Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (22 page)

Take a look at your results and add up the savings in time and money — this will give you your business case for happiness. Now it’s time to commit to happiness at work. Without this commitment, any action is likely to be hollow and ineffective.

Put happiness first

Google recognises that the key to their success is to consistently attract and hold onto the best people, and a web page listing “Top 10 Reasons to Work at Google” included these wonderful points:

• Life is beautiful. Being a part of something that matters and working on products in which you can believe is remarkably fulfilling.
  
• Appreciation is the best motivation.
  
• Work and play are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to code and pass the puck at the same time.
  
• Boldly go where no one has gone before. There are hundreds of challenges yet to solve. Your creative ideas matter here and are worth exploring. You’ll have the opportunity to develop innovative new products that millions of people will find useful.
  

When Google announced their IPO in 2004, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that they would keep treating their employees exceptionally well. Investors who did not like this approach were kindly requested to take their money elsewhere.

In other words, Google put their people first. As a leader, are you ready to put happiness at work first? Or do you want to see your best employees defecting one by one to companies that do?

The traditional ways of motivating and engaging employees — raises, promotions, bonuses, incentives and titles — simply don’t work, as we saw in Chapter 3. They can even be harmful and make people less happy and motivated.

What you need to do is both simpler and harder. Simpler, because it doesn’t require you to set up complex bonus systems and results tracking. Harder, because it requires more of you as a human being. More than anything you must want positive relations with your people. You must want them to be happy.

Putting happiness first is a bold statement and might not sit well with the executives, the board, or with investors. Too bad. This is where leaders need to step up and show their conviction that a happy workforce is a great thing in itself and the best way to a better bottom line.

This is how Southwest Airlines, Rosenbluth, Irma, Google, Middelfart Sparekasse and many other great organisations get their amazing results, and they’ve done it by taking these three steps:

1. Put happiness at work first

Which of these two statements do you think would inspire and energise your people the most?

1. Our most important goals are to increase profits by 15%, increase stock prices by 12%, grow our market share by 8%, create 3 new divisions, and increase overseas sales by 20%. Oh, right — and to make our people happy at work.

or

2. Our most important goal is to make our people happy at work and nothing beats that priority. This is how we as a company will reach our goals together.

It’s really no contest, is it? There is no way that leaders can make a company happy on their own. We need everybody on board for that, and the only way to get your employees involved is to demonstrate a heartfelt, genuine, inspiring commitment to happiness at work. That is why you must put happiness first, not at a distant 5th place to other business goals.

2. Announce these priorities to the organisation

There’s no reason to keep this intention a secret — quite the contrary. People need to know that this is going on so that they can get involved. This also creates accountability so that people can hold management to it, and people can get involved in making the organisation happy.

3. Stick to these priorities

This is the difficult part — announcing that you’ll put happiness first and then drifting off track when it gets too hard is worse than doing nothing. It results only in cynicism and a depressing sense that, “Yeah, management announces a lot of fancy new programs but nothing ever comes of them. We just carry on as usual until it blows over.”

A clear vision of your goal and knowing exactly why this is good for you, good for your people and good for the company will help you hang onto that commitment. It’s a great idea to periodically go back and review your answers to the exercises in order to boost your faith in and commitment to happiness at work.

Make a happy plan

Of course, the very best way to boost resolve and commitment to anything is to get some results from your efforts, preferably results that are fast, tangible, positive and inspiring. For that, you need a plan. But not just any plan — you need a happy plan!

11. make a happy plan

“Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: First, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.”

Arnold J. Toynbee

Happiness at work is just that: an ideal that takes the imagination by storm. In the previous two chapters we have imagined workplaces that are thriving, vibrant, dynamic, efficient and fun; where people come in excited and leave proud; where they grow and learn; where they do great work for themselves, the company and the customers; where new ideas are constantly hatched, implemented and celebrated. Imagine the mood. Imagine the buzz!

The other thing we need to create some sustained enthusiasm, aside from a vision, is a plan, but let’s not fall into the usual trap and:

• Set an overly ambitious goal.
  
• Make a 50-step plan complete with Gantt charts and deadlines.
  
• Commit to absolutely, positively fulfil the plan no matter what.
  
• Fall behind on the plan because it’s difficult to take time out for your 50 action items when there’s “real work” to be done.
  
• Lose heart and drop the whole thing because it wasn’t “important enough or you would have done it”.
  

Does that process sound familiar? I suggest you do this instead:

• Make a plan that’s fun rather than ambitious.
  
• Do one small thing every day.
  
• Follow up without pressure.
  
• Celebrate your results.
  
• Share what you do.
  

In short, go for the low-hanging fruit. Get some quick, easy wins — then move on from there.

Look at the table below and fill it out. You’ll notice that it only has space for five action items, and that’s all you’re allowed to plan. Just five actions, each of which must be:

1. Fast — Something you can do now or in the next week’s time.
   
2. Easy — Something you absolutely, positively know you can do. If you’re not quite sure if you can pull it off, think of something even simpler that you know you can do.
   
3. Fun — Something you’ll enjoy doing.
   

And, of course, it must be something that will make you and/or others a little happier at work.

5 fast, fun, easy things I will do to create more happiness at work:

Then, put one more action on the plan that you feel is more challenging. Say, a difficult conversation you need to have, a decision you want to make, or even switching to a new job, if that is what you want to do.

One slightly more challenging thing I will do to create more happiness at work:

1.

The following are some tips for choosing good items for your happy plan.

Look to what makes you and others happy

We saw which actions make most people happy at work in Chapter 2. To get great results you must:

• Praise
  
• Grow and learn
  
• Find meaning
  
• Be free
  

To create great relationships you must:

• Be positive
  
• Be yourself
  
• Love
  

Which of these do you already do in your present job? Which could you do more of? How could you do each of these more to make yourself and others a little happier?

Involve others

It’s possible to go it alone, but it’s much easier and much more fun to spread happiness together with others. Invite your co-workers to be a part of the project, and be sure to invite people who are sympathetic to the idea of happiness at work, particularly people who are naturally happy, fun to be around and have energy to spare.

Get together, kick some ideas around, and then try the easiest and most fun ones. This is what the nurses at the H4 children’s ward did, and look how well it worked for them. We learned about their story in Chapter 8.

Go for contagious

It’s even better if you can come up with an idea that is self-reproducing, i.e., one that spreads itself throughout the workplace.

You could make a list of “Reasons why our department, team or workgroup rocks”. Write the first reason at the top, then pass the list to a co-worker who must do the same. When everybody has contributed, hang the paper somewhere highly visible.

Or, you could make some small “Thank you” cards to thank people for a job well done, which they can then pass on to others.

Go for something where your initial effort only needs to be very small but involves a lot of people, each of whom gets to contribute.

Give to get

It seems to be a universal principle that when there’s something you want, it pays to give it to others. Would you like to receive more praise? Start praising others and they will start praising you more. Want to be surrounded by happy people? Be happy yourself. Want to be greeted with a cheerful “Good morning” every day? Start doing this yourself.

If there’s anything you would like to have more of for yourself, see if you can find a way to give that to others. Give to get.

Make it fun and playful

“Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been the key to everything I’ve done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin’s success.”

Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin

The more fun and play you can inject into this process, the better. Imagine the opposite: a book that tells you that the road to happiness at work should be long, difficult and unpleasant — you’d drop the book straight away!

Try it!

You can spend days and weeks trying to come up with the perfect plan — or you can just come up with some stuff that might be fun to do, then try it. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, try something else.

Trust your instincts. If part of you really wants to try something, try it!

Make others happy

More than anything, the best way to make yourself happy at work is to make others happy. When you can spread some happiness to others, you become happy yourself, because:

• Making others happy is fun.
  
• They become happier and are nicer to be around.
  
• They might start making you happier in return.