The Happy Manifesto

Make Your Organization a Great Workplace

Henry Stewart

• Editore: Kogan Page
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780749467524
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Negocios y empresa
• Categoria: Gestión

Imagine a workplace where people are energized and motivated by being in control of the work they do. Imagine they are trusted and given freedom, within clear guidelines, to decide how to achieve their results. Imagine they are able to get the life balance they want. Imagine they are valued according to the work they do, rather than the number of hours they spend at their desk.Wouldn't you want to work there? Wouldn't it also be the place that would enable you to work at your best and most productive?
The Happy Manifesto is a guide to anyone wanting to improve their workplace. Learn how you too could change your work environment for the better.

02

Make your people feel good

The key focus for managers

One of the core beliefs that underlies everything we do at Happy is this:

People work best when they feel good about themselves.

Think about that statement. Do you agree with it? I find that the overwhelming majority of people do. Assuming you are in agreement then there is a natural follow-up question:

What then should be the key role of management in your organization?

By simple logic, if the first statement is true, the key role of management should be to create an environment where people feel good about themselves. It is that simple. I like to ask my audiences to put their hands up if they work for companies where that is the key focus. Normally one or two hands, out of an audience of 100 or more, will go up.

Yet if you look at some of the most successful companies on this planet – such as Microsoft, Google or Gore – creating a great workplace is often one of their key strategic objectives.

Nando’s – happy people are the key

Nando’s is a popular restaurant chain in the UK, specializing in spicy chicken. Some years ago they undertook research to find out what were the key factors that explained why sales at some of their restaurants grew faster than at others.

After detailed analysis they found one factor stood out above all others in explaining the difference. This was how happy the staff were, as measured in the annual staff survey. As a result they changed their managers’ bonuses so that 50 per cent was based solely on those staff survey results.

Nando’s still wanted to maximize growth and profits, of course. However, they believed that the way to achieve that was not to target these elements but instead to target the key factor that creates growth and profits, namely how happy its staff were. They sent a clear message to their managers: ‘Your key focus should be on making your staff happy.’ 1

Following up the story from Nando’s, I discovered that the new bonus system had proved difficult and had been withdrawn after a year. Sadly some of the less effective managers focused more on trying to persuade their staff to give good scores than on actually changing the workplace. But Nando’s belief in the connection between staff satisfaction and results continues, based on their experience and their research findings. Indeed in 2010, with 6,300 staff and 220 restaurants, Nando’s was voted the best large business to work for in the UK in the Sunday Times annual list.

A similar story is told by David Smith, who was Head of People at the supermarket chain Asda from 1990 to 2007. At one point in 1990 Asda was just 10 days from bankruptcy. They turned it around and grew to the company they are today: £18 billion in sales, 170,000 employees and rated the Best Place to Work in the UK in 2008 (in the Sunday Times list). How did they do this? According to David, it was by focusing on their people.

Key principles included ‘work made fun gets done’ and ‘hire for attitude’ (more on that one later). The turnaround was based on a real focus on engaging front-line staff. Their internal measure of employee engagement went from 55 per cent in 1990 to 91 per cent in 2008.

‘We have 360 separate P & Ls [Profit and Loss accounts] and I have done the calculations,’ explains David. ‘There is an absolute positive correlation between staff engagement and profitability. If a branch can achieve an engagement level of 94 per cent I guarantee the profits will grow exponentially.’ 2

Questions: What can you do, as a manager or a colleague, to make your people feel good now?

How would your organization be different if its key focus for management was on making its people happy?

Believe the best

Discover the problem

Janet had been one of the most reliable front-line staff in the company. Suddenly that changed. She was often off sick or late to work. When she was there, her heart no longer seemed to be in the job. Some companies would have started disciplinary procedures or other forms of coercive management.

This company believed in assuming the best of their people. They took the time to find out why this previously well-motivated employee was now performing so badly. She was not keen to talk about it, but eventually explained that she was in financial difficulties. She had borrowed a small amount from a loan shark, just £50 for a pair of trainers for her daughter for Christmas. But the amount owing had ballooned and she was having difficulty paying it back. She was worried sick about the consequences.

Once the company discovered this, it was an easy matter to solve. They paid off the loan shark and, over time, took the money owing from the woman’s salary. She was hugely grateful and returned to being a strongly motivated and reliable member of staff – indeed, she became more loyal than ever.

I would like to think that most companies would support their loyal staff in this way. However, several steps are needed. First, the company needs to start from a position of believing the best of its people. Second, it must have a good enough relationship between the member of staff and the manager to be able to cover a personal issue such as this. Finally, the company needs to be prepared to carry out this sort of remedy, and not be too restricted by its own rules.

People don’t wake up and go to work wanting to do a bad job. Indeed a core belief at Happy is that every person you meet is doing the very best they can, given their background, experience and current circumstances.3 This, of course, includes yourself.

It is easy to get annoyed and frustrated when people seem to be performing badly. Instead, try to think about the challenges in your workplace and how you would approach them if you start by believing the best of the people involved.

In the early days of Happy, when we had only three employees, a new member of staff had started and it didn’t seem to be working out. I’d held a couple of difficult meetings with her and was starting to micro-manage her work, which was making things worse.

I discussed the situation with more experienced colleagues and they suggested I had to step back, give her a chance and really try to make it work. From that point the situation changed and Toni became a valuable member of staff, working hard to fulfil her tasks. At her next appraisal I asked what had caused the change. Her answer was simple: ‘You started believing in me.’

Henry Ford famously said, ‘Whether you believe you will succeed or believe you will fail, you are probably correct.’ His point was that your expectation will determine the result. The same is true of others. I would rephrase it as follows:

Whether you believe the person you are managing will succeed or believe they will fail, you will probably be proved correct.

I think it was Richard Branson who said that you should never make rules on the basis of the 2 per cent of your workers who are disruptive or deliberately poor performers. Instead, set them for the 98 per cent who come to work every day seeking to do their best.

Management the Google way

Lara Harding is ‘People Programs Specialist’ at Google, which was voted the best workplace in the UK in 2008 (in the Financial Times awards). I asked her what they do when somebody is underperforming. ‘We coach and mentor the hell out of them,’ was her response.4

Questions: Is your first reaction to a problem with any of your people to believe the best of them and work from that belief?

Are your systems and processes based on the assumption that people are seeking to do a great job?

Believe the best of everybody you deal with

This principle can be extended to everybody you work with. My colleague Diye Wareibi, whose Digibridge company provides our technical support, gave a great example. One of his clients owed him money, and Diye described how he changed his debt-collecting strategy after borrowing a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People from our bookshelf.

This classic book, written by Dale Carnegie in the 1930s, encourages you to understand the people you work with and to ‘walk in their shoes’. As Diye explains:

I had been chasing this debt for weeks, and it was getting increasingly antagonistic. I had threatened legal action and he had responded with ‘see you in court’.

After reading the book I took a different approach. I knew he had been having a difficult time and there had been health problems in his family. So I e-mailed him and then we talked on the phone. I expressed my concern and my understanding that he had been having a difficult time and asked if there was any way I could help.

We had a really good talk and I think that meant something to him because I know others had been giving him a really hard time. I didn’t mention the debt at all. But, you know what, within a few days I got a cheque for £1,000 in the post. And, just today, I got a second one paying the debt off in full. Treating him as a friend and trying to understand where he was coming from resulted in my bill getting paid. And hopefully we will continue to do business together for many years.

As I write this I have just succeeded in getting a full refund of £260 on a fine when my car was clamped and towed away. On one of our contracts we actually train people who deal with complaints about parking issues (in how to improve their service) and I know the abuse they have to put up with. When we ask delegates to give examples of a time when a customer has treated them well, they often find it hard to come up with any examples. The best they can often think of is people who haven’t actually shouted at them.

I was annoyed about the car being towed and having to spend hours getting it back, especially as I felt I’d gone out of my way to park it legally (there was a very small notice stating that, for this short piece of road, parking was not allowed there on Sundays). But I knew these were people, like all of us, just trying to do a good day’s work. So when I wrote I sought to make them feel good. I told them I was a big supporter of their work, as they keep London moving (which is true). And I commended their staff on being friendly and helpful (which they were), while explaining why I felt they had ‘inadvertently’ got it wrong in this case. The result of this pleasant, positive complaint was that – despite being legally in the wrong – I got my money back in full.

People work best and think best, and act most flexibly, when they feel good about themselves. Anything we can do to understand where they are coming from and make them feel positive will always go towards building trust and helping us get what we want. Think of your own experience: do you work best when shouted at, or when you are supported and made to feel good?

Questions: Do you always try to ‘walk in their shoes’ and understand other people’s position?

Where could you do more in your everyday contacts to make others feel good?

Systems not rules

When Happy Computers was voted the best company in the UK for customer service,5 I asked one of the judges why we had won it. He answered that it was clear we knew exactly what our customers wanted.

‘But’, he continued, ‘that is not unusual. We find that most companies understand very well what their customers want. But they then put in place a set of rules and systems that make it almost impossible for their front-line staff to deliver what their customers want. You don’t, you give people the freedom to solve the customers’ problems.’

In many organizations the response to som...

Indice dei contenuti

• Praise for The Happy Manifesto
• Contents
• About Henry Stewart
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 01 Enable people to work at their best
• 02 Make your people feel good
• 03 Creating a great workplace makes good business sense
• 04 Freedom within clear guidelines
• 05 Be open and transparent
• 06 Recruit for attitude, train for skill
• 07 Celebrate mistakes
• 08 Community: create mutual benefit
• 09 Love work, get a life
• 10 Select managers who are good at managing
• Conclusion
• The Happy manifesto
• Recommended books
• Acknowledgements
• How to contact Happy
• Copyright