The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • The most basic freedom is the freedom to quit

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    i-quit

    Bernie deKoven points to this fascinating article by Peter Gray that examines quitting. Here’s an excerpt:

    We like to think of human rights in affirmative terms, so we speak most often of our rights to move toward what we want:  our rights to vote, assemble freely, speak freely, and choose our own paths to happiness. My contention here, however, is that the most basic right—the right that makes all other rights possible—is the right to quit.

    He looks at our freedom to quit i.e. work and relationships and show how important that is.

    Gray points to hunter-gatherer societies as the origin of our freedom to quit:

    As anthropologists have repeatedly pointed out, band hunter-gatherers are highly mobile.  Not only does the whole band move regularly from place to place, to follow he available game and edible vegetation, but individuals and families also move from band to band.

    Because hunter-gatherers don’t own land and don’t own more personal property than they can easily carry, and because they all have friends and relatives in other bands, they are always free to move.

    People who feel oppressed in their current band, and who find no intra-band route to overcome that oppression, can, at a moment’s notice, pick up their things and move out, either to join another band or to start their own band with a group of friends.

    Fascinating stuff that has applications in all aspects of life – especially at work. As I’ve often pointed out, many people stay way too long in jobs they don’t like. Here are some examples:

     

  • I’m in The Guardian

    I’m featured in this article in the Guardian on the rising popularity of Chief Happiness Officers.

  • The fundamental unfairness of the vacation auto reply

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    Email

    With the summer holidays rapidly approaching, I’ve been thinking a lot about vacation auto replies.

    Here’s the problem: Although anyone who sends you a mail is told not to expect a reply until you get back, they probably still expect an answer at that point. This is fundamentally unfair.

    You’re away from work. As part of your contract with the company, you have some time off and yet some of the work from your vacation time is thereby 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.

    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.

    What can we do about it? This policy from Daimler is the solution:

    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.

    Brilliant. Now you can go on vacation knowing that when you come back, your inbox will contain the same number of emails as when you left.

    I think this is the perfect solution and I would love to see more companies adopt it. Maybe this is something unions could work for in the 21st century.

    Your take

    Do you have a vacation auto reply? Do you check and reply to emails during your vacation or handle them all when you’re back?  If you go on vacation for 2 weeks, how many mails are going to be in your inbox when you get back? How much time will it take you to deal with them and how do you plan for it?

    Related posts

  • Kafka and happiness

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    Screen Shot 2015-07-01 at 18.32.44

    I am in BBC Radio 3’s very loose adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis called Mr. Rainbow. Here Gregory, Kafka’s main character facing a scary transformation, seeks advice from different experts – including yours truly.

    Give it a listen – it’s awesome :)

  • Never measure employees on metrics they can’t control

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    calls-waiting

    I once worked with a large insurance company, where the claims handling employees were measured on a number of factors, including average customer wait time on the phone. This is a very typical metric or KPI for call centers and customer service centers but it suffers from one fundamental flaw: That number is outside of the control of the employees.

    The math is simple: Wait time depends on how many calls come in minus the number of calls employees handle. The latter is something employees can control, the first one is completely outside of their control.

    Wait times = calls coming in – how many calls we handle.

    In the case of this insurance company, employees were busy and wait times were going up because of the weather. An unusually wet summer had resulted in several floods all of which lead to a massive increase in the number of calls coming in.

    As an employee of this insurance company you have very little influence on the weather and yet your performance rating is directly affected by it. This is patently unfair and a surefire recipe for unhappiness, frustration and stress at work.

    What happened in this case was that the claims handling employees would get a weekly email with a red graph showing how much they were falling behind on their KPIs. This graph was also proudly displayed in all offices and in the cafeteria and covered in every department meeting. And every week it just got worse, even though the team was doing their very best and working as hard as they possibly could.

    Even though all employees and leaders knew that the weather was to blame, this still significantly lowered morale and created a lot of stress.

    Workplaces everywhere are giving employees metrics and KPIs in the hope of measuring and ultimately increasing performance. I am incredibly sceptical of this whole approach, but it is especially damaging when your performance is rated on factors you do not control.

    We know from any number of studies that a lack of perceived control and self-efficacy leads to frustration and stress so if your workplace has to have metrics, at least make sure that no one is measured on factors they have no control over.

    And remember: It’s not enough for the metric to be partly under your control. If just one component of a metric is outside of your control, the whole metric is. In the example above, even though the number of calls employees handle is something they can control, the weather clearly is not and therefore the whole metric is suspect.

    In the case of this insurance company, we got them to scrap that metric and instead focus only on the number of calls handled – which is something employees control directly. This made the employees much happier at work which in turn made them more productive and the number of calls handled actually increased week by week.

    Your take

    What metrics and KPIs are you measured on? Are they inside or outside of your own control? Do you find them generally beneficial, ie. that they make work more pleasant and help you do a better job or generally detrimental?

  • The first Woohoo Academy was a huge hit. Want to join us for the next one?

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    WoohooAcademy-2392We just had our first ever Woohoo Academy – a 3-day in-depth training for anyone who wants to learn all about happiness at work – and it was a smash hit.

    12 people from 7 countries came to Copenhagen for it. The group was a mix of happiness consultants who can use the content in their work with clients and CEOs and HR managers who can apply it to make their own workplaces happier.

    woohoo-academy-logo-outlined

    Here’s some of what they had to say 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. I also have to mention Alex’s passion and enthusiasm for happiness at work, which I found highly contagious. The training provided me with a much richer understanding of why happiness at work is vital to the success of employees and companies, and also with the how of creating happiness at work. I feel incredibly inspired and that my training dollars were well spent. I highly recommend this training to anyone who feels the calling to create happier workplaces.

    – 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

    For me, this Academy was a huge pleasure too. It let me take a deep dive into many of the things we’ve learned about happiness at work over the years, which I find incredibly fascinating, but which I rarely get a chance to share because it goes into more depth than most of our clients need.

    Also, the group that came for this training were all smart, engaged people with a real passion for happiness at work. And they were all incredibly nice. As I mentioned at the Academy, you don’t get a lot of jerks coming to this kind of training. They’re probably across town at the business school learning all about business strategy :)

    And finally – everyone passed the training and I got a real sense that the participants got the knowledge, tools and energy they need to make a real difference where they are – inside their own organizations or as consultants/coaches/speakers.

    We are currently planning the next Academy for this winter and we’re going to have that one somewhere in North America. Sign up here if you might be interested and we’ll let you know as soon as we have the exact time and place.

    Here are some of my favorite pics from the Academy:

    Most of these pics are by Douglas Robar. More pics from the Academy here.

  • Help: What book should I write next?

    Happy Hour is 9 to 5 by Alexander KjerulfI want to write another book about happiness at work and I have a number of ideas to choose from.

    I would love to hear your thoughts – which of these books would give you the most value? Which intrigues you the most?

    Leading with happiness
    A book on a new kind of leadership that seeks to maximize happiness rather than profits.

    Manners for managers
    A short book of rules for managers in different situations – to help managers avoid behavior that is simply rude or bad manners.

    Quit already
    A book on quitting to help everyone who feels stuck in a bad job get the heck out of there.

    The happy team
    A book on how to create a happy team.

    The customer is always right is wrong
    How putting employees first helps them put customers first

     

  • Tim Dorsett: Top 10 Tips from Innocent Drinks

    Tim Dorsett: Top 10 Tips from Innocent Drinks

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    Last week we had our annual conference on happiness at work and it went insanely well.

    As always we will share the speeches online and here’s the first one. Tim Dorsett works at Innocent Drinks. His titel is Office MANgel and his job is to make sure that people at Innocent Drinks do great work and go home happy.

    In his inspiring presentation he shares the top 10 things he’s done to make sure that happen.

  • Catch me in London on October 15

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    Well-Being@Work

    On October 15 I’m speaking at the Well-Being@Work event in London along with some great people in the field, including Nic Marks and Henry Stewart.

    Check out the event here.

  • I’m in The Guardian (in The Bahamas)

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    Screen Shot 2015-05-22 at 13.00.56

    When I was in The Bahamas last week, I did a radio interview and a newspaper interview with some really smart, passionate people.

    You can hear the radio show here and see the two newspaper articles here and here.

     

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