Don’t tell me you don’t secretly long to stick your head out the window when you’re in a car:
Have a happy weekend :o)
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Friday Woohoo
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One more brave quitter
Here’s another fantastic comment from Karen who quit a horrible job:
I spent nearly a decade working as a technical and customer support specialist in an inbound contact centre. I was the person who answered the phone from customers angry over their bill or because their internet, tv or cell phone was not working. People tend to forget their manners when talking to a person over phone who works in a subservient position to them. The company was all about squeezing every last cent out of their workers, and most of management seemed to almost gleefully accept their role as pseudo-slavers. It was probably the most soul-killing job I ever did.
After 5 years of it, both my doctor and I hated it. I told myself many of these excuses, and finally owned up to the fact that without a better resume, I wasn’t confident I could do much better for pay, and when the pay is already just above minimum wage, that’s a really hard one to swallow. I also had enough friends in other contact centres to know I was just jumping fires to switch companies, and at least I liked a group of the people I worked with – some friendships I still maintain today. I made a concious decision that I was actively choosing to stay there until I found a better career, instead of meekly and passively thinking I was doomed to remain there.
And so I started working on myself. What else I would want to do, what I was looking for. I decided money was not the leading factor, though all the other items had to be superb for me to accept a lesser wage. Working with a friend, I slowly started to identify transferrable skills, and piece together a resume, and applying to positions with other companies. While it is likely a process that would have taken most people only a few months, my confidence was in the early stages of being built up, and so it took longer for me.
As well, where I finally decided I wanted to be was notorious to take a year or more to go through the entire selection process. I also had to factor in that due to varying shifts that kept me from having any consisent time off, I would need to use my meagre amount of vacation or sick leave for any interviews I wanted to attend, as management was not exactly open to my career growth.
2 months prior to my 9 year anniversary with that company, I happily bounced into work with a spring in my step that was highly unusual, and caused some confused looks from others. I was so happy, I actually went in, on my vacation day – on my birthday in fact – to tender my very polite and professional resignation, which gave no room for them to try to convince me to stay in their specially-reserved section of hell. Multiple supervisors actually approached me after to ask how I got my job with my new employer, as perhaps it was a time for them to change as well.
Oh, that was a happy day that nearly three years later, still brings a smile to my face. After some special handling by awesome managers who recognized the near PTSD-like condition that my old employer had left me in, I’ve found new confidence in myself, and I now thrive in a career that challenges me, welcomes my input, and supports both my personal and professional growth, wherever that may take me.
The best I could offer to others is this: Identify the exuses or reasons of why you are staying where you are. Dream of better, and then figure out how to get there, because it is possible. May be a rocky road, but the smooth ones really do lose their appeal. Decide that your departure from this company is a definite fact, not a far off wish. If for whatever reason, you can’t immediately just quit right now, then decide what your departure entails, and own that decision. Accept it. Make the conscious decision that you are actively choosing to stay where you are for the short term. Draw lines about what you will accept in your continued employment, and give yourself the all-clear that “if x happens, I quit”, and hold that life line firm. Find out what the rules the employer, not necessarily your boss, has about conflict resolution, and follow it. At that point, what is the worst that can happen? You lose a job you have decided you will be leaving. And in that good-bye process, however long it takes, milk it for all it’s worth; every last transferrable skill, training, knowledge and experience. There’s a certain satisfaction to knowing they are just making you that much more valuable to your next employer.
Kudos! It’s great to see Karen’s courage and practical approach to finding better work, rather than accepting jobs that suck!
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Quitting instantly improved the quality of my life
This great comment came in yesterday from Stephan De Villiers:
I quit my job today! Don’t know what I am going to for sure, I just know that by quitting I instantly improved the quality of my life.
I honestly think that fear of quitting a bad job is one of the main sources of unhappiness at work. Hating your job is bad enough but if you also feel that there is no way out, no matter how badly they treat you, then things become much, much worse. Conversely, knowing that you are free to quit and find something else makes a bad job situation easier to bare. But only if you’re willing to exercise that freedom and actually leave that job. Which way to few people do.
Kudos to Stephan for doing it!
Related posts
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The 10 most awesome things from Valve’s employee handbook
I recently had a chance to read the employee handbook from video game company Valve and it’s the single most inspiring such document I have ever seen.
I play some video games myself (the Bioshock and Dead Space franchises are my favorites), but if you don’t partake you may never have heard of Valve so here’s the skinny from Wikipedia:
Valve Corporation is an American video game development and digital distribution company based in Bellevue, Washington, United States. Founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, Valve became famous from its critically acclaimed Half-Life series. It is also well known for its social-distribution network Steam; and for developing the Source engine.
Valve is privately owned so few financial figures are known but they have 300 employees and Forbes estimates the company’s worth at $3 billion.
Their employee handbook was recently released on the web and it explains how they’ve become so successful. Here are the top 10 most awesome things from the document.
1: Valve has no hierarchy
Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily.
But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.
That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager.
How cool is that?
2: Pick your projects
We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100.
Heh :o) Screw Google and their “20% time to work on your own projects.” Valve turned that dial to 11!
3: Don’t forget the long term
Because we all are responsible for prioritizing our own work, and because we are conscientious and anxious to be valuable, as individuals we tend to gravitate toward projects that have a high, measurable, and predictable return for the company.
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This sounds like a good thing, and it often is, but it has some downsides that are worth keeping in mind. Specifically, if we’re not careful, these traits can cause us to race back and forth between short-term opportunities and threats, being responsive rather than proactive.So our lack of a traditional structure comes with an important responsibility. It’s up to all of us to spend effort focusing on what we think the long-term goals of the company should be.
In many, many workplaces where employees are unhappy and frustrated because their workdays are entirely taken up with putting out one fire and then the next, leaving no time for long-term planning of any kind. Valve try not to fall into that trap.
4: Don’t stress over the things you don’t do
It’s natural in this kind of environment to constantly feel like you’re failing because for every one task you decide to work on, there will be dozens that aren’t getting your attention. Trust us, this is normal. Nobody expects you to devote time to every opportunity that comes your way. Instead, we want you to learn how to choose the most important work to do.
At most workplaces there is a huge and unrelenting focus on the things employees haven’t done. Almost every meeting, email and phone call are intended to remind people of the next deadline and how far away they are from reaching it. Valve try to take the pressure of employees so they don’t stress over the things they don’t do.
5: We test ourselves
…rather than simply trusting each other to just be smart, we also constantly test our own decisions
Yes. Don’t believe your own hype. Test your decisions and adjust as needed.
6: Overwork is bad
While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication.
This is a brilliant slap in the face to all members of The Cult of Overwork, ie. everyone who believes that the key to succes is simply to work more hours.
7: Enjoy yourself
Sometimes things around the office can seem a little too good to be true. If you find yourself walking down the hall one morning with a bowl of fresh fruit and Stumptown-roasted espresso, dropping off your laundry to be washed, and heading into one of the massage rooms, don’t freak out. All these things are here for you to actually use.
And don’t worry that somebody’s going to judge you for taking advantage of it—relax! And if you stop on the way back from your massage to play darts or work out in the Valve gym or whatever, it’s not a sign that this place is going to come crumbling down like some 1999-era dot-com startup.
If we ever institute caviar-catered lunches, though, then maybe something’s wrong. Definitely panic if there’s caviar.
In short, you should feel good during your work day.
8: You’re free to screw up
Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake.
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Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company — we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors.Yes! I cannot stress enough, how important it is to let employees make mistakes.
In fact, we should celebrate mistakes at work.
9: It’s not about growth
We do not have a growth goal. We intend to continue hiring the best people as fast as we can, and to continue scaling up our business as fast as we can, given our existing staff. Fortunately, we don’t have to make growth decisions based on any external pressures — only our own business goals. And we’re always free to temper those goals with the long-term vision for our success as a company. Ultimately, we win by keeping the hiring bar very high.
Yes! Way too many businesses are slaves to growth goals that are arbitrary, unrealistic and ultimately meaningless.
As Ricardo Semler put it:
There is no correlation between growth and ultimate success. For a while growth seems very glamorous, but the sustainability of growth is so delicate that many of the mid-sized companies which just stayed where they were doing the same thing are much better off today than the ones that went crazy and came back to nothing. There are too many automobile plants, too many airplanes. Who is viable in the airline business?10: Hiring
Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing.
So when you’re working on hiring … everything else you could be doing is stupid and should be ignored!
Again, this is brilliant. Nothing undermines a strong positive company culture faster than hiring people who don’t fit in.
In short, this is a fantastic document and one of the coolest things about it is that it’s maintained by the Valve employees themselves, who are free to edit it on their intranet.
You can find the whole Valve Employee Handbook here – read it, read it, read it :)
Your take
What do you think of these 10 points? How does this document compare to your workplace’s employee handbook? Is there anything in your employee handbook that inspires you?
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Quote
You know a corporate values program is doomed to fail when they start printing mouse mats with the values.
– Henrik Burkal, CEO of REMA1000 DenmarkPossibly the best quote from our conference two weeks ago :o)
REMA1000 is a Norwegian chain of grocery stores and Henrik is the CEO of the Danish division. REMA1000’s vision is to be the most values-driven organization in Scandinavia. Consequently they have strong opinions on how or how NOT to introduce and strengthen corporate values.
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Take pride in your work
Spotted in front of a café in Copenhagen:
Never be afraid to show that you’re proud of your product. Especially if you’re f*cking proud!
Update: Jut to avoid any potential religious confusion, I should probably add that “god” means “good” in Danish :o)
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Are you engaged or are you happy?
I was recently invited to talk with employee engagement expert David Zinger about happiness at work and how it relates to engagement.
We had a great talk and you can hear the whole thing here:
There’s also a transcript if you’d prefer to read it.
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Working time through the ages
Wikipedia delivers again, this time with a great overview of working time – from the stone age to today.
A few nuggets from the article:
…early hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure time than is permitted by capitalist and agrarian societies;[5][6] For instance, one camp of !Kung Bushmen was estimated to work two-and-a-half days per week, at around 6 hours a day.[7] Aggregated comparisons show that on average the working day was less than five hours.[5]
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The automobile manufacturer, Henry Ford, was an ardent proponent of shorter work hours, which he introduced unilaterally in his own factories.
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Recent studies[9][10] supporting a four-day week have shown that reduced work hours not only increase consumption and invigorate the economy
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Because of the pressure of working, time is increasingly viewed as a commodity.[26] This trend, as well as the amount of working time being found to affect gender roles, has been notably researched by Sociology professor Dr. Stephen C. Smith.[27] In 2006, the average man employed full-time worked 8.4 hours per work day, and the average woman employed full-time worked 7.7 hours per work day.[28]Good stuff. There’s loads more – go read the whole thing.
Related posts
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Ed Diener’s FAQ on happiness is all kinds of awesome
Often you Google one thing and end up with something else and that’s how i discovered that Ed Diener (one of the world’s leading researchers in positive psychology) has an FAQ on Subjective Well-Being and that it is awesome!
It’s quite comprehensive (which is great) but it’s also nuanced and doesn’t try to give easy answers when there aren’t any.
Here’s an example:
Q: What is your advice to those who want to be happy?
A: As I have said repeatedly, I have no simple, easy answer that will make everyone happy. Some people with serious problems need to see a therapist and get professional help. And many of us have such deep-grained habits that it won’t be easy to change overnight. Plus, we all have our temperaments that will put some limits on how easy it for us to be happy.So there is no magic elixir. Having said this, I think there are some steps people can take to insure that they are as happy as they can be (although nothing will make us happy every moment, fortunately).
First, we need good friends and family, and we may need to sacrifice to some extent to insure that we have intimate, loving relationships – people who care about us, and about whom we care deeply.
Second, we need to involve ourselves in activities – work, for example – that we enjoy and value. We are likely to be best at things we value and think are interesting.
Finally, we need to control how we look at the world. We need to train ourselves not to make a big deal of trivial little hassles, to learn to focus on the process of working toward our goals (not waiting to be happy until we achieve them), and to think about our blessings (making a habit of noticing the good things in our lives).
Or this one:
Q: Are there scientific theories of SWB?
A: There are lots of theories, but no powerful theory has emerged that can explain most of the data. There are theories about social comparison, about adaptation, and many other aspects of SWB, but each one of them seems to predict only some of the differences in happiness, and each of the theories thus far has been incompatible with at least some of the data. So the field is still in a theory-building stage.Beware of researchers who think that they have a broad theory that can explain everything about SWB. Many theories (e.g., the idea that people are less happy if they are around others who have more than they do) have proven oversimplified, or correct only in limited circumstances.
There’s loads more. Go read the whole thing.
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The brain likes surprises
According to research, we become a happier when good things happen to us (duh!) but the effect is even bigger when good things happen to us unexpectedly:
Emory University and Baylor College of Medicine researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans to measure changes in human brain activity in response to a sequence of pleasurable stimuli.
They used a computer-controlled device to squirt fruit juice or water into the mouths of 25 research participants. The patterns of the squirting were either predictable or unpredictable.
The researchers found that the MRI scans showed a brain area called the nucleus accumbens to be much more active when the subjects received unpredictable patterns of juice and water.
So:
- Something nice happens that you expect = good
- Something nice happens unexpectedly = even better
This is interesting in the context of happiness at work because many of the things companies do to make their employees happier are utterly predictable: Summer parties, Christmas parties, Bonuses, team events, and so on happen on an almost completely fixed schedule, which serves to diminish their effectiveness.
This is why we advocate also doing random acts of workplace kindness. According to this research, a small well-meant surprising gesture towards an employee or a team may make them much happier.
So what could you do, to surprise a co-worker today? Here are some examples from previous blog posts:
- A really nice, surprising reward for a star performer.
- Give you co-workers a morning surprise.
- Random acts of kindness at work.
Your take
Has anyone ever done something that surprised and delighted you at work? Or have you done something like that to you co-workers?
