My first book Happy Hour is 9 to 5 is coming out in Portuguese soon and I need your help to pick the cover.
Here are the three suggestions that they’ve cooked up:
2:
3:
What’s your favorite and why? Please write a comment.
You can read more about the book here. It’s already out in English, Spanish, Chinese, Dutch and Danish.
It is with great pride that we can announce our next conference about happiness at work. The conference takes place on May 26 from 9:30-5PM at the Danish Design Center in Copenhagen.
We have a great speaker lineup, including:
The themes of the conference are:
Most of the conference will be held in Danish. You can read all about it here (in Danish).
We also have 6 free, open events lined up for the first half of 2009. You can see the list and sign up here.
I ran the text of my first book Happy Hour is 9 to 5 through Wordle – this amazing site that let’s you do a word cloud on any text – and this is the result I got:
I’d say that gives you a pretty precise idea of what my book’s about :o) I stole the idea from my buddy Steve Shapiro, who did the same thing for his Little Book if Big Innovation Ideas.
I’m currently working on my second book, which will be out soon. I’ll reveal the topic in a new blogpost very soon. Stay tuned.
The last time I was in New York City I recorded a podcast with the American Management Association and Terrence Seamon.
We talked about the value of happiness at work, why happy companies make more money and the importance of saying good morning.
2008 for me has been the best year ever. So much interesting stuff has been happening that to even start to summarise it here is almost meaningless. Suffice it to say, that 2008 seemed to zoom by because so many cool things were always going on but now that I look back on it, it seems like a loooong year indeed.
Here are just a few highlights:
I have taken less time for blogging than I’d like and will prioritize it more in 2009! Blogging is seriously one of the most inspiring, productive, fun and useful things I do – particularly because so many nice people read along and take time to give feedback.
Now I’m off to some Christmas celebrations (yes, Christmas is on the 24th. in Denmark) and then on to a week of snowboarding in the French Alps. In the meantime, you might enjoy some of my previous favourite posts on the blog or maybe some of the quickly growing number of links in the happy at work link collection.
But most importantly: I wish you and your loved ones a very happy Christmas and a spectacular new year.
Imagine it’s your first day in a new job. You sit down at your desk for the first time, and waiting for you there is a note from your new boss.
In the note your boss bids you a warm welcome to the company, and then says this:
1: My most important priority is your happiness and productivity at work. If there’s anything I can do to make you happier and more efficient – tell me right away. This isn’t idealism, it’s good business, because happy people are more productive.
2: I will not burden you with endless rules and regulations. You’re an adult – I trust you to use your best judgment.
3: You have my full permission to screw up, as long as you own up to it, apologize to those affected and learn from it.
4: Please tell me when I screw up so I can apologize and learn from it.
5: Please make sure to hunt down people who do great work and praise them for it. I will do this as much as humanly possible, but I can’t do it alone.
6: If I get it right occasionally, I’d love to hear about it from you, too :o)
7: I will always have time for you. My calendar will never be so full that my next free time to talk to you is three weeks from next Friday.
8: I want to know about you as an employee AND as a human being. I DO care about your private life, about your and your family’s health and well-being.
9: Life is more than work. If you’re regularly working overtime, you’re just making yourself less happy and more stressed. Don’t join the cult of overwork – it’s bad for you and the company.
10: I expect you to take responsibility for your own well-being at work. If you can do something today to make yourself, a co-worker or me a little happier at work – do it!
This post was inspired by Michael Wade’s post over at ExecuPundit called Note from boss to employees. I liked his tips but I found the tone of them a little defensive. Michael’s tips had an undercurrent of “business is hard and being a leader is tough but we can slog it out together.”
I disagree – work is great fun (or at least it could and should be).
How would you like a note like this from your new boss?
I love this fun little movie called Validation. At 15 minutes, it’s a little longer than your standard oh-my-god-what-a-cute-kitten video, but it’s definitely worth it.
Related posts:
Now that 2008 is nearly over, it makes a lot of sense to reflect on the year that passed. Unfortunately, most people do this by looking back and making a tally of everything that went wrong. The things they should have done. The goals they should have reached. The progress that didn’t come.
I think you will learn much more if you turn this approach upside-down, so here’s my suggestion for a new-year’s exercise in happiness at work.
Simply because the best way to be happy at work in 2009 is to find out what worked for you in 2008 and get yourself more of that.
So think back on your working life in 2008 and answer the following 10 questions. It’s important that you write down your answers – it helps you to reflect more deeply about the questions.
If you like you can share your answers in a comment here.
Have fun – and have a happy 2009 at work!
Here’s an important thing to know about happiness:
“Happiness is a social emotion. It’s an emotion that we derive from social events… Happiness is not simply about me.”
A fascinating study published online yesterday in the British Medical Journal has confirmed what we already know, namely that happiness is contagious and that we are all affected by the moods of the people around us.
But his study goes a step further by mapping those connections and influences among nearly 5,000 individuals over 20 years and the
Here’s the skinny:
Fowler and Christakis were able to map the social networks of 4,739 individuals with data from the Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing cardiovascular study. Participants in that study listed contact information for their closest friends, family members and neighbors, connecting the pair of researchers to more than 50,000 social ties.
The researchers used the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Index — a standard set of questions psychologists use to measure happiness — to analyze the cheeriness of the study participants.
They found that when someone gets happy, that person’s friend experiences a 25 percent increased chance of becoming happy. A friend of that friend experiences a nearly 10 percent chance of increased happiness, and a friend of that friend has a 5.6 percent increased chance of happiness.
That means a stranger’s good mood can do more to lift your spirits than a $5,000 raise, which only increased happiness 2 percent, Fowler and Christakis found.
Whoah!
So what about bad moods? Surprisingly (to me anyway), this study found that sadness is less contagious:
Sadness doesn’t infect a social group as reliably happiness does, researchers found. Within some friendship networks, sadness had a significant effect on the members of the group, but on others, the effect was very small.
Why? Because, the study says, sadness makes you pull away from others, thus giving them less exposure to your bad mood.
This is really interesting with respect to bad moods at work – because at work, if you have a really rotten day, there’s really no way to pull back from social interactions, meetings and conversations, exposing your co-workers the full brunt of your bad mood.
A while back, I wrote a blog post about dealing with constant complainers. The main point is that offering possible solutions rarely works on inveterate complainers because they’re not really after suggestions – they’re after empathy.
Well, one reader tried it out, and found that… well, read it for yourself:
Holy Crap it works. My wife is a constant complainer and when ever I voice my opinion or offer a suggestion she gets mad. I literally used what was suggested in the article, I said, “You know, that sounds terrible. I don’t know how you deal with all of these problems.”
She thought I was being super sweet and understanding… to make a long story short, I got laid. It was worth the effort.
I’m still laughing about that one. And if this whole “happiness at work” gig ever goes sour I’m going into marriage counselling instead :o)
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