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.

  • The top 5 ways NOT to praise people at work

    In 2011 we conducted a study of 1,000 Danish employees from a wide variety of workplaces to try to find the biggest factors that make people unhappy at work. Our study found that the second biggest driver of dissatisfaction at work was a lack of praise and recognition. Too many Danish employees are unhappy and demotivated at work because, even though they do great work, they hardly ever receive any positive feedback and I’m willing to bet good money that this applies in most other countries too.

    That’s a damn shame because studies confirm that workplaces that have a culture of recognition are happier, have lower absenteeism and are more successful.

    So we need more praise at work, sure, but that’s not enough. It’s also about better praise. We won’t create a viable culture of recognition in a workplace simply by increasing the amount of praise given, we must also improve the quality of the praise.

    It is actually possible to praise employees and co-workers in ways that make them less happy at work.

    Here are the top 5 ways NOT to praise people at work. Do you recognize any of these from your workplace?

    1: Obligatory praise
    Never praise people just because you feel you should. Praise has to be meaningful and earned. This means you can only praise others when there is a good reason to do so – which fortunately is quite often.

    Praise given because you have to and not because you feel the person has earned it makes no one happy at work. It will also undermine all future praise, because people can’t trust it to be honest.

    Also, some people will only give praise and tend to avoid giving negative feedback, possibly in an attempt to avoid unpleasant conversations and conflict. That won’t do. Our study showed that people long for feedback at work. They want to know what they do well but they also want to know what they can do better.

    2: Sarcastic praise
    Imagine this said in a wildly sarcastic tone: “Wow, you just did an awesome job on that, didn’t you?”

    That’s not very likely to make anyone happy at work.

    3: Praise mixed with criticism
    Have you ever heard that you should preface any criticism with praise? Some people argue that the best way to give negative feedback is to wrap it in praise, i.e. you should praise, criticize and then praise again at the end.

    I disagree completely with that approach. I say if you have negative feedback, say so. If you have praise to give, do it. But don’t feel like you have to mix the two.

    The problem is this:

    • The praise you do give seems fake – it’s just a preamble to the real message.
    • It seems like you think people can’t take criticism since you wrap it in praise to soften the blow.
    • In the future when you praise people, they’ll just be waiting for the hammer to drop.

    4: Praising some – ignoring others
    If some people get tons of praise while others are consistently ignored, this is highly demotivating since it give the praise-less a feeling of unfairness and of being overlooked.

    A classic example would be a company where the salespeople get all the praise for getting new customers while the people working in the backoffice, who make the sales possible, are routinely ignored and taken for granted.

    Unfortunately it’s easy to end up praising only those people who get the most visible results and ignoring the people backstage. Its also tempting to only praise the people who are most like you, who do work you immediately understand and who do it the way you would have done it. Therefore we should all make an extra effort to appreciate the people who are not like us.

    This is not to say that praise should be handed out evenly so everyone gets the exact same amount of recognition. In any workplace, there will be people who shine and it’s perfectly alright if they get more praise. But it’s important that everyone gets noticed and praised for the good work they do.

    5: Trivial praise
    I once talked to a woman who got lots of praise from her male supervisor at her last job… but only ever for her looks. This was both creepy and utterly meaningless. She’s a highly skilled professional and she wants to be recognized for that – not for something as trivial as how she looks.

    So make sure you praise people for things that actually matter to them and not for superficial matters and trivial accomplishments.

    Your take

    Have you ever been praised in a way that made you less happy at work? Does your workplace have a good culture of recognition? What’s the best way you’ve ever given or received praise at work? Write a comment, we’d love to know your take.

    Related posts

  • Tiger Oil Memos

    Have you seen the Tiger Oil memos? Whoah, Nelly!

    It’s “…a total of 22 enormously entertaining memos; all sent by, or on behalf of, the firm’s incredibly amusing, painfully tactless, and seemingly constantly angry CEO — Edward ‘Tiger Mike’ Davis — to his staff.”

    Here’s are some of my favorites.

    On gossip:

    Idle conversation and gossip in this office among employees will result in immediate termination.

    Don’t talk about other people and other things in this office.

    DO YOUR JOBS AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!

    I can swear – you can’t:

    I swear, but since I am the owner of this company, that is my privilege, and this privilege is not to be interpreted as the same for any employee. That differentiates me from you, and I want to keep it that way. There will be absolutely no swearing, by any employee, male or female, in this office, ever.

    No celebrations:

    Per Edward Mike Davis’ orders, there will be no more birthday celebrations, birthday cakes, levity, or celebrations of any kind within the office. This is a business office.

    If you have to celebrate, do it after office hours on your own time.

    Source.

    I can’t believe that company isn’t around anymore :o)

    Hat-tip to Peter Billingham for telling me about these!

    Also – it made me think of this classic Simpsons moment:

  • The customer is not always right

    Here’s a great story from Natalie, who sent me an email to tell me how happiness at work has made her business much more successful:

    My company owns and operates a sandwich franchise. We came into a market that the name brand struggled with in my city. My partner and I were so frightened to open this first store but believed that if we could change the atmosphere and create happiness we could be a success.

    I am proud to say that we have not even been open a full year and our sales are approx. 186% higher than the other stores in the city. Second store on its way.

    The other owners and even the franchisor themselves keep asking what our success tools were. I used to stand there and think of a clever, smart, analytical way to answer this. The answer was simple…. We cared about our staff and in turn they cared for our customers. Our staff repeatedly tells customers how much they love working there. Best reward I can ask for! I have super low turn over and you will never guess what the turnover mainly consists of…. An employee having a dream career and us helping them find the path to get there.

    So I came across your article by typing into google “Why are customers so rude” You know what I got? A million different articles written on how to handle and keep that customer! Then I came across your article about how “The customer is always right” is wrong and got emotional. Thank you a million times over for believing and standing by your staff.

    I noticed a great pattern in my store. Anytime we had one of those horrific customers who threatened us and my staff with “I am telling everyone how horrible you people are,” the next week we hit record sales. So we stop the mean customers and put our foot down. Our staff knows if they are being treated poorly never to stand for that! You are human and have feelings and do not deserve to be treated like crap!

    My favorite line to say to really upset customers…”Sir/Maam, it’s okay it’s just a sandwich.” Risky I know but when you put it into reality for them most of them stop and look at themselves. Yes you are screaming and yelling at me that I ruined your day because the sandwich had tomatoes on it and you asked for no tomatoes but we even said we can remake it and we apologize for the mistake.

    So again thank you for working with companies and spreading the word about this simple solution. I am thrilled to know that there are people out there who think this way as well and try to spread the happiness around. It inspires me more to share my happiness with the staff that I sincerely care for. I hope you come to the States more and I can see one of your segments in person. God knows this Country could learn a thing or two about happiness.

    YES! Way to go Natalie.

    I’ve said this a million times: When customers are rude or unreasonable, stand with your staff. It makes them happy and that in turn makes the other, reasonable, nice customers happy. And that way you make more money!

    Related posts

    Top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong

  • Paying employees to get healthy is a bad idea

    I just discovered this brilliant whitepaper on employee wellness. It looks at a new worrying trend which has companies paying their employees to participate in wellness programmes.

    This is of course an incredibly bad idea for many reasons, including these:

    • Financial rewards undermine autonomy
    • Employees who aren’t ready or willing to change… won’t
    • Financial incentives aren’t enough to change complex behaviors

    It’s really, really time for companies to understand that financial rewards have several serious limitations as a tool to change employee behavior.

    Related posts

  • The 10 most awesome things from Valve’s employee handbook

    I recently had a chance to read the employee handbook from video game company Valve and it’s the single most inspiring such document I have ever seen.

    I play some video games myself (the Bioshock and Dead Space franchises are my favorites), but if you don’t partake you may never have heard of Valve so here’s the skinny from Wikipedia:

    Valve Corporation is an American video game development and digital distribution company based in Bellevue, Washington, United States. Founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, Valve became famous from its critically acclaimed Half-Life series. It is also well known for its social-distribution network Steam; and for developing the Source engine.

    Valve is privately owned so few financial figures are known but they have 300 employees and Forbes estimates the company’s worth at $3 billion.

    Their employee handbook was recently released on the web and it explains how they’ve become so successful. Here are the top 10 most awesome things from the document.

    1: Valve has no hierarchy

    Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily.

    But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.

    That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager.

    How cool is that?

    2: Pick your projects

    We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100.

    Heh :o) Screw Google and their “20% time to work on your own projects.” Valve turned that dial to 11!

    3: Don’t forget the long term

    Because we all are responsible for prioritizing our own work, and because we are conscientious and anxious to be valuable, as individuals we tend to gravitate toward projects that have a high, measurable, and predictable return for the company.
    …
    This sounds like a good thing, and it often is, but it has some downsides that are worth keeping in mind. Specifically, if we’re not careful, these traits can cause us to race back and forth between short-term opportunities and threats, being responsive rather than proactive.

    So our lack of a traditional structure comes with an important responsibility. It’s up to all of us to spend effort focusing on what we think the long-term goals of the company should be.

    In many, many workplaces where employees are unhappy and frustrated because their workdays are entirely taken up with putting out one fire and then the next, leaving no time for long-term planning of any kind. Valve try not to fall into that trap.

    4: Don’t stress over the things you don’t do

    It’s natural in this kind of environment to constantly feel like you’re failing because for every one task you decide to work on, there will be dozens that aren’t getting your attention. Trust us, this is normal. Nobody expects you to devote time to every opportunity that comes your way. Instead, we want you to learn how to choose the most important work to do.

    At most workplaces there is a huge and unrelenting focus on the things employees haven’t done. Almost every meeting, email and phone call are intended to remind people of the next deadline and how far away they are from reaching it. Valve try to take the pressure of employees so they don’t stress over the things they don’t do.

    5: We test ourselves

    …rather than simply trusting each other to just be smart, we also constantly test our own decisions

    Yes. Don’t believe your own hype. Test your decisions and adjust as needed.

    6: Overwork is bad

    While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication.

    This is a brilliant slap in the face to all members of The Cult of Overwork, ie. everyone who believes that the key to succes is simply to work more hours.

    7: Enjoy yourself

    Sometimes things around the office can seem a little too good to be true. If you find yourself walking down the hall one morning with a bowl of fresh fruit and Stumptown-roasted espresso, dropping off your laundry to be washed, and heading into one of the massage rooms, don’t freak out. All these things are here for you to actually use.

    And don’t worry that somebody’s going to judge you for taking advantage of it—relax! And if you stop on the way back from your massage to play darts or work out in the Valve gym or whatever, it’s not a sign that this place is going to come crumbling down like some 1999-era dot-com startup.

    If we ever institute caviar-catered lunches, though, then maybe something’s wrong. Definitely panic if there’s caviar.

    In short, you should feel good during your work day.

    8: You’re free to screw up

    Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake.
    …
    Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company — we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors.

    Yes! I cannot stress enough, how important it is to let employees make mistakes.

    In fact, we should celebrate mistakes at work.

    9: It’s not about growth

    We do not have a growth goal. We intend to continue hiring the best people as fast as we can, and to continue scaling up our business as fast as we can, given our existing staff. Fortunately, we don’t have to make growth decisions based on any external pressures — only our own business goals. And we’re always free to temper those goals with the long-term vision for our success as a company. Ultimately, we win by keeping the hiring bar very high.

    Yes! Way too many businesses are slaves to growth goals that are arbitrary, unrealistic and ultimately meaningless.

    As Ricardo Semler put it:
    There is no correlation between growth and ultimate success. For a while growth seems very glamorous, but the sustainability of growth is so delicate that many of the mid-sized companies which just stayed where they were doing the same thing are much better off today than the ones that went crazy and came back to nothing. There are too many automobile plants, too many airplanes. Who is viable in the airline business?

    10: Hiring

    Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing.

    So when you’re working on hiring … everything else you could be doing is stupid and should be ignored!

    Again, this is brilliant. Nothing undermines a strong positive company culture faster than hiring people who don’t fit in.

    In short, this is a fantastic document and one of the coolest things about it is that it’s maintained by the Valve employees themselves, who are free to edit it on their intranet.

    You can find the whole Valve Employee Handbook here – read it, read it, read it :)

    Your take

    What do you think of these 10 points? How does this document compare to your workplace’s employee handbook? Is there anything in your employee handbook that inspires you?

  • Quote

    You know a corporate values program is doomed to fail when they start printing mouse mats with the values.
    – Henrik Burkal, CEO of REMA1000 Denmark

    Possibly the best quote from our conference two weeks ago :o)

    REMA1000 is a Norwegian chain of grocery stores and Henrik is the CEO of the Danish division. REMA1000’s vision is to be the most values-driven organization in Scandinavia. Consequently they have strong opinions on how or how NOT to introduce and strengthen corporate values.

  • When your boss saves your job

    Bob Sutton, author of the excellent book Good Boss Bad Boss tells this story from the very early days at Pixar:

    The company was under financial pressure and much of this pressure came down on the heads of the Division’s leaders, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.

    The new president, Doug Norby, wanted to bring some discipline to Lucasfilm, and was pressing Catmull and Smith to do some fairly deep layoffs. The two couldn’t bring themselves to do it.

    But Norby was unmoved. He was pestering Ed and Alvy for a list of names from the Computer Division to lay off, and Ed and Alvy kept blowing him off. Finally came the order: “You will be in my office tomorrow morning at 9:00 with a list of names.”

    So what did these two bosses do? They showed up in his office at 9:00 and plunked down a list. It had two names on it: Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.

    Remember, there are many great managers out there. If you work for one who isn’t great, don’t just accept that as the natural state of things. Do something about it.

    Related posts

  • It Pays to be NICE to Your Employees

    Nice boss

    This is a guest post by my good buddies Linda and Robin over at THE POWER OF NICE.

    Managers, when was the last time you asked yourself, “Am I doing enough to show my employees how much I appreciate them?”

    If you’re unsure, chances are your office could probably benefit from a little gratitude. A November 2009 Careerbuilder.com survey revealed that 40 percent of employees have difficulty staying motivated at work, while 23 percent describe their office morale as “low.”  What was the reason? As you might have suspected, it was a simple one. They felt unappreciated by their employers.

    Contrary to what you might think, however, it doesn’t take a whopping pay raise or a slew of promotions to make employees feel valued. Studies have shown repeatedly that it’s the small, interpersonal gestures that have the biggest payoff.

    A 2010 McKinsey study found that the best workplace motivators appeal directly to the emotions, with 67 percent listing praise or recognition from an immediate manager as “effective” or “extremely effective.”  What’s more, respondents found all emotionally based motivators to be more effective than financial ones.

    While we certainly can’t argue with the value of congratulating an employee on a job well done, we have another novel trick that we’ve found rather effective: chocolate. Yes, when you “sweeten the deal” quite literally, you’ll find that your employees will actually experience a bit of an emotional boost. It’s not just because of the sweet taste, either. Chocolate contains over 300 different chemicals, including caffeine, theobromine, and phenylethylamine, which stimulate the neurotransmitters in the brain linked to concentration and mood. In other words, a few handfuls of M&M’s could have employees feeling better and working smarter. (Quite a big accomplishment for a little chocolate candy!)

    No matter what your approach, demonstrating your gratitude toward your employees and recognizing their accomplishments regularly is a SMALL but highly effective way to transform your office culture and rev up productivity—and as a result, kick your business into high gear.

    And that’s something everyone can appreciate.

    Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval are the co-authors of the bestselling books, THE POWER OF NICE: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness and THE POWER OF SMALL: Why Little Things Make All the Difference. To connect with them, follow them on Twitter, “like” them on Facebook, or check out their blog.

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  • Three ways to deal with off-days at work

    Off-day at work

    Niels Hartvig, founder of Umbraco, the world’s only open source Microsoft-based CMS, recently asked what he should do about off-days at work among the people at Umbraco HQ:

    This morning I thought of dealing with off-days. Probably because I had one yesterday. One of the days where I’m going to work and get very little done. Not because I don’t want to, but simply because there’s some miscommunication between my fingers and my brain. Most programmers – and creative people in general – that I’ve spoke to about this, recognize it immediately yet I haven’t found anyone who had a ‘formal’ policy on dealing with these things. I’d love to.
    …
    We’re humans – we’re not perfect. If it was ok and if everyone in a company could be open, we might start being able to work out patterns for off-days and see if they could be minimized. Or just be turned better. Whether it’s going home and getting some sleep, seeing a therapist (paid by work), calling your wife or…

    I really want to develop some policy around this for the HQ and if it works out, I’ll blog again. At least a start is simply saying out loud that off-days are fine and a part of us. Until then, let’s try to help each other with our experiences in the comments – start the conversation!

    I think that’s an awesome question. Let’s face it, everyone has off-days. No matter how much you love your job, there will be days where you just don’t feel like it, for whatever reason. Sure you can force yourself to show up anyway, and sometimes it will be fine but most often you waste a day and get very little done. Also, forcing yourself to come in, may mean that you feel even less like working the next day.

    And yet, most workplaces completely deny this reality and expect employees to be equally productive, alert and (not least) present every work day.

    I would like to suggest three possible policies to deal with off-days:

    Suggestion #1 (the easy one): If you have an off-day, say so.
    The IT support department at the medical company Leo Pharma are a critical part of the organization. If they’re not picking up the phones, Leo’s 4.000 employees have nowhere to go with their IT-related questions and problems. To ensure that the phones are always manned, a huge whiteboard with a space for each support-worker shows who’s on call at any time.

    The IT department realizes, that people have good and bad days, so they set up a simple policy: When employees get in in the morning, they can place a green or a red magnetic tag next to their name. Green means “I’m having a good day”, a red tag means “I’m having a bad day.”

    So if a co-worker storms in the door without saying good morning, places at red marker next to his name, and sits at his desk scowling at his computer, you don’t have to wonder “was it something I said?”

    This policy does two things for the department:

    1. It makes it visible who is having a good or a bad day, and people with red markers are given a little space and leeway. If somebody puts up a red marker every day for a week this becomes visible, and steps can be taken to help that person.
    2. It makes it legal to have a bad day. We all have bad days, but if you have to hide it and pretend to be chipper, it takes longer to get out of the bad mood.

    Simple and effective. If you have a bad day you still have to come in, but at least you know that it’s OK.

    Suggestion #2 (the radical one): If you don’t feel like coming to work, don’t come to work.
    I know of a few workplaces in Denmark that have actually introduced this rule: If you really, really don’t feel like working you can call in and say you’re taking an off-day. The rule is that you don’t have to explain or justify yourself. Also, it’s not a day off or a sick day, so you’ll have to make up the lost time later.

    The “if you don’t feel like working, then don’t” rule has some clear advantages:

    1. Just knowing that you don’t have to go to work if you don’t want to, can make a bad day better.
    2. If you don’t want to work, you don’t have to demean yourself and the workplace by lying and calling in sick.
    3. When you take the off-day, you can return to work the next day with new energy.
    4. You don’t have to waste time in the office being unproductive.
    5. You don’t have to bring your bad mood into the office and infect everyone around you.
    6. If someone takes a lot of off-days, that’s a clear warning sign, that they’re unhappy at work and something needs to be done.

    Before introducing a rule like this, I think a workplace would need to have a conversation to decide when it’s OK to take an off-day. You could even write down the rules, ie. “It’s OK to take an off-day if the very thought of going to work makes you want to kill yourself, but not if it’s a Friday and the weather’s nice and you just feel more like going to the beach.”

    Stephan wrote a comment on Niels’ original post saying pretty much the same thing, but for school kids:

    Reminds me of some friends of my parents, who had the following family rule: each child was allowed to have one single “I don’t want to go to school” day per year. On that special day, parents would not ask any question (eg why? are you ok?). They would just write the obligatory excuse note saying something along “little John was not feeling well yesterday”.
    Funny enough, knowing that they could decide not to go (but then they’d loose that possibility for the rest of the year) was usually enough, and it was common that at the end of the year, the “off-day” credit had not been used.

    And no, you could not carry your unused day over to the next year ;-)

    Suggestion #3: The really radical one: Give people complete freedom to work whenever they want.
    What if workplaces completely stopped making rules for or monitoring when people work? What if we just acknowledged that our employees are responsible adults, who are eminently capable of deciding when they are productive and when they’re not? What if we stopped focusing on how many hours people work and instead focused on the results they get?

    That is the point of ROWE, Results Only Work Environments. This article gives a great introduction to ROWEs:

    At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation’s leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical–if risky–experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for “results-only work environment,” seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

    Hence workers pulling into the company’s amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren’t considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It’s O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid.

    This is what we do in our company – our rule is that you work when you want to and don’t when you don’t. You will never be judged by how many hours you work but only by the results you get and the value you contribute.

    Another example is sports wear maker Patagonia which has surf boards lined up in the office near the beach in Southern California. Their founder Yvon Chouinard explains why:

    I’m a businessman, but I’m still going to do things on my own terms. I’m going to break a lot of rules, and we’re going to blur the distinction between work and play. So we have a policy here – it’s called “Let My People Go Surfing.” A policy which is, when the surf comes up, anybody can just go surfing. Any time of the day, you just take off and go surfing… That attitude changes your whole life. If your life is set up so that you can drop anything when the surf comes up, it changes the whole way you do your life. And it has changed this whole company here.

    Nice, huh?

    Related posts

    Your take

    How does you workplace deal with off-days? Are people required to show up anyway? Which of the three suggestions above would you like to see introduced where you work? See any risks or pitfalls? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.

  • Leaders must address emotions in the workplace

    Emotions at work

    My friend Michael Stallard has written an article together with Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks. Their premise is this:

    American leaders need to wake up and smell the coffee. Research from two well-respected organizations makes it clear that we have a big collective blind spot that’s dragging down productivity, innovation and economic performance.

    So what’s wrong? It’s simple:

    Gradually over time, America has become overly obsessed about managing tasks. In our quest to produce results, we have lost sight of the importance of engaging people. As human beings we have emotions. We have hopes and dreams. We have a conscience. We want to be respected, to be recognized for our talents, to belong, to have autonomy or control over our work and our lives, to experience personal growth, and to do work that we believe is worthwhile and in a way that we feel is ethical. It’s how we are wired.

    …

    We need to recognize that emotions have a disproportionate effect when it comes to inspiring people or burning them out. An earlier Corporate Executive Board research report showed that emotional factors were four times more effective than rational factors such as compensation when it came to motivating human beings to give their best efforts.

    All I can say is: Woohooooo! Read the whole article here.

    I have written about this previously here:

    What do you think? Are emotions acknowledged, allowed and addressed in your workplace? Or do leaders where you work still try to pretend we’re all robots who can leave their feelings at home?