and this means that ideas can get acted on while the energy is still there.
4: It has memory
The board is a great record of previous failed ideas (so you don’t have to deal with the same proposals once every 6 months from different people and it also highlights ideas that were implemented, so you can see that this actually works.
5: It’s transparent
This takes most of the politics out of these ideas. Getting your idea implemented is not about who you know or how well you can lobby for it, it’s about gaining support for good suggestions.
There is zero doubt that autonomy and control over our own situation makes us happy. The more we can meaningfully contribute to things we care about at work, the prouder and happier we feel. And that way the company can also better tap into the creativity of its employees and become more efficient.
So simply put:
Fake empowerment = frustration and cynicism.
Real empowerment = trust and happiness.
Does your workplace empower its employees? For real or in a fake way? If you have a really good idea, do you know where to go with it?
Photo credits: The awesome picture above of the suggestion box is from a train station in Moshi, Tanzania and was originally shown here. All other photos are courtesy of Quirk.
Last week when I was in London I met Gaye Andrews who is Head of Customer Service, EMEA at PEER 1 Hosting and very much the woman behind creating a great workplace.
She shared a cool policy they have: Any employee who has an idea to make work more fun or the office a little more cool that costs less than £100 can just do it and expense the amount.
As an example, that’s how they got space hoppers.
I think it’s a cool idea, that can remove layers of bureaucracy and get employees involved in making the workplace better and happier.
I just got one of my favorite kinds of emails – from a company who is doing something to create a happier workplace.
Dean Stainton who is the Director of Client Services and People Systems at NRI Distribution in Canada wrote:
I wanted to reach out to you and let you know about a couple of things.
I had the fun of meeting you at the Worldblu Live Conference in Denver and attending your session on workplace happiness. As a result of that experience I decided to try something when I got back to our work environment.
I am very fortunate that I have accountabilities on both the HR and the Client Services side, knowing that getting 12 customer service reps onside with workplace happiness would be far more difficult than 4 HR people I decided to give it a try and tackle Workplace Happiness with the 12.
I bought copies of the book for everyone (Happy Hour is 9 – 5) and everyone took some time to read it on their own. After reading the book we discussed it in our weekly meeting (which has been named Happy Hour!) and each Client Services Rep and myself were left with three questions to answer:
- What can you do to make NRI a happier place to be?
- What can we do as a team to make NRI a happier place to be?
- What is stopping you/us from doing the answers to the above?
Those are some great questions and Dean’s group came up with plenty of ideas and have implemented two already.
One is a Praise Window at Dean’s office (erasable markers are available at the window and coworkers write down good things about each other for everyone to see). Dean writes:
No matter what people have written they are doing it with a smile on their face and typically a little giggle. Everyone who comes by stops to have a read and all either smile or laugh too….it is really contagious (but you already knew that). It has gotten to the point now where people in the warehouse are talking about doing the “praise window”. It has been particularly neat to see this coming from the Client Services side, as people have typically expected things like this from our HR team.
Someone else suggested “sharing the love,” writing:
I know that every now and then I get an email from a client who is super stoked about something. Most of the time I’m just happy that they’re happy and delete the email. Recently I forwarded one of these emails to Ops to SHOW them that the client was happy with the work they had done. This is praise coming directly from the client, and not just boring old me who says “yay! Thanks!” all the time. I think it was awesome for them to see, and made them feel good about their work! I know this isn’t something that happens often, but when it does…..share it!
Dean sums the whole thing up like this:
The ideas and enthusiasm have been amazing and once realizing that they didn’t need anyone’s “permission” to do cool, fun things it has been contagious.
And this is the team doing it, not the Manager asking them to do it!
We are very early in our journey but wanted to let you know the impact that your insight and passion have had on our team. I anticipate that the next time I send you an email it will have expanded past the Client Services Team. Thanks Alex!
What I really like about this is two things:
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: Happiness at work is something we do.
I suggest you find a way to ask some of the same questions in your workplace and if you come up with something cool, please tell me about it :o)
“Study finds that basically every single person hates performance reviews.”
That’s the headline for this new Washington Post article and I couldn’t agree more.
In fact, I’ve written about this previously. Here are the Top 10 Reasons Why Performance Reviews Don’t Work.
I recently had a chance to visit PEER1 hosting in Southampton in southern England and talk to their CEO Dominic Monkhouse about their culture.
PEER1 does hosting for big web sites and have around 120 employees in the UK. They have a very clear vision for creating customer happiness, and have realized that this is only possible when you have happy employees.
There are many cool aspects of their culture (here’s an excellent video where Dom explains it), but the most visible is how cool their office space is. First of all, it’s on the docks in Southampton with beautiful views over the water – but they’ve also gone out of their way to introduce many great-looking, fun and functional elements.
Here are my photos from a seeeeeriously cool workplace.
I’ll be keynoting at the People Innovation Summit in Moscow on May 19-21.
In preparation for that, I did a short video interview with them, where I talk about the link between happiness and business success. Check it out – it summarizes the idea of happiness at work from a business perspective quite well.
I’ve written a lot about the obsession companies have with tracking and increasing employees’ working hours – based on the myth that working more hours leads to better results.
But the clearest and most concise commentary on this comes from Zach Holman of American software company GitHub, who puts it like this:
Hours are bullshit!
I could not agree more. Stop focusing on hours worked and start focusing on results delivered. And realize that there is not a linear relationship between the two.
Read more about what makes GitHub an awesome workplace here.
This article from Harvard Business Review by Matthew Lieberman asks whether leaders should focus on results or people. It quotes a study by Jamez Zenger from 2009 who found that:
If a leader was seen as being very strong on results focus, the chance of that leader being seen as a great leader was only 14%…
If a leader was strong on social skills, he or she was seen as a great leader even less of the time — a paltry 12%.
However, for leaders who were strong in both results focus and in social skills, the likelihood of being seen as a great leader skyrocketed to 72%.
But here’s the kicker:
Less than 1% of leaders were rated high on both goal focus and social skills.
Ouch!
Our theoretical framework says that happiness at work comes mainly from results and relationships – we need both to create happy workplaces. And while our traditional image of a leader is someone who is extremely results-oriented, it seems that great leaders have both skills.
So why is that so rare? It goes against the way our brains are wired says Lieberman in the article and in his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect:
These two networks (results and relationships) function like a neural seesaw. In countless neuroimaging studies, the more one of these networks got more active, the more the other one got quieter…
Its safe to say that in business, analytical thinking has historically been the coin of the realm — making it harder to recognize the social issues that significantly affect productivity and profits. Moreover, employees are much more likely to be promoted to leadership positions because of their technical prowess. We are thus promoting people who may lack the social skills to make the most of their teams and not giving them the training they need to thrive once promoted.
Again: Ouch!
The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. Get an in-depth background in happiness at work, hear about the latest research in the field and learn how to use this in your own business.