The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

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  • New study confirms that positive feedback increases performance

    Thumbs upYet another study confirms what we all know: Giving employees positive feedback leads to more happiness at work, less stress and better performance:

    In the study, participants… were asked to solve problems. Approximately half of the participants were told to ask friends and family members to send them an email just prior to their participation that described a time when the participant was at his or her best.

    Overwhelmingly, those who read positive statements about their past actions were more creative in their approach, more successful at problem-solving and less stressed out than their counterparts.

    For instance, participants had three minutes to complete Duncker’s candle problem. Fifty-one percent who had read emails prior to the task were able to successfully complete it; only 19% of those who did not receive “best-self activation” emails were able to solve it.

    Those who received praise were also significantly less stressed than the control group.

    (source).

    Which is kinda sad, when we know how many employees feel under-appreciated.

    In our recent study of what makes people unhappy at work, a lack of praise and recognition was one of the major causes. 37% of participants in our survey mentioned it as something that made them unhappy at work.

    So get praisin’. Positive feedback takes no time and costs no money. It does require you to actually pay attention to other people and be able to see their good work and positive qualities. But if we can’t even do that, there is something more fundamentally wrong.

  • To create results, leaders must put relationships first

    To create results, leaders must put relationships first

     

    seesaw

    Should a manager focus primarily on results or people? Should the manager be the one who sets KPIs and drives employees towards their goals, or should the manager rather be the one who understands and likes employees and is able to build good relationships with them?

    In 2009 James Zenger published a study that examined exactly that question. He found that if a manager is seen as being particularly focused on results alone, he/she will be seen as a good manager by only 14 % of the employees. If a manager has only strong social skills, the manager is regarded as being a good manager by a mere 12 % of the employees.

    However, for those managers who are both focused on results and have strong social skills, the likelihood of being evaluated as a good manager rockets to 72 %. But here is the bad news: Less than 1 % of the managers in Zenger’s study were evaluated as being strong on results and having strong social skills. Ouch!

    But how can it be that so few managers master both? An article from Harvard Business Review by Matthew Lieberman provides the answer: It is the brain’s fault. Our brains simply have a hard time being both socially and analytically focused at the same time. In the article and in his outstanding book “Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect”, Lieberman writes:

    Even though thinking social and analytically don’t feel radically different, evolution built our brain with different networks for handling these two ways of thinking.

    In the frontal lobe, regions on the outer surface, closer to the skull, are responsible for analytical thinking and are highly related to IQ. In contrast, regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch, support social thinking.

    Here’s the really surprising thing about the brain: These two networks function like a neural seesaw. In countless neuroimaging studies, the more one of these networks got active, the more the other one got quieter. […] in general, engaging in one of these kinds of thinking makes it harder to engage in the other kind.

    We know from extensive research that happiness at work is primarily affected by two factors, namely results and relationships.

    Employees love their jobs when they make a difference at work, and when they feel cared for as human beings. These two factors determine – far more than gyms, massages and other perks – whether employees are happy, motivated and productive, or not. That is why it is essential to have managers who are able to help employees experience both.

    Yet, in the business community, it is depressingly common to primarily acknowledge results-oriented managers, instead of those with strong social skills. Usually, the most professionally competent employees are promoted to managerial positions, even if they lack the social skills it takes to be a manager. If these new managers do not get the training/further education they need, it has a directly negative impact on happiness at work and consequently on productivity.

    Here is a radical idea: I believe that you will have more success if you select managers with excellent social skills, and train them to become more focused on results. I believe that it is much easier for a person with good social skills to learn to focus on results, than it is for a hard-core results-driven person to develop social skills and empathy.

    Southwest Airlines have long done this. The excellent book “The Southwest Airlines Way” by Jody Hoffer-Gittell reveals the secret to Southwest’s remarkable success: high performance relationships that create enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among Southwest employees. For instance, when Southwest looks for new managers, the most important skill is the ability to connect with others and create good relationships.

    Personally, I am convinced that the most important leadership skill is to actually like other people.

    We also have to consider how we reward managers. Most workplaces reward managers for creating good results, but how many have bonus arrangements considering those who build good relations? Why not split the managers’ bonuses 50/50 between results and relations? If we only reward one of the two, it only encourages one type of behaviour, and the one-sided focus on results will eventually harm results and the bottom line.

    Your take

    Think about the best manager you’ve ever had or met. What made that manager effective? What about examples of bad management you’ve seen – what made those managers bad?

    Do you agree that relationship skills are the most important for managers?

    Write a comment – I’d love to hear your take.

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  • Why every company needs to give employees Free Time on the job

    Why every company needs to give employees Free Time on the job

    My first “real” job was for a large and very famous Danish company who’d hired me fresh out of university to work on one of their big new products. One day, about a month into my employment there, I was sitting at my desk thinking big thoughts.

    To other people it might have looked like I was slacking – I’d put my feet up on the desk and was staring into the air – but in reality I was considering if the approach I’d chosen to solving a particular task was the right one or of there was a smarter, faster way.

    And for that I was reprimanded. When my manager walked by and saw me sitting there, he criticized me for goofing off. As long as he could see me pecking away at my keyboard, he felt confident that I was productive. Seeing me with my feet up automatically made him assume that I was wasting time.

    Companies everywhere are looking to increase productivity. Employees are asked to work more efficiently and get more done faster. But it seems to me that the constant focus on short-term productivity gains is hurting long-term results because employees’ work days are filled to capacity (and over) with tasks, meetings, deadlines, projects, etc.

    What’s missing from that picture? Free time. Or as some call it: Slack.

    In the excellent article ”In Praise of Slack: Time Is of the Essence” from The Academy of Management Executives M. B. Lawson writes about the importance of having time during your work day that is not already taken up with tasks. From the article:

    Slack is important for organizational adaptation and innovation.

    Increasingly complex systems and technologies require more, not less, time for monitoring and processing information. Future demands for strategic flexibility and for integrating learning and knowledge throughout organizations highlight the need to reexamine the importance of time in organizational work – and to recognize that all organizational resources cannot be committed to immediate output efforts if we are to have time to pay attention, think and benefit from the knowledge gained.

    Some managers (among them my first team leader) see all free time as wasted time, but they’re completely wrong. When every moment of the work day is taken up with tasks and work, it damages the organization in many ways. Here are some we’ve seen among our clients:

    1. Creativity is lost because there is no time to come up with and act on new ideas.
    2. No one helps anyone else, because people are booked 100% (or more) on their own tasks
    3. There’s no time to learn new skills
    4. We end up always doing things the same way because there’s no time to optimize processes
    5. Customers become less happy because there is no time to go the extra mile and deliver great customer service.
    6. Everything becomes a chaotic mess because there is no time to organize and structure things
    7. Flexibility is lost because everyone is too busy to deal with changing circumstances
    8. Employees become less happy and more stressed because there is no time to deepen your skills

    In short, organizations without slack become stiff and brittle and lose the ability to lift themselves out of their current problems and create ongoing improvements. These organizations become extremely fragile in the face of any unforeseen changes.

    So slack is great for employees and for the workplace. But it must be created consciously. Workplaces must make a concerted effort to show employees

    How do you do that in practice? Here are 5 ways we have seen work well in practice.

    1. Hackathons are well-known in software companies. Employees are given time (frome 1 day to several days) to work in groups on any project of their own choosing. At the end, teams present their results.
    2. 20%-time (popularized by companies like 3M and Google) means that employees can devote up to 20% of their work week to projects they come up with themselves.
    3. Training and development is crucial. In the company I co-founded, every employee had an annual training budget of 2 weeks and 8,000 USD, which they were required to use.
    4. Minimize time spent on useless meetings, status reports and similar.
    5. Plan for slack so that employees’ work week can not be booked 100%. Software company Menlo Innovations in the US, only let their people budget for 32 hours a week – they know that the rest is spent on planning, training, coordinating, etc.

    Of course workplaces need to become more competitive and productive. Of course we must constantly try to do more with the resources we have. But we can’t expect people to become more effective, if they never have time to reflect, plan, learn or try out new ideas. That takes slack.

    Your take

    Do you have free time at work? Or is every minute filled already? Are people in your workplace rewarded or punished for stopping what they’re doing, so they can figure out a better way to do it?

    Write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.

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  • What do you do when there’s just too much work?

    What do you do when there’s just too much work?

    graph

    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:

    Resultater_med_postit_II

    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:

    Resultater_med_postit

    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:

    Resultater

    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:

    1. There’s too much work compared to the available resources
    2. Employees are constantly told that they’re falling behind
    3. Employees become unhappy at work
    4. Employees become less productive
    5. Less work gets done
    6. Back to 1

    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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  • What if a 6-hour work day would let us do MORE work?

    I while back I did an interview with professor Benjamin Hunnicutt about his new book called “Free Time – The Forgotten American Dream.” My favorite thing from our chat was his story of what happened at the Kellogg’s factory during the great depression in the ’30s.

    Instead of laying people off, they changed to 6-hour shifts, so the workers kept their jobs but everyone worked fewer hours. The result:

    The company found that the shorter workday influenced employees to work harder and more efficiently. The results included drastic reductions in overhead costs, labor costs, and the number of work-related accidents. Unit cost of production “is so lowered we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight,” Kellogg boasted in a newspaper in 1935.

    Fascinating. And a good reminder, yet again, that working 80 hours a week may actually be lowering productivity and performance.

  • Our 10 most popular articles ever

    Our 10 most popular articles ever

    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 Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909. Ironically it often leads to unhappy employees and bad customer service. Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

    9: Ten seeeeeeriously cool workplaces
    Physical space matters. It’s easier to be productive, creative and happy at work in a colourful, organic, playful environment than in a grey, linear, boring one. Take a tour of 10 really cool, beautiful workplaces.

    8: How NOT to lead geeks
    The main reason IT people are unhappy at work is bad relations with management, often because geeks and managers have fundamentally different personalities, professional backgrounds and ambitions. See the top 10 mistakes IT managers make.

    7: Secret salaries are a baaaaaad idea
    It’s a golden rule in most businesses that salaries must be kept secret. Except for a few heretics, it is almost universally accepted that mayhem would ensue in the workplace if people knew what their co-workers, their managers or – gasp – the CEO was making. Making salaries open inside a company instead seems like a wild idea sure, but it makes a lot of sense and brings advantages for both the workplace and for its people.

    6: Top five business maxims that need to go
    Much well-known business advice is sadly obsolete but can still be found in articles, business books and, not least, in daily use in the workplace. The worst of these old maxims are not only wrong, they’re bad for people and bad for business. Here’s my pick of the top 5 business maxims in serious need of an update – with a replacement for each.

    5: Rewards don’t motivate. No, really, they don’t.
    Many people don’t feel motivated at work, and there’s a very simple explanation for this: The motivational techniques used by most managers don’t work.

    4: Top ten bad excuses for staying in a job you hate
    If you’re unhappy at work, I’m sure that the thought “Man, I really should quit!” crosses your mind occasionally. So why don’t you? Here are 10 of the most common bad excuses for staying in a crappy job.

    3: 12 ways to pimp your office
    I’m not going to claim that a fancy desk or a weird chair is going to magically improve your creativity and productivity – but I am damn sure, that all that sameness and eternal corporate grayness, does nothing good for your ability to come up with great new ideas. Here are some ways to spruce up a workplace that may actually inject some color and fun into your work environment.

    2: Top ten signs you’re unhappy at work
    How do you know that you’re unhappy at work? In my work, I talk to a lot of people who are not happy with their jobs. Here are the top ten symptoms of unhappiness at work that I’ve observed. How many apply to you?

    1: Don’t let The Cult of Overwork ruin your life
    I know it’s normal to view people working constant overtime as heroes of the organization. But still I think they would be more efficient and enjoy life more if they cut down their time at work. They may find that they become more open, less stressed, have more fun AND are better role models for their employees. This cult of overwork has got to stop.

    See more popular posts here.

  • Stop obsessing about working hours

    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!

    I could not agree more. Stop focusing on hours worked and start focusing on results delivered. And realize that there is not a linear relationship between the two.

    Read more about what makes GitHub an awesome workplace here.

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  • Should leaders focus on results or on people? The answer is Yes!

    seesaw

    This article from Harvard Business Review by Matthew Lieberman asks whether leaders should focus on results or people. It quotes a study by Jamez Zenger from 2009 who found that:

    If a leader was seen as being very strong on results focus, the chance of that leader being seen as a great leader was only 14%…

    If a leader was strong on social skills, he or she was seen as a great leader even less of the time — a paltry 12%.

    However, for leaders who were strong in both results focus and in social skills, the likelihood of being seen as a great leader skyrocketed to 72%.

    But here’s the kicker:

    Less than 1% of leaders were rated high on both goal focus and social skills.

    Ouch!

    Our theoretical framework says that happiness at work comes mainly from results and relationships – we need both to create happy workplaces. And while our traditional image of a leader is someone who is extremely results-oriented, it seems that great leaders have both skills.

    So why is that so rare? It goes against the way our brains are wired says Lieberman in the article and in his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect:

    These two networks (results and relationships) function like a neural seesaw. In countless neuroimaging studies, the more one of these networks got more active, the more the other one got quieter…

    Its safe to say that in business, analytical thinking has historically been the coin of the realm — making it harder to recognize the social issues that significantly affect productivity and profits. Moreover, employees are much more likely to be promoted to leadership positions because of their technical prowess. We are thus promoting people who may lack the social skills to make the most of their teams and not giving them the training they need to thrive once promoted.

    Again: Ouch!

  • Forbes: Managers Should Spread A Little Happiness This New Year

    ForbesI was interviewed for this excellent article in Forbes. Here’s how the article opens:

    Nobody needs telling that the years since the financial crisis struck have been tough. Across Europe, the United States and the rest of the industrialized world, employment levels are only just starting to pick up, while growth in emerging markets has not been as strong as many predicted. Even those in work have in many cases found life harder than it was before. With pay rises, promotions, bonuses and other incentives thin on the ground, going to work has been anything but fun.

    Alexander Kjerulf is one of a growing number convinced it does not have to be that way. The Danish entrepreneur is author of a book, Happy Hour is 9 to 5, published on New Year’s Day by Pine Tribe, in which he argues that if managers put more effort into ensuring employees were happy at work they would not only create more pleasant workplaces but also improve productivity, innovation, motivation, customer service and the ability to handle change – in short, all the things that managers say are so important.

    Read the whole thing – it also features Henry Stewart of the London-based training company Happy.

  • Swiss study: Pay cuts lower performance, raises don’t improve performance

    MoneyHere’s a fascinating Swiss study into the effects of raises and pay cuts. The result:

    Wage cuts had a detrimental and persistent impact on productivity, reducing average output by more than 20 percent. An equivalent wage increase, however, did not result in any productivity gains.

    The cool thing about this study, is that it was done with actual employees in a workplace – not in a lab.

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