I know that it’s expected of executives to start the day extremely early, but frankly I feel I make better decisions and relate better to people when I’m well rested. So I usually get up around 8 after a good night’s sleep.
I also make sure to almost always work a standard 40-hour week and never work on the weekends. This is important to me for two reasons. First of all, I have a life outside of work. I have a family who likes to have me around and friends and hobbies that I also want to have time for. I find that the time I spend outside of work recharges my batteries, expands my horizons and actually makes me more efficient at work.
Secondly, if I’m always seen arriving at the office at 6 in the morning and leaving at 9 in the evening, not to mention taking calls and writing emails late at night and all weekend, it’s sure to send a signal to my employees that this is what the company expects, that this is “the right way”. But it isn’t.
It’s a simple fact that for most leaders and employees, the first 40 hours they work each week are worth much more to the company than the next 20, 30 or 40 hours. But those extra hours spent at work can harm your private life, your family and your health. Which in turn becomes damaging to the company.
Frankly, if you can’t structure your time so your work fits inside a 40-hour week, you need to get better at prioritizing and delegating.
Refreshing words. Guess which of the executives said that?
Come on, take a guess!
NONE OF THEM! Not one.
Instead, there’s a lot of “I get up at 5 and arrive at the office at 6” and “I work 16 hours a day” and “I take a lot of calls on the drive in to the office” and “I usually leave the office at 7 and then work a few more hours in the evening at home.”
I fully expected one of them to go “I get up at 4 in the morning, half an hour before I go to bed, and work a 27-hour day, only stopping for a 3-minute lunch break in which two assistants stuff food down my throat like a foie-gras goose.”
I know it’s normal to view people working this hard as heroes of the organization, but still I think they would be more efficient and enjoy life more if they cut down their time at work. They may find that they become more open, less stressed, have more fun AND are better role models for their employees. This cult of overwork has got to stop.
The school of “work your butt off, everything else comes second” is bad for business and bad for people. Can we please retire this tired idea once and for all?
If you liked this post, I think you’ll also enjoy these:
Last week I attended the annual conference on happiness at work here in Copenhagen and as usual it was a fantastic day with some great talks by researchers in the field and people from some of Denmark’s happiest workplaces who shared how they do it in practice.
One of the overall themes this year was how to stay focused at work or in broader terms, how to make a brain-friendly workplace.
That’s an important theme. I don’t know about you but I feel increasingly distracted these days. It’s become harder and harder for me to stay focused on whatever I’m doing and not succumb to the temptation of pulling out my phone and scroll social media, news or other sites. Reddit is my biggest vice! Or YouTube. Probably both!
The central misunderstanding
The speakers offered a lot of suggestions for this issue but some of it missed the mark a little bit.
For instance, one speaker referenced research that showed that smelling rosemary helped a person maintain focus longer. Other similar advice included:
Go for a walk
Look at nature
Stare at a fixed point without moving your eyes for 2 minutes
Be physically active
Look at something beautiful
Each of these are probably great, but here’s my problem with this type of solution: It takes what is most likely a workplace problem and makes it an employee problem.
Let’s say a lot of employees in the workplace find it hard to maintain focus. Before we start pumping rosemary or other scents into the office (yes, this is actually a thing) we should probably ask WHY employees are so easily distracted. Here are some common problems I often see:
Processes and workflows are inefficient or unclear
Meetings take up significant portions of everyone’s workweek
Everyone is overworked and the ensuing stress is making it hard to focus.
Employees find their tasks meaningless because no one has ever told them why their work makes a difference.
Employees feel overlooked because no one ever appreciates their good work.
Bosses micromanage their employees making them feel completely disinterested in their work.
People are constantly interrupted and are expected to respond instantly to every email, text message or call.
I promise you, if any of these is the problem (and it might even be several of them or all of them) then sniffing rosemary is going to do very little to improve focus and concentration.
In fact, telling employees to fix their own focus issues with rosemary might make things worse because it take something that is a workplace problem (the workplace is treating employees badly) and makes it an individual problem that employees must fix themselves.
This can serve to absolve management from their mistreatment and shift the blame and responsibility onto employees themselves.
Why this does not work in isolation
And it’s important to point out that this individual approach does not work. I did a video with Louise Lambert where we talk about a huge British study that looked at the effectiveness of individual-level workplace interventions like stress trainings or yoga classes and concludes that they do not make employees any happier.
Of course, there are ways for each of us to boost our own concentration and we should each figure out what works for us and do that.
Personally, I find I need structure and overview to function well. Nothing drains my focus faster than a vague sense that there is some task somewhere that I’ve forgotten to do and someone is waiting for. I also need to know that my work matters and that everything I do makes a difference.
That’s why I need an organized calendar, a clear email inbox and a comprehensive to do-list. Without these, I would get nothing done.
I also take into account my daily rhythms. I find that I am much more creative in the mornings, so I save those times for writing, thinking and planning ahead. It is 9:37 as I write this sentence. I use the afternoons for everything else like meetings, emails, etc.
These are just some of the things that I’ve found over the years help me stay focused and productive. What works for you? Write a comment, I’d love to know.
BUT!!! You could use every focus hack in existence and it still wouldn’t work if the real problem is a micromanaging toxic boss or stress caused by an overwhelming workload.
And that’s my problem with many of the workplace happiness approaches I see speakers and experts promote. It goes for individual solutions to systemic problems.
What to do instead
So what should we do instead? Many of the speakers at the Happiness At Work Conference offered specific solutions that they’ve used in their workplaces.
My favorite examples was the Danish law firm Molt Wengel. Their CEO Anne Katrine Schjønning explained that they have gone through a 6-month long process to redesign how they work.
This was their mission:
”We want to look forward to going to work and at Molt Wengel we believe that we can create a work life where where we end the work day with more energy than when et began.”
Specifically they:
Focused on making the work meaningful to each employee so everyone knows why their work is important
Redesigned their workflow to make it more clear and efficient
Created well-defined roles in projects so everyone can work to their strengths
Work in sprints to create focus and a clear sense of progress
Use the pomodoro technique to create periods of uninterrupted focus time
This has worked so well that they now work fewer hours and still get more work done than before. The company has also massively increased revenue and profits.
Astonishingly, they are now so efficient that they can all start their weekends at noon on Fridays so everyone has an extra half day off every week. If you know law firms, you know just how uncommon this is.
And I think this is the way to go. Let’s look at HOW we work together in order to boos focus and concentration and minimize interruptions and distractions.
Another speaker at the conference was Michael Hedemann who works in HR at Middelfart Sparekasse, a Danish bank that has ranked among Denmark’s best workplaces for 20 years. One of their specific initiatives was to encourage all employees to turn off email and Teams notifications on their computers as well as all notifications on their phones. He told me that the only thing that pops up on his phone to interrupt his workflow are actual phone calls.
That’s how you do it.
Some specific ideas
Here are some other specific ways to make our workplaces more focused and productive:
If he workplace is not willing to do any of this, shifting the burden of responsibility onto employees is never going to work.
The upshot
Yes, we are all finding it harder to focus – both at work and in our private lives. We can all blame the increasingly addictive nature of social media or the faster pace of the modern world or the increasing political insecurity in the world, but either way, the problem is real.
But addressing it in the workplace requires addressing any systemic issues at work that sap our concentration. If course it would be easier to just tell employees to go for a walk but that is, at best, a band-aid and at worst a way for the company to shirk its responsibility and shift the responsibility onto the employees.
Fortunately, there are companies that have cracked this already and it turns out that these steps are not just great for helping employees be more focused they also boost productivity and the bottom line.
Your take
What is your best focus hack? Or conversely, what destroys your focus and concentration at work? What has your workplace done to help people work with more focus? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.
So Greece has decided to buck the trend in the rest of the world and make the work week LONGER for many workers. The law just went into effect this month and it is a spectacularly bad idea that WILL backfire in the worst possible way. And in this article I’m going to prove it with science!
What does the law say / not say
But first – what does the new law actually say and why are they passing it?
Greek companies can now compel employees to work more hours. It’s been widely reported as a move to a 6-day workweek, but in reality some workers will have to either work 6 8-hour days OR an extra 2 hours a day 5 days a week. Each of these options will take the workweek from 40 to 48 hours. In return they get a 40% wage increase for the extra hours and more for working Sundays. The law doesn’t apply in all workplaces, only in private companies that operate around the clock in shifts and which are facing labor shortages.
The pro-business Greek government believes this law will boost the economy by addressing a lack of skilled employees. Of course many other countries are facing similar challenges due to falling birthrates and other factors, so it’s tempting to assume that we can make up for a lack of workers by making existing workers work more hours.
And indeed, many countries and workplaces are itching to make people work more. For instance, here in Denmark, the government just canceled one of our beloved annual public holidays because – they claim – we need to boost productivity to counter the threat posed by Putin and Russia. I’m sure Putin is just quaking with fear now that Danes will have to work one more day every year.
In reality, research clearly shows that increasing working hours is going to have the opposite effect and hurt the economy! Here are 6 reasons why.
1: Lower output
First of all – let’s make this very clear: Greek companies will not be any more productive or profitable with a 6-day workweek.
Why not? It really isn’t a big mystery: When employees work more hours they get more tired, They lose cognitive capacity which means that overworked people:
Are less productive
Are less creative
Make worse decisions
Make more mistakes.
Studies even show that overwork makes you dumber. A study of British government workers found that those who worked longer hours scored lower on various cognitive tests than their coworkers who worked 40 hours a week.
It’s important to make a clear distinction between PRODUCTIVITY and OUTPUT. Output is how much work a given person or team or company completes. A certain number of widgets produced in a factory or lines of code written in a tech company, for instance. Productivity on the other hand is output per hour worked, so how much gets produced per hour worked by employees.
For instance: If a car factory with 1000 employees makes 80 cars in an 8-hour shift, their output that day is 800 and their productivity is .01 car per man-hour.
Now, many people accept that a person who works 60 hours a week will probably be less PRODUCTIVE than one working 40. They intuitively get that the last 20 hours are probably going to be less effective than the first 40.
I asked about this on LinkedIn and people understand that. Only 17% believed that more working hours would lead to higher output.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that only 37% got the correct answer: that productivity actually drops so much for people working more than 50 hours a week – for all of the reasons we just saw – that their total OUTPUT is lower – not just their PRODUCTIVITY. This is true for both factory workers and knowledge workers. It’s not just a matter of diminishing returns on the extra hours – there’s a negative return on those hours and the company is overall LESS profitable.
This is not a new discovery. Back in world war 1 the British army needed as much ammunition as possible, so they desperately wanted to maximize the output of their munitions factories. So obviously they made workers work more – up to 90 hours a week. When that mysteriously didn’t work, they started gathering data connecting working hours to output and found something very curious.
This graph shows actual output (not productivity) vs. hours worked for two groups of women workers doing two different kinds of tasks. As you can see, beyond a certain number of hours – in this case 51 a week – working more hours did not increase output. Every hour worked after that was essentially wasted. We have known this since 1917.
This effect has been found again and again in many different studies from both factory settings and office-type knowledge work.
Granted, Greece isn’t moving workers to a 90-hour work week but only 48 hours every week, but the data shows very clearly that a 20% increase in hours will NOT lead to a 20% increase in production.
This new law is extra ironic because Greece already has the longest working hours per worker of any European country and 7th highest in the OECD.
So if Greece is hoping that companies will be overall more profitable and therefore boost the economy, the data shows the exact opposite – this will lead to lower productivity and output among Greek businesses.
2: More illness
So overwork is bad for the workplace – but it’s even worse for employees. Studies show that permanent overwork is connected with a long list of mental and physical health problems including strokes, depression, alcoholism, diabetes and heart disease.
This is not just bad for the individual, it’s also going to hurt Greek workplaces. If the problem they’re seeking to address is a lack of qualified workers, you don’t want your current workers to get sick and miss a ton of work.
And of course more illness among workers will also hurt the Greek economy because it will increase healthcare costs.
3: More workplace injuries
Also, a longer work week will lead to more workplace accidents. Research shows that an increase in normal hours worked increases injury risk because workers are more fatigued.
This is especially relevant for Greece because most of the workplaces that can extend hours under this new law will probably be in manufacturing.
4: Worse work-life balance and more burnout
This is so obvious that you hardly need to say it but if you’re working 6 days a week, your work-life balance is going to suffer. You’ll have less time for your family, your friends, your children, your partner, your hobbies and everything else in your life.
Research clearly shows that longer working hours lead to:
Impaired sleep
Job stress and burnout
Worse partner relationships
Worse family relationships
Lower life satisfaction
More burnout
And again, more burnout leads to more workers being absent from work and higher healthcare costs for the country.
5: More brain drain
Brain drain has been a huge problem for Greece. The financial crisis hit that country especially hard and the tough economy made hundreds of thousands of mostly young and well-educated people leave and find work in other countries. Authorities estimate that 600,000 young professionals left to work abroad between 2010 and 2021.
Greece really wants them back. Among other initiatives, the Labor Ministry has created an online platform called Rebrain Greece to help match professionals willing to return home with potential employers.
But here’s the thing: Given that the younger generations at work tend to value work-life balance, how do you think they’re going to like the prospect of being forced to work 6 days a week’ Imagine you’re a young Greek working in Denmark where the official work week is 37 hours and moving back might mean working 48 instead? Or imagine you’re a young Greek currently working in Greece whose workplace is looking to go to a 6-day workweek. Might this not be exactly the thing that inspires you to find work in a different country?
If Greece is looking to reverse the brain drain, this is exactly the wrong thing to do.
6: Unproductive time
OK, one last problem with Greece’s new law: While people can be forced into the workplace for a longer time, that doesn’t mean they’ll be working productively all the time. Forced overwork leads to a ton of unproductive time where people are at work? but little real work is getting done. This is deeply frustrating for workers because not only is that time taken away from the rest of your life, that time is WASTED and YOU KNOW it’s wasted. Nobody likes to waste time.
Also, studies show that when the workplace mandates long working hours, people tend to lie about how many hours they work. And managers are easy to fool. One study found that managers couldn’t tell the difference between those of their employees who ACTUALLY worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to.
What should Greece have done instead?
So my prediction is that this is going to backfire spectacularly for all of these reasons. Companies will be less productive, employees will be more sick leading to higher healthcare costs for the country and more Greeks who are able to will flee the country or stay abroad in countries that have more reasonable working hours.
What should Greece (and any other country looking to boost the economy) do instead? Well first they could have looked at all the countries that have tested a 4-day work week and found it to work exceptionally well. Like Iceland, where it’s been called an “overwhelming success.”
They could also have chosen policies that maximize workers’ welfare. Any government has an interest in enacting public policies that strengthen the competitive advantage of companies in that country. However, this is often done by cutting corporate taxes, deregulation or attempts to increase working hours – none of which have much of a track record of success.
If a government is truly serious about giving companies a sustained, strong competitive advantage, they should really focus on policies that create happier workplaces. This would not only be good for the companies and the employees, it would also be good for the national economy, as it would boost national productivity and reduce absenteeism, stress and related healthcare costs.
Another thing Greece could have done that I also mention in that article is invest in training existing workers. The unemployment rate in Greece is over 10% so there are plenty of people without jobs. They may not currently have the skills and competencies that companies are looking for but that’s why you train them.
But most of all, Greece – and any other country that wants to boost the economy – could have focused on maximizing output and profitability, not hours worked, and realized that those are two very different things. If they had spent just a little time looking at the available research on overwork, they would have realized that a longer work week is actually going to hurt, not help.
Just to be clear: I’m not saying that Greece’s new law is completely useless. You see, other countries are already looking at this law and asking if they could do the same. And I have every confidence that when this law inevitably backfires in Greece, that failure will warn any other countries or companies away from trying something similar.
So I guess we should all thank them for that at least.
Your take
What do you think? How much will this law boost the Greek economy? Should other countries follow their lead? What is the optimal length of a work week that will lead to the most output? Write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.
Video
If you’d prefer to watch this, I also have a video where I make all the same points:
A new law just went into effect in Greece that aims to boost the economy by moving workers to a 6-day work week. This law is going to backfire and hurt both the economy and of course the workers and in this video I present to present 6 reasons why.
Sometimes you put on your tinfoil hat… and turn out to be right.
Something so insane came along today that I just had to drop everything else and make this video. I give a little glimpse of how bad the US pension system is because it directly incentivizes companies when their employees die younger. I contrast and compare with the Danish pension system.
Some people want you to believe that quitting is weak and for losers. They’re lying and we need to normalize leaving jobs that are not good for us.
In this video we take a deep look at what happens when you’re unhappy at work, how you can know it’s time to quit and how you can support others who need to get away from a bad job.
Content:
(00:00) 1: Frogs aren’t idiots (01:01) 2: Introduction to quitting
(03:45) 3: How hating your job hurts you
(06:56) 4: Exposing the anti-quitting propaganda
(18:05) 5: The excuses people make for not quitting
(27:23) 6: Should you quit?
(32:47) 7: 21 perfectly valid reasons for quitting
(40:21) 8: What if you can’t quit
(46:24) 9: How to quit
(47:39) 10: Should you always find a new job first before you quit?
(49:42) 11: We should celebrate quitters
(59:22) 12: I quit!
Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Chinese tech company Alibaba, has come out in favor of the so-called 996 rule, i.e. that you should work from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week if you want to have a successful career. For anyone doing the math that’s 72 hours of work a week. Add a 1 hour commute on top of that and there’s very little time left for your family, kids, hobbies, exercise and life in general.
His belief in this is unshakeable:
“I personally think that 996 is a huge blessing,” hesaid. “How do you achieve the success you want without paying extra effort and time?”
He also added that you can only achieve business success through suffering and sacrifice.
I realize I may be wasting my time here by going up against a belief that is so prevalent among business leaders, but there’s no way I can let that kind of nonsense pass and not point out exactly why it’s wrong. Here are 5 quick reasons:
1: Pointing to successful people that achieved success by working 72 hours a week proves nothing. What about all the people that worked just as hard but failed?
2: Many of the mental qualities that make a person successful at work are lost when people are overworked, tired, stressed and unhappy, including networking, creativity and effective decision making.
So permanent overwork does not lead to increased results and success – in fact it hurts people AND profits.
It’s easy to point to Alibaba and say “But they work really long hours and the company is successful. Check mate!” But that’s just correlation; where is the proof that they are profitable BECAUSE OF the long working hours? Maybe they would’ve been even more profitable if their employees were happy, relaxed and had lives outside of work too? The research certainly indicates that.
So why do so many people still believe this nonsense? As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman noted, it’s difficult to change people’s minds. Look at this picture:
Every horizontal line is perfectly straight. Don’t believe me? Hold up a ruler to your screen and check. OK, now that you know the horizontal lines are straight, what does your mind see? Bendy lines.
You will often see Denmark listed as one of the “happiest countries on the planet.” Interestingly Danes are not only happy at home, they’re also happy at work and according to most studies of worker satisfaction among nations, the happiest employees in the world are in Denmark.
Here’s just one data point: Gallup found that 18% of American workers are actively disengaged, meaning they are “emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive.” The same number for Danish workers is only 10%.
But why are Danish workers so much happier than their counterparts around the world? Here are five fundamental differences that explain what’s going on.
1: REASONABLE WORKING HOURS
I once talked to an American who had gotten a job as a manager at a Danish company. Wanting to prove his worth, he did what he had always done and put in 60 to 70 hours a week. After a month, his manager invited him to a meeting. He was fully expecting to be praised for his hard work, but instead he was asked “Why do you work so much? Is something wrong? Do you have a problem delegating? What can we do to fix this?”
Some non-Danes wonder if Danes ever work. Not only do Danes tend to leave work at a reasonable hour most days, but they also get five to six weeks of vacation per year, several national holidays and up to a year of paid maternity/paternity leave. While the average American works 1,780 hours and the average South Korean 2,024 hours per year, the average Dane only works 1,408, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics. Danes also have more leisure hours than any other OECD workers and the link between sufficient leisure and happiness is well established in the research.
The difference to other countries is stark. Many companies around the world celebrate overwork as a sign of commitment. “You have to put in the hours” is the message in the mistaken belief that the more hours you work, the more work you get done. We call this “The Cult of Overwork.” Danish companies, on the other hand, recognize that employees also have a life outside of work and that working 80 hours a week is bad for both employees and the bottom line.
2: LOW POWER DISTANCE
In many countries, if your boss gives you an order, you pretty much do what you’re told. In a Danish workplace, extremely few direct orders are ever given and employees are more likely to view them as suggestions.
Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede has quantified the culture in more than 100 countries on several parameters, one of which is “power distance.” A high power distance means that bosses are undisputed kings whose every word is law. Danish workplaces–with a score of 18-have the lowest power distance in the world. Just for comparison, Belgium has a power distance of 65, China clocks in at 80 and Malaysia holds the world record at 100.
By law, any Danish workplace with more than 35 employees must open up seats on the board for employees. This means that Danish employees experience more autonomy and are more empowered at work. Here’s just one example: By law, any Danish workplace with more than 35 employees must open up seats on the board for employees, who are elected to the board by their peers and serve on an equal footing and with same voting powers as all other board members.
3: GENEROUS UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS
In Denmark, losing your job is not the end of the world. In fact, unemployment insurance seems too good to be true, giving workers up to 90% of their original salary for two years. In the U.S., for instance, losing your job can easily lead to financial disaster and loss of health insurance. This leads to job lock i.e. staying in a job you hate because you can’t afford to leave.
Simply put: If you’re a Dane and you don’t like your job, you can quit that job without risking serious financial problems, forcing companies to treat their employees well or risk losing them.
4: CONSTANT TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
Since the mid-1800s, Denmark has focused on life-long education of its workers. This policy continues to this day, with an extremely elaborate set of government, union, and corporate policies that allow almost any employee who so desires to attend paid training and pick up new skills. It’s called an “active labor market policy,” and Denmark spends more on these types of programs than any other country in the OECD.
This lets Danish workers constantly grow and develop and helps them stay relevant (not to mention stay employed) even in a changing work environment. It also makes their jobs richer and more interesting.
5: A FOCUS ON HAPPINESS
Here’s a word that exists only in the Scandinavian languages: Arbejdsglæde. Arbejde means work and glæde means happiness, so arbejdsglæde is “happiness at work.” This word is not in common use in any other language on the planet.
Many people around the world hate their jobs and consider this to be perfectly normal.
For instance, where we Scandinavians have arbejdsglæde, the Japanese instead have karoshi, which means “Death from overwork.” And this is no coincidence; there is a word for it in Danish because Danish workplaces have a long-standing tradition of wanting to make their employees happy. To most Danes, a job isn’t just a way to get paid; we fully expect to enjoy ourselves at work.
In other countries, the attitude towards work is often very different. A few years ago I gave a speech in Chicago, and an audience member told me that “Of course I hate my job, that’s why they pay me to do it!” Many people around the world hate their jobs and consider this to be perfectly normal. Similarly, many workplaces around the world do little or nothing to create happiness among employees, sticking to the philosophy that “If you’re enjoying yourself, you’re not working hard enough.”
THE UPSHOT
I’m not trying to paint Danish companies as utopias for workers and their international counterparts as tyrannical hellholes. There are bad Danish workplaces and stellar non-Danish ones–Zappos and Google are two that I’ve personally visited and studied.
But studies have uncovered a number of systemic and cultural differences between Denmark and the rest of the world that serve to explain why Danish workers are on average so much happier.
This goes far beyond happiness. We know from any number of studies that happy workers are more productive and innovative and that consequently, happy companies have happier customers and make more money. This may help explain why Danish workers are among the most productive in the OECD and why the Danish economy continues to do so well.
Yesterday I participated in the Copenhagen March for Science – part of a global movement to celebrate science and the role it plays in our live.
It was tremendously cool to march through the streets of Copenhagen along with hundreds of other science enthusiasts and it’s easy to see that it has never been more important to encourage the use of science in public policy given the challenges we’re facing (especially climate change) and the current unscientific and populist tendencies we’re seeing in some countries.
And the same goes in business. Many of the most widespread practices in business and leadership have been repeatedly proven wrong in studies and yet they persist. Here are some of my favorite examples of scientific findings that are being soundly ignored by many companies:
Given that happy companies have significant competitive advantages, governments have a strong interest in enacting public policies that promote happiness at work in their country.
But what exactly could a government do to achieve this?
We had a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion and came up with many cool ideas. Some of these may seem radical or weird but many of them are already in place in countries around the world.
Here are 11 ideas I would suggest:
1: Regulate and inspect psychological workplace safety
Pretty much every country has a government agency that sets requirements for physical workplace safety and sends out inspectors to visit e.g. factories and construction sites to make sure that the correct safety equipment is being used and that workers are following safety regulations.
So why not do the same for psychological workplace safety?
In the Scandinavian countries, this is actually in place. The Working Environment Authorities conduct inspections in cases where they suspect that working conditions are psychologically unsafe. They inspect things like:
Amount of work and time pressure
High emotional costs of labor
Bullying and sexual harassment
Contradictory or unclear work requirements
If they find that the workplace is psychologically unsafe they can issue orders that the company must follow. In serious cases they can even issue fines.
Breaking a leg because you trip over something at work is painful and can take a long time to heal. But make no mistake about it: being bullied by your boss or working under constant stress can affect your mental and physical health just as severely.
Therefore it makes perfect sense to mandate standards for psychological workplace safety and inspect workplaces to make sure they’re followed.
2: Regulate against permanent overwork
In Denmark, we have laws protecting employees from permanent overwork. The result is that Danes tend to leave work at a reasonable hour most days, and they also get five to six weeks of vacation per year, several national holidays and up to a year of paid maternity/paternity leave. While the average American works 1,790 hours per year, the average Dane only works 1,450.
Even Japan where the culture of overwork is so rampant that they have a word called karoshi that means death from overwork, is trying to enact similar laws:
The law, introduced as a response to the social problem that has been serious since the late 1980s, makes it the state’s responsibility to take steps to prevent death from overwork. It calls on the government to study the situation of heavy workloads that impair the health of company workers and lead them to take their own life.
Protecting employees from permanent overwork makes them happier and more productive.
3: Mandate employee representation on board of directors
Here’s another idea from Scandinavia – give employees representation on the board of directors:
Employees in Danish companies employing 35 employees or more, are entitled to elect a number of representatives to the board of directors. The number elected by employees should correspond to half the number elected by those who own the company at the general meeting, and should be at least two.
Crucially these employee representatives are not mere observers – they have all the same powers and responsibilities as the “regular” board members.
This means that employees are informed about and have influence on major strategic decisions.
4: Make government workplaces role models
I would love to see governments take a leading role by making public sector workplaces among the best in the country.
Sadly, the public sector usually has a bit of an inferiority complex. Since they usually can’t offer the same salaries, perks and incentives as private sector workplaces, they feel that they can’t be as good workplaces.
However, it turns out that those factors matter very little for workplace happiness, as long as they’re fair. However, public sector workplaces have a huge potential for being happy because they can offer something that many private workplaces struggle to give their employees: Meaningful work.
Public organizations almost by definition work for an important purpose. Schools educate children, hospitals heal the sick, city planners create better and more liveable cities – even the garbage men play a huge role in making people’s lives easier and better.
By contrast, let’s say you work in an ad agency. The end result of your hard work might be that some company somewhere sells a fraction more detergent. Is that really meaningful to you?
If public sector workplaces would take the lead on offering their employees things like meaningful work, great leadership, good working conditions, work/life balance, professional development and employee empowerment they could serve as role models for all workplaces.
5: Promote lifelong learning
When a government makes education available cheap or free to its citizens, there is a much bigger chance that they get to realize their full potential and become happy at work.
And this should not be limited to young people. Lifelong learning should make it easy and affordable for anyone to upgrade their skills so they can get different or more interesting work.
6: Require companies to measure and report on employee happiness
Pretty much all countries require strict financial reporting from companies.
So why not require companies to measure and report on employee happiness?
7: Require all government suppliers to be certified happy workplaces
The government of any nation buys huge amounts of goods and services from private sector companies.
No government should knowingly buy from a company that used slave labor or child labor or polluted the environment.
So why not require that all government suppliers be good workplaces?
8: Don’t hobble trade unions
Trade unions have a somewhat mixed reputation and can fall victim to corruption or cronyism.
However, on the whole it is clear from the research that collective bargaining is a powerful tool to improve working conditions not just for union members but for all workers in many areas including compensation, vacation time, maternity/paternity leave and workplace safety.
Employers and lobbyists in some countries are trying to restrict unions, making it easier for employers to keep costs low. If a government protects workers’ rights to organize, the result is better working conditions and happier workplaces.
9: Celebrate the best workplaces
Several private companies conduct surveys to find the best workplaces in different countries, but these rankings are always limited to those workplaces that pay to be included. This limits their usefulness.
So why not let the state publish a ranking of the best workplaces in the country?
10: Make unemployment benefits widely available and liveable
When unemployment benefits are too low to live on or too hard to obtain, employees are locked in to their jobs, because leaving a bad workplace could have disastrous financial consequences.
However, when unemployment benefits support a decent standard of living and are available also to people who quit a job, getting away from a toxic workplace is much easier.
11: Make bad workplaces and managers legally responsible for the harm they cause
If a workplace is run in a way that systematically harms its employees mental health, causing stress and depression, it should be possible to hold the leadership of that company legally accountable.
We already do this for workplaces that don’t live up to physical workplace safety regulations – serious violations can lead to fines or even jail time for the managers responsible.
I think it makes perfect sense to do the same for companies or managers that harm their employees mental health.
The point
Any government has an interest in enacting public policies that strengthen the competitive advantage of companies in that country.
However, this is often done by cutting corporate taxes, deregulation or corporate subsidies – none of which have much of a track record of success.
If a government is truly serious about giving companies a sustained, strong competitive advantage, they should really focus on policies that create happier workplaces.
This would not only be good for the companies and the employees, it would also be good for the national economy, as it would boost national productivity and reduce absenteeism, stress and related healthcare costs.
“Your car is having trouble and will need repairs at a cost of around $1,500. How would you handle that situation?”
Scientists from the University of Warwick led by professor Anandi Mani stopped customers at a New Jersey mall and asked them that question. Next the subjects took an IQ test and the results was stunning: For financially well-off participants, this question did not affect their IQ scores in any way. But people who were struggling financially underperformed by 13 IQ-points simply because their money worries had been brought to their attention.
This experiment is described in the excellent book “Scarcity – Why Having Too Little Means So Much” by professor of economics Sendhil Mullainathan and professor of psychology Eldar Shafir, in which the two scientists clearly lay out the negative cognitive effects of scarcity.
When we have too little of something that is important to us we become a little dumber, less disciplined and we make poor choices. This helps explain – among many other things – why poor people keep taking out pay-day loans, even when they should know better and even though those incredibly expensive loans just put them deeper in the hole.
And this is not only about lack of money; the book gives plenty of examples of how time scarcity has the same kind of effects, making us dumber and worse at managing what little time we do have effectively.
So, knowing this, why is it that so many workplaces mercilessly keep putting their employees under massive time pressure? Why do leaders consistently create time scarcity?
This happens when:
Employees are routinely expected to increase their productivity year after year with little or no additional support, training or resources.
A manager commits to their team doing more work with the same staff.
A company is growing and taking on new clients/projects without a commensurate increase in staff and resources.
An organization lays off staff but expects the reduced staff to the same amount of work.
Schedules are filled to capacity with meetings and tasks before the work week even starts, leaving no time for ad-hoc or unexpected tasks.
Some leaders think that these situations create a burning platform that pressures employees to work effectively and creatively towards the company’s goals, but the truth is the opposite: Time scarcity reduces employees’ cognitive resources and makes it much harder for them to do their jobs well.
And what’s worse, this can become self-reinforcing. Here’s an example: An organizations reduces headcount leading to increased time pressure and scarcity among those left. This weakens their cognitive capacity and productivity drops, leading to even more busyness and scarcity.
Is this something you see happening in your workplace? Here are 5 things we can do about it.
1: Take time pressure off employees
Instead of giving employees hard-to-reach productivity goals and filling their work week to the brim (and beyond) we need to give them more realistic goals and leave some slack in their schedules so any ad-hoc task that comes along (as it inevitably will) does not topple the whole load.
Most employees actually get more work done when they have productivity goals that are reasonable and within their capacity.
Here’s a great example: The IT company Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor only lets employees work 40 hours a week and then only schedules 32 hours of work per employee per week. That way there is no time scarcity and always time for unexpected tasks. This is described in the excellent book “Joy Inc” by Menlo’s CEO Rich Sheridan.
2: Celebrate good performance
We also need to constantly praise and appreciate people and teams for the good work they do. This give employees a sense of accomplishment and purpose that goes a long way towards combatting time scarcity.
Some workplaces do the opposite though: First giving people unrealistic goals and then hitting them over the head for not reaching those goals.
3: Leave time for learning and development
Every single employee must have time to get better. To learn new professional and personal skills. To reflect on what is working well and what can be improved in the workplace.
This becomes near-impossible under time scarcity, preventing employees from getting better at their jobs.
The IT company Next Jump in New York give each employee significant time every week to develop their skills with a mentor, in weekly meetings or on their own. That way employees always have time for growth and development, which they deem essential to their success. Here’s a great article on how they do it.
4: Maintain good workplace relationships
One of the first things to go in a workplace facing time scarcity is the workplace relationships.
When we are very busy it becomes exponentially harder to care about other people, to help and support co-workers and to maintain a habit of helping each other. Needless to say, this just makes the effects of busyness that much worse.
Instead we need to make sure that there is always time to create and maintain relationships between employees. There should always be time for a coffee break and a chat with a co-worker. No one should eat lunch alone at their desk. Even something as simple as saying a cheerful “good morning” to your team mates in the morning can make a positive difference – and can be neglected and forgotten under time scarcity.
5: Avoid permanent overwork
Some companies try to solve this by making people work more hours. Don’t!
Simply put, many workplaces put employees in a situation of near-permanent time scarcity, thinking this will pressure them to work harder. The truth is the opposite: It makes them more stressed, more sick, less happy and less productive.
Instead, we should do our very best to reduce time pressures because that way, the organization will be more successful.
Your take
Do you see any of this happening in your workplace? Is time a scarce resource and how does it affect you?
“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.
The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. Get an in-depth background in happiness at work, hear about the latest research in the field and learn how to use this in your own business.
Discussing public policy in Dubai
