The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Funky government

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    FunkyKaren Høeg, a good friend of mine, works for the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency and if you think that’s a mouthful you should see it in Danish: Erhvervs- og Selskabsstyrelsen. They are:

    the official place of registration for Danish Businesses. In parallel the DCCA administers legislations regulating Businesses, amongst others the Companies Act and the Company Accounts Act.

    Before you get too many images of a dusty, boring government agency rubberstamping it old-skool, I’ll have you know that they’re actually pretty with-it.

    How can we know that? Because they made we are funky one of their core values. Yep, that’s right, a government agency that wants to be funky. This is great news, and a good sign that public work places can actually be very modern and fun to work at.

    However, the “funky” value did result in one hilarious misunderstanding. During a parliament debate, a politician from the opposition asked the The Minister of Economic and Business Affairs a lot of pointed questions about this choice of values. He simply couldn’t understand why they would want to call themselves funky. Turns out he didn’t know what funky meant, and had looked it up in a dictionary, which said:

    Funky
    1. Having a moldy or musty smell: funky cheese; funky cellars.
    2. Having a strong, offensive, unwashed odor.

  • And that will teach them what, exactly?

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    When I first read that an employee of an alarm company has sued the company for emotional distress experienced during a company training event I just thought “here we go again, yet another American suing over nothing.” Remember that case a few years ago where a man sued his colleague for farting at work?

    But check out what they did at this training:

    Employees were paddled with rival companies’ yard signs as part of a contest that pitted sales teams against each other, according to court documents. The winners poked fun at the losers, throwing pies at them, feeding them baby food, making them wear diapers and swatting their buttocks.

    Who on earth still believes that this will create an effective learning environment?

    When I design workshops and training sessions, I always try to make it safe and fun. Everything we know about learning says that people learn better when they feel safe and enjoy themselves. In this kind of setting, participants are:

    • More open to new ideas
    • More motivated to learn
    • More prone to collaborate
    • Friendlier and more relaxed

    And here’s the most important thing: In every event I do, all exercises are voluntary. Even though I’ve tried to make everything fun, simple and straight-forward, there may still be elements of the training that are not right for some participants. And who’s the best judge of that? The participants themselves, of course! Therefore everything is voluntary and if any participants would prefer to sit out an exercise, then that is always OK.

  • Let’s reboot democracy

    Reboot the voteI’ll be presenting at this years Reboot conference in june. Here’s the intro to my session:

    Let’s take back politics
    Most democracies are showing serious strain, including distrust of politicians, disproportionate lobbyist influence, low voter turnout and media spin. In the face of this many people simply give up, feeling that “there’s just no way I can make a difference.”

    It’s time for us to take back politics. Let’s discuss how we can use existing web technologies to create a political process where you and I can contribute directly and regularly, instead of just voting every four years. Because politics is too important to leave to the politicians.

    Mitch Kapor has apparently been thinking the same:

    The internet, if kept open and accessible to all, is a tool we can use to reform our politics and create new democratic processes and institutions. By using the internet and building upon its open decentralized architecture, we can help give every person a voice and offer them a forum to participate in creating a healthy politics. The internet provides the tools to build bottom-up systems that are both globally interconnected and locally controlled.

    I have a deep feeling, that introducing a new, bottom-up political process is the best way to solve many of todays problems, and the only way to really develop our societies. Let’s do it! I wrote about this previously here and here.

  • Quote

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    One day early in this journey it dawned on me that they way I’d been running Interface is the way of the plunderer. Plundering something that is not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth.

    And I said to myself “My goodness, a day must come where this is illegal, where plundering is not allowed. I mean, it must come.”

    So I said to myself “My goodness, some day people like me will end up in jail.”

    – Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer

    In this quote from the interesting documentary The Corporation, Ray Anderson explains how Interface started the journey towards sustainable productions. Articles on it here and here.

  • Happy at work at Microsoft

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    Michael Brundage has written a very interesting piece on what it’s like to work at Microsoft.

    The good includes personal freedom, the top leaders, free soft drinks and the fact that Microsoft contrary to popular belief is not evil. For instance:

    Microsoft gives software developers a lot of personal freedom over both the work and the work environment. I order my own supplies, customize my office as I see fit, schedule my own trips and meetings, and select my own training courses. I choose when I show up for work and when I leave, and what to wear while I’m there. I can eat on campus or off, reheat something from home in the kitchen or scavenge leftovers from meetings. I can even work remotely from home (within reason).

    The bad: mid-level managers, internal “cults” and bad work-life balance.

    Compare this with Paul Thurrott’s highly critical analysis of Microsoft’s failure to deliver Windows Vista on time or even with all the feature they promised.

    Two and a half years later, Microsoft has yet to ship Windows Vista, and it won’t actually ship this system in volume until 2007… Microsoft’s handling of Windows Vista has been abysmal. Promises have been made and forgotten, again and again. Features have come and gone. Heck, the entire project was literally restarted from scratch after it became obvious that the initial code base was a teetering, technological house of cards. Windows Vista, in other words, has been an utter disaster. And it’s not even out yet. What the heck went wrong?

    It almost seems like Microsoft is an example of a company that has a huge, tremendously talented and motivated staff, but still manages to create enormous problems for itself. Does this contradict my claim that a happy organization is also a successful one?

    UPDATE: John Dvorak weighs on on the issue.

    All of Microsoft’s Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column—billions.

    So they’re happy at Microsoft but they make really bad top-level decisions..?

  • Wanted: Innovation exercises

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    BinocularsI may be doing an innovation workshop next week and I’m looking for some new, great exercises to do with the participants. Do you know any good ones?

    I’m especially interested in short, fun activites that either get the creative juices flowing or make an important point about innovation and creativity. Your help will be much appreciated!

  • CSR – Doing well by doing good

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    CSR works

    Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, is defined as voluntary efforts by businesses to contribute to society. It may include

    • Workplace issues (such as training and equal opportunities)
    • Human rights
    • The business’ impact on the community
    • Reputation, branding and marketing
    • Ethical investment
    • Environment
    • Ethics and corporate governance

    I think CSR is great and many corporations practice it already. One percent for the planet, pioneered by Patagonia, is one of my favorite examples.

    And now something even more interesting is going on right here in Denmark: we’re implementing a national policy to enhance corporate growth and sustainable social development by teaching small and mid-sized businesses about CSR .

    I just had a very exciting meeting with Karen Høeg, an old friend who’s currently working on that very project for the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency.

    The project kicked off formally last week and will educate 12.000 danish leaders and employees from small and mid-sized businesses in CSR, helping them to increase their profits while doing something good for society and the planet. It is, as far as I know, the largest CSR project in the world.

    Studies show that companies who do CSR make more money than those who don’t. Quite simply, doing good helps businesses do well.

    I have a simple explanation for why this is the case: Doing good feels good. It makes people happy. And happy people are the best way to business success.

    In my post about Creating a Happy and Rich Business, I outlined the six practices of happy workplaces, and two of these are “Care” and “Think and act long-term”. CSR is an expression of both of these. That’s why it makes people happy, and that’s why it’s good for corporate profits and corporate growth.

    But then again, I would say that, wouldn’t I? :o)

  • Friday links

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    No Cilantro (fresh coriander)Here’s an excellent interview with Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning, safe-cracking, bongo-playing physicist. The introduction alone is great: Feynman explains how a scientific world view doesn’t detract from, but adds to, the beauty of a flower.

    I hate Cilantro (fresh coriander) too. Finally a worthwhile, global cause I can get behind.

    The guy who always wears a name tag and the guy who’s trading a red paperclip for a house are both still at it. That’s life art life-art.

  • The cult of overwork (again)

    The cult of overwork is the prevailing belief that the more hours people work, the better for the company. That notion is not only harmful, it is dead wrong, as this story from Arlie Hochschild’s book The Time Bind demonstrates.

    One executive, Doug Strain, the vice chairman of ESI, a computer company in Portland Oregon, saw the link between reduced hours for some and more jobs for others. At a 1990 focus group for CEOs and managers, he volunteered the following story:

    When demand for a product is down, normally a company fires some people and makes the rest work twice as hard. So we put it to a vote of everyone in the plant. We asked them what they wanted to do: layoffs for some workers or thirty-two-hour workweeks for everyone. They thought about it and decided they’d rather hold the team together. So we went down to a thirty-two-hour-a-week schedule for everyone furing a down time. We took everybody’s hours and salary down – executives too.

    But Strain discovered two surprises.

    First, productivity did not decline. I swear to God we get as much out of them at thirty-two hours as we did at forty. So it’s not a bad business decision. But second, when economic conditions improved, we offered them one hundred percent time again. No one wanted to go back!

    Never in our wildest dreams would our managers have designed a four-day week. But it’s endured at the insistence of our employees.

    Interesting, huh? They cut back work-hours but production remains the same.

  • Time and happiness

    A study shows that happy employees put in more hours but remain less prone to stress than uhappy employees.

    What makes them happy? Easier unscheduled time off, schedule flexibility and better telecommuting options. What makes them unhappy? Too much work, their boss’s behavior and long hours.

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