Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (2 page)

You also can’t wait to come home in the evening, all fired up. Though you spend your workdays focused and concentrated, you have so much fun doing your job that it actually leaves you with more energy than when the day started. You look forward to sharing that energy and positivity with your friends and family after another great workday.

Imagine for a moment how it would feel to lie in bed on a Monday morning going “YES! I get to go to work this week!”

Is it possible to be this happy at work? Can we go to work and be energised, have fun, do great work, enjoy the people we work with, wow our customers, be proud of what we do, and look forward to our Monday mornings as much as some people long for Friday afternoon? Can we create workplaces where this level of happiness is the norm, not the exception?

Or must we simply accept that work is unpleasant and tough and that is why we get paid to do it?

This book is here to tell you that yes, you can be that happy at work, and when you are, it’s great for you and great for your job, your company and your career, because you get:

• More drive and motivation.
  
• Better relationships with co-workers.
  
• Greater success.
  
• More creativity and good ideas.
  
• More energy.
  
• Better health.
  
• Less stress.
  
• Much more fun.
  

Your life outside of work gets better too because work becomes a source of energy and good experiences rather than a stressful, painful, frustrating obligation.

And it’s not just good for people. More and more businesses are finding that things work better with happiness and that happy companies have:

• Higher productivity — happy people achieve better results.
  
• Higher quality — because happy employees care about quality.
  
• Lower absenteeism — people actually want to go to work.
  
• Less stress and burnout — happy people are less prone to stress.
  
• The best people — people want to work for happy companies.
  
• Higher sales — happy people are the best salespeople.
  
• Higher customer satisfaction — happy employees are the best basis for good service.
  
• More creativity and innovation — happy people are more creative.
  
• More adaptability — happy people are much more adaptable and open to change.
  
• Better stock performance and higher profits — for all of the above reasons.
  

Simply put: happy companies are more efficient and make more money. And they make people happy, which is of course a goal in itself.

The flip side

Most of us have probably been on the flip side, and have been unhappy at work. I once spent a long year being unhappy at work, and I hated every second of it.

After graduating with a Masters in computer science in 1994, I worked as a developer and consultant, and then co-founded a software company called Enterprise Systems with some fellow geeks in 1997.

When we started the company we had one huge advantage: we had no idea how to run a business. The three founders—myself, Patrik Helenius and Martin Broch Pedersen—were all happy geeks with great tech skills and almost no business experience. We did have some pretty good notions of how NOT to do it from our previous jobs, but mostly we had a passion for doing things RIGHT and for creating a workplace that people would actually like. This protected us from repeating “business as usual”, and freed us to try many untraditional approaches.

It worked. In our company:

• People did excellent work.
  
• All employees took responsibility and action when needed.
  
• We made good money. Not obscene, just good.
  
• We focused on constant education and training.
  
• Everyone was involved in leading the company.
  
• Everyone was motivated and engaged.
  
• People didn’t work too much — 40 hours a week or less.
  
• We had massive amounts of fun.
  

But nice as it was, after about three years I began to feel constrained and locked in. I wanted to do something new, and there was no room to do this within our company. I thought long and hard about leaving the company, but didn’t get around to actually quitting. That was a mistake.

During my last year at the company, I was desperately unhappy. Most mornings when I woke up I looked for some reason to stay home. At work I got very little done, and spent most of my time counting the hours until I could leave.

And here’s the worst part: I could barely recognise myself. I’m normally energetic, positive and fun. I became tired, negative and bitter, not only at work but also outside of it. I was depressed and annoyed at everyone and everything.

Normally I’m a very creative person who comes up with ten new ideas a day, but during that period my creativity dried up. I couldn’t come up with a good idea to save my life, and every idea other people presented to me sounded horrible. I was in a perpetually negative state.

Finally, in June 2002, I quit. I decided not to look for a new job straight away and to just take some time to decompress. Those summer months with uncharacteristically great weather (for Denmark) slowly brought me back to my old self. I spent zero time thinking about my next job, reading job postings or starting a new company.

Then one lovely summer day at the beach, the idea came to me: happiness at work. That’s it! That’s what I’m passionate about. That’s what I want to work with. This idea became Woohoo inc., and we have been making people happy at work since early 2003. We have worked with clients like IBM, LEGO, IKEA, Hilton, Microsoft, Pfizer and many others, who are now happier at work after trying our methods.

We have taken the message of happiness at work to over 30 countries on 5 continents and our work has been mentioned by CNN, the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Forbes, the Times of India and countless others.

I can safely say that there is no greater job than making other people happy! It’s continually fun, exciting and rewarding. And when you think about it, isn’t that really the true purpose of most jobs — to make people happy? You must make the customers happy. Or your co-workers. Or the boss. Or the shareholders.

Now I want to make it clear that we don’t go to work to be happy. We go to work to work, so to speak. You are at work to do the best possible job you can and to constantly excel and improve your performance. But we happen to do that much better when we are happy at work.

A nurse who makes the patients happy and healthy is better than one who only makes them healthy. A boss who makes her employees happy and efficient is better than one who only touts efficiency. A teacher who can make his students smarter and happier is better than one who only passes on knowledge.

Choose this approach to work and business: make people happy — as many people as possible as often as possible, inside and outside your company — and you can’t fail. And you will have a great time doing it!

The future is happy

I have great news for you: happiness at work is coming to almost all workplaces. It is inevitable. There is a massive tendency in the business world to focus more and more on making work a positive experience, and while it is not yet felt in every country or in every workplace, it soon will be.

The reason is simple but powerful: today, customer service, efficiency and innovation are an organisation’s prime success factors. It doesn’t matter how efficient a company is at producing yesterday’s goods if it doesn’t have the creativity to invent tomorrow’s. Nobody cares how efficient its business processes are if it can’t give its customers a good experience.

Studies consistently show that happy companies are way more productive, creative and service-oriented than unhappy ones. Therefore, the happy companies will beat the pants off the unhappy ones in the market place. The future of business is happy! It’s inevitable.

However, if we choose to do something constructive about it now, we can become happy at work sooner rather than later. Our workplaces can reap the human and financial benefits this year rather than in five or ten years.

That is the thought that gets me out of bed, happy and smiling, almost every single Monday morning!

About This Book

This book is for anyone who has a job and anyone who wants one. Whether you’re an employee, manager or executive, this book has tips for you. Whether you work in industry, service, government or retail, there are tools you can use. Whether you’re a graduate looking for your first job or have a long, distinguished career already behind you, there is always more to learn about happiness at work.

The book aims to convince you that:

• Each and every one of us can be happy at work.
  
• Being happy at work will not only make work more fun, it will also improve your quality of life outside work and make you more successful.
  
• Happy businesses are much more efficient than unhappy ones — happiness makes great business sense.
  
• Happiness at work is not rocket science — it is simple to help yourself and your workplace to be happy.
  

Of course, it’s not enough just to know these things, we must also do something about it, so this book will leave you with everything you need to help make yourself and others happy at work:

1. Knowledge — The basic theory of happiness at work, based on scientific studies from psychology, sociology, neurology and management science.
   
2. Tools — Simple, practical tips and tools that will help you achieve fast results.
   
3. Energy — I will try to make you excited about the concept of happiness at work and all fired up to do something about it.
   
4. A plan — A specific plan tailored to your situation.
   

Stories and case studies

This book refers to many real-life case studies of companies who have achieved success through happiness. Business books normally preface every business case with a list of that company’s accomplishments, which might go something like this:

Acme Inc. is the only company in the world to have achieved triple-digit growth 58 years running.

Their stock price has risen from 10 cents to $452 and is still a “strong buy” recommendation from all investment advisors.

They have expanded from humble beginnings in the founder’s outhouse in 1938, to a complex taking up half the buildings in lower Manhattan.

The founder is now richer than Bill Gates and 3 out of 4 employees retire as millionaires on their stock options before they turn 40.

Or words to that effect.

Not only do these litanies of amazing accomplishments get boring after a while, but they also paint a false picture. The company may be successful, but who really knows why? The reason for their success could be innovation, timing, happiness, wise investments, or sheer, blind luck. Who knows?

When I use a company as a case study in this book, we can safely assume:

1. They are doing phenomenally well (You can always Google them if you don’t believe me).
   
2. They themselves believe that one of the main reasons they are doing so well is happiness at work.
   

OK? OK!

All the stories you’ll read in this book are true. Names and other details may have been changed to protect the innocent, but all events took place as described.

Go visit the website

This book has an accompanying website at this address:
www.pinetribe.com/alexander

Here you will find:

• Additional reading and articles on my blog, where I write about happiness at work regularly.
  
• Worksheets for the exercises.
  
• And lots more
  

And most importantly, you can tell me and the rest of the world what you think about the book, and exchange thoughts about your experiences with other readers.