After every keynote or workshop we do, we ask our clients to rate our work. Specifically we ask them “On a scale from 1-10 how likely are you to recommend us to others?”
And I honestly can’t believe how good our ratings are. This is an overview of the last 100 gigs ratings from our clients:
Yes, out of the last 100 gigs, 80 of them have given us a straight 10. Our lowest rating is an 8.
Our average rating is 9,7. Our NPS score (if you like that kind of thing) is 90.
I can only conclude that we are very, very, very good at this :)
So why not book us to some speak at your workplace or event? Apparently we’re awesome :)
I’m featured in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera under the headline “Il manager della felicità arriva in azienda” – The happiness manager arrives in the workplace.
I’ve been getting a lot of emails from Italy since the article came out and the message is always the same: Italian workplaces don’t focus on happiness and having a Chief Happiness Officer would be a welcome development.
What would happen if you devoted 6 months of your life to helping others – free and anonymously.
The Free Help Guy tried exactly that experiment and in this AWESOME and inspiring speech he shares how he has helped people around the world for no reward and without any recognition.
Almost as a side effect, he also found that helping others made him happier.
He still helps people anonymously, which is why we’ve blurred out his face in the video.
This is simply one of the best new business books I’ve read in a LONG time.
What if you ran your organization based on actually, genuinely caring for every single person in it? How would that inform strategy and leadership and how would it affect employees and the bottom line?
Bob Chapman’s leadership at Barry Wehmiller shows what that looks like and it is amazing.
Barry Wehmiller is essentially in the business of buying struggling production companies around the world and making them happier and more productive by introducing their processes and culture. They have 8,000 employees in 100 locations around the world in a large variety of businesses and they’re profitable and growing fast.
In this short speech, Bob Chapman explains their leadership philosophy:
The book contains a ton of powerful lessons that any workplace could learn from, but for me, these were the 2 most powerful things in the book.
1: Performance focus – with people first.
Of course the company cares about performance, but they realize that people come first. Chapman shares the story of what happened when a lean consultant came to do a presentation:
We scheduled a kickoff meeting in Green Bay with a group of senior leaders to learn about Lean and begin our continuous-improvement journey.
On the first afternoon, a consultant gave an opening presentation on Lean. After forty-five minutes, I stood up and walked out of the room in frustration. The presentation was all about justifying bringing Lean tools into an organization because they help add to the bottom line and get more out of people. “This will help you get more out of people.”
That’s when I left the room.
Brian followed nervously after me, glancing back to see if the presenter was still speaking.
“So, what’s going on?”
With fire in my voice, I said, “Brian, we are never going to have a Lean journey like that in our organization. We are not going to suck the life out of people and take advantage of them in that way. We are going to build a Lean culture focused on people or we’re not going to do it at all.”
I had made it clear that our version of Lean was to be about people.
Too many CEOs would never even catch that. They are steeped in the idea that results come first and processes like Lean are used as a tool for that purpose.
At Barry Wehmiller, Lean has become a tool to make work more fun and meaningful for the employees. And that in turn drives better results, than a direct results focus.
2: No layoffs Your values are tested in hard times. It’s a lot easier to be nice and appreciative and people focused when the business is profitable but when revenue takes a hit and your company is losing money that’s when you get a chance to show if you take your values seriously of if they’re just pretty words that you don’t really mean.
In the book’s most interesting chapter (for me at least) Chapman discusses what happened when the recession hit them in 2008. They lost a large amount of business and were faced with massive pressure from their bank to cut costs.
Most companies around the world would not hesitate for a second before enacting layoffs. It’s just what you do, despite the fact that evidence shows it’s actually bad for business.
Chapman instead worked hard to come up with a plan that would ensure the company’s survival without laying off a single person – which they did.
The upshot
I HIGHLY recommend this book. It’s a great read and shares not only a great business case but also Chapman’s personal story which is interesting in itself.
The book shows that happy workplaces can exist in any industry (even production) and that you can systematically transform bad, failing workplaces into happy successful ones. Provided you do so with some good structure, great leadership and the basic idea that people deserve to be treated well at work.
This is not a coffee shop – this is the reception at one of our clients in Denmark.
They can greet you, get you a visitor’s badge and notify the employee your meeting with. And while you wait for them to come meet you, they can also whip up an excellent cappuccino or a flat white.
Employees can also have informal meetings in the café and buy coffee cheaply using their ID cards or an app on their phones.
I saw something similar at the Coca-Cola HQ in Atlanta.
I like this kind of thing because it breaks down the formality of the reception area and makes it more welcoming and interesting. It gives visitors a better first impression and provides employees with a more relaxed setting.
It just struck me that the Danish word for happiness (glæde) is both a noun and a verb.
So in Danish you can experience happiness (føle glæde) but you can also “happy someone else” (glæde en anden).
As in: “I think this will happy my spouse” (det vil glæde min partner) or “small acts can happy others” (små ting kan glæde andre).
I don’t want to read too much into that linguistic quirk, but it is interesting because it goes to the heart of what happiness is – i.e. very much something we do for each other.
Can you think of another language that has this feature?
Also, the same word is also used to say that you are looking forward to something. “Jeg glæder mig til jul” literally translates “I happy myself about Christmas” and means “I’m looking forward to Christmas.”
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“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
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