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Achieving Your Goals for 2023 and Beyond

Understanding The Contentment Continuum is critical to achieving your goals for 2023 and beyond

The following is excerpts from my book Heyday-how to make every day the best day of your life. This chapter speaks to the fact that we need to be thoughtful about our conscious state of contentment, as it will determine our ability to achieve meaningful goals, and to live a life of happiness and well-being. I believe this is foundational to our ability to set realistic and meaningful goals so that we significantly increase the likelihood that we will to achieve goals, that really matter.

Being creatures whose existence is closely wedded to our emotions, on a day-to-day basis, we human beings live in various degrees of contentment. By this I mean when thinking about our lives—the past, present, and future—we feel happy, unhappy, exhilarated, miserable, elated, depressed. Many of the decisions we make are based not on objective “facts” but on how we feel about ourselves. Our feelings can inhibit action or spur us to take action. We feel deprived, so we seek to get more. We feel satiated, so we go take a nap. We feel slighted, so we seek revenge.

Unlike animals, who (as far as we know) live entirely in the present, with no thoughts of the past or concerns about the future, we humans constantly think about both the past and the future: Where we’ve been and where we’re going. Our degree of contentment versus discontent drives us to either sit around and do nothing, or get up and take action to improve our lives.

I call this “contentment consciousness.”

While contentment consciousness is a wide continuum, in terms of reaching and staying at your heyday, we recognize three areas of contentment consciousness that matter. These states are:

Destructive Discontent

Here you say, “My life is good, but it’s not good enough—not now, not ever. I will never reach my heyday.”

In this state, you tell yourself, “If I could only have that brand-new Porsche, the extra $50,000 a year in income, the new house, the perfect physique, the ideal mate, then, and only then, could I be happy.”

Sadly, individuals who live in this state often have a really good life, but because they do not practice daily appreciation, they lose sight of what they have and only focus on what they don’t have. In my work, I have the opportunity to meet unbelievably successful people. I find that many of them are at peace with their success because they spend a great deal of time appreciating it, and somehow more success finds its way to them. Meanwhile, others cannot accept their success and they feel deprived even as more wealth is heaped upon them.

This state of malcontentment has created many casualties and it most certainly is not sustainable. I suppose the biggest irony is that if you do not focus on appreciating the things you have and you become compulsive about wanting more, you actually put your wealth, health, and happiness at great risk.

Destructive discontent can lead to:

1) Inaction, because you believe that life is hopeless and there’s no point in trying to make it better because you’re always going to lose. You retreat to your sofa and watch cable TV all day, and then complain bitterly how the world has cheated you out of what you deserve.

2) Reckless action, because you feel desperate and will do anything to make a change. You’ll become a drug dealer, or fall for a Ponzi scheme, or embezzle from your job. This is a dangerous state to be in because you may break the law and wind up in jail, or gamble foolishly and lose everything.

Destructive Contentment

This person says, “My life is bad, but I’m okay with that. I do not deserve to reach my heyday.”

I once had a friend named Tim. He was a smart guy with an amazing potential ahead of him. The problem was that he didn’t believe he deserved to be successful. He always felt he wasn’t good enough. In his mind, he pictured himself being able to afford only a modest apartment, a used car, and a woman who was willing to endure him. (These were his words, not mine!) Since our reality always squares up with our core beliefs about ourselves, Tim lived the last thirty years never realizing his potential to evolve and serve others. Throughout the years I tried to coach him to a better state, but he would give me shopping lists of all of the external factors that prevented him from succeeding. I would explain to him that so many others—including myself!—had risen above their adversities to grow, thrive, and prosper. Tim would listen to me patiently, and then (in my imagination) he would take another dose of the mind-numbing medicine I called “Tim-enol.” It was as if he were self-medicating with a drug that sapped his ambition and turned him into a hollow man, willing to accept whatever scraps the world tossed to him.

Destructive contentment can cause a person to alter their values to ensure continued mediocrity. Once I was driving down the street and I noticed a car with a bumper sticker. The message on the sticker proclaimed, “When all else fails, lower your standards!” At first I chuckled, and then almost immediately became mortified.

Why? The truth of the matter is too many people adopt this strategy as their lifelong mantra. I’ve heard people say things like, “I tried to get fit and lose weight, but then I lowered my expectations because it was just too hard.” Or, “I started the process of my lifetime goal of earning a master’s degree, but then I realized it was difficult and inconvenient, so I recalibrated by lowering my standards.” Isn’t that sad?

The other side of destructive contentment is when you become (for lack of a better expression) fat and lazy. Life is good, the money is rolling in, and everything seems to be just fine. You willfully ignore the warning signs that the world is changing and your heyday is not going to last.

Constructive Discontent

This is what you want! Here, the person holds two beliefs that at first may seem contradictory but in reality complement each other perfectly. They are:

1) At the present time, I am happy, and my life is good. I get up each morning eager to experience the new day. I am truly content.

2) I am incomplete and a work in progress. I see how much more I could do to continue my personal growth, pursue a meaningful purpose, and provide service to others. In that respect, I am discontent. I can do better!

Doesn’t this make perfect sense? After all, why should the will to improve oneself be rooted only in misery? Why couldn’t it also be rooted in constructive discontent?

In the state of constructive discontent, we are truly happy and feel blessed about what we have in our life. We also know that we are here to learn, to evolve, and to serve others. In order to serve more people we need to learn more things and acquire more tools like connections and (yes) money. We need to be healthy, agile, and most importantly, evolutionary. In other words, in this state of heyday happiness we are really pleased with the velocity and quantity of opportunities that we enjoy. But we also know that stopping our evolution at this point in our life would mean that we would start to tamper with our purpose, our evolution, and our ability to serve others. We are here to become ourselves, and since this job lasts for a lifetime, we can never be completely content with where we are. But not being content whilst living in a state of thankfulness allows us to be truly happy while improving our impact on the world.

While no life is perfect—everyone has their ups and downs—if you look at certain people, you see that, at least in their public persona, they’ve created a lifelong heyday based on constructive discontent. Take author Stephen King, for example. His first best seller was his novel Carrie, which was published in 1973, when King was twenty-six years old. He didn’t know it then, but his heyday had officially begun. Over the next forty-plus years he has sold over 350 million copies of his books, and despite the roadside accident in 1999 that nearly killed him, he publishes roughly one new novel every year. In 2020—forty-seven years after Carrie—he’s slated to release If It Bleeds, which, like the many that have preceded it, will surely land on the best seller lists. King could have long ago rested on his laurels (and his millions in the bank), but even after the crippling hit-and-run accident he’s driven to keep doing what he does best. That’s well-earned heyday!

Key Takeaways

Our existence is closely wedded to our emotions, and many of the decisions we make are based on how we feel about ourselves and others. Our feelings can inhibit action or spur us to take action. This is our “contentment consciousness.”

There are three basic levels of contentment consciousness.

Destructive discontent can lead to a) Inaction, because you believe that life is hopeless and there’s no point in trying to make it better, or b) Reckless action, because you feel desperate and will do anything to make a change. Destructive contentment leads to a lowering of your standards to avoid facing hard reality. The consequences can be costly. Constructive discontent is what you want! Here, the person holds two beliefs that at first may seem contradictory but in reality, complement each other perfectly. They are:

1) At the present time, I am happy, and my life is good. I get up each morning eager to experience the new day. I am truly content.

2) I am incomplete and a work in progress. I see how much more I could do to continue my personal growth, pursue a meaningful purpose, and provide service to others. In that respect, I am discontent. I can do better!

I wrote the book heyday with the intention of giving it away, not selling it. I believe it has the potential of helping a lot of people. If you would like to receive a digital copy of the complete book, simply send me an email and I will forward it to you. nick@nickwebb.com

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What Customers Hate selected as one of the top marketing books for 2022

I believe my book was very well received by the marketing community because it really addresses the four quadrants of growth and revenue. By that I mean, most marketing efforts focus on the use of marketing to get new customers. The problem is theoretically this only represents 25% of your revenue opportunity. There are three other areas that are just as important as your marketing efforts if you are looking to drive predictable and sustainable enterprise growth. The three other areas that have a major impact on sustainable enterprise growth is customer retention, customer promotion, and the avoidance of customer deflection.

The first two are pretty straightforward, the last term customer deflection refers to the fact that bad social ratings or adverse comments about your organization or products in social communities will have a massive impact on affecting opportunities for continuous growth. In addition to my book, What Customers Hate, I also recommend taking a look at my books, Happy Work, and One Step Ahead as a playbook for your growth for 2023 and beyond.

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One Step Ahead

Competing in business is often compared to running a race.

It’s a good analogy, and it dovetails with the fact that in sports, there are two kinds of races: sprints and marathons.

In a sprint, the race is short. The goal is to run full speed until you cross the finish line ahead of the pack, whereupon the race is over. The winner is declared, medals awarded, and then everyone goes off to the local watering hole.

Companies that are sprinters want to grow to a certain size, achieve a solid market share, and then make a profitable exit by selling out to a larger firm. Thousands of companies do this every year. For example, in September 2022, the owners of Signify Health, which operated a network of doctors making house calls, announced they were selling the company to drugstore giant CVS. The price was roughly $8 billion. Founded in 2017 in Dallas, Texas, Signify offered analytics and technology to help a network of 10,000 doctors provide in-home health care to 2.5 million patients across the United States it would acquire. As of the time of the CVS acquisition announcement, the company had been sprinting toward the finish line for about five years. Its founders and investors anticipated a nice fat payday.

In a marathon, the race is much longer. You need to pace yourself and maintain a steady position either at the front or within striking distance. You’re thinking ahead and planning what you need to do to win, both today and in the future.

While actual marathons involving runners must eventually end at the finish line, in business, a marathon may never end! It may continue for years and even decades. In the American auto industry, the Big Three—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—have been battling for first place for nearly a century. IBM and Xerox have been at it for even longer. GE and Westinghouse have been competing for 130 years. And Proctor & Gamble has been fighting Colgate-Palmolive for over 180 years—with no sign of either side weakening!

These companies are running marathons. They fight to stay at the front of the pack as long as they can. There may be times when they’ll slip in into second or even third place, and then they’ll regroup and claw their way back to the front. For any company competing in a marathon, staying One Step Ahead for decades is an amazing feat.

The Race Is Getting Faster and Tougher

For a thousand years, no man could run a mile in under four minutes. Nobody believed it could be done. Then in 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3:59.4 minutes. At the time, this was astonishing. No one had ever run so fast! But the pace quickened. Since then, runners have gotten faster, and the four-minute barrier has been routinely broken. The current men’s record holder is Hicham El Guerrouj, with a time of 3:43.13—more than fifteen seconds faster than Bannister.

Just like the speeds set by top sprinters, the pace of business is getting faster. The rate of change is accelerating.

For example, consider Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, published a landmark article in which he proposed that due to continuing advances in manufacturing technology, the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every year. In 1975 he revised his prediction to doubling every two years—still an astonishing rate. He projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another ten years. In fact, Moore’s prediction has proved to be accurate for several decades, during which it has become clear that accelerating advancements in many areas of digital electronics reflect Moore’s law, including memory capacity, sensors, the number and size of pixels in digital cameras, and quality-adjusted microprocessor prices. It’s a manifestation of the fact that change in every area of business, from technology to human resources, is getting faster.

In addition to the rate of change in the marketplace—and the world—accelerating, the rate and severity of market disruption is increasing. The race itself is getting more difficult. Instead of a nice smooth path, the way forward is getting bumpier and more hazardous.

Today’s challenge is the fact that today, we have both: accelerating change and massive disruption.

As the race intensifies, staying One Step Ahead requires more speed, agility, and stamina than ever before. The technology that was cutting edge yesterday will be obsolete tomorrow. Employment practices are evolving at lightning speed. New rules, new goals, and new threats are emerging more quickly than many leaders can handle them.

We live in a time of hyper-consumerism. With just a few taps on their smartphones, consumers can buy just about anything at any time and have it delivered overnight. Businesses live or die by social ratings on digital platforms including Yelp, Google reviews, Trip Advisor, Angi, Foursquare, and many others. If a business makes its customers or employees unhappy, there’s no place to hide. Even top recruits have become picky consumers: the overwhelming majority of job seekers will not consider a role until they have researched the company on platforms such as Glassdoor.

Why Your Leadership Is Important

The accelerating rate of change in your marketplace makes leadership—your leadership—all the more important in staying One Step Ahead of the competition.

Why is your personal leadership so important?

Because if you’re not setting the pace, nothing else matters.

Not your team, your technology, your products, or your brilliant business plan.

Here’s just one example—a cautionary tale of woe.

Remember BlackBerry? In the first decade of this century, you either had a BlackBerry or you knew someone who did. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, co-CEOs of the parent company RIM, guided BlackBerry to the top of the personal communications market. In developing the innovative device that was the first to reliably deliver e-mail over the airwaves, they turned a tiny Canadian company into a global electronics giant. For many years, BlackBerry devices were in the lead because they provided small Qwerty keyboards that made it easy to send emails and instant messages.

Then on June 29, 2007, Apple introduced the first iPhone.

The response by Lazaridis and Balsillie? They ignored it. As Apple gained ground and was hot on BlackBerry’s heels, BlackBerry stuck to the idea that analog plastic keys were preferable to sleek, elegant touchscreen devices, and that if they doggedly marketed their old-school technology the phones would continue to sell.

Consumers had other ideas. As the iPhone took off, suddenly nobody wanted to be seen with a BlackBerry, and many rushed to change devices for fear of seeming to be out of touch.

BlackBerry, which had been comfortably ahead of the pack, found itself one step behind, and then falling further from the lead. As Steve Toback wrote for Moneywatch, “Balsillie and Lazaridis couldn’t have done a better job of driving the company off a cliff if they’d cut their own brake line and floored it.”

Obviously, this is not what you want a reporter from Moneywatch to write about you!

This was a case of a sprinter overtaken by a faster, more determined rival. One of the challenges of being in the lead is that you need to look back over your shoulder to see who might be gaining on you. If you only look ahead, you’ll be lulled into thinking you’ve got the market to yourself. Don’t be seduced by success—it needs to be earned every day!

 

Do I Need to Be a Superhero to Win?

It’s true that the rate of change in business is speeding up.

And market disruption is getting stronger and more frequent.

Does this mean that to stay One Step Ahead and win the race, you need to be superhuman?

No, you don’t have to become a superhero. You can be yourself.

You can be yourself because I’m not asking you to outrun a speeding bullet, stop a locomotive, or leap tall buildings in a single bound.

I’m asking you to stay just One Step Ahead of your competitor, who is an ordinary mortal just like you.

You’re already very good at what you do. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be in the race. All you have to do is take your good performance and step it up a notch. Squeeze out just a little more speed. Take a slightly longer stride. Don’t stop for a latte macchiato quite so often. Focus a little more at work. Make an extra effort to engage your employees. Do the things that anyone could do if they chose to do them.

In business, winning is a choice. You can choose to stay One Step Ahead, or you can choose to slide back into the pack with the others.

If you choose to stay One Step Ahead, then keep reading—this book was meant for you.

Take Action! Know if you’re in a sprint or a marathon. If your goal is to exit when your company reaches a certain valuation, then you’re in a sprint. If your goal is to stay in business indefinitely, then you’re in a marathon. Recognize the increasing rate of change.Too many leaders operate under a set of assumptions they may have formulated earlier in life, when the pace was slower; or they may not see that change can impact any industry, no matter how ubiquitous it may be. Make sure your view of your industry is accurate and timely! Cultivate your customers.Consumers are plugged into social media and review sites, and don’t hesitate to express their displeasure with a product or service. You need to respect their growing power and use it to your advantage. Set the goals that work for you.Remember, it’s okay if your company isn’t a massive disruptor or isn’t going to make headlines with a new innovation. As we’ll see in the pages ahead, staying One Step Ahead isn’t just about rolling out new technology or a splashy new product. You can stay One Step Ahead in human resources, your supply chain, operations, financial management, employee relations—all the hidden functional areas that drive an organization forward.

 

 

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How to find the right speaker for your Healthcare Event

Healthcare conferences are very important to the medical professional and non–profit world. They are the central avenue for dispensing information to a wider audience. Beyond education, these events are integral in networking and sharing ideas within a particular medical community.

One of the biggest challenges of putting together a healthcare conference is finding the right experts and speakers. And the keynote address is the most important of all conference components. It sets the tone for the rest of the event.

Healthcare speaking is a very specific challenge. If you are looking for a keynote speaker, there are lots of factors to consider.

The good news is that there are some strategies you can put into place to guarantee you find the perfect healthcare keynote speaker for your event. With a little bit of planning and direction, you can identify the right one to ensure you accomplish your conference goals.

What Is a Keynote Speaker?

Keynote addresses are the main speeches or presentations at an event. In music, the keynote is the first note of a musical scale that sets the tonal progression for the piece. Similarly, a keynote address aims to hit the key notes of what the conference or symposium is about.

The keynote speech frames the subject matter and sets the stage for the rest of the event. You can use it to introduce new ideas or lay the groundwork for what will be discussed in subsequent talks, breakout sessions, or roundtable discussions.

Note that keynote addresses do not have to be at the beginning of an event. You can use them to wrap up a conference and to motivate audience members to go out and accomplish certain goals.

Keynote speakers are often renowned experts in a particular field. Some are professional speakers, but not always.

Even if not, they will likely have some experience in public speaking. Keynote speakers will have the skills to entertain, motivate, and inspire, in addition to informing the audience.

Keynote speakers can often bring prestige and inspire interest in a particular event. Seeing an expert in a certain field can raise awareness and drive attendance at the conference itself.

Tips for Finding the Right Keynote Speaker

There are a few main strategies you can put into place to find the right person for a health speech. Here are five to consider.

Understand the Theme(s) Of Your Event

Continuity is important. You want your keynote address to be in keeping with the general theme or themes of the conference or event.

If you have a keynote address set towards the beginning of a conference, such as an opening plenary, then it should set the tone for the rest of the event.

Relaying information in a consumable form is important, but it should not be the only thing audience members take away. It should set the stage for the rest of the information they will be encountering throughout the conference.

Assess Your Goals

There is no such thing as a speaker who can “do it all.” Some speakers can inspire, motivate action, or condense complex concepts into usable information. You may want some combination of these attributes, but a good starting place is to understand your overall goals and then work from there.

Prioritize what you aim to achieve with the keynote address. Is the speaker’s goal only to inform or to inspire the crowd into some type of action? The search for a keynote speaker who is both an expert in the field and can motivate the crowd will look very different than an expert who can present information.

Likewise, your goal may be largely to entertain. We have all been to conferences where the speaker is a prominent expert in the field but is boring the crowd to tears.

Understand Your Audience

A big part of finding the right keynote speaker is understanding your audience. For instance, what knowledge of the subject matter do they bring to the event? A keynote speaker who is there to raise awareness about a particular subject area will employ a different strategy than one who is there to drill down on complex issues or to present information that inspires the crowd.

This also extends to demographics. Does the audience comprise experts in the field or regular people that are there to learn more about a topic? What about the average age of the audience? A younger audience will respond differently to distinct speaking styles than one that is older.

Have Clear Expectations for the Role

Establish at the outset what functions you would like the keynote speaker to serve. Will the person deliver the address and then leave? Do you want them to manage a breakout session or another seminar? Having a clear vision of the precise roles you want them to serve will help you narrow down the search.

Request Proposals

One tangible thing you can do when looking for a professional keynote speaker is to solicit ideas from candidates. Rather than telling them exactly what you want from the healthcare speech, get their opinions. This accomplishes two goals: it gives you more ideas for the event and allows you to gauge potential speakers.

This can be as formal or informal as you like. Ask for written proposals that include industry-specific work. Or simply have telephone conversations with prospective candidates. Either way, treat it like a job interview. Quality candidates will be happy to make a case for why they will be the best fit for your event. In my busy speaking practice, I provide a fully stylized and completely customized talk abstract that includes detailed talk takeaways. Any professional speaker should be able to provide a talk wireframe, or talk abstract that provides vivid details and what the client should expect. The talk abstract should also be fully stylized, so it can be shared with leaders and selection committees. You can find examples of talk abstracts on the resource page of my website https://nickwebb.com/resources/

A few very important thing to remember. When booking your speaker through a speakers bureau always make certain that the Bureau has expertise in booking healthcare and life science speakers. I would also recommend that you demand a stylized and detailed talk abstract, along with sample videos of any speaker you’re considering. Once you narrow down your candidates, schedule a zoom pre-booking discovery call to ask the potential speaker all of the tough questions. I work with all of the reputable speaker bureaus in the world, and I strongly recommend using a speaker Bureau as there is no financial benefit typically in booking the speaker directly. Remember the speaking industry, is extremely competitive and there are many speakers that, as they say in Texas suffer from “big hat no cattle” syndrome. In other words they position themselves as experts but they simply do not have the pedigree. Your audience is looking for a “Sherpa” not a “Googler” in other words they’re looking for someone who lives in the real world of healthcare, not in the periphery as a researcher. As a Healthcare Inventor with over 40 patents, and a Number One Bestselling Healthcare Author and past Chief Innovation Officer for top medical school and an Advisor to some of the top organizations in healthcare, my talks are based on the current reality of healthcare. I believe the audience appreciates my “in the trenches” perspective, and they also respect my pedigree. This is extremely important when selecting your speaker. One last thing a successful talk requires that your speaker delivers actionable novelty. In other words new information that they’re not hearing elsewhere in the echo chamber, that is New, Relevant and Actionable within their job function and enterprise.

If I can provide more insights feel free to reach out to me through my website www.NickWebb.com

#healthcarespeaker #healthtech #healthcareevents #healthcaremeetings #healthcareleaders #meetings #events #healthcareinnovation #CMP #meetingsandevents #speakersbureau #bureau

 

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The Survey Industrial Complex

The Survey Industrial Complex

 

This article includes excerpts from my book. Happy Work on how to create a culture of happiness. In this article, I will explain the importance of getting far better, actual insights on employee satisfaction that go beyond the outdated and disingenuous employee surveys of the past. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicholasjwebb_activity-7011757173621874688-ASX8?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

 

The proclamation that surveys are a “scam” may seem a bit shocking, but in most cases, it’s simply true. We have created a “survey industrial complex” of organizations that have built the perfect business model. These busy industrialists develop a survey algorithm, charge an organization to have their employees complete the survey, and then report out to the client in a dashboard their employees’ level of job satisfaction. Although this approach is a lucrative business model, it’s also an incredible disservice to the organizations that spend tens of millions of dollars attempting to glean insights through this outdated and fractional model. The survey industry is massive, and it’s also incredibly profitable: GlobeNewsWire projects the global online survey software market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.04 percent from $4.870 billion in 2019 to $10.162 billion in 2025.

Knowledge Sourcing Intelligence estimates the global online survey software market will grow even faster, at a CAGR of 16.04 percent to reach a market size of $13.796 billion in 2026. Big players in the online survey industry include Zoho Corporation Pvt. Ltd., Medallia, Confirmit AS, Inqwise, SurveyMonkey, Campaign Monitor, QuestionPro Survey Software, and Qualtrics. You cannot ignore the power of data monetization, the process of collecting data from the target audience to develop greater insights into the market and generate revenue with this data. The data monetization industry uses many tools including online survey software to collect the data for monetization. This market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 6.02 percent (source: KSI) and will create a significant opportunity for the online survey software market.

This massive industry is essentially an online vending machine that delivers minimal value at an extremely high cost. The companies that produce surveys love this model because it’s profitable, and truthfully most organizational leaders like it because it’s the easiest and fastest way to check the box on employee insights while creating authoritative-looking graphs and charts.

Knowing Where to Tap

The benefit of a survey is to glean insights as to where to direct detailed inquiry.

You may have heard this story. A woman’s car rolls to a stop in front of a mechanic’s shop. She tells the mechanic her engine suddenly quit. The mechanic lifts the hood of the car. He then pulls out a hammer and taps on a particular part of the engine. He then asks the woman to go ahead and start the car. Instantly, the car roars to life. The woman asks the repairman how much for the repair, and he replies, twenty dollars and ten cents. She asks why the unusual price? He replies that it’s ten cents for the tapping and twenty dollars for knowing where to tap.

The benefit of a survey is to learn where to tap to create innovations and improvements. If a survey doesn’t deliver those insights, it’s nothing but worthless data. In our practice, we use a system that focuses on what each employee loves and hates about their job in order to determine their net level of satisfaction. We refer to our approach as the Net Employee Experience (NEX). We believe this approach is superior to traditional methods, but we also realize that it would be disingenuous—in other words a scam! – to suggest that a survey alone would give our client the information that they need to be able to drive a cultural transformation of happiness.

The Holistic Approach Towards Real Employee Insights

Surveys can be very useful in identifying areas that need additional investigation.

For example, when you go to your doctor for an annual physical, they will run a complete blood panel. Once the blood panel returns, the doctor will look to the right side of the blood panel to identify areas that are outside of the normal range. For example, if your total blood count turned out to be low, it would tell your doctor that they need to identify the reasons why your blood count was low.

The blood panel is not a diagnosis but a screening tool that suggests areas of inquiry. If the results raise a “red flag,” then the real work of the doctor would begin. He or she would then have to determine the reason for the low count. Perhaps your iron level was too low, or there was some potential internal bleeding. Again, the blood panel was just used to find out if anything was out of range so the doctor could begin deeper inquiry to potential problem areas.

The same facts are in play when it comes to running an employee engagement or satisfaction survey. Based on the survey alone, you will not have a diagnosable understanding of your employee’s current sentiments. You’ll need to drill deeper into areas that you identified as being problematic in your survey.

Most surveys look at the wrong things. They try to determine an employee’s willingness to promote you or an employee’s level of engagement. These factors in many ways are irrelevant. What we really need to understand across the various anatomical features of employee happiness is where your employee stands from the perspective of the love/hate sentiment.

So how do we get comprehensive insights about your employee’s state of happiness that also help us target areas for further inquiry? It turns out there are three dimensions to gaining the insight we need, yet most companies stop at one—the survey. Following my doctor analogy, they get a blood test and simply report what items are out of range. Then they simply move on without deeper inquiry and without a treatment plan.

The Three Dimensions of Employee Insights

The best organizations in the world leverage a holistic approach toward gaining insights about their employees’ current state of happiness. This approach provides far more accurate data and important insights that go far beyond the screening-tool survey approach. The benefits of a holistic approach include significantly improved insights and actionable discoveries that result in rapid improvement in overall quality of work life.

1. Pre-Survey “State of Play” Analysis

Continuing with my medical analogy, a good doctor won’t begin requesting tests until he or she has completed a thorough consultation. The consultation will look at known factors. For example, if the patient is overweight, this will impact the types of tests that the doctor needs to conduct to make certain that they screen for known disease processes in overweight patients. This would include cardiovascular, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia, just to name a few. The consultation may further discover that the patient has orthopedic problems as a result of their weight, which may require a specialist such as an orthopedic surgeon to inquire about the physical limitation challenges. The consultation may discover that the patient is suffering from depression or stress. Correspondingly, the doctor would want to know more about that in order to offer mental health resources.

In other words, the doctor would never just say, “Thanks for coming in, let me run the standard blood test and I’ll get back to you with the results soon.” Yet that’s exactly what we do with traditional surveys. We are indiscriminate about the way in which we dispatch meaningless and generic surveys.

The best organizations frontload the process with a comprehensive state of play analysis that looks at the unique and special challenges and opportunities of each organization. This allows them to architect a state of play analysis to get to the insights that will move them towards optimal health.

A key question that must be asked is whether the organization is ready for change. It’s like when you construct a skyscraper, the first thing you need to do is perform a complete analysis of the subsoil and bedrock to determine its suitability for a new building. If it’s suitable, then you proceed. But for various reasons it may not be suitable, in which case you must do remediation until it’s ready. Likewise, if the people in your organization are resistant to new ideas—even ones that will measurably help them and make them happier—then your first task must be to change the culture and perhaps even provide training, so that you can then present them with new information they’ll embrace.

2. Survey Design, Evaluation, and Reporting

I’m surprised that the overwhelming majority of employee surveys look very much the same as they did in the 1950s. They ask obvious questions that employees typically answer dishonestly or inaccurately. But don’t blame the employees; they’ve been put into an unfortunate predicament. The surveys ask them to answer questions about the organization that provides their paycheck, and they’re not particularly likely to say anything derogatory even in so-called anonymous surveys. Most employees suspect that if a survey is dispatched digitally, it can easily be traced back to them, and any adverse comments could be detrimental to their career pathway.

Many organizations architect surveys that don’t take into consideration a thoughtful analysis of the organization and its current state of readiness as it relates to cultural transformation towards happiness.

The right way to do this is simple: Design a survey that embraces a comprehensive and thoughtful assessment of the organization’s challenges, problems, opportunities, and needs. Then you evaluate the survey based on the overarching assessment of the organization, which allows you to create specific recommendations to target areas for additional inquiry. This is how you get the best insights and create an amazing results-focused happiness strategy.

3. Collaborative Ideation

I’ve had the great honor of facilitating collaborative ideation sessions and what we call happiness hackathons. These programs are incredibly effective at soliciting authentic and hard-hitting insights from employees. Employees are emboldened by other employees to answer questions more bravely about what’s not working and what really needs to happen in order to build a culture of happiness. We also leverage individuals in group interviews in order to get useful insights from employees that we aggregate along with our survey data to build out specific recommendations on what needs to be done quickly to move the happiness needle within an organization.

Take Action!In business, if you want to manage a process or outcome, you need to measure it over time. If you want to increase the level of happiness in your organization, then you have to begin by measuring it. Having a baseline, you then take positive action to influence it, and measure it again at some future date.Different things and situations make different people happy. Some people hold a low-skills job and they stay with it year after year because they like it. Others need leadership and responsibility to be happy. You have to recognize and leverage these differences.Sadly, some managers view employee misery as an asset and proof they’re squeezing every last drop of productivity from their employees. If this is your mindset, do yourself a favor and change it. Your investors will thank you.By asking the wrong questions in the wrong way, the traditional employee engagement survey process can actually aggravate and provoke increased employee disengagement.Most surveys do not provide a diagnosis but serve as a screening tool to suggest areas of inquiry. They can tell you that an employee is unhappy, but they don’t tell you why. The Net Employee Experience (NEX) system focuses on what each employee loves and hates about their job in order to determine their net level of satisfaction.

 

https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2020/08/28/2085261/28124/en/10-Billion-Worldwide-Online-Survey-Software-Industry-to-2025-Retail-is-Widely-Using-Online-Survey-Software-for-Understanding-Consumer-Behavior.html

 

https://www.knowledge-sourcing.com/report/global-online-survey-software-market

 

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The Magic Compass

I was nine years old and based on the fact that I had been a pretty good kid that year, I was anticipating the onslaught of all my Christmas presents from Santa.

My friends, mostly from the nicer neighborhoods, had shared with me a long list of the presents that they planned to receive for Christmas. My parents were the working poor—my mom worked for the Los Angeles Times and my stepfather worked at the Santa Fe railroad. There were six of us living in a small, 1,000-square-foot home, in San Bernardino, California one of the most dangerous cities in America.

I never thought of myself as poor, but like most kids, especially at nine years of age, I knew I needed lots of presents from Santa. Needless to say, my expectations were extremely high.

At last, on Christmas morning, I couldn’t wait to open up my present. Could it be the Mattel “Varoom” for my bicycle, or maybe the Batman CB walkie-talkies? I attacked the box, and when I opened it, I gasped! A compass! Are you serious? A compass? How could this be? I had been a great kid all year. If Santa, or for that matter, my parents loved me, where the heck was my stuff?

But something happened. As the year progressed after that Christmas, I began to realize that the compass was actually magic. Not magic in the sense that it could levitate my teacher during class (although that would be cool!) but magic in that it taught me everything I now know about a successful life. This is what I learned:

The magic of true north

The first magical power of the compass is the most important. My compass never compromises, it always points to true north. It doesn’t just do it every once in a while, or only when it’s convenient. It is driven by the electromagnetic power of the planet. I know that integrity and principle is the electromagnetic force that drives all human success. Like the compass, I have learned to point to true north no matter what. A life based on principle and integrity is a life of success, health, and true happiness.

The magic of appreciation over expectation

It took me a while to get here, but I have finally achieved the ability to appreciate everything — literally everything. That Christmas morning, I had a tremendous amount of expectation. Unfortunately, however, I was so poorly evolved at that point in my life that I didn’t understand the power of appreciation. When my son Chase was just three years old, we sat on the driveway and watched a bright red bug for 15 minutes with total wonder and enthusiasm. This may sound crazy, I know — but when you can evolve to the point of being able to appreciate a bug in the driveway you might be on the right track. The magic compass taught me that the more we appreciate, the more we have to appreciate. Now that is truly magic.

The magic of the currency of goodness

That Christmas I was under the impression that if I was good the universe owed me something. It turns out that the wages for goodness are an inner peace of knowing you’ve done the right thing in helping others. I didn’t know it at the time, but the lessons of the magic compass were the ultimate gift.

The magic of the shoebox

As a young kid, literally, all of my worldly possessions fit into a shoebox. I kept the shoebox under my bed as it held everything I owned. Army guys perfect for melting, a magnifying glass for barbecuing ants on a sunny Southern California day, and, yes, my compass. Turns out just about every material thing we need in life can fit in a shoebox.

Today I enjoy an amazing life with a beautiful wife and great kids. I get to do cool stuff in my job, and, yes, I have acquired more stuff. But sitting in front of my keyboard is my trusty Christmas compass to remind me to stay on course, to appreciate everything, and to do “good for Goodness Sake.”

Here is to wishing you the bountiful blessings of the lessons of the Christmas compass.

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The Leadership Guide to a Happy Workplace

It goes without saying that a happy workplace is a more productive and profitable workplace. Happy employees are willing to go the extra mile to succeed, are better team players, and genuinely care about their customers. They connect with customers who are ready to spend more money at a happy company.

Given the advantages of a happy workplace, there’s simply no rational reason to tolerate a company culture that’s toxic (at worst) or mediocre and boring (at best). Such a workplace will slowly decline, lose profitability, suffer the exit of top employees, and eventually get bought for pennies on the dollar.

But the busy CEO may ask, how can I cultivate a happy company in real life? The task seems overwhelming. I don’t know where to start.

This is a good question. Fortunately, we know that transformative results come from good questions.

The answer begins with a plan of action. It’s a road map that’s been proven to take you where you want to go. A step-by-step set of instructions that you can follow, no matter how busy or distracted you may be.

This is your road map. Take it one step at a time, and you’ll see the results you want. You might even look like a hero to your investors and customers!

Ready? Let’s get started!

Define Happiness

If I said to you, “To succeed in business, you must get a baslop. That is your goal.”

Your first response would be, “What the heck is a baslop? Please define it.” That makes perfect sense. You can’t possibly set a goal without first knowing what the goal is.

If the goal is to be happy at work, we first need to agree on what that means. Let’s begin with some research. Dictionary.com tells us, “happy” is an adjective. In ordinary usage, it means:

Delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing: to be happy it’s Friday. Characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy: a happy mood; a happy frame of mind.

Over the centuries, people have debated the meaning of true, deep-down happiness. In his book Happiness: A History, Darrin M. McMahon reminds us that for the ancient Greeks, happiness was the result of virtue. If you were not virtuous, you stood little chance of being happy. For the Romans, it sprang from prosperity and divine favor. Therefore, it was difficult to be poor and happy.

Throughout history, happiness has been seen as the most perfect human state, and not necessarily a momentary emotion that could come and go as circumstances changed. In the modern era, we’ve begun to think of happiness as not just an earthly possibility but also as an entitlement, even an obligation. 1

The Declaration of Independence guarantees the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Most scholars now agree the words “the pursuit” do not mean to chase after happiness, as if to catch, but to simply be happy. In the Declaration, the pursuit of happiness is not a quest or something you seek, but “an unalienable right.” Everyone has the right to actually be happy, not just try to be happy.

Happiness can mean many things to many people. Psychologist Tchiki Davis, founder of The Berkeley Well-Being Institute, conducted a survey in which people were asked what factors contributed to their happiness.

They could choose more than one. The eleven factors included: Self-awareness: The ability to attend to and acknowledge thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
Self-regulation: The ability to control and manage thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

Gratitude: The tendency to be thankful for people, experiences, and things, and to show appreciation for the kindness of others.
Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.

Assertiveness: The ability to be self-assured in advocating for your own needs.
Resilience: The capacity to cope with or recover quickly from difficult events. Positive Thinking: The capacity to have attitudes that focus on the bright side of things.

Social Skills: The ability to interact and communicate with others in effective and successful ways.
Conscientiousness: The tendency to be faithful, loyal, and responsible. Kindness: The virtue of benevolence, compassion, and humanity

Wisdom: Knowledge that can be acquired through study or learning from others. 2

The answers were surprisingly uniform, with all the factors receiving a similar number of votes. The lowest vote-getter, assertiveness, was chosen by about 50 percent of the respondents, while the top vote-getter, positive thinking, was chosen by about 70 percent of the respondents. Clearly, in ordinary circumstances, there are many ways to arrive at happiness, and we share many of those ways in common.

To take one more pass at defining happiness, here are a few quotes from learned people about the subject:

“Happiness consists more in conveniences of pleasure that occur every day than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.” – Benjamin Franklin.

“Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.” – Immanuel Kant. “There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.” – Freya Stark.

And one of my personal favorites: “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.” – Chinese proverb.

We could go on and on, but you get the idea. For our purposes, here’s how I define happiness on the job: “The engagement of purposeful work that serves our personal growth, in a way that positively impacts and serves others.”

You can see it has three main components. You’ll be happy at work if you 1) do something constructive that 2) enriches you and 3) produces something good for other people. If you miss one of the three, you may not be happy.

For example, let’s say you work in a fast-food restaurant. Your job is to flip burgers for eight hours a day. It’s clear you’re 1) doing something constructive and 3) producing something good for other people. But how about personal enrichment? That could go one of several ways:

If you’re nothing more than a human robot and you have no authority and no control over your work, and you have no other employment prospects, you will probably become bored and miserable.

If you see your fast-food job as an entry-level steppingstone to a manager’s role or even higher, or you intend to learn the business and then open your own franchise, then you might be very happy.

If you’re a college kid and it’s a temporary summer job to earn extra cash and gain an interesting life experience, you might be very happy.

Different people can look at the same job in different ways. One burger-flipper might be miserable, while another might be very happy. Here’s the part that should matter to you, the leader: You can look at the same job in different ways. How your employees view their jobs depends a lot upon how you view their jobs. If you want miserable employees, you shall have them. If you want happy employees, you can have them.

You want happy employees.

Listen, Learn, and Collaborate

You’ve decided that your goal as a leader is to create a work culture where your stakeholders are engaged in purposeful work that serves their personal growth, in a way that positively impacts and serves others. You’ve made a very positive decision!

Having figured out where you want to go, the next step is to determine where you are now. A map is useless unless you know your starting point.
For an organization, “where you are now” means determining the relative level of stakeholder happiness.

Yes, it’s a tricky thing to do. It’s not like taking inventory in your warehouse or adding up your quarterly revenues. Those are easily quantifiable. They exist as numbers.

Happiness is qualitative. This makes it a bit more challenging, but no less important than the other metrics. And if you use the RealRatings system, from the qualitative analysis you can generate a set of numbers that you can then compare over time to see if they rise or fall.

The first task is to listen. This is where many CEOs have trouble. They’re accustomed to charting the course and getting stakeholders on board by cajoling and convincing. They tend to be very good at persuasion, but not so good at listening.

Here’s how you do it. As a leader, whether your company is B2B or B2C, you’re probably very good at listening to your customers. In order to stay in business, you have to be! Your customers do not hesitate to tell you what makes them happy. They tell you on social media and they tell you when they call to make a complaint. In some industries, such as autos and home electronics, independent reviewers will write reviews and publish them. You can also use surveys to gauge customer satisfaction. And, of course, they vote with their pocketbooks. Taken together, all of these sources of feedback give you a good idea of the level of happiness of your customers.

Your stakeholders, including your employees, are your customers too. They

choose to work for you and support the company. They “buy” their paychecks with their time and talent. If they’re not happy, they’ll look to buy their paychecks somewhere else.

As you approach the task of listening to your stakeholders—which should be an ongoing activity for as long as you hold your job—the key is to eliminate your preconceptions. You must open your eyes and ears to what you really see and hear, not what you want to see or hear or think you ought to see or hear.

Don’t take it personally. Too many CEOs respond to stakeholder comments as if they were personal insults. They think like King Louis XIV of France, the “Sun King,” who is the reported originator of the phrase “L’etat, c’est moi”—“The state, it is I.” If you feel this way, you need to get over it. With leadership comes responsibility, and one of those responsibilities includes always doing the right thing for your stakeholders, even if it means humbling yourself.

Use a combination of listening sessions and anonymous surveys to determine the current state of employee love and hate. Our RealRating system is designed to identify those sentiments across the entire employee journey. I would recommend using something that identifies current states of satisfaction across archetypes, touch points, and other key determinants. It’s important to realize that if you want great insights, it’s a little bit more work in the beginning to conduct ideation sessions and listening sessions, but you will get better information and ultimately have a much better result.

The second task is to learn. It’s not enough to listen with open ears. You then need to put what you’re hearing into context and identify courses of action.

Let’s say you lead a big hospital. You do a RealRatings survey of your front-line intake staff—the people who greet patients as they arrive for non-emergency treatment. They tell you the number one complaint of patients is the excessive wait time in the waiting room. The patients arrive for their appointment on time, and then have to wait. Especially in the era of covid-19, patients hate sitting in a closed room with other sick people. Some may even get up and leave. If you weren’t interested in learning, you might respond by saying, “We can’t help that. This is a hospital, where we heal people. If our patients can’t wait a few minutes to be seen by our wonderful doctors, then they have a problem.”

If you wanted to learn and improve your service to your patients—who are your customers—and also make your intake staff happier, you might say, “Let’s set up an instant message system whereby we’d send a text message to the patient when it’s time for them to check in. They could wait outside in their car, or even at home if they lived close by.” It’s a simple system already in use by many clinics. As soon as an examination room becomes available, you send a text to the next patient in line. They come in, get processed, and are whisked to the examination room within minutes. Everyone’s happy!

The third task is to collaborate. This simply means that it’s never enough for you, the leader, to announce a happiness program or initiative, tell people what to do, and then sit back and watch the results. Remember, this is a qualitative effort, not quantitative. It involves peoples’ feelings, which directly impact their actions. The energy flow is in all directions—from you out to your employees, from your employees to your customers, from your customers back to the employees, and from one employee to another. The “vibe” of the organization goes round and round, amplifying itself here or diminishing there. What happens in sales may impact R&D, and what happens in human resources may impact finance. As CEO, your job it is to manage this energy flow to produce the highest level of stakeholder happiness possible.

Validate

You know the difference between data and information.

Data are unprocessed facts, numbers, and opinions. A data set is considered to be useless in its raw form. A mass of data is like iron ore—there’s potential value there, but before you can produce usable iron or steel you need to put the raw iron ore through various smelting processes to remove the oxygen and other unwanted molecules. Similarly, data must be processed and put into context before it can be used as the basis for a business decision.

For example, let’s say that raw data from year 1 at Company A shows that the average employee tenure was 4.5 years. What does that mean? In isolation, it means nothing. It’s just a data point.

Let’s put it into context. Let’s say the average employee tenure at the top 5 firms in Company A’s industry has consistently been 6 years. And let’s also say that in the previous year, the average employee tenure at Company A was 5 years, and in the year before that it was 5.5 years.

Now we have actionable information. We can conclude that Company A has a retention problem, and it’s getting worse. Three years ago, the industry average was 6 years, and Company A was 5.5 years. Then the Company A tenure duration went down each year, while the industry average stayed the same.

The question is, why are Company A employees jumping ship faster than their peers in other companies? Can this trend be reversed?

The impulsive CEO might say, “Make our employees sign non-disclosure agreements. And offer them a two percent raise. That should take care of the problem!”

Such a response is guaranteed to miss the mark. It might even make the problem worse.

What’s needed is a comprehensive, organization-wide effort to drill down and identify why Company A employees are expressing their unhappiness by quitting sooner than others. It could be the pay structure. It could be the lack of promotion paths. It could be a toxic work environment, or dehumanizing practices. It could be the average age of the customer is getting older, which suggests to employees that the company is in slow decline.

When you have solid information, aggregate and organize your insights into a presentation that you use to collaborate with a greater team to get validation and additional fine-tuning elements. This is an important step because it gives stakeholders the opportunity to agree upon the current state of happiness.

Organize

In the first three steps, you 1) made the decision to get serious about your happy workplace, 2) gathered data about the current level of stakeholder

happiness in your organization, and 3) turned that raw data into actionable information. You now know what you need to achieve and you’ve targeted some specific areas that demand improvement. These areas could be directly related to employee happiness or they could focus more on customer happiness, such as the earlier example of the hospital waiting room. In that case, improving patient happiness would also improve the happiness of the intake staff. A secondary effect can be just as good as a primary effect.

Your company comprises people, from a handful in one location to many thousands across the globe. Call them moving parts, if you will. As the leader— of your division or the entire company—your job is to direct the activities of your people to produce value for your customers, your stakeholders, and your investors.

In a small firm, you can take a hands-on approach and lead the effort yourself. But it’s more likely that you’ll need to work through the managers who report to you. They are your ambassadors to your many employees and stakeholders. They represent you.

Either way, it’s up to you to not only specify what you want, but also model what you want.

There is no other way to do it. If you want a happy workplace, you must set the example. Remember, we’re talking about human emotion. You cannot command people to be happy. You can tell them what task to perform, or when to take a lunch break, or where to sit in the office, but you cannot tell them to be happy.

Happiness is contagious. It’s been scientifically proven. A study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of California of nearly 5,000 individuals over a period of twenty years found that when an individual becomes happy, the network effect can be measured up to three degrees. That is, one person’s happiness triggers a chain reaction that benefits not only his immediate friends, but also their friends and their friends’ friends.3

“Everyday interactions we have with other people are definitely contagious, in terms of happiness,” said Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to Harvard Medicine. “Rather than asking

how we can get happier, we should be asking how we can increase happiness all around us. When you make positive changes in your own life, those effects ripple out from you and you can find yourself surrounded by the very thing you fostered.” 4

Construct a happiness team that will work as the happiness leaders to build out the formal happiness strategy. Building out the strategy will consist of tools such as happiness hackathons, personification development, journey mapping, happiness baseline and improvement measurements, and other standard aspects of a strategic initiative.

You should also have a project manager on your team who manages the collection and organization of the disparate components in a way that manages time and optimizes results. When you do this, you’ll be in good company. Top firms including Google, Salesforce, Airbnb, Zappos, Charity Water, and Chefs Club have created positions specifically dedicated to maintaining and improving employees’ experience and company culture. These executives have various titles including chief happiness officer (CHO), head of employee experience, or vice president of global employee success. Their job is to manage the strategy and processes related to boosting and maintaining the overall level of employee happiness and the resulting rise in productivity and customer satisfaction. They influence any and all people- centered activities including hiring, training, performance management, professional development, and recognition while ensuring the company’s growth and bottom line show positive results.

Your CHO must have robust institutional support. Because the CHO needs to work across departmental lines, and therefore must invade the “turf” of other managers, three minimums are required.

The CHO must have clearly delineated authority granted to him or her by the CEO. While this authority won’t include the ability to hire and fire outside his or her own department, it must include the ability to summon employees for special training sessions, for example.The other managers must be told the CHO has authority in certain areas. This message or memo must come from the CEO.The CHO must have a budget. Even if it’s relatively small, the budget must be real and it must be carefully targeted.

The CHO cannot do it alone, just like the CEO can’t do it alone either. It’s up to each and every member of the organization, from the board of directors to individual employees, to make an effort and actively participate in creating a happy workplace.

Launch Your Happiness as a Strategy Initiative

It’s important to launch a happy initiative only after you are absolutely certain that you have an airtight strategy that includes the budget, time, leadership commitment, communication strategy, and all of the other elements that are required to make happiness at work a reality. You should also leverage internal enterprise social networks to create ongoing dialogue across stakeholders and departments. The best organizations use happiness challenges as a way to get great ideas that turn into great innovations and ultimately a happy workforce.

Your Happiness as a Strategy (HaaS) plan needs to be real and written down. It can be as short as a few bullet points or as long as a multi-faceted text with graphics that analyzes happiness and discusses building your happiness brand. It should gain insights across all stakeholders by building a strategic framework and cross functional team architecture, and by creating a communication strategy, survey design, effective project management, budgeting, events, and reporting. Each organization will create their own unique architecture of elements for their strategy. The most important thing to keep in mind is that your initiative has to be complete prior to launching it.

For specific insights into the components of your HaaS plan, let’s go back to the definition of workplace happiness:

“The engagement of purposeful work that serves our personal growth, in a way that positively impacts and serves others.”

You, the employer and leader, can boost happiness in these three areas: 1. Purposeful work. Here, you can ensure that the actual work being done

by your employees is not boring or demeaning. However, a CEO might point out that this is often easier said than done, because work often requires repetitive tasks. Not every job is exciting!

There are two ways to respond to this.

The first is to ensure that each employee knows how his or her job contributes to the success of the group. The easiest way to do this is to thank them for a job well done—not at the end of the year, but at the end of every day.

The second way is to create a system of cross-training, whereby employees are exposed to the work done by others. The benefits of cross-training are well known and significant. It helps ensure that if an essential team member quits or takes a vacation, another worker can cover for them and the business won’t suffer. It creates a more agile workforce that’s better equipped to handle transitions gracefully and recover quickly from disruptions. This means you can deliver seamless service to your customers, even in times of turmoil.

The work itself can be broken up into more appealing chunks. At Adobe Inc., which has been named the happiest workplace in the United States, Gloria Chen, the company’s chief people officer, told CNBC the company responded to the covid-19 pandemic by measuring employee sentiment through surveys, hosting company all-hands meetings and focus groups to better understand the challenges of working through the pandemic, and proposing solutions to maintain employee happiness.

In response to employee feedback, the company introduced flexible work schedules to accommodate caregiving responsibilities, monthly companywide days off, 20 new paid days off each year for employees “directly impacted by significant events like pandemics or natural disasters,” and an increase of its wellness reimbursement to $600 per year. 5

Adobe couldn’t stop the pandemic, but they could respond to it.

Personal growth. As a leader, you’re probably facing new challenges every day, and perhaps even every hour! You need to be a “jack of all trades,” and the learning curve is steep. The same might be true for employees working in R&D, as they’re constantly trying new ideas.

Therefore, personal growth may not be an issue for you. But you might forget that many of your employees are doing the same thing, day after day. Every business relies on systems, which by definition are repetitive. This might be necessary, but a lack of personal growth can kill happiness very quickly. Your HaaS plan needs to include ways to keep your employees challenged. One of the best is to have a policy of promoting from within, so that employees know they have a shot at moving up the ladder. You can support continuing education programs and pay for employees to take courses. Reward innovative ideas from any and every part of the business, and make sure your employees know the company seeks and values their new ideas.

Positively impacts others. If you’re a front-line salesperson, it’s easy to see how your product or service impacts the customer. But if your job keeps you buried somewhere deep in the supply chain, it can be difficult to see how moving a pallet of parts from one warehouse to another impacts anyone’s life. This is why every employee must be aware of the overall mission of the organization and see how their effort helps the organization fulfill it.

Create or support a program whereby employees are encouraged to volunteer their time—on the company clock—with a local charitable organization. This means that even if all employees don’t see how their product or service directly impacts their customers, at least they can have the sense that the brand is being a good neighbor and helping to improve the community.

This brings us to the idea that while the everyday job of every employee may not be terribly exciting, if the employees know that the organization in general is dedicated to doing good things, that will boost their level of happiness.

Monitor, Measure, and Fix

Happy cultures are dynamic and fluid, and there is no way to create a successful initiative without eliminating the elements that aren’t working well and reinvesting in those elements that do work. Conduct ongoing real rating surveys, happiness hackathons, and listening sessions to continue to improve upon the bold mission of improving the quality life of your employees.

Go back to Step #2: Listen, Learn, and Collaborate. You should have a system for replicating this step on an ongoing basis. Your RealRatings survey is just one tool in your box. Additional strategies may include:

Just Ask Them!

Keep it simple and just ask. As the CEO, you come into contact with many subordinates during the day. When you see one, you can say, “How are you today? Is there any particular problem I can help you with?” This is the essence of servant leadership. When subordinates believe their only role is to “get results or get out,” the last thing they’ll do is confide in you that they’ve got a difficult problem. They’ll tough it out until failure crushes them. To avoid this, create a safe environment for team members to give you feedback at any time. Treat your employees like team members and you’re the coach.

Encourage Initiative and Innovation

If your employees are doing only what they’re told, then you have a stale environment without any creative energy. If they’re spearheading new projects, finding new solutions for problems, and adding new elements to their positions, and then you have a winning company culture. Productivity and well- being build a resilient, engaged, and hard-working workforce and help to attract and retain your top talent.

Innovation hackathons are events in which any employee can participate. In the old days, they called them “brainstorming sessions.” Same thing. You sit around and toss out ideas. The only rule is this: No idea is too far-fetched or crazy. Bring it out! The good ideas will rise to the surface.

Track Late Arrivals

It may sound simplistic, but keeping an eye on employee tardiness can reveal how employees feel about their work and are coping with their responsibilities. Being late for work can signify many things, but if it’s consistent, then the employee may be struggling with their work-life balance or finding ways to delay coming to work, or have issues with kids getting to school. Finding out the reason can often clear the air and lead to greater employee happiness. The best way to know if an employee is truly happy with you is by checking the consistency of an employee’s attitude, performance, and attendance.

Assign a New Task

Periodically ask an employee to do something that takes them out of their

comfort zone. (Be sure you provide them sufficient time to do it. Otherwise, the employee will feel as though you’re squeezing them for extra work!) If your request is met with enthusiasm, you have a happy employee who is motivated to grow with your company. If you are met with foot-dragging, then the employee is most likely unhappy and disengaged, or feels anxiety about their position.

Monitor Glassdoor, Indeed, Fairygodboss, Vault, and Other Employer Review Websites
It’s no fun to read the negative reviews of your company online! And yes, a certain percentage of negative reviews are posted by the classic “disgruntled employee” who hates everything and everyone, and whom you will never please. And while a specific complaint might grab your attention, it’s useful to look at the overall trends. These sites will rank your business against others in your industry, and you’ll see what prospective employees will see when they check out your company profile. They’ll see similar companies doing similar work, and which of the bunch receive the best overall ratings from current and past employees.

Measure the changes in the happiness of your employees. Hopefully, by the metrics you’ve chosen, you’ll see it going up!

Celebrate

Last but certainly not least, it’s incredibly important that you celebrate the innovators who create great ideas that go into implementation. It’s also important to constantly communicate and celebrate the benefits that are being realized in order to maintain the momentum of your happiness initiative. Be sure that while you may shine a spotlight on a particular “employee of the month” or a department’s outstanding performance, everyone in your company knows that it’s a team effort, and one employee’s winning month is a win for everyone.

You might even want to follow in the footsteps of Gary Bertch, who co-founded Bertch Cabinets with his wife in 1977. In 2016, the Waterloo, Iowa company took all 800 of its employees on a weeklong cruise through the Caribbean. Bertch had offered the trip as incentive to employees the previous year.

When they met their goals, he came through with his promise. The luxury Carnival Cruise liner took employees around the Caribbean, including a stop in Cozumel, Mexico.

“We just tried to get all of our people pumped up a little more to achieve the various goals, both customer-oriented goals and financial goals,” Bertch told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.

And if an employee couldn’t go? Bertch offered a cash bonus option for those unable to travel (or in need of the extra money). And everyone got the week off.

“It’s terrific,” he told NBC’s Today show. “Everyone works hard for a common effort and reaps the rewards. I’m just looking forward to seeing all of our associates enjoying themselves.”

That’s the bottom line. If you’re going to ask your employees to spend a significant part of their lives working for your company, then why not make them happy to do so? You’ll receive better work as a result, which will lead to greater long-term success.6

[1] McMahon. https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hist...- McMahon/dp/0802142893

[2] Davis, Tchiki. https://www.berkeleywellbeing.com/wha...

[3] BMJ. https://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a...

[4]https://hms.harvard.edu/magazine/scie...

[5] CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/06/compa...- the-happiest-employees-in-2021.html

[6] NBC Today. https://www.today.com/kindness/best-b...- takes-staff-800-caribbean-cruise-t106542  

 

About Leader Logic®

NICHOLAS WEBB is one of the top Keynote speakers on cultural transformation and employee happiness, his consulting firm LeaderLogic® is an Advisory and Training firm that serves some of the top brands in the world. We provide customer experience, employee happiness and strategy services across most industries. Our CEO, Nicholas Webb is a number one best-selling author and one of the top keynote speakers www.nickwebb.com in the area of Organizational Growth, Innovation, Customer Experience, and Work Life Happiness. For more information on our consulting services visit www.goleaderlogic.com.

The post The Leadership Guide to a Happy Workplace appeared first on Nick Webb.

Are we fostering Replication or Innovation?

I have enjoyed a very interesting career as an award-winning, inventor, bestselling innovation, author, and innovation, executive and consultant. During my career I have had the opportunity to witness innovation in a very practical way. I have seen amazing innovations created from the ground up that has delivered millions of dollars of value to the marketplace. I’ve also seen innovation reapplied in a way that goes far beyond the “bright shiny object” to include new innovative ways in which we gain customer and market insights, and the way in which we deliver value through commercialization and supply chain.

My concern is that we may be inspiring a new generation of “replicators” instead of innovators. Several years ago, I invented an award-winning line of educational toys called Hanz. The motto of my company was instructions not included. I created this line of toys because I wanted to encourage my own children to create new ideas, and solutions. Today the overwhelming majority of toys that claim to be innovation toys, are really nothing more than three-dimensional puzzles. Unfortunately, this includes one of my favorite companies Lego. If you go to a Target store, you’ll see that the majority of Lego toys are not innovation platforms, rather they are puzzles that come with step-by-step instructions. It turns out that the major challenges that we will be facing in the future will not be coming from the replication of old ideas. It will however come from new ideas, and frankly, completely new ways of thinking.

I hope that we can encourage our upcoming leaders in our organizations to look at our problems, and opportunities from my perspective of newness, rather than a retooling of all the ideas that are likely irrelevant today. In my consulting business, I see so many executives, providing their employees with step-by-step instructions, rather than participating in collaborative ideation to build new great solutions.

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Be Brave and Lean Into Disruption

#innovationmandate Disruptive leaders are brave. Their bravery is revealed by their absolute willingness to lean into their own executive development by accepting and even driving the changes occurring both with in their organization and outside in the markets and economies they serve. Many of today’s leading companies began as market disruptors. They include: Airbnb. Launched […]

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A New Age Demands New Leadership Skills

Today’s innovation leaders develop a core competency around future trends. They don’t need to understand the endless minutia of every little emerging technology, consumer behavior, or economic shift.

The post A New Age Demands New Leadership Skills appeared first on Nicholas Webb.