We visited Zappos in Las Vegas last week and saw this epic prank video :)
Ever done something like that in your workplace?
Search results for: “zappos”
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What makes Zappos a happy workplace?
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 :-)
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Happiness at work at Zappos
I’ve been inspired by Zappos for quite a while now. Not only are they insanely successful, it’s also a genuinely happy workplace, judging from all I’ve read about them.
Here’s a nice little piece from abc news that shows just how happy this company is:
MAN, that’s good to see :o)
Here are my top three reasons to love zappos.
1: They have a culture that promotes happiness at work
Zappos is committed to defining and living a positive, happy culture. Their values are:
1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be HumbleThat’s your recipe for happiness right there.
2: They pay new employees to quit
At the end of your training as a new Zappos employee, the company offers you $2000 if you quit right away. This means that the people who stay are committed to the company and the culture.
Here’s an interview where Bill Taylor (formerly of Fast Company) talks about it.
3: They behave like human beings. Great human beings
The fact that people are happy at work (yes, even the ones answering the phone) means that they give incredibly good customer service.
And often that service goes above and beyond. I dare you to read this story and not shed a tear.
The upshot
Zappos gets it, as do more and more companies. When a business puts its people first (not the customer and not the investors, but the people) you increase happiness, creativity, productivity and profits.
This is not rocket science – and companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, SAS Insititute, Disney, Pixar and many many others will testify to the fact that it works.
So how does your company prioiritize? Are employees at the top of the list – or is that spot taken by profits, growth, customers, or..?
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How to create a happy workplace in ANY industry
Whenever we talk about happy workplaces, a lot of the conversation tends to be about big US corporations with huge budgets like Google, Zappos or Southwest Airlines.
But happiness is possible in (nearly) any industry and in any country.
That’s why I was so excited to talk to Nicolás González Restrepo for our latest Heartcount webinar and learn how the company Contento BPS S.A in Colombia creates a happy culture for their 2,000 people – even in a Latin American machismo culture and even though their main business is as a call center for debt collections.
Learn how they created a great culture and how it helped improve absenteeism, employer brand and financial results.
And if they can do it, what’s your company’s excuse? :)
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Free Webinar: Create a happy workplace in ANY industry
Everyone who cares about workplace happiness has heard about Google, Zappos and Southwest Airlines.
But have you ever heard of the call center Contento in Colombia? I hadn’t until I spoke at a conference in Chile and met the awesome Nicolas Gonzalez Restrepo and heard what a great culture he’s helped create for the 2,000 people who work there.
So join our next free Heartcount webinar on April 22nd and learn how you can create a happy culture – even if your company is not a rich US corporation with a huge budget.
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5 reasons why Danish workers are the happiest in the world
You will often see Denmark listed as one of the “happiest countries on the planet.” Interestingly Danes are not only happy at home, they’re also happy at work and according to most studies of worker satisfaction among nations, the happiest employees in the world are in Denmark.
Here’s just one data point: Gallup found that 18% of American workers are actively disengaged, meaning they are “emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive.” The same number for Danish workers is only 10%.
But why are Danish workers so much happier than their counterparts around the world? Here are five fundamental differences that explain what’s going on.
1: REASONABLE WORKING HOURS
I once talked to an American who had gotten a job as a manager at a Danish company. Wanting to prove his worth, he did what he had always done and put in 60 to 70 hours a week. After a month, his manager invited him to a meeting. He was fully expecting to be praised for his hard work, but instead he was asked “Why do you work so much? Is something wrong? Do you have a problem delegating? What can we do to fix this?”
Some non-Danes wonder if Danes ever work. Not only do Danes tend to leave work at a reasonable hour most days, but they also get five to six weeks of vacation per year, several national holidays and up to a year of paid maternity/paternity leave. While the average American works 1,780 hours and the average South Korean 2,024 hours per year, the average Dane only works 1,408, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics. Danes also have more leisure hours than any other OECD workers and the link between sufficient leisure and happiness is well established in the research.
The difference to other countries is stark. Many companies around the world celebrate overwork as a sign of commitment. “You have to put in the hours” is the message in the mistaken belief that the more hours you work, the more work you get done. We call this “The Cult of Overwork.” Danish companies, on the other hand, recognize that employees also have a life outside of work and that working 80 hours a week is bad for both employees and the bottom line.
2: LOW POWER DISTANCE
In many countries, if your boss gives you an order, you pretty much do what you’re told. In a Danish workplace, extremely few direct orders are ever given and employees are more likely to view them as suggestions.
Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede has quantified the culture in more than 100 countries on several parameters, one of which is “power distance.” A high power distance means that bosses are undisputed kings whose every word is law. Danish workplaces–with a score of 18-have the lowest power distance in the world. Just for comparison, Belgium has a power distance of 65, China clocks in at 80 and Malaysia holds the world record at 100.
By law, any Danish workplace with more than 35 employees must open up seats on the board for employees. This means that Danish employees experience more autonomy and are more empowered at work. Here’s just one example: By law, any Danish workplace with more than 35 employees must open up seats on the board for employees, who are elected to the board by their peers and serve on an equal footing and with same voting powers as all other board members.
3: GENEROUS UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS
In Denmark, losing your job is not the end of the world. In fact, unemployment insurance seems too good to be true, giving workers up to 90% of their original salary for two years. In the U.S., for instance, losing your job can easily lead to financial disaster and loss of health insurance. This leads to job lock i.e. staying in a job you hate because you can’t afford to leave.
Simply put: If you’re a Dane and you don’t like your job, you can quit that job without risking serious financial problems, forcing companies to treat their employees well or risk losing them.
4: CONSTANT TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
Since the mid-1800s, Denmark has focused on life-long education of its workers. This policy continues to this day, with an extremely elaborate set of government, union, and corporate policies that allow almost any employee who so desires to attend paid training and pick up new skills. It’s called an “active labor market policy,” and Denmark spends more on these types of programs than any other country in the OECD.
This lets Danish workers constantly grow and develop and helps them stay relevant (not to mention stay employed) even in a changing work environment. It also makes their jobs richer and more interesting.
5: A FOCUS ON HAPPINESS
Here’s a word that exists only in the Scandinavian languages: Arbejdsglæde. Arbejde means work and glæde means happiness, so arbejdsglæde is “happiness at work.” This word is not in common use in any other language on the planet.
Many people around the world hate their jobs and consider this to be perfectly normal.
For instance, where we Scandinavians have arbejdsglæde, the Japanese instead have karoshi, which means “Death from overwork.” And this is no coincidence; there is a word for it in Danish because Danish workplaces have a long-standing tradition of wanting to make their employees happy. To most Danes, a job isn’t just a way to get paid; we fully expect to enjoy ourselves at work.
In other countries, the attitude towards work is often very different. A few years ago I gave a speech in Chicago, and an audience member told me that “Of course I hate my job, that’s why they pay me to do it!” Many people around the world hate their jobs and consider this to be perfectly normal. Similarly, many workplaces around the world do little or nothing to create happiness among employees, sticking to the philosophy that “If you’re enjoying yourself, you’re not working hard enough.”
THE UPSHOT
I’m not trying to paint Danish companies as utopias for workers and their international counterparts as tyrannical hellholes. There are bad Danish workplaces and stellar non-Danish ones–Zappos and Google are two that I’ve personally visited and studied.
But studies have uncovered a number of systemic and cultural differences between Denmark and the rest of the world that serve to explain why Danish workers are on average so much happier.
This goes far beyond happiness. We know from any number of studies that happy workers are more productive and innovative and that consequently, happy companies have happier customers and make more money. This may help explain why Danish workers are among the most productive in the OECD and why the Danish economy continues to do so well.
Related posts
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Why Ping-Pong Tables Wont Make Your Employees Happy – And What Will
In this animated interview Olivier Larvoir and I talk about:
- Which company recently installed a slide in the office to make it a ‘happier’ place to work (#facepalm)
- Why your employees don’t want free coffee, ping pong tables and away days – and what they DO want
- How to attract the best talent without writing a job ad or hiring a recruitment agency
- What happiest places work all do that you can implement today (think: Google, Zappos, Southwest Airlines)
- The one word most leaders are scared to say but is the key to better productivity (hint: it isn’t ‘motivation’)
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Being great at your work vs. feeling great about your work
If we want to be happy in our jobs, we need to be good at our jobs.
We human beings have a basic need to know that we contribute, create value and can make a difference and effect change in our environment.
That’s why doing a good a job feels amazing. It gives us feelings like pride, accomplishment, fulfilment, growth and worth.
On the other hand, when we feel that we don’t perform well at work, it creates feelings like inadequacy and lack of control plus of course fear that we might lose our jobs.
And it’s also in the company’s best interest to make sure that every single employee and team is getting great results and living up to their potential. Companies typically focus on 4 areas to make that happen:
- Skills: Training, competencies, job skills match, …
- Resources: Time, tools, IT-systems, …
- Structure: Organization, plans, goals, budgets, strategy, processes, …
- Support: Coworker+manager support, coaches/mentors, …
These are all important and enable us to get results. If your workplace is not giving employees these 4 things, then how on earth can you expect them to perform well?
If we want people to be happier at work, we can definitely help them get better results. We can give them better training, more resources, more support, etc. in order to help them perform better.However, many people already get great results – but don’t feel that way. And if that’s the case, then they won’t be very happy at work.
This is a crucial distinction that few companies make – the distinction between getting good results and feeling good about those results. If we want employees to be happy at work, they also need the latter – and many don’t have that.
When that is the case, employees may get great results right now but it won’t be sustainable. When people are not happy at work, it hurts their motivation, productivity and creativity. Stress and burnout tend to follow.
So in addition to helping employees get great results, companies also need to make sure that people feel great about their results.
There are 3 things that give us that feeling of results.
1: Meaning
I saw this sign in the lobby of Danish pharmaceutical company Xellia, carrying probably the simplest and most inspiring company purpose I’ve ever seen.
As you may know, one of the biggest current medical crises is the increasing risk of infection by multi-resistant bacteria, which are immune to traditional antibiotics. Xellia produces an antibiotic that is still effective against multi-resistant bacteria. Their research and products directly saves lives all over the world.
It’s crucial that we know what we have to do at work, but equally crucial that we know why we do it.
That is what gives work meaning and purpose: when you know why you do each task and how it somehow helps someone.
And it’s not enough that your work is meaningful to the organization – it must be meaningful to you. Your work must have a purpose that you believe is worthy.
On the other hand, if you have no idea why your work matters and no sense that it makes any kind of a difference, it really doesn’t matter how good you are at your job – you won’t be very happy.
Many workplaces take great pains to give employees performance goals to clearly show them what they are expected to do. But we must make equally sure to show employees why their work matters and how it makes a positive difference.
US online retailer Zappos are a great example of this. Whereas most customer service reps are measured on how many calls/emails they handle, Zappos’ employees are measured primarily on how happy they make their customers. The former metric makes sense only to the company, the latter is meaningful for employees too because it shows them that they make a positive difference for the customers.
2: Autonomy
When you are free to do your job your way, you are much more likely to take pride in your results and feel good about them.
On the other hand, if a micro-managing boss is telling you exactly what to do, how to do it and when to do it, you are much less likely to feel good about the results you get, because they won’t be your results.
As much as possible, we should be free to choose:
- What we work on
- Who we work with
- What approaches and methods to use
- When and where we work
One of my favorite examples of this is Middelfart Savings Bank in Denmark, one of the happiest workplaces in Europe. How did they achieve that? They gave their employees huge levels of freedom and responsibility. Their former HR directors said this:
“You’d be amazed what happens once people are empowered to make decisions.”
Another amazing example comes from the US Navy, where nuclear submarine captain David Marquet gave his sailors unprecedented autonomy. He explained how he did it at our conference in 2015:
3: Appreciation
And finally, we feel good about the work we do when we are recognized for it.
Harvard Business School professors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer talk about this in their awesome book The Progress Principle. They sum up the book’s main message like this:
Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.
Even a small win can make all the difference in how people feel and perform.
Creating a culture of positive feedback in an organization is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to give employees a feeling of results.
When your coworkers, your boss or even the customers praise your good work, it clearly shows that you make a difference and get great results.
On the other hand, if you feel you do good work but nobody ever notices, it becomes much harder to maintain pride in your work. Some companies even take it a step further – they never praise good work, but all mistakes are instantly and severely punished.
Our absolute favorite way to praise others at work is The Poncho. Try it!
The upshot
It’s not enough to help employees get great results – we must help them get a feeling of results.
Of course we first need them to do good work. No one should expect to feel good about their work, if they’re not doing a very good job in the first place.
But that’s not enough.
Happiness at work only comes when people know that their work has meaning and purpose, when they have freedom and autonomy in how they work and when they are appreciated and recognized for their good work.
Imagine the opposite. Imagine that you’re very good at your job and get great results. But you have no idea why any of your tasks matter, somebody else has decided how you work on those tasks leaving you no freedom and autonomy and you are never recognized for any of your efforts.
How happy could you be at work under those conditions? How good would your results be in the long run? How soon would you lose all motivation and burn out?
So improving how people feel about their results is crucial.
It’s also a lot easier. Provided a person is very good at their job already, improving their feeling of results may be a lot faster and easier than improving their actual results.
It’s also a lot more effective, because if we can’t figure out how to make people feel proud and appreciated about their work, it doesn’t matter how stellar their results are – they will never be happy at work and their performance will ultimately suffer.
Related posts
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The stapler that travels the world
Tons of people all around the world follow the continuing adventures of the 4th floor stapler from Innocent’s London HQ:
As these things often do, it started with a minor act of rebellion. A person pushed by circumstance into an act they never thought they’d be capable of. One morning, driven over the edge by one label too many, they grabbed the fourth floor stapler and took it to the second floor. The world would never be the same again.
And then things escalated and the stapler has nown been to The Ritz, to Finland, to New York and to Disneyland – just to mention a few of its travels.
That’s just hilarious. Here’s the whole story of the 4th floor stapler… so far.
Ever seen something similar where you work?
Related posts
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I loved Whiplash. But does success really come from suffering?
I just saw Whiplash and it is not only a great movie but also the perfect example of the “success through suffering” narrative that permeates the modern world in general and the US especially. In this movie a young jazz drumming prodigy is tortured relentlessly by his sadistic teacher and the extreme mental and physical pain he suffers makes him a star drummer.
There are a million other movies and books that subscribe to the same basic world view, according to which you can only achieve success through sacrifice and pain and the more it hurts, the more successful you will ultimately be.
I’ve been trying to think of stories in pop culture that have a narrative where someone achieves success through happiness, but the only ones I can think of (like Forest Gump and Big) are stories where idiots or children achieve success through their innocence and naiveté. This just serves to strengthen the narrative, since only idiots achieve success through happiness.
I think this world view is false. I think there is much more success to be found (in business, in art, and in life) in fun, happiness, camaraderie, and in simply enjoying what you do on the whole.
In real life there are many examples. Richard Branson clearly attributes much of his success to the fact that he’s enjoyed himself along the way. Ben and Jerry, the ice cream makers, say the same thing and so does Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, Tony Hsieh of Zappos and many others.
I find it telling that the director of Whiplash Damien Chazelle was a serious drumming student as a young man and has this to say about that time:
[I was in] a very competitive jazz band that was modeled after professional bands. And I remembered being very terrified. That was my overall emotion during those years. Just dread. And not being able to eat meals before rehearsals and losing sleep and sweating my ass off.
To this day, he still gets nauseous when he sees a drum kit so when it came time to do the movie, here’s how he wanted to do it:
I like a set to be a happy place, where people can feel free to experiment. Especially, for instance, with this set. We only had 20 days to shoot the whole movie. The stress and the anxiety were just inherent in the schedule. So I tried to make it as stress-free of a set as possible.
So the whole “success through suffering” mindset is not only wrong, I think it’s become so pervasive that it’s become self-reinforcing. People go into many ventures expecting it to be tough, expecting to have to sacrifice many other aspects of their lives to “make it” – and if that’s what you expect, then there’s a good chance that that how it will end up.
Also, once people do become successful and start analyzing what worked, this narrative means that they’re more likely to attribute their succes to all the “hard work” and their sacrifices – even though their success may just as well have come from the times they had fun, the help they got from people who likes them or a supporting environment they found themselves in.
And finally, the very idea that you can slave away in stress and fear and frustration for years and sacrifice everything else in your life and THEN achieve your goal and just turn around and be happy seems very suspect to me. I think if you’ve been in pain for that long, that pain is most likely going to stay with you and you will be successful and unhappy.
And that’s why I’m convinced that the best path to success is not pain, it’s happiness. It’s not about comfort and choosing the easy path – but it is about making sure that you enjoy the process most of the time.
As we know, happy people are more productive, energetic, creative and motivated and also learn faster. So enjoying what do you will not only make you more likely to reach your goals, it will also vastly increase your chances of being happy once you do get there.
And that’s why I’m challenging the narrative that success comes through suffering.
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