Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (21 page)

Marissa Mayer, formerly Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, knows how important it is for employees to have a place to go with their questions, ideas, doubts and suggestions. That’s why at Google she sat in her office every day from 4 to 5:30 ready to answer any question or listen to any idea from employees. There was a sign-up sheet on the door and couches and laptop-power outside the office for the people waiting to see her.

Many leaders have their focus exclusively on their own work, to the point where they don’t have time for their employees. These leaders ignore the fact that what really matters as far as happiness at work is concerned is the day-to-day interactions they have with their people. This, more than anything, means that managers must be willing to spend time with their people.

Leaders who don’t do this sacrifice their employees’ efficiency to enhance their own, and they send an unmistakable message that their employees aren’t valued. Here’s an example:

“My new manager seems to do his best to make his people unhappy. During our weekly department meeting, one of my co-workers asked to make an appointment with him to talk about his job. He’s not happy in his job, his job may end anyway, so he wanted to discuss these issues. The manager answered: I won’t have time for you the next four weeks, I’ve got other priorities. All of us felt punched in the stomach…”

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On the other hand, managers who take time for their people make them feel appreciated, understood and motivated, creating a bond of trust. Here’s how you can do it:

“I used to work at a bank and my boss liked to celebrate when a goal was met in a very special way. He would take you to lunch or just talk to you in his office and tell you how important your achievement was.

But the nice thing about the whole thing was that he explained to me just how significant my change had been to the bank operations. For example, I’m a network and security administrator. By the time we’d rebuilt the network and I’d optimized the communications with the remote offices he told me, “Thanks to you the number of credits the bank can handle remotely has increased 200%”, and that actually made me feel great. I was making a difference for this institution.”

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This manager took the time to personally and specifically thank employees who’d done good work, and the impact on their happiness and motivation was huge. It’s impossible for managers to not take time to do this.

Also, spending time with your people is the only viable way to know how happy they are at work. Do you know how happy or unhappy your employees are?

How happy are your people?

One of Denmark’s most successful small banks is from a small town called Middelfart. As a kid I lived there for a few years, and the name always caused uncontrollable giggles in my American relatives. I still have no idea why — it’s a perfectly respectable name for a Danish town…

Anyway, this bank, called Middelfart Sparekasse — stop laughing, this is serious! — has chosen an inspiring mission statement:

1: We want to treat our customers in such a way that they stay with us and also recommend us to people who are not yet our customers.

2: We want to treat our employees in such a way that they look forward to coming to work every day, and are proud to tell others where they work.

3: We want to make enough money to fulfil the first two statements.

How happy is your organisation, or your corner of it? This question is typically handed over to HR, who can then distribute a job satisfaction survey that results in a lot of statistics, which can be sliced and diced in any number of ways to produce any number of results. Which always reminds me of how Mark Twain defined three kinds of untruths - “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Any leader worth their salt knows how happy their people are. This is a leader’s most basic responsibility, and you shouldn’t need to see a bunch of pie charts — you should already know from your daily interactions with your people.

In fact, I challenge you to a simple exercise:
1. Make a list of all the people who report directly to you. If you can’t make the list because you don’t know all their names, that’s a good place to start!
2. Next to each person, write how happy you think that person is at work: Argh, Meh or Yay.
3. Next to each number write what made you choose that score. What have you observed that person doing or saying, or not doing or saying, that led you to that particular score?

Here’s an example of such a chart:

Download the worksheet Exercise 4: How happy are your people? At
www.pinetribe.com/alexander/exercises

Can you do this exercise for all of your people or only for some? If you’re not reasonably confident of all your scores, or if you’re unable to rate some of your people’s work-happiness, add step 4:

4. Observe your people for a few days to gather more data. Don’t tell them what you’re doing and don’t ask them directly, just observe them. Don’t be weird about it — just take a closer look at each of your people to find out how happy they are. Once you have more data, update your chart.

Then comes the last step:

5. Verify your scores. Have a fifteen-minute chat with each of your people to find out how happy they are. Ask them to rate themselves from Argh to Yay. Also, ask them what makes them happy at work and what could make them happier. And don’t forget to ask them what they think of how you’re doing your job.

Do this exercise now and then repeat it periodically. Every three months is great.

You may feel that you don’t have the time for this exercise in your busy schedule. The truth is, you don’t have time not to do it. This might cost you 15 minutes per employee every three months but it will save you enormous amounts of time in the long term. You’re installing an early warning system that tells you when things are starting to go badly for any of your people, instead of only realising it when they finally blow up. You’ll be helping to make them happier at work, and everyone will reap the benefits.

Don’t view the time spent on this exercise as an expense — view it as an investment that’s bound to repay itself many times over through increased productivity, and lower absenteeism and employee turnover.

However, there is one thing that you need to be prepared for: you may be told things about your leadership that you didn’t know and won’t enjoy hearing. The key here is to be open to whatever criticism or praise you receive. The definition of a great leader is not one who does everything right, but one who is always willing to learn and improve their leadership style.

Receive any input openly and constructively. Ask follow-up questions to make sure you’ve understood the criticism fully, and then thank the person for their honest feedback. Then you need to act on the feedback to show people that you’re committed to improving as a leader and that you’re truly listening to their suggestions.

Visualise your happy organisation

Knowing your goal is a great help in achieving your goal. Not just knowing it mentally and rationally, but also visually and emotionally. What does your goal look like? What will it feel like, once you achieve it? This exercise will give you a very clear picture of just that. It mirrors the exercise in the last chapter where you learned what your personal work happiness would feel like.

Imagine that you’ve done it. You have made your department, team or organisation totally happy. Everybody there is engaged and motivated. People love their jobs. They come in excited and leave proud. Meetings are fun and energising. Creative ideas are thrown about constantly, and many of them are carried out.

While your people are definitely having a lot of fun, they’re also doing amazing work. Customers rave about the service they get from your people, and productivity and quality have never been higher.

Try to really put yourself into that future. See what you would see, and feel what you would feel if you were really there. Then, look at the following questions and write down your answers:

1. You’re at home early in the morning, just before you leave for work. How do you feel about the day ahead of you?
   
2. You walk in the door and meet some of your people. How do they greet you? How do you greet them?
   
3. You’re in a meeting with some of your people. What do their voices sound like? What are they saying? What does your voice sound like?
   
4. A new employee is starting at your organisation today. How do you receive them? What is their first impression of you? Of the workplace? Of the people working there?
   
5. One of your employees has done some spectacularly good work. What do you do? How does that employee receive it?
   
6. You need to give an employee some negative feedback. How do you do it? How does that employee receive it?
   
7. Your organisation has done some great work. How do you celebrate? How does it make you feel? How do your people look and sound as you celebrate you results?
   
8. Your organisation has failed to reach one of its goals. How do you react? How do your people react?
   
9. You walk through your organisation and see your people working. How do they look? What expressions are on their faces? How do they sound? What sounds dominate the workplace?
   
10. You come home from work. Someone asks you how your day was. What do you say? How does your voice sound as you say it? How do you feel as you say it?
    

A worksheet for Exercise 5: Visualize your happy organisation is available at
www.pinetribe.com/alexander/exercises

There are three great things about doing this exercise:

1. Knowing what your goal will look, sound and feel like gives you a specific target to aim for.
   
2. Knowing just how great achieving your goal will feel gives you the energy to take action.
   
3. You focus on what you want to achieve (not on what you want to avoid), which programs your subconscious mind to achieve it.
   

The next step is to develop the arguments for doing something. Why exactly will your workplace be better when it’s happy?

Create the business case for happiness at work

“People would ask me when I was talking at a business school or to an analyst group, “Which comes first, your employees, your customers or your shareholders?” And you know for a long, long time, many decades, I’ve been telling them that it isn’t a conundrum. That if you treat your employees right, they’re happy and proud and participative with respect to what they’re doing. They manifest that attitude to your customers and your customers come back. And what’s business all about but having your customers come back, which makes the shareholders happy?”

Herb Kelleher, ex-CEO of Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines has always known that great results come only from people who love their jobs, as the quote from Herb Kelleher shows, but what is the business case for happiness at work in your corner of the organisation? How will more happiness, motivation and energy improve results and the bottom line?

Take a minute to imagine, as in the previous exercise, that you’ve made your part of the organisation happy at work. Your people come into work totally energised, happy and motivated. They’re creative, feel appreciated, take good care of the customers, and help each other out whenever they get the chance. They communicate well, praise and appreciate each other, work well as a team, and find their work meaningful.

Once your organisation, or your corner of it, is this happy, write down how this will change:

In each area, try to be as specific as you can about the effects of making your organisation happy. If there are cost or time savings involved, try to estimate them. You can download the spreadsheet  Exercise 6: Create the business case for happiness at work at
www.pinetribe.com/alexander/exercises