Alexander Kjerulf's Blog, page 13
June 4, 2019
Awesome video: Dancing construction workers
This is AMAZING. A group of Canadian construction workers do a bhangra dance video to collect money for an autism charity.
The post Awesome video: Dancing construction workers appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
Free webinar June 17: The best (and worst) ways to measure happiness at work + introducing Heartcount
Most companies conduct regular job satisfaction surveys, but they often dont work very well and fail to deliver tangible improvements to employees’ perception of their workplace.
This leads to increased unhappiness among employees and from there to lower productivity and higher employee turnover.
In this free webinar we will cover:
Why traditional job satisfaction surveys often fail
Why you absolutely should measure happiness at work
Better ways to measure happiness at work ie. more often, more relevant and more valuable
Share specific experiences from a company that tried it
A very brief introduction to Heartcount – a unique new tool for measuring happiness at work
The webinar is on June 17 from 1:00 pm-1:45 pm Copenhagen time and it’s of course free. Sign up here.
The post Free webinar June 17: The best (and worst) ways to measure happiness at work + introducing Heartcount appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
May 29, 2019
The 3 most important things bosses should learn from swing dancers
In dancing just as in business there are leaders and followers. But if you think this means that The leader always leads and the follower does what theyre told then youre very wrong.
Miranda van Wonterghem is an international swing dance teacher and in this amazing talk from our International Conference On Happiness at Work, she revealed the three main things business leaders should learn from dancers to create happier and more effective leadership – AND demonstrated it with dancing.
The post The 3 most important things bosses should learn from swing dancers appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
3 things leaders should learn from dancers
In dancing just as in business there are leaders and followers. But if you think this means that The leader always leads and the follower does what theyre told then youre very wrong.
Miranda van Wonterghem is an international swing dance teacher and in this amazing talk from our International Conference On Happiness at Work, she revealed the three main things business leaders should learn from dancers to create happier and more effective leadership – AND demonstrated it with dancing.
The post 3 things leaders should learn from dancers appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
May 27, 2019
Highlights from our 2019 conference
2 days, 20 speakers and 200 participants from 25 countries. Here are the highlights from our 2019 International Conference On Happiness At Work.
The post Highlights from our 2019 conference appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
May 20, 2019
Happiness at work is good for employees AND the bottom line
There is a tremendous amount of research that shows that happiness is great for employees AND for the company’s bottom line.
In this speech from our conference in 2017, I go through all the research and show why the future belongs to the happy.
The post Happiness at work is good for employees AND the bottom line appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
May 6, 2019
20 ways to measure happiness at work beyond the usual useless satisfaction surveys
Measuring employee happiness is a great idea.
Sure, it has its problems. Any time you measure anything, you run the risk of getting bad data, the wrong data or making bad decisions based on the data.
But it still makes sense for two main reasons.
First and most obviously, if you measure employee happiness right, it can actually guide efforts to improve the workplace by identifying organizational problems and strengths.
Also, most business leaders are highly results oriented and data driven and find it hard to value things they can’t put a number on. Tracking employee happiness with hard numbers in some way can bolster organizational commitment to happiness initiatives.
So what can you measure? This can go way beyond just an annual job satisfaction survey. It’s essential to find the metrics that are relevant to your employees, your customers and your organization.
Here are all the potential ways we’ve come up with to measure employee happiness. Did we forget any? Write a comment if you have one we didn’t include.
Measure employee mood
If you want to know how happy your employees are, you can quite simply ask them. The traditional way is of course to run annual satisfaction surveys but I’m very skeptical about that approach.
You can measure things like:
Happiness
Satisfaction
Engagement
Well-being
Psychological capital
You can conduct the measurement using surveys, apps, mood boards or even just tennis balls.
Other employee metrics
Two other obvious employee-related metrics are:
Absenteeism
Employee turnover
Each of these have a direct bottom line impact and are directly correlated with employee happiness.
Hiring
Happy organizations also attract more and better new hires. That means that you could also measure on metrics like:
Applications received per opening posted
Time to fill positions
Rate of acceptance of job offers
Rate of successful hires (how many new employees stay at least x months)
This will be especially relevant in fast-growing workplaces or in industries where there is strong competition for the best talent.
Customer metrics
We know that happy employees make the customers happy. Some potential metrics are:
Customer happiness / satisfaction
Customer loyalty / repeat business
Brand perception
Employee performance
We also know that happy employees do a better job, so measuring happiness could also mean tracking metrics like:
Productivity
Quality / errors
Workplace safety / accidents
Success rate of innovation / change projects
Negative behavior
Given that happy employees are less likely to engage in bad behavior at work, we could also track metrics like:
HR complaints
Fraud / stealing
Physiological measures
This area is a little more speculative but some people have suggested measuring things like:
Cortisol in saliva samples
Blood pressure
Sleep time and quality
These do raise some ethical issues around privacy and bodily autonomy.
The upshot
Measuring employee happiness can help efforts to improve a workplace and strengthen leadership’s focus and commitment to these efforts.
While traditional satisfaction surveys have a long list of problems, there are many other metrics you can look at.
No workplace should measure all of these metrics. Depending on the industry, situation and type of employees only a small subset of these will be relevant. It’s up to each workplace to define which are the most relevant and to find a good way to track and act on these metrics.
Related posts
Top 10 reasons why job satisfaction surveys are a waste of time
How to measure employee happiness with tennis balls
Top 10 reasons why performance reviews are a waste of time
A better way to measure employee happiness
The post 20 ways to measure happiness at work beyond the usual useless satisfaction surveys appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
20 ways to measure happiness at work beyond the usual useless satisfaction survey
Measuring employee happiness is a great idea.
Sure, it has its problems. Any time you measure anything, you run the risk of getting bad data, the wrong data or making bad decisions based on the data.
But it still makes sense for two main reasons.
First and most obviously, if you measure employee happiness right, it can actually help steer the process by identifying organizational problems and strengths.
Also, most business leaders are highly results oriented and data driven and find it hard to value things they can’t put a number on. Tracking employee happiness with hard numbers in some way can bolster organizational commitment to happiness initiatives.
So what can you measure? This can go way beyond just an annual job satisfaction survey. It’s essential to find the metrics that are relevant to your employees, your customers and your organization.
Here are all the potential ways we’ve come up with. Did we forget any? Write a comment if you have one we didn’t include.
Measure employee mood
If you want to know how happy your employees are, you can quite simply ask them. The traditional way is of course to run annual satisfaction surveys but I’m very skeptical about that approach.
You can measure satisfaction, engagement, well-being or happiness directly.
You can use surveys, apps, mood boards or even just tennis balls.
Other employee metrics
Two other obvious employee-related metrics are:
Absenteeism
Employee turnover
Each of these have a direct bottom line impact and are directly correlated with employee happiness.
Hiring
Happy organizations also attract more and better new hires. That means that you could also measure on metrics like:
Applications received per opening posted
Time to fill positions
Rate of acceptance of job offers
Rate of successful hires (how many new employees stay at least x months)
This will be especially relevant in fast-growing workplaces or in industries where there is strong competition for the best talent.
Customer metrics
We know that happy employees make the customers happy. Some potential metrics are:
Customer happiness / satisfaction
Customer loyalty / repeat business
Brand perception
Employee performance
We also know that happy employees do a better job, so measuring happiness could also mean tracking metrics like:
Productivity
Quality / errors
Workplace safety / accidents
Success rate of innovation / change projects
Negative behavior
Given that happy employees are less likely to engage in bad behavior at work, we could also track metrics like:
HR complaints
Fraud / stealing
Physiological measures
This area is a little more speculative but some people have suggested measuring things like:
Cortisol in saliva samples
Blood pressure
Sleep time and quality
These do raise some ethical issues around privacy and bodily autonomy.
The upshot
Measuring employee happiness can help efforts to improve a workplace and strengthen leadership’s focus and commitment to these efforts.
While traditional satisfaction surveys have a long list of problems, there are many other metrics you can look at.
No workplace should measure all of these metrics. Depending on the industry, situation and type of employees only a small subset of these will be relevant. It’s up to each workplace to define which are the most relevant and to find a good way to track and act on these metrics.
Related posts
Top 10 reasons why job satisfaction surveys are a waste of time
How to measure employee happiness with tennis balls
Top 10 reasons why performance reviews are a waste of time
A better way to measure employee happiness
The post 20 ways to measure happiness at work beyond the usual useless satisfaction survey appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
May 1, 2019
Happy May 1st! Let’s celebrate how far we have come thanks to organized workers’ movements.
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Today on May 1st it’s fitting to celebrate how much workplaces have improved, thanks in large part to unions and worker movements.
These are the factory rules for an 1800s Manchester cotton factory. Scary today, but perfectly normal back then! Without strong organized labor, it might still be acceptable to treat workers like this.
The post Happy May 1st! Let’s celebrate how far we have come thanks to organized workers’ movements. appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
April 29, 2019
More amazing work from our global partners
In 2015 we started the Woohoo Inc Partnership and we now have partners promoting happiness at work in 30 countries.
We are incredibly proud to be supporting these amazing people. Here are some examples of the fantastic work they do.
Argentina: Team building with purpose
Grupo Aukera in Buenos Aires did a teambuilding workshop for a big international insurance company where the teams had to work together to assemble bicycles.
But there was a surprise:
While the teams were working, they all thought that the bicycles would be drawn by the participants or that they would be left for the winning group.
The surprise was that by the end of the game when the bicycles were finished, the real “clients” were poor children who received help from an NGO and used bicycles not only for playing but also to go to school or to the dining room where they they served food daily. In this way the concept of “Results” came up very clearly, understanding the meaning of our work.
What a great idea – and one that lead to a 50% improvement in that division’s satisfaction surveys.
Lebanon: The country’s first ever conference about happiness at work
Randa Farah of I have Learned Academy arranged a conference on happiness at work in Beirut and over 300 people came and saw some great local and international speakers at a very creative and fun event.
Belgium: Running a happiness program at the Department of Education
Tryangle are currently running a program which consists of a hybrid pack of webinars and keynotes on how to become happier at work with a focus on teamwork and communication. Griet Deca from Tryangle noted that:
Everybody in the department can enroll in their activities and for the first webinars we had a lot of participants. They were actively engaged creating a lot of interaction. And that made Kim, who did the webinar, also happy!
Hybrid learning tracks help to a) balance the budget and b) keep the happiness-idea alive all through the year. The fact that the participants of the webinars will meet the webinar animator is a big added value according to the feedback we get.
The public sector needs more happiness at work and doing a blend of online and physical learnings helps make the training more effective and affordable.
Poland: Putting workplace happiness on the agenda for the first time
Many Central and Eastern European countries have no tradition for focusing in happiness at work so getting attention can be tough. But Kasia Kern has been very successful in changing the conversation using a combination of social media, webinars and physical meetups.
I put together 1 hour webinar called “10 ways to become happier a work”. I remember that I posted it in the network and I literally went for vacation with my family. While sitting on the beach, I couldn’t believe what was happening, I was getting one email after another notifying me that another person register on my webinar.
When I came back I did my first webinar for 100 people, much more than I expected. So I repeated it several times and there was a similar audience each time.
I then decided to organize a few free of charge meetings in the biggest cities in Poland, to share more on Happiness at Work and included local companies to share their best practices. These events have also been sold out and attracted a lot of attention.
She will also be doing Poland’s first conference on happiness at work later this year!
Czech Republic: The world’s biggest conference on Happiness at Work
Our partners in the Czech Republic have done an annual conference on happiness at work for 4 years. It started out small with 70 participants but the latest edition had over 500 attendees, making it the biggest conference about happiness at work anywhere in the world.
UK: Rocking a closing keynote
Sarah Metcalfe of Happy Coffee Consulting in the UK gave the closing keynote at a conference called When Digital Becomes Human. She got awesome feedback, lots of questions and a 4.5/5 speaker rating.
Slovenia: Getting published
Petra and Maja of Paleta Znanj managed to get workplace happiness into some of the major business publications in Slovenia:
We prepared two articles on happiness at work for two professional magazines and they will be published in April and May. First will be an article for Direktor (a magazine focusing on development of managers) with more focus on long term and strategic advantages of H@W and leading with happiness. The second one comes out in May for an HRM magazine (focused on HR professionals) about happiness at work and its importance for a positive organizational culture.
Both magazines have a reach of few thousands, which is quite a lot for our country.
Israel: Launching a happiness board game
Games are a great path to learning and PlusConsulting in Israel have launched one that is focused on strengths and happiness at work:
FINDING THE PLUS is an interactive fun game that boosts happiness and enables participants to learn tools and solutions from the sciences of happiness at work and positive psychology.
Finding the PLUS game, will help you learn to implement and practice the positive perspective in a fun and engaging way. Through the game the players will get familiar with the four aspects of positive psychology: mental, emotional, physical and social. They will learn and practice new techniques that will enable them to increase their happiness level, become more empowered, improve their performance as well as their wellbeing.
How awesome is that!
Italy: The first conference about happiness at work
People 3.0 arranged their country’s first ever conference on workplace happiness with local and international speakers and 100 participants.
Much more coming
There are many, many more great things coming from the partner network. They are, without exception, smart people with great skills who are doing amazing work. If you’re looking for a local speaker or consultant to make your organization happier and more successful, you can see the whole list of partners here.
Are you interested in becoming a partner? Read all about the partnership here.
The post More amazing work from our global partners appeared first on The Chief Happiness Officer Blog.
