I’ve often said that a company’s job ads are a great way of showing what kind of business you’re running and of attracting the right kind of people.
This ad does it brilliantly:
The “Mr. Stabby” line alone is priceless :o)
What do you think – do job ads with personality attract or repulse you?
I’ll be speaking at WorldBlu Live 2008 (October 16+17 in New York), the best and most exciting business conference I know. The theme is Democratic Organizations, i.e. organizations that believe in and practice freedom, openness, transparency and engagement instead of top-down, command-and-control management.
There will be some GREAT speakers there – I particularly look forward to hearing Bill Taylor, Tim Sanders and Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Co-authors of the best-selling Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It.
Another major treat is the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, who have won Grammy awards despite the fact (or because of it) that they have no conductor.
But the most interesting thing will be to hear from CEOs who practice organizational democracy on a day-to-day basis and learn from organizations who know how to do it and achieve success through it.
Check out this short video invitation from WorldBlu:
The last WorldBlu conference in Washington DC was one of the most inspiring business conferences I have ever attended – I have never seen so many cool, fascinating and fun people gathered in one place. If this sounds interesting to you, check out the web site and go sign up.
I also have upcoming gigs in the UK and France, so there’s some serious travel in my future :o)
Samantha Wood interviews Pret A Manger’s Head of Communications, Jay Chapman, and she is more than happy to divulge some of their secrets of success.
I especially love the opening:
She tells me she’d love to have a scary sounding formula to impress people with, but in her mind it’s all pretty simple stuff:
“If you treat your employees well and involve them in the decisions that will affect them, they’re much more likely to be engaged in carrying out the effects of those decisions.”
There’s another gem when they talk recruitment:
“You can’t hire someone who can make sandwiches and teach them to be happy,” says Jay, “So we hire happy people and teach them to make sandwiches”.
If you don’t know Pret A Manger, they make coffee, sandwiches and other great food. It’s sort of like the British Starbucks – only better!
What I’ve always liked about them (apart from the outstanding quality of their products and the great service you get) is their passion. It’s obvious that this company cares deeply about what they do – and that’s huge to me.
Go read the whole thing – it’s excellent!
Why must change in organizations be so hard?
No company can thrive and survive if it can’t adapt and innovate and yet there’s an almost universal cry going up today that “change is tough and takes too much time and energy!”
You’ll have upper management on one side pushing for innovation, employees on the other side clinging to the old ways and middle managers caught (where else?) in the middle trying to actually get stuff done. Sound familiar?
My work with organizations all over the world has shown me that there is one vital factor that is being overlooked practically everywhere. One factor that can not only help companies change more rapidly and effectively but which contributes massively to the bottom line. That factor is happiness at work.
Here are the top three reasons why happy companies change more effectively and painlessly.
1: Happy people get more ideas
In times of change, companies cannot rely on the old ways of doing business and thus need new ideas. Preferably lots of them. And a fascinating study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School shows that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. In other words, happy employees generate more ideas.
2: Happy people buy into new ideas.
It’s not enough to generate lots of ideas, you also need people to believe enough in them to actually want to implement them. Many managers work from a belief that change comes from dissatisfaction, pain and unhappiness, but psychological research proves them wrong. It turns out that what a business needs is optimists. Optimistic employees believe that change projects will pay off and are thus much more likely to commit. Unhappy, pessimistic employees only see all the ways a project can fail and often only go along on the surface – offering compliance rather than commitment.
3: Happy people implement new ideas.
And finally, once you have the ideas and people buy into them, you need to have the motivation to actually do something about it. And once again research shows that happy, satisfied employees are much more motivated. In fact, while managers must constantly work help dissatisfied employees find their motivation, happy employees motivate themselves. If you like the company you work for, you want the company to succeed – if you hate your workplace, you don’t give a damn.
In short, happy companies change willingly and effectively, while their unhappy competitors cling to business as usual and throw up massive resistance to all things new and uncertain.
And it doesn’t stop there. Additional research shows that happy workplaces are more productive, have happier customers and (most importantly) make more money! Unhappy workplaces on the other hand waste huge sums on high absenteeism and employee turnover rates. One Danish company reduced their absenteeism from around 20% to less than 1% and their annual employee turnover from 25% to almost nothing – simply by becoming a happy workplace. It’s incredibly easy (but potentially depressing) to calculate how much money similar improvements could save your company every single month.
In fact, studies indicate that happiness at work is the most important success factor for businesses today. Don’t just take my word for it. Richard Branson of Virgin says that “More than anything, fun is the secret behind Virgin’s success” and Apple CEO Steve Jobs says that “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Many other hugely successful companies like Google, Disney Southwest Airlines and SAS Institute also focus relentlessly on employee happiness – because it helps them change and grow and make more money.
And the good news is that happiness at work ain’t rocket science. Any company, big or small, public or private, can do it, provided it is willing to engage both managers and employees in efforts to create a happy workplace, where people actually enjoy themselves and look forward to coming, rather than one where they show up reluctantly to do as little as they can get away with.
This piece was originally written for the South African management magazine Strictly Business.
I am away on another week of vacation in EuroDisney, Paris and Nice. Yes, it sucks to be me :o)
While I’m gone please enjoy this great interview from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart with Tal Ben-Shahar, the author of Happier.
Aaaahhh… Summer vacation. Depending on your fancy it’s time to lie on the beach with a good book, wear out your shoe soles exploring a strange city or scream your head off skydiving or in some other adrenaline-driven pursuit.
But invariably the vacation ends and you go back to work, and that transition can be a little rough.
Do you know that feeling? You come back to work happy and full of energy – but by the end of the first work day, you’re already feeling tired an unhappy. It’s almost like you didn’t have a vacation at all.
So here are a five tips to help you stay happy when you get back to work.
Don’t take the company mobile and laptop on vacation. Don’t check your voice mail and email.
The point of a vacation is to get away and go to a different mental space, and if you’re preoccupied with work, chances are you’ll both enjoy your vacation less and get less relaxation out of it.
When you get back from your vacation, you will invariably have fallen behind and have a lot of work to catch up on. There will be a ton of voice mails, emails and tasks that need your attention. THAT’S FINE!!! It’s unavoidable and it’s not your fault.
Look at it this way: If you can leave the company for two weeks and there’s no work waiting for you, you’re not really needed there.
So don’t expect to have a clear desk on your first day back – allow yourself to be behind and to catch up steadily.
When you get back to work, don’t immediately throw yourself at the toughest, hairiest most complicated tasks you have. Ease into work by doing something easy and simple – something you know you can do. Once you’re back in full swing you can go at the tough tasks.
It can be really tempting to work long hours to catch up after your vacation. DON’T!!! Work regular hours and stick to point 2 above.
If you find it difficult to catch up, don’t be afraid to ask your co-workers or manager for help. It’s important for you to be aware of any outstanding tasks that may have become critically late in your absence, and if you could use some help – it’s your responsibility to ask for it! It also greatly increases the chance that you will actually get help.
If you use these tips, you may find that your vacations feel more like vacations and that you can be even happier at work.
But on a fundamental level, there is something wrong with the idea that work drains you of energy and weekends and vacations recharge you. I know that this is how most people feel – but that’s not how it should be.
If work typically drains you of energy – if every week ends up draining you of life so you barely make it to Friday afternoon where you can finally relax – then something’s wrong. Don’t accept that state of affairs just because everyone else does.
When you’re happy at work, work can actually be a regenerative activity that leaves you with more energy so you leave the workplace with a spring in your step most days!
And THAT is the ultimate way to beat the post-vacation blues: Have a job you actually like!
Do you ever get the post-vacation blues? What do you do to beat’em? Have you also noticed that vacations these days seem to be more tiring than work (as this article says)?
Psychological studies point out one more reason why long meetings are no fun and get less done:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security.
Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers.
A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise. Unrelated activities that tax the executive function have important lingering effects, and may disrupt your ability to make such an important decision. In other words, you might choose the wrong job because you didn’t eat a cookie.
Research by University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and colleagues indicates that we have a limited amount of what they call executive resources. Once they start to get depleted, we make bad choices.
And how do you consume your executive resources? In three ways. You use them every time you:
A-HA!!!!!
Business meetings require participants to commit, focus and make decisions – with no acknowledgment of the fact that in doing so they’re consuming a finite resource. Once this resource runs out, people make worse decisions!!!
Suddenly those three-hour project meetings aren’t looking so smart, are they? Not that they ever really did, but you know what I mean.
The article left me with a few questions:
If you know the answer to any of these questions, I’d love to hear it!
What do you think? Have you noticed this kind of thing in meetings? What do you think is the cut-off point beyond which meetings just devolve into pointlessness and no good decisions can be made? An hour? Two? 15 minutes?
One of the most gratifying things about my work, is to see how it is spreading across the world. I’m based in Denmark where the idea of happiness at work is so ingrained and commonplace, that there is even a word for it in the dictionary: Arbejdsglæde.
But more and more companies around the world are waking up to the importance of creating a workplace where employees actually like coming. For instance, I just spoke at a conference in The Bahamas and went from there to Dublin where I gave a speech to the UK division of Philip Morris.
Also, I’ve been getting a lot of press internationally – from Canada to Pakistan. Here are some of my recent international media apperances:
Chief Executive China: Happiness at work – a Chinese translation of the first chapter of my book Happy Hour is 9 to 5.
Elemente Magazine, Canada: Shiny happy people (go to page 66). It’s an excellent article with some great pics of beautifully designed workplaces.
AOL Canada: How to be Happy: A Better Life at Work. An interview with me.
The Pakistani Spectator: Interview with the Chief Happiness Officer. An email interview with me.
Christian Science Monitor: Why More Offices Are Going to the Dogs. I give my take on dogs and other pets in the office.
Strictly Business Magazine, South Africa: Innovation with a smile. An article by me on how happiness at work improves innovation.
Chronicle Herald, Canada: Put People First. Interview with me.
Sales and Marketing, Lithuania: “The Customer is Always Right” is Wrong. An article of mine.
I’m also all over the Danish media – from business papers to women’s magazines and of course, I was recently on the BBC and mentioned in the New York Times.
Here are some great, recent, happiness-related links. There are many more at my happy link collection.
London based innovation agency ?What If! talk about the importance of good food at work.
We also believe that good food helps create good ideas – not only is it hard going trying to work without a good breakfast in your tummy, but there’s the fact that new and exciting foods can act as another great piece of stimulus to get your those brain cells pumping!
They believe in it so much that they have a team called Food is Love that provides catering for their customers. You can also get their recipe for cup cakes at the linnk above – I’ve tried them, they’re delicious. And I could not agree more: Food is vital to all human activities and it’s no coincidence that all our major traditions have food at their core.
A Dutch study shows that taking people down a peg impairs their thinking.
Study shows that simply putting someone into a weak social position impairs his cognitive function. Conversely, “empowering” him, in the dread jargon of sociology, sharpens up his mind.
Oldie-but-goodie from Fast Company and Terese Amabile: The 6 myths of creative thinking.
The 6 myths are:
1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types
2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator
3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity
4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs
5. Competition Beats Collaboration
6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization
Way cool: Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit
After a week Zappo says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!
Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.
Bonus link: I defy you to watch this video of dancing NASA employees without smiling.
My buddy Kareem Mayan is starting a new site called RunByHumans.com, dedicated to stories of great, kind and human customer service.
Kareem is now looking for stories about “a customer experience where the customer-facing employee acts like a real, live human being, and isn’t restricted by dehumanizing company rules and regulations.”
As an example he cites this fantastic story from online shoe-seller zappo.com. In it, the store not only lets a customer return shoes bought for his mother after the official return date has passed (his mother passed away), they also send him flowers!
One of my favorite such stories is told by Catherine DeVrye in her book Hot Lemon and Honey. She once arrived at a hotel early in the evening, to give a corporate presentation the next day. As she checks in, the receptionist asks if she wants any in-room dining or a dinner reservation, but Catherine explains that she’s feeling a little ill with a sore throat and that she just wants to relax in her room.
A few minutes after she gets to her room, there’s a knock on the door. When she opens it, there’s a hotel employee with a cup of hot lemon and honey for her sore throat. This wasn’t something she’d ordered or even something the hotel normally served – it was just a gesture of concern and kindness for a fellow human being.
I think it’ll be a fantastic web site, and one that is sorely missing on the net today. I suggested that what Kareem’s really creating is the anti-consumerist.com, where outrageous stories of horrendous customer service abound :o)
Of course, my interest in this project is that people who are happy at work are much more likely to give that kind of service. Also, being able to help your fellow man through your job is likely to make you happy, so it works both ways.
So let’s give Kareem a hand: What’s the best and kindest customer service you have ever experienced or performed for someone else? Do you have a link, video or story that fits Kareem’s quest? Please write a comment here!
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