Blog Entry

In 2006, I was invited to give the keynote at WikiSym in Odense, Denmark. Since I was going to be in town, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal generously organized a blogger dinner for me in Copenhagen, which gave me the chance to meet many local entrepreneurs and changemakers.

One of the many, many highlights for me was meeting Alexander Kjerulf, who had recently started a consultancy devoted to happiness at work. Here’s what I wrote about Alex at the time:

Every time we chatted, I found myself scurrying for my pen and notecards. It will take me three freakin’ years to follow-up with all of his stories and ideas, generated over maybe 12 hours of conversation. I plan on trying anyway, because there was a very high degree of relevance and profundity in everything he said. He is a plethora of ideas, knowledge, and — as his title implies — positive energy.

Fast forward five years. Alex came to San Francisco last week, where he gave a talk at the Hub SoMa about — what else? — happiness at work. This was going to be my first opportunity to see him do his thing, and frankly, I was a bit nervous for him. If you’re in the happiness business, then your talk needs to make people happy. That’s not easy under any circumstance, but it’s even harder when your topic is happiness. Happiness is a very soft topic. It’s easy to go way new age, but it’s also easy to squeeze the life force out of your audience by overwhelming them with data.

How was Alex going to engage his audience? How was he going to balance content with emotion? How was he going to teach the audience something concrete while also making them happy?

I’m not quite sure how he pulled it off, but he did it with flying colors. He rocked the house. His talk was a beautiful mix of concrete content and simple group exercises that embodied his principles. People laughed and smiled throughout, but mostly they nodded vigorously as they listened and learned.

The first thing you need to know about happiness at work is that it’s good for the bottom line. Any way you measure it, there is a strong correlation between happy workplaces and financially successful companies. Alex shared many great examples of this. My personal favorite was Southwest Airlines, which not only manages to create a pleasurable domestic flying experience in this age of airline misery, but has only had one unprofitable quarter in its 30 years.

Second, being happy at work does not mean being happy all the time. That is an unrealistic, undesirable goal. But, it does suggest that we need to be happy most of the time, about a 3:1 ratio to be exact. That’s because humans have a biological proclivity to negativity. It’s a psychological phenomenon known as negativity bias, which basically says that humans tend to remember negative events more than positive ones.

Happiness Framework

Given this, how do we create happier workplaces? It boils down to two things: results and relationships. Getting more hugs at work does not amount to a hill of beans if you’re not accomplishing what you set out to accomplish. It would probably make you hate it even more. Results matter. Being challenged matters. Doing meaningful work matters.

And being appreciated for what you do matters. This is one of the highest potential areas of improvement in the workplace. Fortunately, it’s also one of the easiest.

Results matter, and so do relationships. A lot. The top three factors in leading happy lives are:

1. Romantic relationships. Men who are in a good romantic relationship tend to live six years longer than men who are not! Women live two years longer
2. Friends
3. A good, meaningful job

This third factor isn’t so surprising when you look at the top three things that take up most of our time:

1. Sleep
2. Work
3. Television. (Yes, this is very sad.)

Alex offered a bunch of concrete steps anyone (regardless of your role in the organization) can take to make our workplaces happier:

• Choose to be happy. Intention matters
• Know yourself. Self-awareness matters
• Speak up. Alex mentioned check-ins, which are a regular part of our work practices. Check-ins at the beginning of the day or at the beginning of a meeting allow people to share where they’re at. So if you didn’t get any sleep because your baby was crying all night, and you’re feeling grumpy, share that. Your colleagues are more likely to be understanding and empathetic if they know, and frankly, you’ll feel better acknowledging that
• Do something. There are so many steps — large and small — that you can take to make yourself happy. It could be as simple as physically moving more throughout the day or celebrating your victories, regardless of how small. We’re experimenting with a practice called Wednesday Play Days that’s already having a positive effect
• Make somebody else happy. This is so simple and powerful, we often overlook it. We appreciate others so much more than we actually let on, and yet, when we receive a genuine appreciation, it means so much. Take the time now to share an appreciation with one of your colleagues.

I was struck by how closely Alex’s happiness framework maps to our frameworks for collaboration. Thanks largely to my colleague, Kristin Cobble (with a nod to Christopher Alexander), we’ve recently incorporated “aliveness” into our frameworks for high-performance collaboration. I don’t think happiness and aliveness are equivalent, but they are clearly very interrelated.

We say over and over and over again that collaboration is always in service to some concrete, bounded goal and that you can’t lose sight of that. As Alex notes, results matter. But so do relationships, and that’s the part that businesses often forget.

All of the many, many practices and stories that Alex shared apply directly to my business. I plan on incorporating them and sharing them as widely as possible. If you have the opportunity to see Alex speak, go. If you need someone to help you make your workplace happier, I strongly encourage you to talk to Alex. Right now, I’m happy that I was able to see and learn from my friend.

Categories: Stories