Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (6 page)

To my surprise, this didn’t just change my working life a little, it made a big difference. With my new skills, new projects and a more positive mood at work, I went from feeling OK about my job to feeling really great about it.

I do much better work as well. Partly because I’ve increased my skills and increased my work experience but mainly because I feel so much more enthusiastic about work now. The difference between being OK with my job and being happy about it has been huge for me.”

No matter how much you enjoy your job today, if you do exactly the same things in exactly the same way for a long time, sooner or later you will stop enjoying it. Human beings are learning machines, learning from everything that goes on around us, and loving that feeling of getting better and wiser.

We’re either growing or we’re shrinking; there’s no in-between. Shrinking feels bad; growing feels really, really good because it lets you:

• Know that you’re better at your job now than you’ve ever been.
  
• Be curious and learn about a topic.
  
• Know that you can obtain the skills you need to succeed.
  
• Expand your horizons.
  

Michael took the initiative and learned some new professional skills that made him enjoy his work more. But he also learned what makes him and his co-workers happy at work and was able to use this knowledge to create a fun and engaging mood in his department, together with his manager.

When we don’t learn at work, things become a lot less fun.

“When I worked for the federal government here in Canada I tried suggesting that all the training allowances be used freely. Spend your $700 (!) a year on woodworking if you want, as long as it keeps you learning.

The reply was, “The Queen does not pay for knitting classes.”

I left soon after!”

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The Queen does not pay for knitting classes — that’s classic! Well, perhaps if she did she wouldn’t have lost a valuable employee.

Peter Senge is the man behind the concept of Learning Organisations, which he defines as:

“Organisations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.”

There are many ways to learn in the workplace. You can be learning professionally and getting better at your job, or you can be learning about yourself, the people around you, and the workplace.

Basically, learning can be injected into any activity at work, making it run more smoothly and be more fun to do. You can have a meeting and learn. You can work on a project and learn. You can work alone and learn. You can talk to co-workers and learn. Here are some great ways to keep learning at work.

Take a course in something — anything!

Pixar, the company known and loved for movies like Toy Story and Finding Nemo, has created something they call Pixar University, that lets employees take classes in moviemaking, sure, but also in pottery, improvisational theatre, sculpture, drawing and much more.

How does learning pottery make you a better Pixar employee? Randy S. Nelson, the dean of Pixar University, explains:

“We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people
⁴
.”

I have enjoyed courses in painting, creative writing, improv theatre and singing, and while none of this is directly relevant to the work I do, it all helps me to grow and develop. You never know when something that seems totally irrelevant is going to spark a creative breakthrough, precisely because it is not directly connected to your field of work.

Pixar realises that happy people make better movies and that learning is a key part of making them happy. It doesn’t matter what they’re learning, as long as they’re learning, growing and developing — and having fun doing it.

Learn one new thing about a co-worker every day

What do you know about your co-workers? Do you know who has children and how many? Who has what hobby? Where did they go on their last holiday? What makes them happy or unhappy at work?

Take a genuine interest and absorb at least one new fact every day. The more you know about the people around you, the easier it gets to create a positive work environment, with better communication, better understanding, and fewer conflicts.

Teach

“When I was just starting in my new job, I had a lot of trouble using the IT systems. One day I asked one of my co-workers how to do a specific thing. She promptly put all of her own work aside and spent the whole afternoon teaching me to use the system.

This made me very happy, because it made me much better at my job, but especially because it told me that people at my new job were willing to take time to help each other and teach others what they know.”

One of the best ways to learn is to teach. As the story above shows, it’s also a great way to make others happy at work. What can you teach others? What tips and tricks can you pass on?

Swap jobs

At Southwest Airlines, employees regularly swap jobs. No, the baggage handlers don’t get to fly the planes, but they may get to follow a pilot for a day, just to see what their job is like. And pilots get to be counter staff, executives try working as ground staff, and flight attendants get to be executives.

In one case a baggage handler explained how he’d always envied the pilots. He was down on the tarmac in the sun and hot weather loading and unloading luggage, and from where he was standing he could see the pilot sitting in the cool cockpit eating an ice cream. The lucky bastard! But after following a pilot at work, he gained a new understanding of the pilots’ work. That pilot has probably been up since 4:30 in the morning, and has been flying almost non-stop since then. He’s eating an ice cream because he doesn’t have time for a real lunch — the plane is taking off again in ten minutes.

It also works the other way — if a plane is late, Southwest pilots often leave their cockpit to help the ground crew load or unload bags. That’s the attitude of mutual respect and assistance a company develops when different groups of employees have some insight into each other’s worlds.

Most conflicts between groups of employees arise when people don’t understand each other. If you can spend some time in another person’s shoes, it’s a great way to meet and engage people, and to learn about their job, so you can work more efficiently together afterwards.

Try stuff out

“A ceramics teacher announced on the opening day of the course that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

- From the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

If you always do things the same way, how are you ever going to find a better way? Try new approaches out and see what happens. Yes, you will fail once in a while, but failing is a great way — sometimes the only way — to learn.

Make mistakes faster

Randy Nelson from Pixar has another great saying:

“You have to honor failure, because failure is just the negative space around success.”

No matter how many times you tell yourself that “failure is not an option”, failure always remains an option. Closing your eyes to this fact only makes you more likely to fail. Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because:

• People who work under pressure are less effective.
  
• People resist reporting bad news.
  
• People close their eyes to any signs of trouble.
  

This is especially true when people are punished for making mistakes. Management über-guru Peter Drucker provocatively suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting. Admitting that mistakes happen and dealing constructively with them when they do makes mistakes less likely.

Failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Closing your eyes to failure means closing your eyes to these opportunities. Menlo Innovations, an IT company in Ann Arbor, Michigan has a big sign hanging in their office that reads “Make mistakes faster!” They recognise that occasional mistakes are a part of doing anything interesting or innovative, and that the key lesson is to fail early and learn from it.

Be free

“Last year my company started looking for a new building for our headquarters. The old one was designed for 120 people — we were nearing 200, and things were getting seriously cramped.” 

Anette, a 38-year-old secretary at a Danish shipping company looks a little stressed just thinking about the old overcrowded offices. Then she smiles. 

“And here’s the cool thing: instead of making the decision on their own, management invited all employees who wanted to, to participate in looking for and choosing a new building. Ten people formed a workgroup and we ran the whole process from the very beginning, talking to other co-workers about what their dream office looked like, looking at different possibilities and then recommending one to management, who accepted our decision and signed off on it right away".

“Because the decision involved so many passionate people, we got a really good feel for what we were looking for in an office and that enabled us to choose just the right building. And best of all, when we made the decision almost everyone in the company accepted it instantly. They may not all have agreed that it was the best possible option, but they’d all had the chance to contribute and everyone who cared about the choice felt they’d been heard.”

As I previously said, psychological studies show again and again that a fundamental basis for our happiness is the ability to control our own environment. When we are involved in the decisions that matter to us, when we can participate actively in creating our future, when we feel active rather than passive, we are much happier. Contrast this with a work environment where big decisions that directly affect you are made without your knowledge and without your input.

I admit that there is a problem here: while you can freely choose to be positive, to learn or to be open, it’s difficult to participate unless you’re invited to do so and your workplace and managers encourage it. This particular factor therefore relies more on your work environment than the others. But this is no excuse. If you only participate when you’re actively invited to, you will miss many opportunities. Instead, you must sometimes invite yourself to participate. If there’s something going on that you really, really want to be a part of — ask!

Of course, we can’t all participate in everything, and we can’t all be a part of every decision — nobody would get any work done. But in general, the more freedom and autonomy you experience at work, the happier you will be. Here are some ways to do it.

Plan your own work time

Patagonia makes outdoor clothing and gear. The company has grown from one man making mountain-climbing equipment part time to raise money to fund his own climbing adventures, to a $500 million business. If you visit Patagonia’s headquarters in Southern California, very close to the beach, you may wonder why there are surfboards lined up in the hallways. Founder Yvon Chouinard explains:

“I’m a businessman, but I’m still going to do things on my own terms. I’m going to break a lot of rules, and we’re going to blur the distinction between work and play.

So we have a policy here — it’s called “Let My People Go Surfing.” A policy which is, when the surf comes up, anybody can just go surfing. Any time of the day, you just take off and go surfing…

That attitude changes your whole life. If your life is set up so that you can drop anything when the surf comes up, it changes the whole way you run your life. And it has changed this whole company here.”

If there’s any way for you to plan your own work time, grab it. Being in control of our own work patterns is a crucial factor. And seriously, who is better able to plan your own work time than yourself?