Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (12 page)

• Less creativity, because it’s easier to be creative when you’re relaxed.
  
• Worse relations with co-workers, because we’re too busy to connect with people.
  
• Less time with friends and family.
  
• Less openness to new ideas — there’s no time!
  
• Less energy and motivation.
  
• Lower productivity.
  
• Less happiness at work — because of all of the above.
  

As Carisa Bianchi, Chief Strategy Officer of advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, puts it:

“You can always find reasons to work. There will always be one more thing to do. But when people don’t take time out, they stop being productive. They stop being happy, and that affects the morale of everyone around them.”

In many workplaces there’s always more work, no matter how much work you finish. Everybody is always running behind, and even if you magically managed to clear your inbox, there would just be more new assignments.

You can’t fix this by working harder, working longer, working more efficiently, or by prioritising your work better. You must do all of this, sure, but if there’s just too much work to be done, then none of this is the solution.

“I used to work at a company with a strong “overwork” culture. After two years obsessing about getting in at 7, leaving at 7  (and then working even more from home), my wife had a baby. I took a week off, then felt justified in limiting my work to 40 hours for the next couple of months due to my lack of sleep and need to help around the house.

In that two-month period I realized I accomplished exactly as much and was exactly as busy as I was when I worked 60 hours a week. From then on, I was in at 8, out at 5, aside from the occasional large project, and I completely stopped working at home. I was never happier, more organized or more successful in that job.

All that I learned in this time enabled me to get a new job and a significantly higher salary.

Meanwhile, when I talk to employees at the old company, they’re bragging about the 75-hour workweeks and discussing which anti-anxiety meds they take.”

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Let’s once and for all drop the cult of overwork and realise that it’s not the hours that count — it’s the results. More hours DO NOT equate to better results.

Workplace stress and burnout

“Once upon a time there was a bear and a bee who lived the woods and were the best of friends. All summer long the bee collected nectar from morning to night while the bear lay on his back basking in the long grass.

When winter came the bear realized he had nothing to eat and thought to himself, “I hope that busy little bee will share some of his honey with me.” But the bee was nowhere to be found — he had died of a stress-induced coronary disease.”

 From a piece of street art by the anonymous British guerilla artist Banksy
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Workplace stress can be incredibly damaging to our health and quality of life. Studies show that workplace stress:

• Increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.
  
• Increases the risk of insomnia, depression and anxiety.
  
• Weakens the immune system.
  
• Can cause chronic muscle pain and migraines.
  

The costs to our workplaces are also high. According to the British Health and Safety Executive:

• Work-related stress accounts for over a third of all new incidences of ill health.
  
• Each case of stress-related ill health leads to an average of 30.9 working days lost.
  
• A total of 12.8 million working days were lost to stress, depression and anxiety in 2004/5.
  
• One in five people report their work as “very” or “extremely” stressful.
  

However, there is one fundamental misconception around stress, namely that stress comes primarily from working too much. In reality, there is little correlation between hours worked and levels of stress. It’s not how much you work, it’s how you feel while you work.

If you feel constantly behind and neglected, are being treated unfairly, ignored or bullied, or are going through large changes and fearing for the future, you can become stressed from working 40 hours a week. Or even 20. If this is the case, working less will not help at all. What’s more, you can’t fight stress — fighting stress just creates more stress.

Danish medical scientist Bo Netterstrom has been researching workplace stress for more than 30 years and clearly states:

“Happiness at work is the only lasting cure for stress.”

Instead of stressing about stress, it is important to focus on what makes you calm, peaceful and happy at work, and how to get more of that. It’s impossible to be both happy at work and stressed. There’s an exercise to help you do just that in Chapter 5.

Celebrate the work you do

If you’re feeling stressed because you’re behind at work, there is one realisation that can help you:

Being stressed about being behind only makes me less efficient and is a waste of my resources.

Therefore, I will celebrate and enjoy the work I accomplish and not become stressed about the work I have yet to finish.

It’s not that you shouldn’t care about being behind on work — you should care. But don’t become stressed about it. Instead, make sure to constantly remind yourself of the work you have accomplished, rather than beat yourself up over the work that you haven’t. And always remember that working more is not the same as getting more done.

This goes double for the managers reading this. If you’re always focused on the work your department has not done, you’re making your people stressed — and consequently less efficient. Appreciate the work that gets done, make people happy at work, and you maximise results.

Conflicts at work

I don’t know about you, but I hate conflicts at work. Spending a workday mad at a co-worker, trying to avoid that person and subconsciously finding fault with everything they say or do is not exactly my idea of a good time.

I used to be an expert at dodging conflicts on the job and I’m here to tell you that it just doesn’t work! What does work is biting the bullet and doing something about it here and now. I have seen what appeared to be serious, insurmountable conflicts dissolve completely when handled constructively. But I have also seen tiny molehill-sized problems grow into mountains that threaten to topple an entire company.

You can’t win a conflict at work. If you “win” a conflict you get the outcome you want regardless of what the other person wants. This can be gratifying, sure, but the problem is that the underlying issue has not been addressed. It will simply reappear later over some other topic. Much better than winning a conflict at work is resolving it.

And resolve conflict now — the price of inaction is high. Unresolved, long-running conflicts result in antagonism, a breakdown in communications, inefficient teams, stress and low productivity. In short, unresolved conflicts make people terribly unhappy at work.

With all of this in mind, here are five essential steps to help you constructively solve conflicts at work.

1: Realise that conflicts are inevitable.

Show me a workplace without conflict and I’ll show you a workplace where no one gives a damn. Having a conflict at work does not mean you’re a bad person — it means you’re engaged enough to care. The very best and most efficient workplaces are not the ones without conflicts, but those who handle conflicts constructively.

2: Handle conflict sooner rather than later.

This is the single most important tip to successfully resolve conflicts: Do it now! It’s very tempting to wait for conflicts to blow over by themselves, but they rarely do. In most cases they just get worse with time.

3: Ask!

In the early stages of a conflict the most powerful tool to resolve it is simple: instead of getting annoyed at someone, ask why they did it. Do it nicely. Say, “I was wondering why you took the last coffee yesterday without brewing some more,” or “I’ve noticed that you often leave your cell phone unattended. Why is that?” are good examples. “Why the hell do you always have to talk so loudly on the phone?!” is less constructive.

4: Use giraffe language.

For more serious conflicts that have been going on for a while, use giraffe language. It’s the best tool around for constructively conveying criticism and solving conflicts, and don’t worry — no actual animal noises are involved.

Giraffe language, also known as non-violent communication, works so well because:

• It gives a difficult conversation a solid structure.
  
• It minimises mutual assumptions and accusations.
  
• It focuses on the real problems, not just the symptoms.
  
• It results in a plan of action, not just vague assurances to do better.
  

I won’t give you a complete rundown of giraffe language here, but you can read all about it at this book’s website.

5: Get mediation.

Some conflicts are so entrenched that they cannot be solved by the participants themselves. Outside help is needed in the form of conflict mediation, i.e., finding a third party to help find a solution. The mediator can be someone like a manager, HR employee, business coach, or co-worker.

Bureaucracy

“The place where I work is managed by good people who don’t want to be bureaucratic jerks, but they can’t grasp one simple concept: they are giving me money in exchange for doing something I love — they don’t have to shackle me with schedules and policies to get me to produce! I will be here working my little heart out because *I want to be*.

I try to block out the memos and TPS reports and remind myself that those things aren’t really changing what I get to do here, but damn, every time the red tape is thrust in my face it just deflates me and I don’t even feel like trying to design or build something.”

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Red tape kills the soul. There you are, an employee with brilliant ideas, trying to do the best possible job, and the corporate rulebook is holding you back against common sense and everything you know to be right.

An August 2000 survey of 1,100 American employees from various organisations concluded that organisational red tape, cumbersome work rules, and tangled processes take up an extraordinary amount of time. On average, workplace bureaucracy steals 9.4 hours from the weekly schedule. For one in five people, more than 16 hours per week go down the bureaucracy drain.

Furthermore, there is a clear correlation between workplaces with more bureaucracy and workplaces people want to leave. In other words, people flee organisations burdened with red tape
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As CEO of Oticon, Lars Kolind went on a war against bureaucracy in his organisation. This turned Oticon around, transforming it from a marginal player to the world’s leading manufacturer of hearing aids. It’s a remarkable business case that is now required reading at most business schools around the world.

In his excellent book The Second Cycle: Winning the War Against Bureaucracy, Kolind writes:

“As organisations grow larger, older and more successful, they introduce more management layers, more departments, more procedures, plans, budgets, reports, meetings, traditions and the like. This leads to management developing its own agenda, increasingly detached from employees and customers. It becomes more important to win awards than to care for customers and employees. Management loses touch with the business, which becomes increasingly complacent and even arrogant.

This all leads to less action, slower action and no action outside the well-known patterns.”

That kind of thing makes people desperately unhappy at work, because we all want to do great work! To be held back by stupid rules and irrational regulations makes no sense and makes your job more complicated than it needs to be. You should read Lars’ excellent book to learn his cure for bureaucracy — and to thank him for writing a great foreword to this book.

Bullying

“It was like a cloud of evil had descended on the factory. Everyone was afraid of this evil.

I knew that I was being harassed and bullied, I felt like I was being forced into resigning. Every reasonable step I took to resolve my situation was refused, or worse I was totally ignored. All the time my treatment seemed to get harsher, I was given totally menial tasks, which when complained about would result in me being given physically impossible tasks.

To cut a long story short I eventually suffered a breakdown. This not only devastated me but all my family too
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We human beings are highly social creatures, and feeling that we belong is perhaps our deepest, most primal need. Bullying means cutting a person out of the community, and singling them out for scorn and teasing. Such treatment may seem trivial when viewed from the outside, but it’s not the actions of the bullies themselves that create the damage — it’s the fact that the one being bullied has been excluded.

Bullying is often devastating. People break down mentally and physically, and can take years to recover. If you’re being bullied, it’s immensely important that you act immediately. Talk to someone. Go to your boss. Request a transfer. Quit. Whatever course of action you feel is best for you, do something.