The Chief Happiness Officer

I have just discovered the chief happiness officer blog, which focused on happiness at work and I think it’s great.  Just this morning I was talking to Graham on the phone while out walking (I had nothing better to do, Graham was late for a meeting!) and I was saying how I dislike it when a company says it is in business to make a profit.  I much prefer to think of a company seeing its role as:

Providing fulfilling employment to it’s employees and providing great services to it’s customers whilst making a profit.

Framed like this the company can rethink it’s objectives and derive shareholder value as a side effect of having happy employees and satisfied customers, which I think (maybe unrealistically) is a much healthier way to run a company.

Anyway back to the blog,  the author is in the process of writing a book and is blogging ideas along the way, which seems a great process and one that’s increasingly popular.  As a taster here are some of the recent posts, followed by my comments:

Dealing with uncertainty at work, very important and useful advise in today’s climate.  As a team leader I have been in this situation several times and this is good advise.

Ask a co-worker for advice, a few years I did some research into who people like to ask for advise and way out in front was co-workers.  This was in an IT environment and it’s interesting that help desks were way down on the list.  We formalized this by creating a well supported super user role and it worked very well.

Why job descriptions are useless, very perceptive – when was the last time you looked at yours, the post doesn’t just trash job descriptions through, it describes some good alternatives.

Secret salaries vs. open, most people seem to prefer secret salaries, I worked in a department once with voluntary open salaries – almost everyone decided to declare them and we found it worked very well.

For more on my own thoughts on happiness check out this list of posts