Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (10 page)

Help people out

Michael, a consultant in his 40s, wanted to cheer his co-workers up a little. He came up with a great idea: one day he cleared his calendar, and announced to everyone in his department that he was available all day to help. Whatever tasks they didn’t have time for, had postponed forever or found boring, he would do for them.

Michael was put to work for various co-workers throughout the day. Everyone appreciated his help, but even more importantly they had fun working together. Michael and his co-workers learned a lot about each other that day.

Workplaces in which people are constantly willing to help each other out are sure to be happier than those where people only help themselves. Helping others shows that you value them and that you want them to succeed, and it feels good because it means you can contribute actively.

I often hear people saying, “I simply don’t have time to help others, I have too much work myself already.” However, when everybody subscribes to this philosophy, everybody becomes less efficient, and people have even less time. If, on the other hand, you can take half an hour to help a co-worker, saving them an hour of work, and that co-worker can return the favour some day, then everybody wins. Really, we don’t have time not to.

Someone has to start this trend of mutual co-operation — it might as well be you, and might as well be now!

Socialise

Kirsten Gehl, the HR manager at Accenture Denmark, and her party team, were forced to get creative. Accenture had had a rough year in 2003 and were forced to rethink their usual annual company summer party. Normally it was a huge affair held at some fancy hotel or restaurant. That was out of the question in 2003, so what would work? How could she give the people at Accenture a much-needed positive collective experience on a much more limited budget?

First the party team decided to have the party at a smaller, cheaper and much cosier venue. Then they had the brilliant idea to get the partners to staff the bar. At first some of the partners were apprehensive, as they were known more for their dedication to work, dark suits and businesslike manner than for their ability to get down and party.

Kirsten and her party team cornered a few senior partners and garnered their support, which convinced the others to give it a try. The party became Accenture’s best ever. Not only was it more fun than the traditional parties, but suddenly the partners were approachable to all employees, who could simply step up to the bar and order a gin and tonic from them. The employees loved it and, maybe most surprisingly, the partners loved it. Each of them had to be forced to leave the bar when their shifts were over!

Even after the party, the effect was felt — better relations and communication between Accenture’s partners and employees.

Go bowling, go to a pub or café, have dinner at someone’s house, go to the park, have an office party — anything that gives co-workers a chance to see each other outside of work and to get to know each other as people. Whatever event you choose, don’t make it too traditional, fancy or expensive — make it personal and memorable instead.

Make love the foundation of your work

“The most powerful force in business isn’t greed, fear, or even the raw energy of unbridled competition. The most powerful force in business is love. It’s what will help your company grow and become stronger. It’s what will propel your career forward. It’s what will give you a sense of meaning and satisfaction in your work, which will help you do your best work.”

- Tim Sanders, in his excellent book Love is the Killer App

What if your work was an expression of your love for the world, for other people, for your community, and for yourself? What if you worked not only because you have to support yourself and your family, not only to advance yourself, not for the money, the title, the status symbols and the power, but because your work is a great way for you to express this love and to make a positive difference in the world?

This may seem to be a high-flying and unrealistic goal, but people who take this approach to work find that work becomes incredibly fulfilling. Everything they do becomes imbued with meaning and purpose, and their work days are spent improving people’s lives — and that makes them really happy at work.

Getting results and relationships

It really is that simple to create happiness at work. Make sure that you get:

• Results
  
• Relationships
  

To get great results you must:

1. Praise

2. Grow and learn

3. Find meaning

4. Be free

To create great relationships you must:

5. Be positive

6. Be yourself

7. Love

These seven actions can be added to any activity in the workplace. Want to improve the quality of your meetings? Want to run a great project? Want to make your department a happy workplace? Ask yourself how you can help yourself and the people on the project be positive, learn, be themselves, and so on.

This is great news! This means that almost any company can become a happy place to work. Everything you need is already present or can easily be found.

Unfortunately, many people and companies don’t focus their attention where it matters. They look to other, more traditional, means to create more happiness at work. Means that, unfortunately, don’t work. We’ll look at those in the next chapter.

3. looking for happiness in all the wrong places

There are three things that we traditionally strive for at work. The bad news is that they simply do not work, and pursuing them relentlessly may even be harmful to your work-happiness. They are:

1. Money, raises, bonuses and incentives.
   
2. Promotions, impressive titles and similar rewards.
   
3. Job security.
   

As long as we look to these three things to make us happy at work, we will get nowhere, and happiness at work will remain beyond our grasp. Let’s take a closer look.

It’s NOT about raises and promotions.

A high salary does not make people happy at work. Neither does a raise, a bonus, a prize, or any other kind of financial reward – except perhaps very briefly. When a person gets a raise or a bonus there is a brief spike in happiness at work, but this happiness quickly settles back to its previous level. This does not mean that salaries don’t affect our happiness at work. If you perceive your salary to be unfair, that can definitely make you unhappy. As we will see in chapter 4, being treated unfairly can make us desperately unhappy.

You should definitely fight to get the salary you deserve. If you’ve earned a bonus or a raise, you should get it. Also, if your salary is so low that you and your family cannot comfortably live on it, that can definitely make you unhappy.

But once your salary is fair and enough to live on, further increases in salary do not lead to an increase in happiness.

Alfie Kohn, author of the excellent and provocative book Punished by Rewards, has this to say:

“The idea that dangling money and other goodies in front of people will “motivate” them to work harder is the conventional wisdom in our society, and particularly among compensation specialists.

Rewards are not merely ineffective but actually counterproductive. Subjects offered an incentive for doing a task (or, in some of the studies, for doing it well) actually did lower quality work than subjects offered no reward at all. As University of Texas psychologist Janet Spence put it after discovering this surprising effect in an early study of her own, rewards “have effects that interfere with performance in ways that we are only beginning to understand.”

Kohn’s book is meticulously researched and collates results from hundreds of psychological studies. This thoroughness is essential in order to communicate Kohn’s message, which is totally at odds with the way that businesses traditionally motivate employees, by throwing money and rewards at them.

A small town in the US wanted to promote reading among school children, so during the summer vacation they set up a program where children earned points for checking out books from the local library. Those points could be redeemed for free pizza at the local Domino’s Pizza.

While the program ran, it was a success and the children who participated read a lot of books — and presumably got very fat on pizza. But after the program ended, these kids now read fewer books. Their own natural motivation to read books had been replaced by the external motivation of free pizza, and when the promise of pizza went away, so did the motivation.

Kohn’s research found that rewarding people reduces motivation. This seems counter-intuitive at first, but Kohn’s explanation is simple: every time you reward people for doing something, you motivate them externally, an act which inevitably reduces people’s inner motivation. Inner motivation is the only guarantee of quality and performance in the long term.

Businesses and leaders struggle so hard to motivate their people using the promise of rewards like titles, promotions, larger offices and other corporate status symbols — but this actively lowers people’s motivation.

If rewards don’t work, what is the alternative? Kohn’s advice is to pay people fairly and then do everything possible to not focus on rewards. Incentives, bonuses, pay-for-performance plans, and other reward systems violate that last principle by their very nature. Businesses need to stop focusing so much on offering rewards, and employees need to stop chasing them.

In summary, the truth is this:

The salary just makes it possible for us to show up at work every day.

It has no lasting effect on how happy, motivated or productive we are.

Job security

“I work in the government sector in Denmark as a
tjenestemand
, a type of civil servant, virtually immune to being fired. No matter how incompetent or obnoxious I get, I can’t be fired without a huge hassle for my government department.

Though the public sector is moving away from hiring people on these terms, many people still have them. No matter what they do, they won’t lose their jobs. It’s the ultimate job security.

It’s terrible!

People end up stuck in a rut. Their world gets smaller and smaller, their focus gets more and more narrow. They also resist any and all change, no matter how small or how innocent. I hate to say this, but in many cases I really feel that firing that person would actually help them, because it would force him or her to move on.”