Here’s some serious happiness at work for ya:

This is just awesome. It’s silly, playful, fun, loud AND it involves the passengers, making them part of the experience.

One of the many things I love about Southwest Airlines is that these kinds of people are the heroes of the organization. They’re the ones who are celebrated and held up as shining examples.

If you can help someone out or brighten someone’s day, be it a co-worker or a passenger, you’re doing your job well.

This is no coincidence – it’s by design. You can see Southwest’s former president Colleen Barret talk about it here. Just press play, the video will start playing just when she talks about this.

If you have 25 minutes, watch the whole thing – it rocks!

Complete this sentence: “When it rains, the price of umbrellas goes __.”

If you guessed up you’d be right in most places. But at IKEA stores, you’d be wrong.

Here’s how they price their umbrellas:

IKEA umbrellas
Sunny Day: $ 10
Rainy Day: $ 3

Yes, on rainy days, umbrellas are cheaper :o) What a nice way to make customers happy.

This is no coincidence – happiness matters at IKEA. Their founder, Ingvar Kamprad, once said this:

Work should always be fun for all colleagues. We all only have one life. A third of life is work. Without desire and fun, work becomes hell.

To me, this attitude only makes sense. Making your employees happy makes the business more profitable and making your customers happy keeps them coming back.

It ain’t rocket surgery, and fortunately more and more companies are figuring this out and committing themselves to happiness at work.

Your take

What about your workplace? Does happiness matter where you work? Does anyone care whether the people and customers are happy? Please write a comment, I’d love to know.

Related posts

• Top 5 Reasons Why “The customer is Always Right” is Wrong
• Happiness at Work at Southwest Airlines

Are butchers happy at work? Sure thing, according to an Australian survey:

A Galaxy poll of consumers on the perceived happiness of workers found that butchers were the most friendly and contented workers in Australia, and Ricky Beaves agrees.

Mr Beaves became a butcher 35 years ago and is happy every day.

“At the time I went into it simply because it was a job,” he said. “I’m lucky that I’ve always enjoyed it.”

Being a successful butcher has more to do with personality than anything else, Mr Beaves said. “We have fun with our customers.”

So there are apparently a great many happy buthcers.

What about happy plumbers? Those exist too:

Happy dentists? Why the heck not:

Almost any job holds the potential for happiness at work. There are happy bus drivers, nurses, programmers, teachers, undertakers, sewage workers and fry cooks at McDonald’s. There are also unhappy people in every profession you can mention.

This doesn’t mean that YOU personally could be happy in any job. You need a job that lets you do what you do best. You also need to work in a company culture that fits well with who you are.

So this is not to say that anyone can be happy in any job. That would be an overly simplistic, naive assertion. But any job has the potential for happiness, with a few exceptions: If a job is exploitative, if it requires you to be a bad person or if it involves unethical behaviour, then happiness at work is probably impossible.

Update: Just found an article, which proves that you can be happy at McDonald’s – and make a lot of other people happy: McDonald’s drive-thru worker gains online fan base.

Your take

What do you think? Can you think of a job that by definition makes happiness at work impossible? What jobs have made you happy or unhappy?

Related posts

• Why “Motivation by Pizza” Doesn’t Work
• Top 5 Reasons Why “The Customer is Always Right” is Wrong
• When is it Time to Leave a Bad Job? Find Your Quitting Point.

I was on Danish news TV (TV Avisen) Monday night talking about how you can stay happy at work after the summer vacation is over.

You can see the clip here – all two minutes of it :o)

Here’s three minutes of happiness for ya:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Fun though this clip is, there are also some deep lessons here about communication, fun, play and mutual expectations.

Why shouldn’t corporate communication be as lively, fun, playful and effective?

Last week on my twitter account (click here to follow me), I hinted at this mysterious project in London that I couldn’t talk more about. Well now I finally can and it’s a really cool one :o)

CA (formerly Computer Associates) commissioned a study (called The CA 2009 Webstress Index) to look at webstress, a term they came up with to describe the frustration and unhappiness you experience when a crucial web application is not working properly.

Here I am, talking about the study:

And here are some of the key findings:

• 68% of workers say they rely on web applications more now than two years ago and 97% wouldn’t be able to do their job without them.
• 24% say that every day they have to cope with badly performing applications with an additional third 34% claiming this happens on a weekly basis.
• 81% say they have no choice but to use some business applications even when they aren’t working properly

You can see the whole study here.

This study is interesting because it confirms something I’ve seen in many workplaces: Employees are reliant on IT systems to their jobs. Increasingly, the IT systems we use are web applications, meaning they reside “somewhere on the internet”. When these systems are slow, buggy or unavailable we get frustrated and angry.

This is especially true these days, where companies are demanding ever higher levels of productivity, efficiency and customer service from their people. If companies demand this but don’t give employees the well-functioning tools they need to deliver, the result is unhappiness at work.

And of course, when employees are unhappy at work, the results are:

• Lower productivity
• Higher absenteeism
• Higher employee turnover
• Lower customer satisfaction
• Lower profits

These factors taken together can cost organizations huge sums of money.

Speaking from my own experience, my own company is absolutely dependent on web apps – all our vital IT systems run on a web server somewhere. If any of them are not working, we’re basically crippled. Fortunately, that happens very rarely or I would be suffering from seeeeerious webstress :o)

The same goes on the customer side. We all use web applications to buy books, plane tickets, movie tickets, hotels, etc. – and when these web apps aren’t working or seem too slow, there are always ten other sites offering much the same products at much the same prices.

If your company offers any kind of web application to its customers, that system should make them happy. At the very least, it shouldn’t give them webstress and make the unhappy because its, slow, buggy or even down.

I think it’s time for organizations to take webstress seriously. CA’s study confirms what I’ve seen in many workplaces all over the world, namely that badly performing web applications is a major source of unhappiness at work and in customers. And THAT’S why I am so excited about the CA study.

Full disclosure:
CA offers Application Performance Monitoring Solutions that let organizations track the performance of web applications. They are paying me to contribute to this campaign but I still mean every word :o)

Your take

What about you? Are you using any crucial web apps in your job? Have you experienced web stress?

A couple of months ago I went to London to guest speak at Srikumar Rao’s class on Creativity and Personal Mastery at London Business School. It was a fun and exciting couple of hours… and then the students in the class completely surprised me.

A mysterious package arrived with a poster which you can see above. These are pictures of the students being happy with some of my key messages superimposed. That has got to be one of the coolest things anyone has ever sent me and that poster is going up on the wall in my trophy room.

Thanks again to Srikumar’s class for a great time and a fun gift which surprised me AND made me happy!