Category: Leadership

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

• The Top 5 New Rules of Productivity
• How to Procrastinate Effectively
• How to turn around a bad day at work

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.

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:

• Why no workplace can afford to ignore emotions.
• Anna Farmery interviews me about emotions in the workplace.
• Chapter 1 from my book Happy Hour is 9 to 5.

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?

A few weeks ago I spoke with Jane, who’d just been hired as a project manager. She was excited to start in the new company, but her first day at work was not exactly a good experience. Her boss was out to meetings all day and her new colleagues were so busy that nobody had time to brief her of her tasks.

There wasn’t even a desk ready for her and she had to go get a PC from the IT department and an access card from security herself. Jane felt let down, ignored and badly treated and now doubts very much whether she took the right job.

A person’s first day on a new job is a stressful time even under the best of circumstances. You don’t know anyone there, you don’t know your job, you don’t know the written and unwritten rules of the workplace – and yet you have a burning desire to do well, to show your worth and to excel.

The least a workplace can do is to make an effort to show new hires that they’re wanted and make their first day a nice one.

It’s a crucial time and that is why welcoming new people does actually pay off. Studies show that new employees who have undergone a successful start-up process are 69% more likely to still be in the company after 3 years and they reach their full production rate 2 months faster.

The alternative – for employees who simply get thrown in to sink or swim – is reality shock. They feel that the job doesn’t meet the expectations created during hiring and that will make them less happy at work, less committed and more likely to leave the company again.

And this is not exactly rocket science. Here are 4 practical tips to how any organization should treat all new employees.

1: Be there for them the first day.

It is crucial that the manager is there to meet new employees with a smile and a handshake when they arrive. There should be time set aside for meeting the colleagues, e.g. over breakfast in the department. A bottle of wine or a bouquet of flowers as a small welcome gift would not be a bad thing. The U.S. dialysis company DaVita even send a bouquet of flowers home to the spouse, to also welcome them in the DaVita family.

Also, the manager should be there again at the end of the first work day, to ask how the first day went and follow up on any problems or questions.

2: Have the practical stuff ready

It is not a good sign if people arrive on their first day and neither desk, PC, login or access card is ready. That’s why all the practical things just have to be in place before they arrive.

3: Give them a solid technical introduction

It should be needless to mention it, but new employees have to be promptly and thoroughly briefed about the professional skills they need in order to do their job well. In Rosenbluth International, a travel agency in the U.S., all new employees spent a week with one of the most seasoned co-workers, so they could see exactly how to do things. Of course it cost the experienced staff some time, but that time investment paid off many times because the new employees learned how to do the job just as well as the very best.

4: Lay down the culture

And just as important as the professional introduction is the cultural – that new employees from the start experience the organization’s culture from its best side. All new employees at Disney
World in Florida (about 15,000 new people a year!) take part in a 1-day course called Disney Traditions, which has one single purpose: To teach them the Disney culture. Here the story of Walt Disney and all the positive things the company stands for is told. It gives pride and happiness at work from day one.

Zappos.com go even further. The company is only 11 years old, but already sell shoes online for over 1 billion dollars a year. Here all new employees join a 4-week seminar, which introduces them to the professional content of the job, but especially to the Zappos culture characterized by commitment, happiness at work and good service. As part of the course all the new people get ‘the offer’: “If you feel that you do not belong to Zappos, and choose to quit before the course is over, then you get paid for the 4 weeks plus $ 2000 on top. ” It ensures that all those who are not quite sure if Zappos is right for them, leave the job early.

The first time in a new job very much sets the trend for the rest of your time at the work place which is why every workplace should take extreme care to greet people in the best possible way.

And if you want to know how your workplace is doing, here is my challenge to you: Find 3 of your newest employees and ask them how their first days in the company felt. And then listen openly to what they have to say.

Your take

What were your first few days in your current job like? What’s the best thing a workplace has done for you as a new hire? What’s the worst thing? Did you ever feel uncertain or unwelcome? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.

Related posts

• A note from your new boss
• Happiness at work at Zappos
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Linda and Robin (authors of the excellent book The Power of Nice) just blogged about niceness in managers, and their post is one of those bad-news-good-news deals. First the bad news. They write that:

Some scientific studies suggest that being in a position of authority has a unique effect on the human brain, that can cause people to become less sympathetic to the emotions and concerns of others—and as history has shown us, this can have a devastating effect on a business’ bottom line.

I agree completely. There are two unfortunate factors working against niceness in management:

1: Many organizations don’t see niceness as a success factor in managers.
When they promote people to management positions, they may pick people who are professional, experienced, assertive, etc. Studies also show, that they tend to pick people who are taller than average and have good hair. Seriously.

In fact, being nice can actually hinder your career prospects. Just think of the old saw that “Nice guys finish last.”

2: Being given authority can actually make a person less nice.
Bob Sutton wrote about this in The No Asshole Rule:

One of the simplest and yet most fascinating experiments to test the thesis is the “cookie crumbles” experiment. Researchers placed college students in groups of three and gave them an artificial assignment — collaboration on a short policy paper about a social issue. They then randomly assigned one of the students to evaluate the other two for points that would affect their ability to win a cash bonus. Having set up this artificial power hierarchy, researchers then casually brought to working trios plates containing five cookies.

They found that not only did the disinhibited “powerful” students eat more than their share of the cookies, they were more likely to chew with their mouths open and to scatter crumbs over the table.

Fortunately, there’s good news too in Linda’s and Robin’s post.

In order for NICE guys who made it to the top to avoid falling victim to the power paradox, all they need to do is flex their NICE muscles, daily.

They go on to give some specific actions that managers can take to stay nice. Go read their post, it’s excellent.

And of course I hardly have to add that nice managers are essential to happiness at work. They’re much more likely to be happy themselves, much more likely to have happy employees and hence are much more successful.

Your take

Is niceness a trait you want to see in your boss? Who’s the nicest boss you’ve ever had? What did he or she do that worked? What did that do to you and your colleagues? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.

Related posts

• A letter from your new boss.
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• How can companies hire happy managers?
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A couple of weeks ago I was writing my regular op-ed piece on leadership for a major Danish newspaper and I was plumb out if ideas. It’s funny how your creativity can get stuck when you’re looking at an empty word document and a looming deadline :o)

So I asked for ideas in my twitter feed (follow me on twitter) and got tons of input, of which the email I got from Joe D. Calhoun, Director of Business Development at Paraco Gas Corporation was by far the coolest.

Here is Joe’s email in full – read and enjoy, it’s excellent!

When it comes to leadership … we have all been told leaders are born, not made, that leadership is about ego, nice guys finish last. BUNK …. Leadership is all about happiness. Seeking a means to find the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If you’re happy and your know it … share it … find a way to lead others to it … nice guys DO finish first.

Leadership is also NOT about a title or a job or position. I have had jobs that were very low on the totem pole of life and yet I was looked up to for my leadership of taking on a task and seeing it through to completion … all the while doing it with my “excessively happy” style. Volunteerism is leadership of the happiest sort. A labor of love … working for free (and I have been doing a lot of that lately as I have been un-employed) and supporting a cause – sometimes one that is not sexy and glamorous. This year I helped an organization plan, solicit donations, decorate, facilitate live and silent auctions, all to raise $20,000 for the treatment of drug and alcohol additions. I loved it … Leadership is love.

Leadership takes energy … do you know any energetic people that are not happy? Energy to face the challenges of anything with a smile on your face and find new ways of solving problems.

Ask most leaders … they will tell you … they feel “called” to lead. Every calling has an innermost happiness associated with it. I recently accepted a job offer … I knew 30 minutes into the interview that I would take the job … it felt right in my gut. I felt like I was supposed to be doing this. This sense of calling came while discussing the opportunity and the company. I had prepared three pages of notes for the interview … questions … things I thought I wanted to discuss. Instead we talked about the industry … laughed and I read the plan they had for expansion of the department. I was the right peg for the hole … I knew it … they knew it. Leadership is having a calling and answering it … and that feeling in your gut is ultimately tied to “how happy will this make me?”

That’s a nice little manifesto for leadership right there! Click here for more cool thoughts from Joe.

Your take

What do you think – are leaders born or made? Does your boss have your happiness in mind? Is there any room for love in your workplace?

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