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 … Continue reading AWESOME letter from Joe Biden to his staff. Every boss should say this.
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: Emails still reach your inbox, tempting … Continue reading 5 reasons you should close your inbox on your next vacation
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 … Continue reading 10 simple things the CEO can do to create a happy workplace
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 … Continue reading How Toyota Gothenburg moved to a 30-hour workweek and boosted profits and customer satisfaction
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 … Continue reading Leading with happiness
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: 26% of employees were overworked often or very often in the last month 27% were overwhelmed by how much work they had to do often or … Continue reading Free webinar: How to stay happy when things get busy
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 … Continue reading 5 awesome 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 … Continue reading What do you do when there’s just too much work?
The articles on this blog have been viewed more than 10,000,000 times. I can hardly believe it. Here are the 10 most popular of all time. 10: Top 5 reasons why “The Customer is Always Right” is wrong The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of … Continue reading Our 10 most popular articles ever
I’ve written a lot about the obsession companies have with tracking and increasing employees’ working hours – based on the myth that working more hours leads to better results. But the clearest and most concise commentary on this comes from Zach Holman of American software company GitHub, who puts it like this: Hours are bullshit! … Continue reading Stop obsessing about working hours
