This is just too cool: Every month, financial-services company Motley Fool selects a random employee who gets 2 weeks off and $1,000. Their mission is to spend those two weeks on whatever they want with zero contact with the office.
They do this to show employees that it’s OK to balance work and life and not overwork yourself to death.
Genius!
10 days ago I posted this picture of a memo from Joe Biden to his staff, saying that he never wants them “to miss or sacrifice important family obligations for work.”
The image has since gone viral. It was retweeted by tons of people (including the amazing Sarah Silverman) and it has gained a lot of attention on LinkedIn too.
The 1000s of likes/favorites show that people love this idea and so do the many, many positive comments. Here are some examples:
Having worked in the past for a company who insisted you “made up the hours you’ve taken off” for hospital appointments, dentist treatment and even funerals and bereavements, this makes me smile! A breath of fresh air.
– Lee CashmanHaving just started up a new business, one of the absolute joys is finally being able to treat everyone in the business as if they genuinely matter, not just paying lip service to this. I still find it amazing that companies fail to realise that treating the team with respect and trusting them will be reciprocated massively. We have written into our contracts that everyone gets time off for school plays, sports days etc.
– Glenn Martin
There is a real longing out there for leaders who understand that while work is important we must also recognize that sometimes important family events come first.
This is not only humane, it is also good leadership because it makes employees happier and therefore more productive.
In fact, it seems strange to me that anyone could be against it, but this being the internet, of course I got some negative comments too.
For instance, given the current political climate in the US, some comments were negative simply because Biden is a Democrat. This one was my favorite:
“The man is a complete baffoon!!!”
You know, if you can’t even spell buffoon… you might just be one :)
But there were three common objections that I’d like to offer my rebuttals to.
Some people just can’t believe that this could possibly be true. Some sample comments:
“But those that go the extra mile get the promotion. It’s lip service of the politically correct. If anyone believes that memo they must not understand American work ethic.”
“If I ever got a letter like this from an employer I would think there is a hidden agenda.”
“This is Reverse Psychology at it’s best.”
I’ll be the first to admit that this sounds unrealistic. In many workplaces, particularly in the US, there is a strong belief in the cult of overwork.
And I have to say that I’ve never actually worked for Joe Biden’s office or met anyone who has so I have no way of knowing if this is true or just nice words.
But what I have been able to learn from some internet research, is that Biden is, by all accounts, a tremendously nice person.
Here’s republican senator Lindsay Graham talking warmly about Biden.
“I called him after Beau died, and he basically said, ‘Well Beau was my soul’,” Graham said, his voice trembling, adding that Biden gave a speech at Graham’s retirement party from the Air Force Reserve “and said some of the most incredibly heartfelt things that anybody could ever say to me.”
“He’s THE nicest person I’ve ever met in politics,” Graham said. “He’s as good a man as God has ever created.”
Graham added, “We don’t agree on much,” but noted Biden has “been dealt a real gut blow” yet “focuses on what he’s got to do, not what he’s lost.”
“His heart has been ripped out but he’s gonna make sure the other members of his family are well taken care of,” Graham said. “He’s more worried about his grandkids than anything…. He started talking about the future, the future of his family.”
This GQ article on Biden also notes his friendly spirit and happy personality. Here’s what happened when Biden went to the Italian President’s palace:
I saw him freelance a grand Joe Biden entrance into President Giorgio Napolitano’s palace, teeth gleaming, arms fully outstretched, ready to hug this guy, that guy, Hey, guys! I’m here! You’re here! We’re beautiful!
Decked out in his smooth blue suit, white pocket square—his broad smile the kind a man reserves for his bowling team. This demeanor contrasted sharply with everyone else’s. Guards in shiny helmets sprouting horsehair ponytails, bedraggled White House advance team in smart skirts and solid-color pumps. A Biden entrance can make the stuffiest event intimate, for an instant human and vaguely…funny.
2: “This is easy in the government sector”
By far the most common objection was that this lax attitude of letting staff take time for family is easy in government. In a “real” workplace, it would never work. Some sample comments:
“Very easy to do on gov’t time.”
“Easier to write if one is not running a profit-making business, fulfilling commitments to clients.”
“Sure what does he care. Its the people money and he never signed a paycheck in his life so its not his money.”
Nonsense. This is good leadership in any workplace, public or private sector.
I firmly believe that if you want to give the taxpayers’ the best possible government, one that works as efficiently as humanly possible, then this is the exact right policy.
Some commenters lamented that this soft attitude would surely tank any workplace sentimental enough to actually let its employees take time off for important family events:
“Nice sentiment, but totally disconnected from current reality & results. Consider it this way — If you were a C-level exec running a lackluster company with many problems and then taking long lunches and letting your staff take free days whenever they had an important moment… you’d be out of business.”
“What is right is the mission and getting the job done in either public or private. Showing you care is not the decisive management technique or sole point…winning is much more of a motivation.”
“I hope my competition reads this and adopts the policy, I’ll be happy to close deals while they attend graduations.”
This is exactly the kind of dinosaur thinking that is so prevalent in business today – and it’s exactly the kind of thinking that is creating a lot of stress, frustration and ultimately poor performance.
I call it the cult of overwork – the irrational belief that the more hours bosses can make people work, the better.
Look, it’s not rocket science: Studies show that happy employees are more productive, committed, conscientious and creative and also have lower absenteeism and turnover rates.
Simply put, happy workplaces get better results. And many bosses get that.
I found an excellent blog post about Wisetech Global, an Australian IT company with a completely different attitude to overwork:
If employees work more than 40 hours a week regularly, they have to talk to their manager to redress the situation.
…
WiseTech Global chief executive Richard White said the company’s approach was consistent with its core values, which state that although staff should strive for the best outcomes, “we do not ask people to impale themselves on their work commitments”.
…
“Its not the amount of work, it’s the quality of the work,” he said.
On the other hand, if you’re the kind of boss who demands that employees come to work even though they have important family obligations, you demonstrate clearly that you care nothing for the well-being of your people. What happens is they become stressed and frustrated. The best employees quickly leave and find work elsewhere, where they’re treated with respect and you are left with only those employees who lack the skills or the energy to get away from you.
Add to that the trail of devastation, the ruined health and the broken families that this antiquated management style also causes and I simply don’t understand how these managers can live with themselves. It is bad leadership, it’s bad for people, it’s bad for business and it’s just plain stupid.
This 2014 letter from US vice president to his staff is AWESOME. Here’s the full text:
“To my wonderful staff,
I would like to take a moment and make something clear to everyone. I do not expect, nor do I want any of you to miss or sacrifice important family obligations for work. Family obligations include, but are not limited to family birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, any religious ceremonies such as first communions and bar mitzvahs, graduations and times of need such as an illness or a loss in the family. This is very important to me. In fact I will go so far as to say that if I find out you are working with me while missing important family responsibilities, it will disappoint me greatly. This has be an unwritten rule sine my days in the Senate.
Thank you for all the hard work.
Sincerely,
Joe.”
There are three reasons why I love this:
Considering the losses Biden has suffered in his family, this letter becomes even more poignant.
UPDATE: This post went viral and generated a lot of comments. Most were positive, but there were also some criticisms, that I felt missed the mark. I’ve countered them here:
The 3 most common objections to Biden’s AWESOME memo – and my rebuttals.
If you have some vacation time coming up, and if you’re like most people, you will put up an autoreply email just before you leave, saying that you’re gone, when you’ll be back and who to contact if it’s urgent.
Although this approach is nearly universal, it has two massive flaws:
I have talked to many people who mention both of these as a source of stress and I’ve just seen too many parents on family vacations handling work emails on their phone/laptop by the pool, when they should’ve been playing with their kids.
Fortunately there’s an alternative: Close your inbox while you’re away. This may seem like a weird idea but some workplaces are already doing it:
The car and truck maker Daimler has implemented a new program that allows employees to set their email software to automatically delete incoming emails while they are on vacation.
When an email is sent, the program, which is called “Mail on Holiday,” issues a reply to the sender that the person is out of the office and that the email will be deleted, while also offering the contact information of another employee for pressing matters.
I think this is brilliant and ought to become the standard way we handle emails on vacations.
The autoreply during your holiday would then look something like this:
I’m on vacation and your email was not delivered to me. You can resend it when I’m back at the office on August 4 and I’ll be happy to get back to you then.
Or if it’s urgent, you can contact these great people:
lisa@company.com
stephen@company.comBest,
John
Here are 5 reasons why you should close your work inbox completely on your next holiday.
Here’s the problem: You’re away from work. As part of your contract with the company, you have time off and yet emails still reach you. This means that some of the work from your vacation time is simply shifted into your post-vacation work days.
And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a company that plans for their employees to have extra time after a vacation to deal with the emails that came in during the vacation. Therefore this becomes extra work you have to do on top of your regular tasks.
One consequence of this is that many people end up checking their emails and responding to them during their holidays, which is also unfair. You’re entitled to time away from work. That’s what a holiday is.
But one of the most insidious effects of this is that taking longer stretches of time away from the office is punished immediately upon return, because your inbox will be full to overflowing. I haven’t seen any research on this, but I could easily imagine that this would subconsciously discourage people from taking time off or at the very least increase stress around any time off.
When you know in advance that not a single work email will tick in, you can relax more. You can better be present in your vacation activities and be with the people you love.
Imagine going away for 2 weeks without dealing with incoming emails and coming back to find that the world has not ended, the office is not on fire and the company didn’t bankrupt itself in your absence. In fact, things went pretty smoothly without you.
Being indispensable at work can give you quite a kick, but it’s a dangerous addiction.
In short, while you’re a valued employee who does great work, you are not indispensable. No one is. Or at least, no one should be. If your workplace cannot function at all without you, that is a clear failure of organization and leadership.
Knowing that things can function without you leads to a lot less stress and makes it easier for you to take time off in the future.
In my company, bosses send emails at all hours – late at night, on the weekend or during vacations – and always expect an answer. If you don’t react within 20 minutes, you get a text message demanding a reply. If you don’t react to that, they call you on the phone. They basically expect us to always be available.
Some clients (these can be external or internal clients/managers/co-workers) have developed an expectation that others are available to them 24/7.
Closing your inbox sets boundaries and shows them that this is not the way things are.
And finally, closing your inbox means that when you get back to the office, you can instantly be more effective because you don’t have to deal with a backlog of hundreds of emails and having to figure out which of them were important, which are still relevant and which were handled by others while you were gone.
If you go on vacation with an empty inbox, you come back to an empty inbox. Anything important that wasn’t handled in your absence can be resent to you now that people know you’re back.
I took most of July off this and did exactly this. However, I’m self-employed, so I can do whatever I want :)
But what if your workplace won’t allow you to do it? If that’s the case, there’s also a middle way.
Julian Troian is the Chief Happiness Officer of a company in Luxembourg called Etix Everywhere. His autroreply gives people an option to interrupt his vacation but also makes it clear that there’s a cost:
I am currently out of the office on vacation.
I know I’m supposed to say that I’ll have limited access to email and won’t be able to respond until I return… but that’s not true. My iPhone will be with me and I can respond if I need to. And I recognize that I’ll probably need to interrupt my vacation from time to time to deal with something urgent.
That said, I promised my family that I am going to try to disconnect, get away and enjoy our time together as much as possible. So, I’m going to leave the decision in your hands:
If your email truly is urgent and you need a response while I’m on vacation, please give me a call on +352.xxxxxx and I’ll try to take your call and provide you with assistance.
If you think someone else at Etix Everywhere might be able to help you, feel free to email one of my colleagues at HR : xxxxx@etixgroup.com and they’ll try to point you in the right direction.
Otherwise, I’ll respond when I return…
Warm regards,
Julian
Julian says it works really well and people only interrupt him when it’s something urgent that only he can deal with.
How will you handle emails on your next vacation? Could you close your inbox?
Happiness at work starts from the top. This is one of the fundamental truths of happy workplaces.
In any organization where people consistently love to work, you will find a CEO and executive leadership team that places employee happiness among their top strategic priorities and act accordingly.
One of our favorite examples of a CEO who truly gets this is Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines (since retired), who put it like this:
When I started out, business school professors liked to pose a conundrum: Which do you put first, your employees, your customers, or your shareholders? As if that were an unanswerable question.
My answer was very easy: You put your employees first. If you truly treat your employees that way, they will treat your customers well, your customers will come back, and that’s what makes your shareholders happy.
So there is no constituency at war with any other constituency. Ultimately, it’s shareholder value that you’re producing.
If, on the other hand, you have top brass who don’t give a damn about anything but the bottom line and their own bonuses and stock options, I can flat-out guarantee that you will create an organization with very little happiness but with a lot of fear, stress and frustration. And, ironically, with poor bottom line results.
So top executives MUST make employee happiness one of their most important goal. Both because it’s the right thing to do for the sake of their people, but also because it will actually make the company more successful. Studies consistently show that happy workplaces make more money.
But how does a CEO or top executive practice this on a daily basis? What can they do to make their organization happier?
Here are 10 great real-life examples that we’ve seen work really well in workplaces around the world.
During a speech in Istanbul, I met an executive of a huge Turkish organization who has had a monthly lunch with 10 randomly picked employees for years now. Every month 10 employees get a chance to have a nice lunch and over the course of a couple of hours get to ask any question they want and air any concerns or complaints.
They also get a chance to meet him in an informal setting and get a sense of who he is as a person.
Some CEOs enjoy doing little random things to surprise and delight their staff. Here’s an example from Medis, one of our clients in Iceland, where the CEO decided to make fresh pancakes and waffles for anyone passing by.
He even had a great time himself:
I thoroughly enjoyed it – the biggest joy I actually got out of observing the reaction of the colleagues !
FYI we did not announce anything but simply showed up in the corridor without notice and took people pleasantly by surprise.
The Danish Competition and Consumer Authority is a government agency whose 200 employees work to enforce consumer regulations and keep markets competitive.
Every month they have a breakfast meeting where important information is shared with all employees. At this meeting, the director Agnete always shares 2-3 successes that the organization has had since the last meeting. She’ll highlight how they’ve completed a big project or won a court case and make sure that the people who worked on that are recognized and celebrated.
One CEO we know had a strong desire to receive all bad news as soon as possible. He knew bad things happened (they do in all workplaces) but he also knew that some employees were to afraid of reprisals to come out and directly say that they might miss a deadline or have to disappoint a client.
So he has trained himself and his managers to always receive bad news with a smile and a phrase like “Thank you for telling me that.” This took some practice.
That way bad news come out early and can be dealt with before it turns into a disaster.
One fast-growing company of ours has a tradition where the CEO hosts a monthly afternoon tea at his home for all new hires that month.
It’s a completely informal gathering that serves two functions: He gets to meet all the new people and get a sense of who they are and he takes some time to talk about the company’s history and vision which is a powerful way to show the new hires the values and purpose of the organization.
South African social media agency Quirk has a process in place that encourages employees to bring about any problems they see to the attention of the executive team. The process gives all employees a voice and guarantees action from the executives in two weeks at the most.
You can read about their process here.
Here is a letter that US vice president Joe Biden sent to his staff in 2014:
He explicitly tells them that it’s OK to prioritize important family events over work. Appreciating staff and giving them time for family makes them happier – and happy staff are more productive. It also combats the ubiquitous cult of overwork.
Carsten and Karsten, two sales managers at Danish company Solar, wanted to do something nice for their employees.
Early one Monday morning, they stood at the entrance and greeted every employee with a cheerful “good morning” and a breakfast they could take to their desks.
In one company, the CEO was told by a trembling employee, that the company website was down. This was a big deal – this company made most of its sales online, and downtime cost them thousands of dollars an hour.
The CEO asked what had happened, and was told that John in IT had bungled a system backup, and caused the problem. “Well, then,” says the CEO “Let’s go see John!”
When the CEO walked into the IT department everyone went quiet. They had a pretty good idea what wass coming, and were sure it wouldn’t be pretty.
The CEO walks up to John’s desk and asks “You John?”
“Yes” he says meekly.
“John, ” says the CEO, “I want to thank you for finding this weakness in our system. Thanks to your actions, we can now learn from this, and fix the system, so something like this can’t happen in the future. Good work!”
Then he left a visibly baffled John and an astounded IT department. That particular mistake never happened again.
In many workplaces, employees who do good work are rarely recognized but anyone who makes a mistake is immediately and harshly punished. This is dumb.
When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes. And that’s why top executives should help employees celebrate mistakes.
As an example, IT company Menlo Innovations in Michigan has this banner hanging in their office:
The execs wrapped up at 6 in the evening and Ingvar then took a stroll through the entire store as if this was the most natural thing in the world, kindly greeting each and every employee. He encountered two female employees talking to each other and approached them with a smile and the words: “And what are you two lovely ladies talking about?” – following up with big hugs for both of them.
I love this because it shows a genuine interest in the employees and because Kamprad is clearly happy himself and not afraid to show it.
We know from psychological studies that emotions are contagious and top leaders can spread a lot of happiness simply by being happy themselves.
This list is by no means exhaustive and it’s definitely not meant to be prescriptive. We’re not saying all executives should do these things.
What we are saying is that top executives play a huge role in creating happy workplaces. They do this in the big stuff – by making sure that the strategies, plans, goals and values they set for the organization are defined with the employees’ well-being in mind.
But they also do it in small, daily, interpersonal ways where they can show that they genuinely care about their people, can build relationships with employees and can let employees see them as real human beings.
However, this can only work under a few conditions:
Understanding this and acting on it gives the executives in a workplace huge leverage to make their employees feel valued professionally and personally – thus increasing happiness, engagement and motivation as well as productivity.
Not doing this – and let’s face facts, most executives don’t – means failing your employees, your customers and your investors.
Do you think executives should care about the happiness of their employees? Do the executives in your workplace honestly care about their people? How do they show it / not show it?
The video has English subtitles. If you don’t see them, press the 
button in the video.
Could a 30-hour workweek work?
It not only could, for the mechanics at Toyota Center in Gothenburg Sweden it has worked incredibly well for over 10 years, leading to happier employees, happier customers and higher growth and profits.
In this short 13-minute speech, CEO Martin Banck of Toyota Center Gothenburg explains why they made the transition from a 40-hour workweek to 30 and what the results have been.
One outcome: Their mechanics now get more work done in 30 hours a week, than other mechanics do in 40. Not only is productivity higher (which you would certainly expect), their actual total output is higher!
In fact, several workplaces in Sweden are now trying it out, including hospitals and nursing homes.
I fully realize that many people are going to dismiss this out of hand. They are stuck in the cult of overwork and totally committed to the idea that working more hours always means getting more work done, even though the research shows that permanent overwork leads to poor health and low performance.
It seems counter-intuitive that you could work fewer hours and get more done, but here’s another example:
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.
We need to fundamentally change how we think about time in the workplace and Toyota Gothenburg is a great example to learn from.
I believe we’re seeing a new kind of leadership emerging.
It’s been a truism that leadership is about maximizing business results, whatever it takes. As the economist Milton Friedman depressingly put it:
The business of business is business.
He argued that a CEO who spent resources on anything that did not enhance shareholder value was failing his duties and could be fired or sued.
This kind of thinking is still incredibly prevalent in the business world and it leads to attitudes and actions that are incredibly damaging.
This is the kind of thinking that lets a corporation:
You may think me dystopian but these things go on daily in corporations all over the world. And ultimately executives think they are right to do these kinds of things because their only responsibility is shareholder value. They take no responsibilities to do good in the world – or even avoid doing bad.
In fact, they have been so immersed in this kind of thinking that they can do incredible harm and feel no remorse. I have seen way too many press releases where a CEO explains why she/he fired 1,000s of employees to “enhance stakeholder value” without showing even a shred of regret or emotional investment in the fact that their leadership is now harming 1000s of families.
And that is why I think we need a new kind of executive – one that is motivated primarily by doing good. Or, in other words, by increasing happiness.
And I do see a lot of these leaders. They are not perfect people but they have a clear vision of what they want in the world and rather than just maximizing shareholder value, they want to create more happiness in 4 domains:
These leaders create organizations that are a force for good in the world. They lead in a way that is sustainable – not just environmentally but also economically and psychologically.
Their employees’ lives are better and happier for working there. Customers’ lives are improved by the company’s services or products. And the world is in some way a better place because this company exists.
And don’t ignore the first one: These leaders are happy themselves, because they know that their leadership is making things better, not worse.
There are many examples of these leaders in all industries and all over the world. I’ll be writing a book about them next. The ones I know of include Tony Hsieh, Richard Branson, Ben Zander, Ricardo Semler, Lars Kolind, Vineet Nayar, Thyra Frank, Rich Sheridan, Herb Kelleher, Colleen Barrett, Charlie Kim, Patch Adams, Odd Reitan, Ingvar Kamprad, Yvon Chouinard and many, many others.
Do you see more happy leadership or more if the old kind out there? What does either of them do to you?
And if you know any other happy leaders, I’d love to hear about them.
Get the slides right here.
Are people in your workplace busy? Dumb question, right – everyone is these days.
Here are the results of one US study from 2005:
And this was 10 years ago – indications are that it’s only gotten worse since.
This constant busyness is not only making us unhappy and stressed at work, it’s also hurting performance and keeping us form doing our best possible work.
Join our next free webinar to learn what we can do about it. Topics include:
Date and time: Wednesday March 4th at noon US East coast time / 9am pacific time / 5pm GMT / 6pm Central European time.
If you feel like email is stressing you out, there might be something to it. A study conducted at the University of California found that giving people uninterrupted time where they weren’t dealing with email generally made them less stressed and better able to focus:
Without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window.
Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email.
This Fast Company article has a great overview of the findings. It’s a rather small study, so take it with a grain of salt, but it does support the sense that emails are a source of stress and distraction at work.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against email. It’s an awesome communication tool, but in many workplaces it is used poorly, and mostly the burden has been put on employees to figure out strategies for dealing with the resulting email onslaught.
I think it’s time for workplaces to take responsibility for this issue at a corporate level and fortunately, some workplaces have done just that and are trying new and better email policies.
Here are the 5 best we’ve found.
French trade unions recently negotiated a deal for some of their members, which:
…allows staff to shut down their phones and computers after 6 p.m. and not have to worry about checking in.
Part of the deal is that companies can’t pressure or make their employees feel bad about not checking or responding to their email either.
This is a good first approach to reduce the pressure to handle emails outside of working hours. While it can definitely help, it has the limitation that it puts full responsibility on employees to not check emails. Which is why I like the next one even better.
VW made an agreement with the company’s work council to limit employees’ access to email on their Blackberry devices outside of working hours:
Under the arrangement servers stop routing emails 30 minutes after the end of employees’ shifts, and then start again 30 minutes before they return to work.
The staff can still use their devices to make calls and the rule does not apply to senior management.
I really like this idea. Now it’s not up to employees to not check emails in their free time, email is just not delivered.
Intel tried an experiment where 300 engineers and managers went “offline” every Tuesday morning.
During these periods they had all set their email and IM clients to “offline”, forwarded their phones to voice mail, avoided setting up meetings, and isolated themselves from “visitors” by putting up a “Do not disturb” sign at their doorway.
The purpose was to see the effect of 4 hours of contiguous “thinking time”.
The experiment was a hit:
It has been successful in improving employee effectiveness, efficiency and quality of life for numerous employees in diverse job roles. 45% of post-pilot survey respondents had found it effective as is, and 71% recommended we consider extending it to other groups, possibly after applying some modifications.
However it’s telling that this experiment was conducted in 2008 and nothing’s changed inside Intel. It shows just how ingrained corporate attitudes to email are.
One of the most insidious effects of email overload is that any longer stretches of time away from the office is punished immediately upon return, because your inbox will be full to overflowing. I haven’t seen any research on this, but I could easily imagine that this would subconsciously discourage people from taking vacations or at the very least increase stress around any time off.
And that’s why this policy from Daimler is so awesome:
The car and truck maker has implemented a new program that allows employees to set their email software to automatically delete incoming emails while they are on vacation.
When an email is sent, the program, which is called “Mail on Holiday,” issues a reply to the sender that the person is out of the office and that the email will be deleted, while also offering the contact information of another employee for pressing matters.
So you can go on vacation knowing that when you come back your inbox will contain the same number of emails as when you left.
US software company Menlo Innovations have ditched internal emails in favor of what they call “High-speed voice-activated technology.” Yes, if you want some information from a coworker, you’ll have to actually talk to that person.
Several other companies have done something similar. Typically, employees can still receive emails from external sources like clients and vendors but there is no way to email colleagues.
This makes a lot of sense considering all the great tools that can replace emails in many cases. We use Podio internally and it has seriously cut down on the number of internal emails we need to send. Others use Yammer or chat or even facebook.
Update: Markus Schröter alerted me to another cool email policy:
from now on, each Ferrari employee will only be able to send the same email to three people in-house.
Email can be awesome. It can suck. It’s time for workplaces to create policies that address some of the problems and reduce the stress.
What’s your take on this? How is email affecting you? Which of the policies above would you like to see implemented in your workplaces? Know of any other great corporate email policies?
Last year I did a workshop for a client in Copenhagen whose main problem was that they were just way too busy. They’re a trade union and new legislation meant that they got an influx of new government-mandated tasks but budget constraints meant they couldn’t hire more people.
Consequently they were increasingly falling behind on their work, through no fault of their own. They have an internal IT system that tracks every open case and they were currently 3,000 cases behind.
Even though this was due to circumstances outside of their control, knowing that they were behind made everybody stressed and irritable. They also felt a responsibility towards their members – every delayed case meant that one of their union members was waiting for an important answer or potentially weren’t being paid money they were owed.
This situation is becoming familiar in many workplaces where there is simply more work than resources. Typically management will bombard employees with information showing the current lag, which only serves to make people frustrated and unhappy at work.
So what can you do instead? Here’s what we did in our workshop with this client.
I pointed out the fact that they were currently behind by 3,000 cases. Everybody had heard that number – it had been sent out en emails and mentioned in countless meetings. I then gave the group 30 post-its notes and told them that each post-it represented 100 open cases.
I asked them to stick those post-its on the wall. It looked like this:
I asked how looking at that made them feel and they said things like “I feel hopeless,” “I feel like we’re failing our members,” and “I don’t see how we can ever catch up.”
Then I gave them 900 more post-it notes and asked the group to stick them on the wall next to that. It looked like this:
I told them that I’d checked their IT system, and in the last 12 months they had completed 90,000 cases. Each post-it represents 100 cases – hence 900 post-its.
I asked how they felt looking at this and they said things like “I feel proud,” “I feel like we’re making a difference,” and “I feel hopeful.”
Interestingly, the year before that they’d processed 73,000 cases so they had actually become much more productive, but had never focused on that. Instead their focus was only ever on how much they were falling behind.
This gave them renewed energy to tackle their increased case load. They also came up with their own way to track progress, using a whiteboard in their cafeteria:
They use it to track monthly completed cases. They’d set a goal for March of 1,000 cases – and reached it on March 17th. Note how they had to extend the scale upward with a piece of paper because they completed much more work than planned.
In short, focusing on the work they completed (instead of how much they were falling behind) allowed them to catch up over a period of a few months.
Sadly, many workplaces do the exact opposite. When teams fall behind, they are constantly told exactly how much. I’ve seen workplaces send out weekly emails with red graphs showing the current lag. I’ve seen the same graphs hanging in offices, cafeterias and being presented in every department meeting.
The problem is of course that this makes employees frustrated, hopeless and unhappy. The work of Harvard professor Teresa Amabile has shown that the most important factor that makes us happy at work is perceived meaningful progress in our work and that the absence of progress makes us unhappy.
And of course we know from the research that happy employees are more productive, creative and resilient.
In short, this means that most workplaces set up a vicious cycle:
So that’s my challenge to your workplace: How can you highlight and celebrate the work that gets done, instead of only feeling bad over the work that’s not yet completed?
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