What do you have to do to find happiness. A great, comprehensive article on the science of being happy.
Wire up the right area of the brain, press a button, and hey presto – you’re happy. Is that as real as “real” happiness?
Can technology cure fear? And should it, even if it could?
A recent Danish study showed that 62% of all danish employees have felt stressed at work in the last month and 15% have had to report in sick at some point because of stress. The Danish ministry of work states that up to a quarter of all absenteeism is due to stress.
Stress is a serious problem that costs businesses a lot of money and, even worse, can ruin employees’ lives. However, the typical solutions used to combat stress don’t work – in fact they often make matters worse.
The typical solution is, of course, the stress management training. Typical content includes:
This will typically be presented by a stress consultant. In Denmark that consultant may even come from the unfortunately named Center for Stress (shouldn’t that be against stress?).
Are you getting it? Stress, stress, stress, stress and more stress. If I wasn’t stressed before, I certainly will be now. In fact, one study indicated that employees who attend stress management training become more stressed.
You know how people react when they read about some exotic disease? Suddenly they’re convinced they have all the symptoms and that they in fact suffer from dengue fever. When presented with a long list of symptons of stress, people can easily convince themselves that “Wow I must be really stressed too.”
What’s needed is a fundamental shift in approach – you do not fight stress by talking about stress. that just stresses people more. You fight stress by talking about peace and calm instead. That’s the solution to stress: To give employees tools to stay calm in a busy work environment.
Forget about stress for a moment. What can you do to stay calm even when things are moving fast at work? Here are three simple steps that anyone in any position can use.
Examine when you stay calm
Examine previous situations at work where you were busy but calm. What happened? What allowed you to stay calm? How can you use this in future busy situations?
Stop and feel
Once a day, take five minutes to stop what you’re doing and notice how you’re doing. The greatest danger is stealth stress, where you get a little more stressed day by day but never notice it because it sneaks up on you in small increments.
The antidote: Take five minutes every day to do the following:
You don’t need to do anything about it while you’re sitting there. Don’t expect any solutions to come to you. Just sit there and notice what’s going on in your body, emotions and thoughts.
Enjoy your achievements
Appreciate the amount of work you do, and don’t berate yourself over the tasks you don’t manage. It’s a fact of work today, that there’s always more work. You will never clear your desk and if you do, more work will find you. So you must remember to feel good about the work you do and not beat yourself up over the tasks you haven’t yet finished.
These three tips can be used by anyone in any job. They take very little time and effort and can help employees keep their cool even in the busiest work environments. Try them out!
Most modern countries are seeing a steady rise in the amount of time people spend at work. There is some evidence, however, that this trend contributes neither to the bottom line nor to our overall well-being.
Esther Derby euthanizes the idea that long hours are a sign of employee commitment. She cites some alternative reasons people stay late at the office, including:
- One woman’s marriage was disintegrating and she stayed late to avoid tension at home.
- Another woman was using company assets to run a side business… and it was easier to hide it when people weren’t around.
- Two people who were having an affair stayed late at work to be together.
Via Jason Yip’s excellent blog.
As for productivity, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in one of her books mentions an IT copany that were in big financial trouble. Rather than lay some people off they switched to a 30-hour work week and a corresponding pay cut, and experienced no reduction in production. They did the exact same amount of work in 30 hours a week as in 40.
When the company righted itself each employee could choose to return to the original work schedule and pay or remain at 30 hours a week. They all chose to keep the short work week. Read the whole amazing story here.
A recent Danish study found that 90% of managers who worked 30-37 hours a week were satisfied with their work-life balance. Among managers working more than 48 hours a week, that percentage dropped to 46. The consequence: More stress, less job satisfaction and an increased risk that they will leave the company.
We’ve long known that reasonable working hours are one of the most important factors determining whether people are happy at work (and in life). Long working hours are not a sign if commitment and may not even contribute to business productivity.
Therefore businesses should stop encouraging (implicitly and explicitly) long work hours and start rewarding the people who go home on time. They’re good for business.
You can always find reasons to work. There will always be one more thing to do. But when people don’t take time out, they stop being productive. They stop being happy, and that affects the morale of everyone around them.
– Carisa Bianchi
The New Yorker on the history of Happiness. From a caveman to Seligman.
Replace your desk with a treadmill and work out while you work.
Extreme collaboration: 2.500 people play pong against 2.500 other people.
Great interview with Fred Gratzon, the world’s laziest entrepreneur. His book is on it’s way to my to-read-shelf.
Diego Rodriguez agrees with me and identifies happiness at work as the root of innovation.
I got sick and tired of sales people at one point. There seems to be some unspoken agreement among them that all sales meetings must run like this:
There’s gotta be a better way! And there is. Sales meetings don’t have to be an unpleasant affair in which pushy salespeople use every trick in the book to convince reluctant customers to buy their stuff.
I developed a better format for The Happy at Work Project for two reasons:First of all, with our name and our products we were forced to come up with a way to make sales meetings fun, or we would have lost all credibility right there. (If you’ve never heard of us, we do workshops, presentations, conferences and board games to make people happy at work).
Secondly I’ve tried being the victim target potential customer of many traditional sales pitches, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of inflicting that experience on potential, unsuspecting customers.
When using the meeting format described below, I have repeatedly seen clients switch from a defensive, arms-crossed, you-can’t-trick-me-into-buying- nothing-buster posture to a relaxed, positive atmosphere where they’re asking me interested questions – rather than me trying to ram information down their throats. Simply speaking, sales meetings become fun.
Here’s how I do it.
First of all, we don’t call them sales meetings, we call them customer meetings. This is not just semantics, the point truly isn’t selling – the point is to meet a potential customer, to learn about that customer and to let them learn about what you can offer.
You’re not there to sell – you’re there to help the customer make a wise decision (this idea is courtesy of my Iowan friend Mike Wagner). Of course you’re there in the first place because you believe in the quality of your products/services and you believe the customer needs what you can deliver. If this isn’t so, why did you approach this customer at all?
And that is the fundamental difference: Is selling a matter of salesman vs. customer or is it a matter of working together. Our meeting format creates a setting where seller and buyer work together to create value for both.
I very briefly introduce myself and my company, and then take a little time to frame the meeting.
Time: All our meetings are planned for a 1 hour duration, but I still always start by fixing the time frame, saying “I’d planned to finish no later than X o’clock. Is that OK?” Sometimes the customer will say, “That’s fine I have a meeting right after” and then I always offer to end our meeting 5 minutes early.
Content: Then I explain that in my experience, the meetings go better if I can spend some time asking about them first. I can talk for a long time about our products, but if I don’t know something about the customer, I may not say anything that’s relevant to them. Then I ask if that’s OK.
Agreeing to these things up front puts the customer in charge of the whole process. While you will of course be running the meeting, you do so with their full consent.
This meeting is not about you. It’s about the customer. We have a list of good questions to ask, and the first question is always this: “What made you take time for this meeting?”
This is an amazing question, because it goes right to the root of why you’re talking to that customer. We’re all busy people, and there’s a reason this person has taken an hour out to talk to you. The entire point of the meeting is to find that reason. So why not ask up front?
Also, our last question “What benefits could your organization achieve, if people were happier at work???? is crucial, because right there, the customer will supply you with all the selling points. Substitute your own argument instead of “happier at work” here.
Asking questions is important, because successful customer meetings are the ones where the customer does most of the talking. Also, this means that whether or not the meeting results in a sale, you will still walk away with new knowledge.
We then present one sheet of paper that describes our work and our products. Yes, that’s right, one single, solitary sheet.
At this point many customers are expecting (or dreading) a 20-slide corporate PowerPoint presentation, and they’re unfailingly relieved and happy when I pull out just this one piece of paper and explain our offerings based on that.
“But my products will never fit on one page” I hear you cry. Oh, yeah? Well if you can’t describe yourself and your products simply enough to fit on one page, then you’re not ready to talk to potential customers yet. They deserve that level of clarity and simplicity.
Our presentation focuses on what we do, i.e. the actual products and services we can deliver – and very little on who we are. The paper also contains a short description of how we work and some (great) customer quotes.
Of course, having just learned a lot about the customer, it’s easy for met to connect our offerings to their business and to focus more on products they can use. It becomes a targeted presentation, tailored to that specific customer – and boy, do they ever appreciate that.
Remember to constantly stop and ask the customer “How does that sound?” or similar. Don’t go into your entire spiel and then ask at the end. You might ask after every product: “How could you apply this in your business?”
We always end the meeting a few minutes before the agreed time. This shows respect for the customer’s time, and avoids that fidgety few minutes at the end where the customer is subconsciously wondering whether the meeting will end in time for her to make her next meeting/appointment.
There seems to be an unstated belief among sales people that long meetings = good meetings. That the longer you can keep the meeting going, the more interested the customer must be. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
At the end of the meeting, we ask:
“How did you like the meeting? Did you get all the information you need????
“Would you like to be added to our mailing list so you get our newsletter????
“How would you like me to follow up on the meeting? Should I call you in X weeks????
This ensures customer commitment on whatever follow-up we decide on.
Step 2 takes just a couple of minutes, while step 3 (asking about the customer) should take about 25 minutes of a one hour meeting. You then have 20 minutes to present your products and let the customer ask questions about them and 5 minutes to end the meeting.
If you find yourself dreading sales meetings or find yourself uncomfortable in a traditional salesman role, give this method a shot. Not only will you enjoy meeting customers this way – you’ll also sell more.
If you liked this post I’m pretty sure you’ll also like these:
Jodee Bock writes some very kind words about my post on The story so far.
Thank you Jodee, I’m truly honored!
A while ago I asked “How do you find your playmates”, and increasingly “Through their blogs” is the answer.
Fred Gratzon is
an entrepreneur who hates hard work. In fact, I refuse to do it. Yet two of my businesses grew like Jack’s beanstalk. Each made Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest growing companies in America. One of those businesses appeared three times and was even ranked #2.
His blog is excellent. Check out his run-in with jackal investment bankers or this story of financial growing pains solved by the question “Does it feeeeeeeel like you’re making money?”.
I could write a long piece on the value of laziness, but I can’t be bothered right now, so I’ll just point to this excellent quote by Mark Twain who says it much better anyway.
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne has much in it to like, but in the end it fails to deliver usable business tools because of one huge flaw: It completely misrepresents the nature of corporate innovation.
The book is subtitled “How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant” and is based on a blue ocean vs. red ocean metaphor. Businesses can stay in their place in the market and fight all others in that red-ocean space (think red with blood) or they can sail of into the blue ocean where no one else has gone yet.
The book cites ventures by companies such as Cirque Du Soleil, Southwest Airlines, [yellowtail] wine, Apple and Curves gyms as examples of Blue Ocean Strategies.
Blue Ocean makes 4 major points that every business can learn from:
Pay attention
All change begins with an appreciation of your current situation. First get to know your business and your market. Listen to your customers and to those who are not your customers.
Go simple
Look at what you can do, but also examine what you can stop doing. What are you doing that isn’t really of value to the customer? How can a simpler product be of even greater value?
Play a non-zero-sum game
Don’t fight over the pie – grow the pie. Cirque Du Soleil didn’t steal customers from Ringling Bros., they brought a whole new crowd of people to the circus.
Visualize your strategy
The book demonstrates a strategy canvas – a 1-page chart that visualizes what areas to focus more or less on compared to the business today and to competitors. This helps sell the strategy inside the organization.
That’s good advice. However, the approach described will not help companies create major change.
The problem is the role the book gives to innovation. When the Blue Ocean strategic process is outlined, only one point out of 10 mentions new ideas, saying “See which factors you should eliminate, create or change”. In other words, one word (“create”) in one sentence focuses on the actual process of creating new ideas – everything else is strategy. That’s not the way it works.
It is typical, though, of the way many businesses misunderstand creativity. There’s a widespread illusion that innovation happens like this:
In real life, however, innovation usually happens like this:
If you don’t believe me, read this story of how post-its were invented at 3M. If ever there was a Blue Ocean product this is it, but the process was most definitely NOT as described in the Blue Ocean book.
It is my firm belief that few companies will be able to apply the tools in the Blue Ocean book to actually create ground-breaking innovation. Even the case stories cited in the book support this – only two stories are told in which companies apply the book’s metods and they result only in incremental innovation.
Which is not surprising. A measured strategic approach like the one described here is fine for creating measured, incremental change, but if you really want to take your business into uncharted water, you will need a completely different approach to innovation.
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