The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Some more quotes from my book

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    Happy Hour is 9 to 5Here are some more quotable quotes from my new book Happy Hour is 9 to 5.

    The uncontested, number-one reason why people are unhappy at work is bad management. Nothing has more power to turn a good work situation bad than a bad boss.
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    Some managers steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that they’re bad leaders, or even revel in the fact that they make people unhappy at work. These managers are usually beyond helping and may never learn and improve. Get away from them as fast as you can.
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    Let’s once and for all drop the cult of overwork and realize that it’s not the hours that count—it’s the results. More hours DO NOT equate to better results.
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    If you feel constantly behind and neglected, are being treated unfairly, ignored or bullied, or are going through large changes and fearing for the future, you can become stressed from working 40 hours a week. Or even 20. If this is the case, working less will not help at all. What’s more, you can’t fight stress—fighting stress just creates more stress.
    —
    Just 50 years ago people had many sources of identity. Religion, class, nationality, political affiliation, family roots, and geographical and cultural origins all went into defining who we are. Today most of these, if not all, have been subsumed by work. When you meet someone at a party, what’s the first question you typically ask them? Exactly: “So, what do you do????
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    What is the point of spending most of your life at a job that doesn’t make you happy? What would you feel like, lying on your deathbed, having achieved all the traditional signs of success—a huge house, flatscreen TVs in every room, lots of cars, a huge salary, a lofty title and a corner office—if your career never made you happy?
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    We don’t have to sacrifice happiness for the sake of success—a depressingly common assumption these days. In fact, the opposite is true: The happier you are, the more successful you will be.
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    So, according to our cultural roots, work is a curse, a punishment for original sin, and only for slaves. In short, life is hell—or “nasty, brutish and short,??? as Hobbes put it—work is hell, and we must endure it because we’re all sinners. It’s time to put that particular view of work behind us!
    —

    You can read the whole book free on line or buy it on paper ($29) or as a pdf ($19).

    Previous quotes from my book.

  • Review: Sumo Omni bean bag chair

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    Sumo OmniA while back I got an email from Andrew at Sumo, asking me if I would review their bean bag chair for the blog.

    I struggled with the question for a while. On the one hand I was afraid to sell out. Could I maintain my integrity in the face of free stuff? On the other hand: “Yaaay, free stuff!”

    I accepted and my Sumo Omni arrived two weeks ago.

    Alexander KjerulfI’ve been thoroughly testing it and the verdict is in: It’s an insanely comfortable piece of furniture. My favorite position is to lean it against a wall and sit there with my a laptop, as I’m sitting right now writing this. It works even better if you can out your feet up on something.

    The material is cool to the touch even when you’ve been sitting in it for a while and the bag strikes just the right balance between firm and squishy. Also: The thing is huge! Further testing found that it is fine for two people watching a DVD together. Or, say, an episode or two of Dexter.

    If anything, the damn thing is too comfortable – I don’t really want to get up out of it.

    When they ship the Omni overseas, they do it without filling, so I had to order 400 liters of those little plastic pellets on line. This is what such a package looks like:

    Bean bag pellets

    And let me tell ya: They do look at your strangely at the post office when you pick up those kinds of parcels.

    Sumo OttoMy dream: Make a meeting room where all the walls are whiteboards and the only furniture is bean bag chairs in various sizes. The Omni and it’s smaller cousin The Otto would be perfect for this.

  • My take on the “top 100 workplace list”

    GoogleI took a look at this year’s list of the 100 best US workplaces, and while I don’t know many of the companies on there, many of the “usual suspects” are certainly included. Google, Container Store, Whole Foods, W.L. Gore, Starbucks, Nordstrom and others are certainly familiar cases from the books I’ve read about happiness at work. I’m not sure if this validates the top 100 list or the case literature. Or neither :o)

    However, we should remember that not every company competes here. In fact, only around 500 companies entered the competition, so making the top 100 list is not THAT impressive. Companies with less than 1000 employees can not participate – even though many of them are probably better workplaces than the big organizations.

    Also, a company’s score depends not only on what its employees say. Here’s some info from the website:

    Two-thirds of a company’s score is based on the survey, which is sent to a minimum of 400 randomly selected employees from each company and asks about things such as attitudes toward management, job satisfaction, and camaraderie.

    The remaining third of the score comes from our evaluation of each company’s responses to the institute’s Culture Audit, which includes detailed questions about demographic makeup, pay, and benefits programs, and open-ended questions about the company’s people-management philosophy, internal communications, opportunities, compensation practices, diversity programs, etc.

    All in all, I’m sure that the companies on this list are all good places to work – and I’m equally sure that there are many even better ones out there that simply didn’t compete in this particular contest.

    (A big thank you to Andrew Ferrier for asking the question that inspired this post).

    Previously:
    10 seeeeeeriously cool workplaces
    Happiness at work at Google
    Perks gone wild: SAS Institute

  • Happiness at work at Google

    Google employees have it good, as this video shows.

    (Thx Erno Mijland).

    While perks like on-site doctors, car wash, pool tables and 11 great free restaurants are nice, I still believe that those aren’t the real reasons Google employees are happy. The real reason is that they have fun, get to kick butt, work with great people and have a large degree of freedom.

    Perks help, but are not the source of happiness at work, as my previous blogpost about another master of perks, SAS Institute, shows.

  • Monday Tip: Appreciate your co-workers

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    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsThis week’s Monday Tip is about appreciating the people around you at work. Who do you like? Why do you like them?

    Make a list of your closest co-workers. Not necessarily the ones you like the best, but the ones you have the most dealings with. Then, for each person on your list, write down at least five things you appreciate about that person. Things they’re good at, ways they make your life easier, their personal or professional skills and qualities… as long as it’s something positive.

    That’s it. You don’t need to show your list to anyone, just take a moment to make it.

    Now, when you make that list, there may be a person on it that really annoys you. Every workplace I’ve ever been in, there’s always been at lest one person who really honked me off. The trick here is to also find five things you appreciate about that person too. As the saying goes, there’s some good in everyone and if you can’t see it, it’s because you don’t want to see it.

    And then I usually get the counter-argument: What about Hitler? (Or Stalin, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden). Is there something good in them too? And I say let’s skip that entire discussion – if you work with one of those guys, you may leave them out of the exercise :o)

    By the way: Do you have any ideas for future Monday Tips? How do you make yourself and others happier in fun, simple, easy ways? Write a comment if you have a suggestion.

    The Chief Happiness Officer’s Monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.

    Previous monday tips.

  • A question for ya: How can you go out with a (positive) bang

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    QuestionMike Hoffman is in an interesting situation:

    I’m currently in one of the worst jobs of my life. The majority of my co-workers reply with a negative response when asked if they honestly enjoy coming into work. Management seems miserable (overworked, stressed, and never caught smiling). You already know what kind of environment this creates.

    I already have a contract for another job within the next 90 days. I think my co-workers are good people and I feel that I have an obligation to leave a legacy, whether this means dropping off a case of your books on the way out or writing an honest letter to management about the work environment as a whole, to make their jobs (or their mindset to find another one) that much better. I want to be direct but not insulting.

    Do you have any suggestions on the best ways to leave a job while leaving a positive impact in its wake?

    What a great idea! When you know you’re leaving, you’re free to say and do some things you might not normally be able to. The question is, what can you do that is positive and inspiring, as opposed to bitterly slamming the door on your way out.

    What could you do in this situation? I would very much like to hear your ideas!

  • Podcast about emotions at work

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    podcastAnna Farmery of the excellent Engaging Brand blog and I had a great conversation about emotions at work.

    Some of the key points that came up were:

    • Ignoring emotions at work means big trouble.
    • We can try and tell ourselves that we are 100% rational at work. We’re kidding no one.
    • How should leaders handle emotions?
    • The main point is openness. Be open to what you and others are feeling.
    • Ask, and be able to handle the answers.

    And of course the hilarious story of how Anna celebrates at work and when she scores hockey goals.

    Listen to or download the podcast.

  • Happy Links

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    Happy LinksLearning Voyager thinks intelligent disobedience is important at work. “The ultimate application is in the field of organization development, where leaders are attempting to build a highly adaptive and successful organization. Unless the organization has a way to overcome its own blindness and detect a real and present danger, it may get run over.”

    Slow Leadership has The Plain Truth About Work/Life Balance. “Achieving an acceptable degree of work/life balance is never going to be easy, but it won’t even be possible unless you first understand clearly what that balance is and how it works.” This blog has some of the most consistently great writing on leadership and work I’ve ever seen.

    The Engaging Brand got great customer service – at the dentist! “I had a mother who gave me this HUGE fear of dentists…40 years into my life and the sweat rolls as I enter THAT room, and see THAT chair. But fear not, I have found a dentist who could coach you on turning an unhappy customer into an engaged one.”

  • Some quotes from my book

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    Happy Hour is 9 to 5I thought I’d pull out and publish some quotes from my brand new book about happiness at work:

    “Seriously: Do you want to spend your working life simply being satisfied? When you look back on 50 years spent in business, do you want to be able to say, “Well, I was satisfied???? No! Make happiness your goal. As in, “Let’s make this a workplace where people are happy to work.??? As in, “I’ve been working for 50 years now, and it absolutely rocks! To me work is challenging, stimulating and just plain fun.??? ”
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    “Imagine for a moment how it would feel to lie in bed on a Monday morning going “YES! I get to go to work this week!???”
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    “Studies consistently show that happy companies are way more productive, creative and service-oriented than unhappy ones. Therefore, the happy companies will beat the pants off the unhappy ones in the market place. The future of business is happy! It’s inevitable.”
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    “See, happiness at work is an emotion. It comes from inside of you, and like all other emotions it is difficult to define, but inescapable once it’s present. Or not present. Can you define love? Poets have tried for thousands of years and aren’t getting much closer. But when you’re feeling love, you’re acutely aware of it, even though you have no formal definition.”
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    “You can’t be happy at work every day. No matter how much you love your job, there are still going to be bad days. And that’s cool—it’s always OK to have a bad day at work.”
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    “Happiness at work is not about eliminating all the bad stuff from your job. It’s about being happy at work even though some of these bad things are present. It’s about building your skills and your energy to fix the problems, and to create more and more positive experiences at work.”
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    “The path to happiness at work starts with a simple decision: You must want to be happy. If you don’t commit to being happy at work, you won’t be. You won’t make the choices that make you happy. You won’t take the actions needed to get there. You won’t change the things that need to change.”
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    All of these are plucked from just the introduction and the first chapter. Hey – that book is pretty quotable :o) You can buy it or read the whole book free online.

  • The BBC on happiness at work

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    bbcIt’s official, happiness at work matters!

    Forget salary, location, prospects – happiness is the new weapon in the drive to recruit the best and brightest new workers.

    Would the BBC lie to us? I think not!

    The article actually deals both with having a happy brand and happy employees, and cites Google and Orange as examples of companies who practice this.

    All eschew the sleek corporate image once associated with success, favouring instead cute hand-drawn logos and chatty spiels about the company ethos.

    Not only does this seem to appeal to customers, it proves quite a hook for prospective employees. To be in employment is, for most of us, a given. And Britons work the longest hours in Europe. So why not try to make it sound as enjoyable and fulfilling as possible?

    I like it, but not everyone agrees. Check out this comment on the article:

    What a crock…. I, like almost everyone I have ever met come to work to earn a living to pay for the things they like/need. If they did not need to work they would be sat at home watching the footy…….

    Maybe he’s right, and we should all just accept that work is by definition unpleasant and that’s why we get paid to do it :o)

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