I’m doing a book giveaway on goodreads.com – sign up below to get a chance to win a copy of my book :)
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Happy Hour Is 9 to 5
by Alexander Kjerulf
Giveaway ends July 21, 2014.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
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Testers wanted for a new way of measuring happiness at work
It’s no secret that I am deeply sceptical of job satisfaction surveys. In fact, here’s my article on the top 10 reasons why they’re usually a waste of time.But as the saying goes, it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, so we are working on a completely new and different kind of tool to measure happiness at work.
It’ll be ridiculously simple:
- Every Friday, every member of the team/department will get an email with 3 questions about their week. Replying should take about 30 seconds.
- Every Monday, everyone in the team gets an email with the team’s results.
- Replies are anonymous – no one can see who replied what.
We now need 25 teams/departments from around the world who would like to be the first to try this.
Here are the requirements for teams who’d like to participate:
- The group must consist of 10-25 people who all want to participate
- Everyone must have access to email
- The questions will be in English so people must understand that
- The test will run from September 15 to November 15
- Once testing ends you must help us evaluate the system
If your team would like to be the first to try this, fill out the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible to arrange your participation.
UPDATE: Holy moly, 50 teams from around the world have signed up and the beta test will start soon. We can’t accept any more teams into the test.
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Top 5 Policies That Make Danish Workers Way More Happy Than Americans
You will often see Denmark listed in surveys as the “happiest country on the planet.” Interestingly Danes are not only happy at home, they’re also happy at work. According to most studies of worker satisfaction among nations, the happiest employees in the world are in Denmark. The U.S.? Not so much.I wrote an article for Fast Company on the 5 most important factors that explains this difference and it’s been incredibly popular. It seems the Danish way of working is attractive to many Americans.
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Woohoo inc expands
We have just expanded our team with a couple of great new people. Sofia and Nanna (3rd and 4th from the left) are our new interns who will be helping us on 2 massively important projects: Studying our impact on clients and helping us analyze the results from all the happiness surveys we’ve done in various workplaces.
Interestingly, we wanted to avoid the traditional process of doing job interviews (’cause job interviews suck) so we used a variation of Menlo Innovations’ Extreme Hiring process and it worked out beautifully.
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33 countries
Today I spoke at the People Innovation Summit in Moscow and since this was my first keynote in Russia, this means we’ve now spoken in 33 different countries.
Here they are:
Also: Guess a flag :)
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Happy nurses = happy patients
I’m on a train on my way to speak to 300 nurses and a bit of google research turned up this:
“Places that are good environments for nurses to work also then translate into nurses being able to do their jobs well and being able to provide good quality care to their patients.”
Simply put, the study found that happy nurses = better care = happy patients.
This just confirms that happiness at work improves business results on almost any meaningful metric.
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Creating a happy workplace
Here’s a 1-hour video of a speech I did last year for a group of South African business leaders:
This is one out of 6 speeches I did for ICAS in South Africa last year and after the speech they wrote that:
The guest speaker, Alexander Kjerulf, wowed the crowd with his charismatic charm and his pure passion for making people happier in the workplace.
If you’re thinking of booking me for a speech, this video will give you a great sense of how my speeches go. You can book me to speak in your company right here.
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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.
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“The Customer Is Not Always Right” – follow-up
My article on why “The Customer is Always Right” is wrong has generated an amazing amount of attention. It’s been read by 100,000s of people and been mentioned all over the internet. 
Call Center Magazine in the UK liked it so much that they turned it into a wall chart that is waaaaay more attractive than my original post. Download it here.But most of all the article gets a LOT of great comments. Here are some of my favorites.
I run a small company with about 20 employees. One day I heard commotion coming from the reception area. I hear a man yelling “I am the customer, you work for me and the customer is always right!”. I immediately went up and said, “No sir, you can’t get away with what you get away with at Walmart here. This young lady works for me and no matter what you think you were right about, you raised your voice and are no longer welcome.”
He needed our services and wrote a letter of apology for his ‘cranky mood’.
You raise your voice and you are out. No exceptions.
That’s it in a nutshell.
I read this post the other day and it was hiding in the back of my mind then this past Thursday I had a job interview. The interviewer asked me, “What do you feel about the statement, ‘The customer is always right’?” I remembered this post and mentioned these points as well as embellished to make it more appropriate to the job description.
After I answered that, the interviewer told me that I was the first person all day to answer that question correctly (she had already interviewed 6 people). Today I got a call offering me the position. I’d like to think that it had something to do with this blog post.
Thanks :)
SEE MOM! BROWSING THE INTERNETS IS A GOOD THING!!!
I’ve told Grant that I take full credit for him getting the job and given him an account number where he can deposit 10% of his first year’s salary :o)
We recently had a customer who bounced a check, and had the audacity to call my customer service manager with a tirade of yelling & profanity (before she could explain what had happened). She was calm and waited for him to settle down and tried to explain… He continued to use profanity, only to stop when my CS Manager politely told him that if he didn’t quit, she would hang up… Later, he emailed a complaint to the corporate office stating how rude and unprofessional she had been…
The customer DOES NOT have the right to harass my employees. I just happened to be in the office that day and could hear him screaming at her over the phone. I think she handled it WONDERFULLY; I took her out to lunch!
I don’t believe that a customer has the right to verbally assault my employees and I have trained them not to take that type of abuse from anyone.
I worked at a print shop where my manager would occasionally fire customers. In four years, I think it was 3 people. He told one person, “I won’t have you abuse my employee.”
I would have crawled through broken glass for him. It was one of the best employment experiences of my life.
These comments show that there are many companies out there that realize that putting the employees first actually results in better customer service. The formula is simple: Happy employees = happy customers.
But of course not everyone gets it. Yet.
Anonymous writes:
I work in a call center and showed this article to my boss. I’m told that senior managers view the ideas presented here as “silly.” Is it any wonder employees think our company is out to get them?
Customers are allowed to verbally abuse our employees and this is supposed to be a sign of great customer service. All the while, lower level managers are directed to keep turnover down. The company doesn’t understand that people are not satisfied in a job where the company supports abuse towards them.
Get a clue.
Sheeesh!
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