The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Meetings: Hell or heaven?

    We recently developed a product in the Happy at Work Project to create better meetings – or in our parlance happy meetings. We tested it on a few organizations and one group of leaders told us, that they normally have 20-30 hours worth of meetings a week. I was flabbergasted.

    Our product aims at making meetings more fun, productive and dynamic by distributing ownership and responsibility for the meeting’s content from one person (typically the manager) to the entire group. When everyone is involved in setting the agenda and prioritizing items, meeting participants become more focused, engaged and creative.

    And now The Guardian reports on a study on meetings which found that:

    1. The more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects
    2. The more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects
    …
    The results speak volumes. “It is impressive,” Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, “that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee’s level of fatigue and subjective workload was found”. Their central insight, they say, is the concept of “the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals”.

    Notice that it is not meetings per se that are annoying people – it’s bad meetings. I’m pretty sure that fun, engaging, productive meetings would simply make people happier at work.

    Here’s my question to you: What do you think it takes, to make meetings fun and productive rather than boring and stressful?

  • Socratic teaching

    Rick Garlikov tried something new teaching a third grade math class:

    The experiment was to see whether I could teach these students binary arithmetic (arithmetic using only two numbers, 0 and 1) only by asking them questions. None of them had been introduced to binary arithmetic before.
    …
    17) How come we have ten numerals? Could it be because we have 10 fingers?
    COULD BE

    18) What if we were aliens with only two fingers? How many numerals might we have?
    2

    19) How many numbers could we write out of 2 numerals?
    NOT MANY /
    [one kid:] THERE WOULD BE A PROBLEM

    20) What problem?
    THEY COULDN’T DO THIS [he holds up seven fingers]

    21) [This strikes me as a very quick, intelligent insight I did not expect so suddenly.] But how can you do fifty five?
    [he flashes five fingers for an instant and then flashes them again]

    The result:

    Their teacher told me later that after I left the children talked about it until it was time to go home.
    …
    The chief benefits of this method are that it excites students’ curiosity and arouses their thinking, rather than stifling it. It also makes teaching more interesting, because most of the time, you learn more from the students — or by what they make you think of — than what you knew going into the class. Each group of students is just enough different, that it makes it stimulating. It is a very efficient teaching method, because the first time through tends to cover the topic very thoroughly, in terms of their understanding it. It is more efficient for their learning then lecturing to them is, though, of course, a teacher can lecture in less time.

    Here’s a though: Rather than asking why many kids don’t like (or actively hate) school, we could ask how we might create schools that are so much fun, that we couldn’t possibly keep the kids out, no matter how hard we tried. And this is certainly one way!

  • Making the switch

    ,

    I’m writing this blogpost on my laptop in the Firefox browser as usual, but this time… IT’S RUNNING ON LINUX. Penguins rejoice!

    I’ve been wanting to install linux on my laptop for a while because lately it’s been running slower and slower – a typical syndrome for PC’s running Windows. All the usual windows remedies gave only short term improvements.

    So friday I installed Ubuntu Linux (probably the most user friendly and easily installed flavour of Linux), and I’ve spent the weekend trying it out and getting stuff to work. The installation was really easy once I figured out how to install it on my laptop which doesn’t have a CD-rom drive. Importantly, all the major stuff worked right after installation and the Ubuntu installer correctly recognized and configured my hard disk, keyboard, trackpad, wifi, etc… A few things didn’t work or weren’t installed by default, and in each of those cases, I’ve been able to find excellent online resources giving step-by-step instructions.

    Some major victories:
    * Getting my online bank to work
    * Getting my Palm Treo to sync with the Evolution calendar application included
    * Migrating all my mails and bookmarks from Windows

    Woo-hoo :o)

    My overall impression is paradoxical:
    Windows XP Professional Edition which I’ve been running so far is made by a huge, succesful corporation and sells for a lot of money. Linux is made by passionate amateurs and professionals around the world, loosely organized in an open source Community. The version I’m using is not only free, they actually go to considerable lengths to give it away, eg. by mailing people free install CD’s.

    And yet Ubuntu Linux feels like a more professional, finished and complete product than Windows XP, which has always struck me as half-baked. There are solid practical reasons why I think Linux is preferable to Windows:
    * Price/value – Hey, it’s free and just as good (at least)
    * Free appplications – Ubuntu comes with the Openoffice.org office suite and many other great applications.
    * Speed/performance – Applications run faster than on Windows
    * Security – Linux is less vulnerable to viruses, adware and other attacks than Windows
    * Stability – Windows is famous for crashing or needing rebooting often. Linux is famous for being stable.

    Also, there are two “fluffier” reasons for me to choose Linux:
    * Ideology
    Ubuntu Linux is committed to an ideology which is Free Software. This is free as in freedom not free as in gratis, meaning:

    * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
    * The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
    * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
    * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that everyone benefits.

    Microsoft on the other hand is comitted to … Microsoft. Time and again they make business and technology decisions that clearly favour their bottom line rather than their customers. I don’t blaiming them, most businesses (but not all) choose this approach. It’s just not a philosophy I favour or want to support more than I absolutely have to.

    Does values and philosophy matter when choosing products? It does to me, and while the Free Software philosophy doesn’t make the product any more useful to me, I believe that these principles will create better IT solutions for all of us.

    * Technology base
    Linux has a better technological base than Windows – quite simply, it’s built on a better foundation. Again, this may not make much of a difference for me here and now, but in the long run it definitely pays to build on solid ground.

    PS.
    Mygdal suggested I should switch to Apple, but while the Apple OS is certainly a better product than Windows, Apple falls short on values. Apple is Microsoft with better design.

  • Joke of the week

    Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on the latest Osama Bin Laden tape:

    Bin Laden has released his 19th message; it’s only a matter of time before he starts podcasting.

    Followed by this delightful little screenshot:

  • Turkish Q&A

    , ,

    I’m speaking at an HR conference in Istanbul next month, a leading turkish newspaper wanted to do an interview by email about happiness at work. They sent me some great questions, which I answered as best I could. The best part about great questions is that they leave you and the questioner wiser.

    Below are the questions and my answers, which contain some of our basic thoughts on happiness at work.

    (more…)

  • Quote

    ,

    Really cool quote:

    What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said, “Blessed is the man who has found his work”? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work–not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

    – Mark Twain

  • Google gets silly

    ,

    It’s nice to know, that there’s still time to goof around at Google:

    Not long ago, I walked by the desk of software engineer JJ Furman, and saw that he had made an interesting addition to his desk: a large blob of Silly Putty, about the size of a grapefruit. Intrigued, I asked how he’d gotten so much of the stuff. The answer? A bulk order directly from the manufacturer! Of course.

    I knew then that I wanted some, and it dawned on me that I probably wasn’t the only one. So I set out to place a really, really big bulk order. An email went out to cohorts. Their orders came in. Three weeks later, I had an eighth of a ton of Silly Putty delivered to my desk.

    I honestly believe that this is a sign of a healthy company, when employees have the creativity, freedom and time to do stuff like that.

    Of course, this begs the question: What happens if you drop a 25 kg. ball of silly putty from a height of 20 meters. MAN, I love the internet :o)

  • Quote

    ,

    I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

    – Douglas Adams

  • VW’s sci-fi car plant

    ,

    Solange de Santi’s excellent book Life on the Line about her experience of working under cover (she’s a journalist) for 18 months in a GM van plant gave me the sense that car factories are noisy, dirty, dangerous places.

    Apparently they don’t have to be – they can also be amazing, beautiful, friendly, ergonomic and high-tech. Check out these amazing pictures from the Volkswagen plant in Dresden. I think I could live comfortably and in high style inside that building :o)

  • The goat problem

    ,

    The first time I heard of the goat problem, a deceptively simple exercise, I flat out refused to believe the solution. A friend and I had been just about to go to a bar, but that plan had to be cancelled in favour of spending 3 hours to prove it to me. See how well you do:

    Imagine a TV game show where the winner chooses between 3 doors. Between one door is a car, between each of the other two doors there’s a goat.

    The contestant chooses one door, and the host then opens another door behind which there is a goat. This is always possible since there are two goats and one car.

    The host will now give the contestant the option of sticking with the door she has already chosen or switching to the one door still unopened. What should the contestant do? There are of course three possible answers:
    1: The contestant should stick to the first choice
    2: The contestant should switch
    3: It doesn’t matter

    What do you think? The answer can be found here and it WILL surprise you. I LOVE it when things get counter-intuitive.

    A warning though: Bringing this riddle up may cause aggravation. I have seen people flat out refuse to acknowledge the solution and get very frustrated in the process.

    UPDATE: Tveskov pointed me to this online version of let’s make a deal, which let’s you try out the game for yourself and keeps track of the stats for you. From the site:

    Despite a very clear explanation of this paradox, most students have a difficulty understanding the problem. It is very difficult to conquer the strong intuition which most students have in this case. As a challenge to students who don’t believe the explanation, an instructor may ask the students to actually play the game a number of times by switching and by not switching and to keep track of the relative frequency of wins with each strategy.

    The goats have been replaced by donkeys, but don’t let that confuse you.

Connect

Get our newsletter

“I can’t believe it – a newsletter actually worth reading!”
– Subscriber

Over 6,000 people subscribe to our newsletter with tons of tips about happiness at work.

Get our books

“It’s very, very good. It’s incredibly well written, full of insights, and there are exercises to improve your own happiness at work. You can’t ask for more than that!”
– David Maister, author of Practice What You Preach

“What an inspiring book. Every leader should read it. This type of leadership has been integral to our success and I know it will boost your results too.“
– Garry Ridge, CEO WD-40 Company

Get Our Free Newsletter

Over 6,000 people already get our free newsletter with useful tips, videos, links and articles about happiness at work.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Top posts last week

How We REALLY Stay Focused At WorkMay 26, 2025
Non-inspirational quotesOctober 22, 2003
Danish bank says forget about retention and focus on happinessMay 28, 2025
Top 10 reasons why constant complaining is so toxic in the workplaceAugust 7, 2007
The world is uncertain (again). Happiness at work must be part of the answer.April 9, 2025

recent Posts