Search results for: “productivity”

  • Ask the CHO: Fighting the cult of overwork in upper management

    Ask the CHOStan has some questions about the cult of overwork:

    1) When/where did the cult of overwork start? Or has business/marketing/office work always been a race towards more & more hours?

    2) Upper management at our company work 6+ days a week, have sacrificed their family lives for the past 15 years to build the company, and in general are not a fun bunch. Is it worth trying to change the corporate culture one step at a time, or should we just give up?

    Thanks for the great questions, Stan. Here’s what I think.
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  • Top 10 tips for productive, creative, fun writing

    Writing unchained
    Well whaddaya know: It’s only been three months since I wrote and posted the first chapter of the happy at work book and now the whole book is done (minus one chapter which is almost done).

    I’m having trouble believing it myself: Not only did I write a book in three months, I’ve also taken a holiday in that time, worked on other projects and done a serious amount of blogging. This means I actually wrote the book in twenty writing days, writing only before lunch.

    So how’d I do it? Well the answer is obvious isn’t it? Clear goals, hard work, perseverance, sticking to it, eliminating distractions and writing no matter what, right?

    Wrong.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong. I tried that. Didn’t work. So I tried the exact opposite and that worked.

    Here are my top 10 tips for fun, creative and productive writing, which can be applied to blogging, writing a book, an article, a report at work, a thesis, a term paper or any other major writing project.
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  • Friday links

    Why happiness is overrated. It can only be a matter of time before companies appoint happiness action officers whose job it will be to patrol workstations with a clipboard: “Jenkins – cheer up or it’s a remedial, wellbeing residential workshop for you. Smith – happy enough!” (via). Heh!

    Microsoft made two training videos with renowned business consultant David Brent (played of course by Ricky Gervais of The Office). Hilarious!
    Video 1Video 2. (Via Mathias Vestergaard).
    This is actually a great and entertaining way to get the message remembered – I might even be able to recite the Microsoft values now :o)

    But the funniest fake corporate videos are still the Reebok commercials featuring Terry Tate.

    10 things you could do this friday afternoon. I like number 8-10.

    Oh, the dangers of being self-employed.

  • Fill your office with kids, dogs and happy people

    Christian of think:lab visited a Montana printing company called Printing For Less. Some teasers from his post:

    The first thing you see when you come walk the parking lot to the front door are little kiddos playing under the Montana sky. All employees pay a pitance to have their young kids on site with them.

    Spaces were vibrant. Team members were free to work in a variety of settings. And the place had a learning buzz about it.

    The dog to the right was one of at least 12 that I saw, roaming happily around the Printing For Less offices/halls. Talk about a perk for employees!

    Man, there just weren’t any spaces in the building that didn’t suggest learning, collaboration, experiment, and team.

    Kinda sounds like he liked it, huh?

    And so do I. It’s a nice break from the traditional, sterile office environment that many other businesses think is necessary for productivity and professionalism. I think this type of office atmosphere lets people be themselves and is much more likely to make them happy at work.

    Also check out my previous post about an ad agency that allowed babies and subsequently dogs, cats and other pets to the workplace. Though they did have to draw the line at goats, they found it to be a real boost for the company and for the employees.

    Via Lifestylism.

  • Ask the CHO: Dealing with uncertainty at work

    A reader sent me this question:

    The company I work at “went global”. That means horrible things like many people fired and so. Thus, people are afraid to lose their job, even when I directly asked a manager I trust and he said that “no one from your department will lost his job”. People don’t trust management. Some are cynical, some are afraid, but I think, at different levels, all are unhappy with the situation. I like these people very much, and I would like to do something to confort them, but so far, listening was the only thing I was able to do.

    Additionally, the people from another site are also unhappy, because even when most of them are very capable professionals, they are being threated like… uhm.. incapable kids (not to mention the fact that they know that they were hired because they are “cheaper”).

    Any suggestions to improve the situation?

    First of all thanks for a great question which describes a situation that is found in many workplaces today: A workplace goes through large-scale changes and people wonder “what will it mean for me?” Management may or may not try to create some certainty, but may fail because of a lack of trust.
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  • Tournament theory – the worst argument ever for overpaying executives

    Overpaid

    The executives in your company may be paid way more than they’re worth, but don’t worry – it’s for your own good.

    That’s the point of a recent Forbes article defending overpaid executives which contains the single most disingenuous and illogical argument it has ever been my misfortune to see in a business context. From the article:

    The ugly truth is that your boss is probably overpaid–and it’s for your benefit, not his. Why? It might be because he isn’t being paid for the work he does but, rather, to inspire you. In other words, we work our socks off in underpaying jobs in the hope that one day we’ll win the rat race and become overpaid fat cats ourselves. Economists call this “tournament theory.”

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  • Why job descriptions are useless

    Job description

    Let’s do a quick reality check on job descriptions. Ask yourself these three questions:

    1. When was the last time you read your job description?
    2. Do you remember what it says?
    3. When was the last time you did something at work that you could not have done without your job description?

    If your answers are 1) When I interviewed for the job, 2) Ehmmmm… not really and 3) I don’t think that has ever happened – then maybe it’s time to rethink the value of job descriptions.

    I say job descriptions as they exist today amount to little more than organizational clutter and could easily be dropped altogether. Here’s why we should lose’em and what to do instead.
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  • Comment roundup on secret salaries vs. open

    Everybody hates open salaries

    When I wrote my post on why secret salaries are a baaaaaad idea I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. On most other posts I’ve written, 3 out of 4 commenters agree – in this case 3 out 4 thought that open salaries are a really baaaaaaaad idea. How many a’s are there in baaaad anyway?

    There’s about 60 comments on the post itself, 50 on reddit, 80 on digg and more on other sites, most of which, as mentioned, are dead set against the idea of open salaries.

    Interestingly, the comments from people who have tried open salaries are overwhelmingly in favor of the idea – many cite great benefits. I still think open salaries are a great idea for employees, businesses and the bottom line.

    I’ve summed up the major arguments from the comments against secret salaries and my arguments against these arguments below, not so much because I want the last word (well, that too :o) but mostly because most of the arguments are really good arguments, many of which I hadn’t thought about before.
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  • The six practices of happy, succesful workplaces

    This chapter is not yet finished – but I really need your help, so I’m posting it now.

    Am I on the right track? It kinda feels like the advice here is either too simple or too complex to be useful. I want people to read this chapter and be inspired by what other great companies are doing. To get ideas they can implement themselves.

    Is it working? What do you think?

    How to make your business happy – in practice

    What can a workplace do to make its people want to be happy there? Given that raises, bonuses and perks don’t work what are the things that do? We could start from scratch and invent some methods and tools, but it makes much more sense to learn from the best practices already out there. What is it that the best, happiest and most successful companies do to reach high levels of happiness, excellence and profits? What makes their people consistently choose to be happy at work and lets employees and leaders work together to create great workplaces?

    And let’s not just look at what they do, let’s look at what they do that can readily be stolen implented in your workplace. Let’s focus on practices that are:

    • Generic – so they apply to almost any workplace, big or small, private or government
    • Effective – so they make a real difference
    • Fun – so they make people happy
    • Good for business – so they’ll get you more results

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  • 5 essential steps to resolve a conflict at work

    Conflict at work

    Though Jane enjoyed working as the sales manager of Wilbey & Sons, working with Scott, the financial manager, was a constant struggle for her. At every meeting, Scott would take great care to explain why all her ideas were unworkable. Also, Scott was constantly asking for sales projections and financial data from her and always wanted it in excruciating detail. Supplying these figures was taking up a large amount of her department’s already packed schedule. Frankly she thought, he was nothing but a dry, negative perfectionist.

    Scott, on the other hand, thought that Jane was a maverick. She always had to interrup meetings with her harebrained schemes and whenever he asked her for the data he needed to keep the company finances in order, she would always stall and make him have to ask her again several times. Jane, he felt, was nothing but a happy-go-lucky, unrealistic show-off.

    It got to the point where neither of them could stand to be in the same room together. The company clearly suffered under this conflict between two of its key employees and something clearly needed to be done. Fortunately the CEO had a simple but surprising solution.

    I don’t know about you, but I hate conflicts at work. Spending my work days mad at a co-worker, trying to avoid that person and subconsciously finding fault with everything they say or do is not exactly my idea of a good time.

    I used to be an expert at dodging conflicts on the job and I’m here to tell you that it just doesn’t work! What does work is biting the bullet and doing something about it here and now. I have seen what looked like huge, insurmountable, serious conflicts go “poof” and disappear into dust when handled constructively. I have also seen an itty-bitty molehill of a problem grow into a mountain that threatened to topple an entire company.

    You can’t win a conflict at work. Winning a conflict ie. getting the outcome you want regardless of what the other person wants can be gratifying, sure, but the problem is that the underlying issue has not been solved. It will simply reappear later over some other topic. Much better than winning a conflict at work is resolving it.

    And the price of inaction is high, because unresolved, long-running conflicts result in antagonism, break-down in communications, inefficient teams, stress and low productivity. In short, unresolved conflicts make people terribly unhappy at work.

    With all of this in mind, here are five essential steps to constructively resolve conflicts at work. The steps can be applied to any kind of conflict between co-workers with maybe one exception – read more at the end of the post.
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