Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (8 page)

“It dawned on me that the way I’d been running Interface is the way of the plunderer. Plundering something that is not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth. And I said to myself, “My goodness, a day must come where this is illegal, where plundering is not allowed. I mean, it must come.” So I said to myself, “My goodness, some day people like me will end up in jail.”

Interface designed and manufactured a new kind of carpet that was environmentally friendly, and while the design and production of this new product was more expensive than their regular line, it instantly became a bestseller and has made the company a fortune.

More and more companies are starting to care for the environment, and this is one area in which we can all contribute. Can you get your company to recycle paper? To use less electricity or water? To save on fuel or other resources? To start buying more environmentally friendly products? Make yourself heard, start a campaign, enlist support. Go green!

Be positive

“I have this co-worker who is almost always cheerful,” says Paul, a 28-year-old schoolteacher. “It doesn’t matter how busy we are, how many problems we’re having, or how bad the weather is outside — he is unfailingly cheerful, relaxed, positive and optimistic, and sees the best in everything and everybody.

“He’s a life-saver. There is always a positive, calm atmosphere around him, people visibly relax and become more open and constructive when they work with him, and his optimism infects others, which means that we all tend more to see solutions than problems.”

“While he himself gets no more work done than anyone else, I still think he is responsible for a large part of our school’s success, because his happiness at work spreads to so many other people.”

Being positive is an incredibly important skill to learn, a skill that is key to both happiness and success at work. Positive people and positive workplaces choose to focus on possibilities, solutions, advantages and fun. It’s not that they ignore problems, disadvantages and threats — far from it — it’s just that they have found that being positive makes you both happier and more efficient. Psychological research clearly shows that they’re onto something:

As a young psychology student at Pennsylvania University in the sixties, Martin Seligman was troubled. He’d designed a ground-breaking experiment, which involved giving dogs mild electric shocks that would be unpleasant but not harm them in any way. Should he go ahead and perform it? Would the potential benefits of the experiment outweigh the discomfort of the dogs? After talking it over with his advisor he went through with it and his findings shocked (no pun intended) the world of psychology.

Three dogs went through each experiment. The first dog was placed in a special cage and given electrical shocks through the floor, which stopped whenever the dog pressed a panel with its nose. It received shocks but had the power to stop them and quickly learned to do just that. The second dog got shocks whenever the first dog got them. This means that it received exactly the same amount and duration of electrical shocks as the first dog, but it had no chance to affect them. The third dog got no shocks.

Then each dog was placed in a so-called shuttlebox. Here the dog was given an electrical shock through the floor that it could easily escape by jumping over a low barrier into another part of the box. Dog number one (who’d received shocks it could turn off itself) quickly jumped over the barrier. So did dog number three that had gotten no shocks. But dog number two just lay there, feeling powerless to change its conditions. It had learned that electrical shocks were not something it could control. It had learned helplessness.

If you want to be happy at work, it’s important to be positive. But how do you do that? You can’t walk around all day mumbling “gotta be positive, gotta be positive” under your breath. That might make your co-workers a bit anxious…

The truth is that many workplaces have a strong focus upon the negative. Everything that goes well is ignored, while meetings focus upon problems, emails are about mistakes, phone calls mean unhappy clients, and conversations are about conflict. This constantly reinforces a sense that things are bad and there’s nothing we can do to change it, and people end up like the second dog in Seligman’s experiment — they give up.

Seligman’s research into the field he calls positive psychology clearly shows that positive, optimistic people do much better than negative people. For example, positive people:

1. Have a higher quality of life.
   
2. Live longer.
   
3. Are healthier.
   
4. Do better at work.
   
5. Experience less depression.
   
6. Have more friends and better social lives.
   

And it gets better:

1. Nine out of ten of the American presidential elections from 1948 to 1984 were won by the most optimistic candidate.
   
2. Optimistic sports teams outperform pessimistic ones.
   

These are good solid reasons to be positive. And while Seligman’s research shows that it’s easy to learn negativity, pessimism and helplessness, it also shows that you can teach yourself to be positive.

In a workplace experiment, Seligman convinced an insurance company to hire a group of people who were not initially qualified to work at the company, but who all scored highly in terms of positivity and optimism. This group of employees went on to outperform all their highly skilled but less positive colleagues.

Think about it: what kind of person do you want to be at work? The positive, upbeat, happy, smiling person who works actively to make things better? Or the negative, pessimistic grouch who’s already given up and accepted that things are bad and will never change?

Now, I’m not advocating constant positivity, and I think the concept of
positive thinking
is incredibly harmful. You can’t always be upbeat, optimistic and happy but you can wear yourself down trying to be. Sometimes being angry, negative or pessimistic is the way to go and if it is, I say go for it. If someone treats you badly or if bad things are happening all around then being positive and cheerful might not only be hard, it might be wrong. In her fantastic book “Bright-sided – How the Tyranny of Positive Thinking is Undermining America”, Barbara Ehrenreich shows how damaging it can be to force yourself and others to always be positive. In it, Ehrenreich writes:

“In fact, there is some evidence that the ubiquitous moral injunction to think positively may place an additional burden on the already sick or otherwise aggrieved. Not only are you failing to get better but you’re failing to feel good about not getting better. Similarly for the long-term unemployed, who, as I found while researching my book Bait and Switch, are informed by career coaches and self-help books that their principal battle is against their own negative, resentful, loser-like feelings. This is victim-blaming at its cruelest, and may help account for the passivity of Americans in the face of repeated economic insult.

But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people’s suffering. Far from being a "culture of complaint" that upholds "victims," ours has become "less and less tolerant of people having a bad day or a bad year," according to Barbara Held, professor of psychology at Bowdoin College and a leading critic of positive psychology. If no one will listen to my problems, I won’t listen to theirs: "no whining," as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn. Thus the cult acquires a viral-like reproductive energy, creating an empathy deficit that pushes evermore people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.”

So no one should be forced to be positive all the time, but you can still increase workplace happiness by increasing positivity appropriately. The following are some simple things that you can do to make yourself and the people around you more positive.

Keep a happiness-at-work log

At the end of every workday, just before you go home, take a few minutes to note down five things that made you happy at work that day. Type the log on your computer before you shut it down, or just write it on a piece of paper. Big or small doesn’t matter — note it down if it made your day a little better. Making a deadline. Talking to a nice co-worker. Meat loaf day at the cafeteria. Anything!

If you can’t come up with five items for the list, just write down as many as you can. If you can’t think of a single good thing, then either it’s been a really bad day, or you’re just not accustomed to remembering the good things that happen during the day.

Let’s say you’ve had ten good experiences at work and one bad. If you go home thinking only of the bad one, you will remember it as a bad day. It will even feel like a bad day. Since most people have a tendency to remember negative experiences better than positive ones, it’s a good idea to take extra care to remember good experiences. A happiness-at-work log is a simple, effective way to do it.

You can find a sample happiness log at this book’s website:
www.pinetribe.com/alexander/exercises

Have fun

A senior Southwest Airlines executive spent a day working at the ticket counter and with the ground crew in order to better understand their roles.

While she was helping direct a plane to the gate using those long orange directional devices, one of the seasoned ground crew members told her to rotate her wrists in a circular manner.

When she did this, the plane did a 360-degree turn! She began to scream, thinking she had sent a confusing signal to the pilot.

In reality, the ground crew had contacted the pilot and told them they had a “greeny” directing the plane and that they wanted to have some fun with her. The pilot enthusiastically agreed to play along
⁶
.

Fun matters, and any job can be fun. Even in the most serious situation, fun can make work bearable.

Make room for fun at work. Give up on the idea that fun is somehow unprofessional and frivolous. Even if you’re not in the mood for fun that day, let others have theirs — never ruin it for them. Just as importantly, don’t force people to participate. Some are up for it that day, some aren’t.

Don’t worry too much about what is appropriate or proper. Fun is about being spontaneous and open. Try some things out and see what works.

Be yourself

Does your company allow you to be open and honest? Can you say what you really think? Can you show how you really feel? Can you be yourself, or do you need to hide behind a corporate, professional demeanour to be accepted?

We’re much more likely to be happy at work if we can be ourselves and behave openly. Conversely, having to always hide our real thoughts and emotions will make us unhappy at work.

Say what you think

“Does it really have to be this way?” 

Anna couldn’t help wondering why her new boss treated her people so callously and rudely. Didn’t she see that this only made them negative, cynical and demotivated?

Being the newest employee, she was in a tricky position. One that made it easy for her to see that things were not right, but difficult for her to do something about it.

Finally, after seeing her manager once again belittling a co-worker, Anna decided to do something about it. With some trepidation, she arranged a meeting with her. At the meeting she carefully explained how her boss’ behaviour was affecting everyone in the department, and how she felt things should be.

To her surprise, her manager listened and gradually began trying to change her ways. With Anna’s help, she has begun to praise her employees, to seek out their advice, to ask nicely rather than give orders. The manager has also discovered that this kind of behaviour is easier, more enjoyable and much more efficient than her old autocratic style.

Difficult as this may seem, the only reliable way to create openness is for each of us to say what we really think. We don’t need to be rude or impolite about it, but we must express what is really going on in our minds, especially if it’s something we find difficult to say. If you can’t speak your mind, you’re likely to be unhappy at work.

Openness also works the other way — from the company to the employees. What is your company’s default approach to information?

• Almost everything is secret. We’ll tell people what they need to know.
  
• Almost everything is open. Only a few things are secret, and only if absolutely necessary.