Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
– Sigmund Freud
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Monday Tip: Random acts of kindness at work
Your mission today is to perform at least three random acts of kindness at work. Three small, nice, generous, funny, surprising, silly, amazing, touching and/or kind acts for three different co-workers.If you’re stuck for ideas, here are a few suggestions:
- Bring someone a cup of coffee, without them asking
- Leave a flower on someone’s desk
- Leave a nice, hand-written note for a co-worker
- Help someone carry their stuff
- Pass out candy in the hallways
Do you have more suggestions? Write a comment!
For bonus points, do two more random acts of kindness to total stranges on the way home from work.
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.
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Quote
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
– Arnold J. ToynbeeThank you to David Zinger for telling me about this excellent quote.
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Banksy: The Bear And The Bee
The anonymous british street artist Banksy made a hilarious piece on the side of a trash container in Notting Hill, that is highly relevant to happiness at work. The text is a parody of a La Fontaine fable and goes like this:“Once upon a time there was a bear and a bee who lived in a wood and were the best of friends. All summer long the bee collected nectar from morning to night while the bear lay on his back basking in the long grass.
When Winter came the Bear realised he had nothing to eat and thought to himself ‘I hope that busy little Bee will share some of his honey with me’. But the Bee was nowhere to be found – he had died of a stress induced coronary disease”.
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Top performers leaving in droves
One large company finds that many of their top performers are absconding:It’s like clockwork. Every year a portion of our top talent decides it’s time to move on. Once those bonus or holiday checks are cashed, the flood gates open and the resignation letters start flowing in.
They’ve done an exit survey among the top performing employees leaving the company:
Of the 178 files, 83 people listed money as a reason for leaving. 62 listed it as the only reason.
Their conclusion: They must adjust salaries and compensation. My conclusion: They’re wrong. Here’s why.
(more…)
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What makes people happy or unhappy at work
I recently asked you what makes you happy or unhappy at work and got a lot of great answers. Thank you to everyone who responded! Though small, unscientific and totally without academic merit, there are still a few things to learn from this mini-survey, and any managers reading this could stand to take a look at the answers. Here are some of my conclusions.
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Appetite lost in translation
Yesterday my wonderful girlfriend suggested crab chowder for dinner. We found a great recipe a few years ago by british TV chef Ainsley Harriott which quickly became one of our favorites. Ainsley is a man who is very obviously happy at work – as you can probably tell by looking here.
We Googled our way to a danish version of the recipe… which had lost a little something in the translation though:
And no, that’s not the danish spelling of crab chowder :o)
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Ze Frank on happiness
This just in: Ze Frank is forced to explore happiness on The Show all this week.
Hilarious :o)
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Finding happy companies? What do you think?
Josh Peck emailed me a great suggestion last week:I’ve been keeping up with your blog for a few months now and first, thank you for bringing some sanity to the world of work. Secondly, as I read the blog, I keep seeing examples of great companies that are doing things right. How can I find companies near me that “get it”?
Could it be time for a CHO job board, where only enlightened companies are allowed to post?
Could it ever! And what if we add a Google map, where we can all plot in companies we know to be happy and what makes them happy? That way it would be easy to find happy companies to go work for in any country/city/town.
What else would we need? What would make this idea really great? Does something like this already exist?
Write a comment :o)
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Great graphics by Tdenham
In case you’re wondering where I get all my weird clip-art from, I get almost all of it from stock.xchng, and most of it from just one of their users: Tdenham. His series of pictures of himself in a suit enacting various business scenarios are hilarious, technically excellent and already separated on a white background (making my life a LOT easier).
Thanks, Tom!!!!
I then take his pictures and mangle them utterly using my -ahem- meagre graphics skills and the excellent open source graphics program The Gimp. Here are some of the results:
Click each image for a close-up.
And if you’re looking for some great illustrations for your blog, website, document or PowerPoint presentation, check out Tom’s work.
