Forget about trying to enforce positive emotions all the time. It requires extra effort and ends up being counter productive.
Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., is the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley and a leading expert on the neuroscience and psychology of compassion, kindness, gratitude, and other “pro-social” skills.
Watch her full speech from our 2018 Happiness at Work Conference 2018 here.
Work has moved from cow to computer, but workplaces still favour early risers and an industrial-age view of productivity.
Camilla Kring has a PhD in Work-Life Balance and as owner of Super Navigators, makes workplaces happier by increasing the Work-Life Balance of their employees. She is specialized in creating flexible work cultures that support our differences in family forms, work forms and biological rhythms.
This is her talk from the International Conference on Happiness at Work 2017 in Copenhagen. Flexibility is among the keys to well-being, and management must have the courage to address the flexibility of their company’s work culture because culture determines whether employees have the courage to make use of flexibility.
The first step is to set people free from 9-5 and that work is something that only can take place at the office. Work is not a place – it’s an ongoing activity. Second, focus more on results and less on visibility. Third, give people the tools to improve their individual Work-Life Balance.
For the last 8 years we have arranged an annual conference on happiness at work in Copenhagen. The next one is on May 18+19 2017 and for the first time ever we’re making the conference international, so the whole event will be in English.
We want to show you just how energetic, fun and valuable this conference is, so here are five of our favorite speeches from previous years.
When David Marquet took command of the nuclear submarine the USS Santa Fe, he knew he needed to change a lot of things. It was the worst performing submarine, was never ready for its missions on time and was basically the laughing stock of the US navy.
David came in with a plan to improve the results on the submarine and thereby make its crew happier. By accident, he found that he had to do it the other way around: Make the submarine a happy workplace and results would follow.
The new plan worked, and the USS Santa Fe became the best performing submarine.
In this speech from our 2013 conference, David Marquet explains how he did it and how you can create a happier workplace too.
One of the highlights of our 2009 conference on happiness at work in Copenhagen was Dr. Srikumar S. Rao’s wonderfully inspiring and funny presentation.
His presentation focused specifically on two traps you must avoid, that keep us from becoming happy.
Dr. Rao is the man behind the pioneering course Creativity and Personal Mastery, the only business school course that has its own alumni association and it has been extensively covered in the media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the London Times, the Independent, Time, the Financial Times, Fortune, the Guardian, Business Week and dozens of other publications.
The Free Help Guy has devoted a large part of his life to helping others – free and anonymously.
He believes in doing what you can for others, that value doesn’t look like coins and notes and that for every problem there is at least one solution.
He also believes in anonymity rather than self promotion and in living by your beliefs, which is why you can’t see his face in the video.
In this inspiring speech, he shares his story. Read more at www.thefreehelpguy.com.
Does your organization help every single employee know their strong sides AND apply them more at work? Do people know and respect their coworkers’ personalities and preferences? Do you know what makes your coworkers happy or unhappy at work?
Steve Shapiro, the author of 24/7 Innovation and Best Practices Are Stupid takes participants at our 2011 conference through a game of Personality Poker, showing the 4 main personalities at work and what makes each of them happy or unhappy.
Henry Stewart is the founder of Happy, a company in London that does computer and happiness trainings. They are also (naturally) a very happy workplace.
In this speech, Henry shares 3 advanced tips for creating a happy workplace:
This isn’t a speech as such but it is one of our favorite moments from the conferences.
This is a German DJ who became famous on youtube a few years ago for being incredibly happy while playing. He used that as a springboard to quit the day job that he hated and become a full-time DJ.
In this video from our 2015 conference he plays a very short set and then shares his story.
Meet a man who had the courage to go his own way and became world famous for being happy at work.
Henry Stewart is the found of Happy, a company in London that does computer and happiness trainings. They are also (naturally) a very happy workplace.
In this speech, Henry shares 3 more advanced tips for creating a happy workplace:
Yet another study confirms what we all know: Giving employees positive feedback leads to more happiness at work, less stress and better performance:
In the study, participants… were asked to solve problems. Approximately half of the participants were told to ask friends and family members to send them an email just prior to their participation 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.
(source).
Which is kinda sad, when we know how many employees feel under-appreciated.
In our recent study of what makes people unhappy at work, a lack of praise and recognition was one of the major causes. 37% of participants in our survey mentioned it as something that made them unhappy at work.
So get praisin’. Positive feedback takes no time and costs no money. It does require you to actually pay attention to other people and be able to see their good work and positive qualities. But if we can’t even do that, there is something more fundamentally wrong.
Everyone has bad days at work – those really frustrating and stressful days that we just want to be over. But how how often do we have bad work days and what causes them?
Our brand new survey of over 700 employees worldwide shows that bad work days are disturbingly common and reveals some of the main causes.
See the main findings here – it’s pretty fascinating stuff.
With the summer holidays rapidly approaching, I’ve been thinking a lot about vacation auto replies.
Here’s the problem: Although anyone who sends you a mail is told not to expect a reply until you get back, they probably still expect an answer at that point. This is fundamentally unfair.
You’re away from work. As part of your contract with the company, you have some time off and yet some of the work from your vacation time is thereby shifted into your post-vacation work days.
And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a company that plans for their employees to have extra time after a vacation to deal with the emails that came in during the vacation. Therefore this becomes extra work you have to do on top of your regular tasks.
One consequence of this is that many people end up checking their emails and responding to them during their holidays, which is also unfair. You’re entitled to time away from work. That’s what a holiday is.
One of the most insidious effects of this is that taking longer stretches of time away from the office is punished immediately upon return, because your inbox will be full to overflowing. I haven’t seen any research on this, but I could easily imagine that this would subconsciously discourage people from taking time off or at the very least increase stress around any time off.
What can we do about it? This policy from Daimler is the solution:
The car and truck maker has implemented a new program that allows employees to set their email software to automatically delete incoming emails while they are on vacation.
When an email is sent, the program, which is called “Mail on Holiday,” issues a reply to the sender that the person is out of the office and that the email will be deleted, while also offering the contact information of another employee for pressing matters.
Brilliant. Now you can go on vacation knowing that when you come back, your inbox will contain the same number of emails as when you left.
I think this is the perfect solution and I would love to see more companies adopt it. Maybe this is something unions could work for in the 21st century.
Do you have a vacation auto reply? Do you check and reply to emails during your vacation or handle them all when you’re back? If you go on vacation for 2 weeks, how many mails are going to be in your inbox when you get back? How much time will it take you to deal with them and how do you plan for it?
Yesterday we had our latest webinar – this one was on staying happy even when you’re busy at work. You can watch the whole thing here:
Get the slides right here.
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback in the comments. And if you have ever tried being busy AND happy at the same time, please tell us what made that possible.
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:
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?
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.
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.