Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (17 page)

Gedankenexperiment

Let’s try a
Gedankenexperiment
— a thought experiment. Imagine two different departments in the same company, department A and department B. They do pretty much the same work, work out of the same building, and are comparable in most respects.

The only difference is this:

• Department A is mostly happy. They’re not deliriously happy each and every day, but the people like their jobs, like each other, and look forward to coming to work most days.
  
• Department B is less happy. It’s not that they hate their jobs all the time, it’s just that they’re not crazy about them, they’re not mad about each other, and though they do show up at work most of the time, it’s mostly for the paycheque.
  

If department A (the happy one) has 10 people, how many people do you need in department B to complete the same amount of work? Think about it for a second.

Whenever I speak about happiness at work to groups of leaders, I ask them this question. The answers range from 30 (i.e., department B needs three times as many people) to 8 (i.e., department B is actually more efficient than A because they don’t waste any time on being happy). Typical answers are 11, 12 or 13.  As the studies quoted in this chapter show, the difference is even bigger than this, and happy employees vastly outperform unhappy ones.

Here’s a bonus question for managers: what is it like to be a leader in department A compared to department B? Where would it be easier for you as a leader to:

• Motivate people.
  
• Initiate and implement changes.
  
• Create good communication.
  
• Create understanding of, and achieve, the company’s objectives.
  
• Create an innovative and creative culture.
  

Which department would you rather lead? This question is left as an exercise to the reader.

Unhappy employees will cost you

Unhappy employees cost companies dearly. According to a University of Florida study, published in the January 2006 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, employees start to misbehave when they are angry at work, dislike their jobs, or believe their supervisors are unfair.

And this is not only the case for a few malcontents and complainers; even model employees turn bad and start gossiping, pilfering, backstabbing and taking long lunch breaks when they’re not happy at work
²⁶
. So not only are unhappy employees unmotivated and disengaged, but many of the people who would be exemplary employees if they were happy will actively work against the company’s interest to get back at it when unhappy.

Four ways the happy companies have the unhappy beat

I want to briefly mention four specific areas in which happy companies beat unhappy ones. I’ve picked these because they’re among the most important factors for business success today, and because many companies struggle with them.

Happy organisations are more innovative

Previously I mentioned Professor Teresa M. Amibile’s research into how the work environment influences the motivation, creativity, and performance of individuals and teams. Her work shows that happy people are more creative:

“If people are in a good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day.

There seems to be a cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover, an incubation effect, to the next day.”

The Gallup Management Journal agrees, and finds that,

“59% of happy employees strongly agreed with the statement that their current job “brings out their most creative ideas,” compared with only 3% of unhappy employees
²⁷
.”

So if innovation and creativity matter to your business, you need happy people.

Happy people are more motivated

“Let me be blunt. To say that the job of a leader is to motivate his followers is as ridiculous as to say the job of the Chairman of the Board of General Motors is to turn on the sun in the morning so that we may have light by which to work.

As long as we cling to the myth and magic implicit in the notion that the leader’s job is to motivate the followers, that the boss’s job is to motivate subordinates, that the job of development of people in our organisation is a job of motivating them, we are wasting our time.”

John Paul Jones Sr.

Every leader wants motivated employees. Every employee wants to be motivated. And yet we often see managers complaining that their employees are impossible to get going, and workers complaining that their managers don’t motivate them and don’t know what makes them tick.

It’s not the job of the manager to motivate employees. That is impossible. It’s a manager’s job to create a happy work environment in which employees are naturally motivated.

Think about it: how difficult must it be to motivate people who are dissatisfied, disappointed, distrustful, disengaged and unhappy at work? It’s an uphill battle all the way.

An article from Harvard Business School put it like this:

“Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them
²⁸
.”

Happy employees need no external motivation — they motivate themselves and each other, and this internal motivation is both more efficient and more sustainable than the external motivation (like rewards) that managers of unhappy employees must resort to.

If you want true motivation in the workplace, you must create a happy workplace. It’s that simple!

Happy employees deliver better customer service

A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work” concluded that:

“When companies put employees... first, their employees are satisfied, their customers are loyal, their profits increase, and their continued success is sustained.
²⁹
”

Happy employees make their customers happy because they:

• Are in a good mood.
  
• Are motivated.
  
• Care about customers.
  
• Handle difficult situations better.
  
• Care about quality.
  
• Have more energy.
  

Good, genuine customer service comes only from happy employees. Unhappy employees can try to fake it, but it’ll be just that: fake service.

The maths is a little strange on this one: One happy employee can give ten customers a good experience. Ten unhappy employees can’t give one customer a good experience — what they can do is give 100 customers a bad experience.

Happy organisations handle change better

When Poul Pabian was made CEO of a new tax office outside of Copenhagen, Denmark, created by merging five independent departments, he faced a huge challenge. The individual offices had been through too many half-baked changes already, and cynicism had set in, with employees saying, “Yeah, right, this is just one more crazy decision made over our heads. If we ignore it, it’ll go away.”

In such an atmosphere, it’s difficult to make a merger a success, so Poul knew that he needed to do something special in order to get the employees to approach the merger with a positive attitude.

His solution was simple: he had a one-hour chat with each of his 100 new employees. This wasn’t a job interview — the only purpose was to get to know his people, and to let them meet him.

He also organised for the employees themselves to paint their new offices — not to save money, but as a team-building exercise and to create ownership of the new building. People loved both ideas, and cynicism transformed to trust between management and employees.

A few years later the structure of the whole Danish tax service was changed again, and Pabian’s organisation now faced new mergers. How did the employees react this time? They said “A new merger? Sure, let’s do it. The last time it was so easy, we’re sure we can do it again.”

Many companies find that change becomes more and more difficult, and that resistance to change grows inside the organisation.

Some people think that change happens only out of necessity, when the status quo becomes unbearable. These people may be surprised to learn that happy companies are much better at creating rapid, positive change than unhappy ones.

Why? Because happy companies have:

• Higher levels of trust.
  
• Better communication.
  
• Better mutual understanding.
  
• Greater ability to solve conflicts.
  
• More creativity and innovation.
  
• More energy and motivation.
  

In fact, only happy organisations can get to the point where they thrive on change, and turn one major change after another into resounding success stories. Unhappy organisations never reach that point and are simply left to dread the next change.

The bottom line

There is no trade-off between happiness at work and the bottom line. It’s not about sacrificing one for the other. It’s not a matter of either/or — it’s both or neither.

Businesses don’t have to choose between profits and happiness. The real choice is this:

Do you want your business to be rich and happy

or poor and unhappy?

Tough choice, huh?

Let’s take it a step further: Making your business happy is not just a good thing, it’s the best thing you can do for any business, because it enhances everything else. Happy people learn faster, communicate better and form more efficient teams. They are more motivated, energetic and creative. Plus, happy people care about what happens to the business. Unhappy people don’t give a damn — or actively wish bad things on the workplace.

This means that happiness at work makes every other activity in the workplace more efficient. Expanding the business, introducing new business processes, signing new customers, dividing or merging — whatever your business needs to do, it can do so much more efficiently when people are happy.

The future of work is happy

Our working environment is getting better. Would you want to work in today’s business world or the business world of 100 years ago? 50 years ago? Even 20 years ago, sexism, discrimination and authoritarian leadership were more common than they are today. There was also less freedom, stricter codes of behaviour, less room for personal expression, and less room for professional growth and development.

Sure, some things are getting worse, particularly since the start of the financial crisis in 2008 — there is definitely more stress and anxiety in today’s workplaces. But if you ask me to choose, I would absolutely prefer today’s world of work over that of the 1980s, 1950s or 1920s. Even if we don’t notice or think about it often, things are getting better.

If we take that thought even further, in a few years time there will mostly be happy companies. Happy companies are so much more efficient than their unhappy competitors that they will beat them in the marketplace. In fact:

Happy companies will beat the pants off their unhappy competition!

A wave of happiness is coming to the business world. The companies who can surf that wave are bound to get more success and more happiness. Those who can’t or won’t will slowly sink beneath the surface. They won’t be missed.

Unhappiness is just plain wrong

“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”

 John Stuart Mill

This chapter shows that businesses should embrace happiness because it’s good for business. But there is one other, even more fundamental reason: making people happy is good, making them unhappy is just plain wrong!

There are workplaces out there that run their people down, make them stressed and ill, destroy their sense of self-worth, are havens for bullies, and allow all kinds of harassment. Though it is rarely intentional, these workplaces still make their people unhappy, and mentally and physically ill.

I have no idea how leaders and managers of these businesses can live with themselves. They may hide behind the old argument that companies should only care about money — or, as Milton Friedman said it, “The business of business is business.” However, I hope this chapter has convinced you that this is a false argument because happy businesses make more money.

There is no longer any excuse for tolerating an unhappy work environment, when it’s just as easy to create one that is inspiring, uplifting, healthy and happy — one that is good for people and good for business.