The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Tag: featured

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.

January 17, 2014
Steal our best exercise for happiness at work: The Poncho
Praising people at work is great, but hard. It takes some practice to do well and doesn’t come naturally to many people.

So ages ago we developed an exercise to help teams praise each other and it’s our absolute favorite thing to do in our workshops. And now we’ve put the instructions online, so you can do it with your team.

We have done this hundreds of times and it never fails. It takes about 30 minutes and works in groups of 10 people and upwards. We’ve done it with hundreds of participants, but typically we’ll do it with one department or team, so about 10-50 people.

You will need a flip-over chart and a marker pen for each person. Here’s how to do it, step by step.

1: Give each person a marker pen and a flip-over chart.

2: Ask each person to tear a whole in the middle of the sheet of paper and then put it on like a poncho. The easiest way is to fold the chart into quarters and tear off one corner.

3: Once everyone is wearing their poncho, give people the following instructions: “Go around and write on the backs of other people. Write the stuff you like and appreciate about the person. The stuff they do well and the qualities they have. Write on as many people as possible, write as much as possible but only write it if you mean it.”

4: Then give people time to write on each other. Groups up to 20 people will need about 10 minutes for the actual writing, larger groups may need more time.

5: Once people have finished writing on each other, give them these instructions: “I bet you’re all wondering what people have been writing on you. Please keep your ponchos on and sit down. Now for the next minute, you’re not allowed to speak. You’re only allowed to read what it says on your poncho and to enjoy it. Please, take them off and read them now”.

6: Give them a minute or so to read their ponchos.

7: Ask them to turn to their neighbor and discuss what it says on their poncho. Did anything surprise them? What do they especially appreciate?

8: End the exercise and thank them for participating.

We’ve done this exercise with leaders, employees, government workers, school teachers, school kids, social workers, secretaries, lab workers, prison guards, kitchen staff and many, many other groups and it works every single time.

Participants especially enjoy that:
- It’s easy to give praise.
- It’s easy to receive praise – you don’t have to respond to it, only to enjoy it.
- They learn what people appreciate about you.
- People get praised both for what they do but also for who they are.
- They can save their ponchos and take them out and read them when the need a boost.
My favorite part of the poncho exercise is when you get chains of 5-10 people, each writing on the back of the next one.

Your take

What do you think – would this work in your workplace? Have you tried something similar already? How did it work?

Related posts
December 6, 2013
Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work
Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh recently tweeted this:

“$1.6 million mistake on sister site @6pm.com. I guess that means no ice cream for me tonight. Details: http://bit.ly/blfLnF”

Apparently an employee had made a mistake while updating the prices on the web site, which meant that for a whole day, no item could cost more than $49.95. Some of their items cost a lot more. Ouch!

Now what do you do? In many organizations a mistake like this would be the starting point for a witch hunt. Who is responsible? How did they screw up? What would be an appropriate punishment?

But this is not how they do business at Zappos. At the link above, Tony Hsieh writes:

To those of you asking if anybody was fired, the answer is no, nobody was fired – this was a learning experience for all of us. Even though our terms and conditions state that we do not need to fulfill orders that are placed due to pricing mistakes, and even though this mistake cost us over $1.6 million, we felt that the right thing to do for our customers was to eat the loss and fulfill all the orders that had been placed before we discovered the problem.

PS: To put an end to any further speculation about my tweet, I will also confirm that I did not, in fact, eat any ice cream on Sunday night.

This is not soft or wishy-washy, it’is a great way to handle mistakes in a business. Rather than stigmatizing failure, we should acknowledge and even celebrate it.

Yes, that’s right, I said celebrate our mistakes. I’ve long argued that we should celebrate success at work, but we should also celebrate mistakes, failure and fiascoes. Here are the top 5 reasons why this is a good idea.

1: When you celebrate mistakes, you learn more from the mistakes you make

In one company, the CEO was told by a trembling employee, that the company website was down. This was a big deal – this company made most of its sales online, and downtime cost them thousands of dollars an hour.

The CEO asked what had happened, and was told that John in IT had bungled a system backup, and caused the problem. “Well, then,” says the CEO “Let’s go see John!”

When the CEO walked into the IT department everyone went quiet. They had a pretty good idea what wass coming, and were sure it wouldn’t be pretty.

The CEO walks up to John’s desk and asks “You John?”

“Yes” he says meekly.

“John, ” says the CEO, “I want to thank you for finding this weakness in our system. Thanks to your actions, we can now learn from this, and fix the system, so something like this can’t happen in the future. Good work!”

Then he left a visibly baffled John and an astounded IT department. That particular mistake never happened again.

When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes.

2: You don’t have to waste time on CYA (Cover Your Ass)

Huge amounts of time and energy can be wasted in organizations on explaining why the mistakes that do happen are not my fault. This is pointless.

3: When mistakes are celebrated, you strengthen creativity and innovation

Randy Pausch, was a college professor who became famous after giving his “last lecture” when he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

In his classes, Pausch would give out an award called The First Penguin to the team that took the greatest risk – and failed. The award is inspired by that one penguin out of a whole flock up on dry land who is the first to jump in the water, knowing full well that there may be predators just below the surface. That penguin runs a risk but if no one jumps in first, the whole flock will starve on land.

And check out this sign that hangs in the offices of Menlo Innovations, an IT company in Ann Arbor, Michigan:

Yep, it says “Make mistakes faster”. They know that mistakes are an integral part of doing anything cool and interesting and the sooner you can screw up, the sooner you can learn and move on.

4: Failure often opens new doors

Also, failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Closing your eyes to failure means closing your eyes to these opportunities.

Just to give you one example: Robert Redford was once an oil worker – and not a very good one. He once fell asleep inside an oil tank he was supposed to clean. But failing at that, opened his way to movie stardom.

5: When you celebrate mistakes, you make fewer mistakes

I know that a lot of people stick to the old saw “Failure is not an option”. But guess, what no matter how many times you repeat this maxim, failure remains an option. Closing your eyes to this fact only makes you more likely to fail. Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because:
- People who work under pressure are less effective
- People resist reporting bad news
- People close their eyes to signs of trouble
This is especially true when it’s backed up with punishment of those who make mistakes.

The upshot

Peter Drucker provocatively suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting. Admitting that mistakes happen and celebrating them when they do, makes mistakes less likely.

James Dyson says this:

I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative…

We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually.

So my challenge to you is to start celebrating your failures. Next time you or someone on your team messes up, admit it, celebrate it and learn from it. Tackle the situation with humor (as Tony Hsieh did) rather than with fear and shame.

Your take

How does your workplace handle mistakes? Is it more like a celebration or a witch hunt? What has been your most spectacular screw-up at work so far? How did you handle it and what did you learn from it? Please write a comment, I’d like to hear your take.

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June 3, 2010