Our Woohoo Partnership program is constantly growing and we now have partners in 15 different countries:
Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia,Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Serbia, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, USA
See the full list of partners here.
We are looking for many more partners around the world so if you want to work with happiness at work, read all about the Woohoo Partnership program here.
We have just announced the next two Woohoo Academies, which take place:
We have held 2 editions of the Woohoo Academy already, one in Copenhagen and one in Prague. It’s our 3-day intensive, in-depth training for anyone who wants to learn all about happiness at work.
Here’s what participants said about the training:
The Woohoo Academy was, without a doubt, the best training I have ever experienced (and I’ve participated in many trainings). It was very well organized, and provided the latest research, practical strategies and opportunities to engage in many meaningful experiential activities.
– Danielle, Canada
I have attended many motivational and leadership courses over the past 20 years and never came out with so much clarity as after this course. It was interesting with so many nationalities, experiences and angles to the same topic. The value vs time spend for me was immense as my entire organisation over 100 people will benefit directly.
– Monika, Czech Republic
My main reason for going to the course was to got a broader perspective on happiness at work. I wanted to learn more about the theory behind joy, people, work, meaning and succes in businesses. The course gave me a lot of confidence on this topic and I’m convinced that within a copple of years this will be a very important part of leading a business.
– Tamara, Netherlands
The training is for:
For us, the Academy is a huge pleasure too. It lets us take a deep dive into many of the things we’ve learned about happiness at work over the years, which we find incredibly fascinating, but which we rarely get a chance to share because it goes into more depth than most of our clients need.
Link sharing site reddit asked its users a really interesting question:
What work moment made your attitude go from proud employee to “I’m just here for the paycheck”?
The answers are incredibly interesting (if not a little depressing) and roughly fall into 3 categories. Here they are with some examples.
The examples also bear out the research that shows that even star employees resort to bad behavior when they feel mistreated at work.
When the owners and GM looked at my prostate cancer as a major inconvenience – for them.
When they bitched about my being out for cancer surgery – and I’d been out less than two weeks.
When I was back after two weeks wearing a fucking diaper because I was afraid of losing my job because of cancer.
Then they expected me to be concerned whether they made a profit. Yeah, that’s likely.
—
For 7 years I had a boss who valued the work people did, and didn’t care how you arrived at the end product. Motivated and innovative employees were recognized and generally received additional responsibility and challenges.
Then came the new boss, who was the text book example of micro manager, and ran the department like it was a 50’s assembly line. Watched the amount of time people took breaks, watched the minute people arrived, and the minute they left. Achievements were no longer recognized and employees were just cogs in a wheel.
If there is no incentive to do anything more than the minimum amount of effort, the minimum amount of effort will be done.
—
A change of boss.
We went from someone positive and inspiring to work for to a dolt without vision or concern for employee morale or motivation.
When the new guy who relies on me to do his job got promoted.
—
The company cut out a whole department and transferred their duties to my department. Now we must do two people’s jobs for a 52¢/hr raise and the strict no overtime policy remains.
Fast forward 3 months and the company flies all the managers (3,000+) from across the US to Florida for a meeting where they rent out an amusement park and have a concert by a well known artist.
Needless to say, I’m now the saltiest of salty employees.
—
Both of my mentors — two ladies who saw potential in me that I didn’t and helped me turn my life around — were fired (packaged out) within a week of each other. Fired by people who had only started a few months before and then themselves quit a few months later.
When I was told to peel the ‘re-manufactured’ sticker off of the back of the ‘new’ instruments we were installing for a customer.
—
Found out that the product reps were giving a ton of free product to the store for the managers to distribute to the sales team.
The reps would even give the managers the option of getting a few display-only models for customers to check out or giving products directly to the sales team for them to describe to the customers. The managers would blatantly lie to the reps and say that giving them to the sales team would help their sales the most, and then the managers would just take all of it.
Then these same managers would blame the sales team 100% for poor numbers, at our no commission position.
If they’re only looking out for themselves, then I’m doing that exact same thing.
—
At a grocery store: When for 2.5 years I warned that someone was going to slip and fall on the faulty loading dock for the trucks because a drip in the ceiling wasn’t being fixed by the company or the landlord who owned the building. On top of the the thing kept breaking.
I griped loud enough and the solution was to send us pretty much this. Since unloading the trucks was a one person job, having one person drag this 165 pound ramp around was a hazard in itself, we just couldn’t use it.
So, inevitably, someone slipped and fell on the old ramp. And only at that point, and some payout that was kept private, did they replace the faulty ramp we had.
Read the whole thread here and for cryin’ out loud: Stop doing this kind of crap to dedicated employees.
Have you subscribed to our Youtube channel yet? It has a ton of great videos about happiness at work.
Is a Chief Happiness Officer always happy at work? Heck no.
Everyone has bad days once in a while and I’m no exception. I always say that if someone is always happy, there’s something wrong with them :)
But for some time now I’ve been feeling burnt out.
Don’t get me wrong – I love giving speeches and workshops. Nothing beats the kick of getting on stage in front of an audience and sharing an important message with them. But over the last few months, I’ve been getting bogged down in a lot of my daily chores and maintenance tasks that just didn’t light my fire.
I’ve also felt like I’ve been stagnating professionally. Business is great, we’re making a ton of money and clients love what we do, but I’ve been feeling frustrated that we haven’t progressed beyond that and grown as a company lately.
If there’s one lesson we try to teach it’s this: when you’re not happy at work, you should take it seriously and do something about it. So it would be pretty hypocritical of me not to do that myself :)
So when I noticed these feelings in myself and, by coincidence, that my schedule for February was actually pretty free of big events and gigs I decided to take February off.
I’ve delegated all my tasks to my awesome coworkers and have closed my inboxes (here’s why I don’t just use an autoreply/vacation message) and company phone so no one can reach me.
What will I do with that time? I don’t know. I have not planned anything and that’s on purpose. I think that completely free and unstructured time is what frees your mind to think big thoughts. Too many plans (or any plans at all) would interfere with that.
So I’ll see you again in March.
We are hard at work finalizing this year’s version of our happiness at work conference in Copenhagen.
While we do have some international speakers, most of the day is in Danish, so this update is mostly for our Danish readers :)
So if you’re interested, read more about this year’s konference om arbejdsglæde. And get your tickets soon – we haven’t even announced the full program yet, and we’ve already sold 100 tickets.
A few years ago this German DJ became famous on youtube and he used that as a springboard to quit the day job he hated and become a full-time DJ.
In this video from our 2015 conference about happiness at work he plays a very short set and then shares his story.
Meet a man who had the courage to go his own way and became world famous for being happy at work.
Here are the upcoming international events you can catch me at:
March 23, The Hague, Holland: Happy People Better Business
April 12+13, Birmingham, UK: #SD16 Service Desk Conference
April 27+28, Wroclaw, Poland: Kongres E(x)plory Innowacje
May 9-11, Miami, USA: WorldBlu Summit
Often our speeches are closed events for one client, but these are all open conferences where anyone can buy a ticket. See you there?
Is it OK to praise yourself at work?
Could you tell a coworker something like “Hey, let me tell you what I just did – it was AWESOME!”
Is it OK to send an email to the rest of your team to proudly share that you found a creative solution to a tough problem?
Can you take a little time in a project meeting to tell others about that task you just completed on time and under budget?
Most people are reluctant to do that. They don’t want to seem arrogant or boastful or like they have a big head. But if you ask me, it’s perfectly OK to be proud of the good work you do AND to share that pride with others.
Just as an example, If I’ve given a speech that I felt went REALLY well (which happens all the time these days) I share that with my coworkers. I tell them what happened and what it was that worked so well.
However, self-praise can become really annoying if you do it wrong :) Here are 8 tips for praising yourself at work:
Just like any other praise, self-praise must be earned. You must have done something awesome before you praise yourself, otherwise it’s completely meaningless.
If you praise yourself for something you’ve done together with others, then you must include them in the praise. In that case you don’t say “I’m awesome,” you say “We’re awesome.”
It’s no good if you always only praise yourself and never recognize others. It’s required of all of us self-praisers that we’re especially good at acknowledging the cool things others do.
If you’re good at praising yourself when you rock, you should be the first to admit when you suck, apologize for your mistakes and be willing to learn from them and improve. People who can only see the good they do and completely overlook their own flaws invite nothing but scorn and contempt.
In fact, why not celebrate your mistakes?
When you praise yourself, do it with an honest infectious enthusiasm. It’s OK to be proud of yourself. It’s OK to have a smile on your face, a spring in your step and pride in your voice when you share your accomplishments. In fact, it will be received more positively by others than if you do it with false humility.
It goes without saying that anything can be overdone – including self-praise. Don’t overdo it.
Practice makes perfect. It’s banal but true. Try it, see what works and then improve from there.
Praise is sorely lacking from many workplace – including self-praise. This may lead to skepticism and resistance from others if you start doing it. If this happens, consider carefully if the criticism is because you’ve gone too far – in which case you should listen to it – or if it’s simply that people are not used to it – in which case you should continue doing it.
We can see four major advantages of self-praise. First, when you share your successes, others can learn from your best practices and maybe apply them themselves.
Secondly, genuine enthusiasm is infectious. When you share something that made you happy, others become a little happier too.
Thirdly, you can inspire others to also share their victories, so the whole team becomes better at sharing what works, to the benefit of all.
And finally, if you are good at praising yourself, you’re not as dependent on receiving praise from others. As Spencer Tracy put it:
It is up to us to give ourselves recognition. If we wait for it to come from others, we feel resentful when it doesn’t, and when it does, we may well reject it.
And if all else fails, there’s always the self-praise machine that an employee at one of our clients built:
What do you think? Do you ever praise yourself at work? How do you do it? What are good ways or bad ways to do it? Write a comment, we’d love to hear your take.
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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.
