The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Journey into leadership: Success!

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    New leaderThis post is part of a series that follows A.M. Starkin, a young manager taking his first major steps into leadership. Starkin writes here to share his experiences and to get input from others, so please share with him your thoughts and ideas.

    There have been some nice successes since last: Our youngest team member has been the most reluctant to buy in to the new deal, and has been looking for work everywhere in our area. Yesterday I heard that because of the way the ambience in the office is developing she has decided to stop looking and start staying. Nice!!

    My deputy is taking a lot of initiative. The huge file handling backlog she has been blaming on the system, the management, the company, etc. This week she activated her “out of office”-assistant and decided to get rid of the backlog herself, thus giving the operations team the time they need to reorganize and enable themselves to stop accumulating backlog. I first thought that I would have done it differently, but 2 seconds later I thought: Well, thats excellent! It sends powerful signals about her making a choice about getting busy winning or getting busy quitting.

    She has also delegated the task that pertains to her core competence to a colleague, so that she has time to learn her new, self-chosen responsibilities. Learning for everyone, progress….happiness!
    (more…)

  • Monday Tip: Thank the happy

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    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsYour mission this monday has three steps. Step 1: make a list of three happy people at work. Three people (or two or four or five) who are:

    • Generally happy and cheerful
    • Spread a good mood around them by being happy
    • Simply good to have around

    It can be a co-worker, your boss, someone from another department, the receptionist… or even a customer or the FedEx guy.

    Step 2: Think about what it means to have these happy people around. What does it do for you and others? What do you enjoy about it? How do they improve the workplace and your working day?

    Step 3: Find a way to thank them. Be specific based on what you found in step 2 and let them know exactly what their positive attitude does for you and others.

    You see, naturally happy people are a huge boon to any organization, but often they don’t know how much it means to others that they are so happy. So make sure to let them know! Also, it’s just too easy to always bitch about the negative people who’re always in a bad mood and infect others with that. Instead, make a point of remembering how many nice people are also around you!

    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.

  • Friday links

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    HappyDan Gilbert talks about happiness at the TED conference – A great talk about the nature of happiness and why we’re totally wrong about what makes us happy or unhappy. Also very funny! (via Andrew Ferrier)

    Give 100% at work – I always do :o) (via Gelle)

    The 37signals guys on happiness – Happiness has a cascading effect. Happy programmers do the right thing. They write simple, readable code. They take clean, expressive, readable, elegant approaches. They have fun. (thanks Antoine Musso)

    Check out Superviva – A community for people who want to improve life. Here’s Superviva on work.

    VideoKarma – Happy videos from around the net.

  • A challenge to all managers (rerun)

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    How happy?

    I’m going to risk provoking business leaders everywhere and state that any leader worth her salt knows how happy her people are at work. This is a leader’s most basic responsibility. You shouldn’t need to see a pie chart – you should know already.

    The question of “How happy are people in our organization??? is typically handed over to HR who can then distribute a job satisfaction survey that results in a lot of statistics which can then be sliced and diced in any number of way to produce any number of results. You know – “lies, damned lies and statistics???.

    I’m not saying these surveys are worthless. Wait a minute: I am saying they’re worthless. They’re a waste of time and money because they very rarely give a company the information or the drive necessary to make positive changes.

    As I said, you as a leader/manager shouldn’t need a survey to know how your people are doing so I challenge you to a simple exercise. It goes like this:

    Read the rest of this entry »

    (This is a rerun of a previous article, while I’m in London on holidays)

  • What I wish I knew 20 years ago

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    StonesHere’s a great article by Peter Grazier who has worked with employee involvment for 25 years:

    When I began working with employee involvement concepts in 1980, I was unbelievably ignorant of the human dimension of organization performance. As a degreed engineer, most of my training had been in the “hard” sciences and left little time for other subjects. I did attend some of the required courses in the humanities such as History of Art, but never in six years of higher education did I receive training in what I call Human Dynamics.

    My education finally came with my entrance into the world of employee involvement. And, to say the least, my beliefs about how organizations operate (or should operate) have changed significantly.

    He goes on to his three key learning points:

    1. Everyone has something to contribute…and will if the environment is right.
    2. The human element of performance is more important than the technical element.
    3. Most decisions can be significantly improved through collaboration.

    I like it, and I agree completely! Not only will this get people involved – it will also make them happy at work.

  • A question for ya: Three tips for you

    QuestionI recently asked which three tips you would give your boss.

    Here’s a sneaky follow-up: What three tips would your boss and co-workers give you, to make yourself happier at work, if they could freely speak their minds?

    Drop a comment, I’d really like to know.

  • Monday Tip: Why do we like our jobs

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    The Chief Happiness Officer's monday tipsYour mission for this monday is to have a conversation with another person in your workplace about this topic: What do we like about working here?

    Possible subtopics could be:

    • Which people do we appreciate
    • What do we like about our jobs
    • What’s the best thing about working here

    Do it over lunch, coffee, cigarettes, in a break, or…

    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.

  • F***ing cool

    Kevin Briody doesn’t want people to think that his products are good:

    I don’t want their reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, …

    I want “f**king cool! Period.

    I want that pure sense of wonder, that kid-at-airshow-seeing-an-F16–on-afterburners-rip-by so-close-it-makes-your-soul-shake reaction, that caress-the-new-Blackberry until-your-friends-start-to-question-your-sanity experience. I want an irrational level of sheer, unfiltered, borderline delusional joy.

    That’s what I want for my book. That’s it, exactly!!!!!!!!

    Via Kathy Sierra who once again outdoes herself with the graphic she made for her post on this topic.

    Do you think creating something that arouses this level of passion in your customers/users might make you happy at work? I think it might :o)

  • Book feedback

    Happy at Work BookThis post is for all the people who signed up to review a chapter of my book “Happy Hour is 9 to 5”.

    First of all: Thank you very much for your generosity! I’m so glad you’re willing to help me on this.

    I have emailed you guys the entire book as a pdf, and you now have a chance to tell me what you think. There are a few instructions in the feedback file I also emailed you. Please read that, write your feedback and write it as a comment to this post.

    Thanks again for doing this, and I’m not at all happy, nervous and totally fracking excited about this. At all :o)

  • Work-life balance links

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    Work-life balanceI’ll round of the Work-Life Balance theme this week with a few good links about it from other blogs:

    Tim King on work-life balance and thought work

    You can’t see a thought-worker’s thoughts, so you can’t measure them. You have to measure what you can see, and you have two choices. You can measure results, or can you measure how much time the worker spends sitting in his chair. But here’s the twist! The act of measuring the time spent sitting in the chair changes what results are achieved. And the act of measuring results changes when and for how long the thought-worker sits in his chair.

    You have one life

    For the longest time, I lived my life in two compartments. There was “work life??? and “personal life,??? all kept in place by an ever-teetering Work-Life Balance. What a silly concept. It’s actually a euphemism for “I don’t intend to let my job take over all aspects of my life,??? which of course can’t be said out loud in many companies.

    Work-life imbalance

    My friend told me an atrocious story. Actually, she told me a few of them, but I’m only going to share one of them with you right now.

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