Read Online Happy Hour is 9 to 5 by Alexander Kjerulf - Free Book Online
Authors: Alexander Kjerulf
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and pretend to be chipper, it takes longer to get out of the bad mood.
What often happens at Leo is that an employee will place a red marker in the morning, and then change it to a green one later that morning. When people are given permission to have a bad day, they recover faster and there’s less chance that they will spread their bad mood to their co-workers.
It’s interesting to notice the degree to which the full range of natural human emotions are not welcome in the workplace. There seems to be a widely-held belief that we’re professionals at work, and professionals approach their work rationally and without emotion. Businesses would prefer us to act more like Spock, the Vulcan science officer on Star Trek, who famously said, “Emotions are alien to me. I’m a scientist.”
Professor Teresa M. Amibile has been researching how working environment influences the motivation, creativity, and performance of individuals and teams. In an interview on the Harvard Business School website, she identified three main points:
People have incredibly rich, intense, daily inner work lives; emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment permeate their daily experience at work.
These feelings powerfully affect people’s day-to-day performance.
These feelings, which are so important for performance, are powerfully influenced by particular daily events 7 .
So, we have strong emotions at work, they are affected by what goes on in the workplace, and they have a powerful impact upon our performance. Of course we do — we’re human beings whether we’re at work or not, and human beings have emotions.
“Emotions are alien to me. I’m an employee of Acme Inc.” That is not how we work.
It’s important that we show our positive emotions because that is one of the best ways to spread happiness to others, as we saw in Chapter 2. If you’re really happy and don’t show it, the feeling will quickly die away in you and in others.
It’s also important to deal constructively with negative emotions. If something at work makes us angry, disappointed or sad and we don’t act on it, three things could happen:
The emotion becomes stronger — Because the situation doesn’t get resolved the feeling is likely to become more intense.
Saving it for later — Instead of dealing with your anger at the meeting that sparked it, you lash out at a co-worker later, at the server at Starbucks who forgets to put soy milk in your latte, or even at your family.
The ketchup effect — Feelings bottled up over a long time suddenly get released all at once and you blow up over some small matter.
All in all, it’s healthier to recognise negative emotions as a sign that something is wrong and then to do something about it. I’m not saying that we should all be hyper-emotional — there are constructive ways to deal with negative emotions at work. If you’re dissatisfied with something, complain constructively.
Love
Thyra Frank was head of a nursing home in Copenhagen for almost 25 years. She is now in her mid-fifties, outspoken, constantly cracks jokes, and has a loud, infectious laugh. Working in the public sector means facing a certain set of constraints: not much money, a lot of red tape, and very little leeway. In the face of this, she created what may be the best functioning nursing home in Denmark.
The employees love working there, and the clients (the elderly) love living there, because of the positive mood and the happy employees, but also because of the weekly gala dinners with great food, wine, live piano music, and after-dinner brandy. The residents also live on average twice as long as in other nursing homes. The only people who aren’t crazy about her work are the authorities, because she continues to flout the rules and do things her own way.
During her first Christmas as head, her husband persuaded her to give the employees Christmas presents. This is not normally done in the public sector, and the
What often happens at Leo is that an employee will place a red marker in the morning, and then change it to a green one later that morning. When people are given permission to have a bad day, they recover faster and there’s less chance that they will spread their bad mood to their co-workers.
It’s interesting to notice the degree to which the full range of natural human emotions are not welcome in the workplace. There seems to be a widely-held belief that we’re professionals at work, and professionals approach their work rationally and without emotion. Businesses would prefer us to act more like Spock, the Vulcan science officer on Star Trek, who famously said, “Emotions are alien to me. I’m a scientist.”
Professor Teresa M. Amibile has been researching how working environment influences the motivation, creativity, and performance of individuals and teams. In an interview on the Harvard Business School website, she identified three main points:
People have incredibly rich, intense, daily inner work lives; emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment permeate their daily experience at work.
These feelings powerfully affect people’s day-to-day performance.
These feelings, which are so important for performance, are powerfully influenced by particular daily events 7 .
So, we have strong emotions at work, they are affected by what goes on in the workplace, and they have a powerful impact upon our performance. Of course we do — we’re human beings whether we’re at work or not, and human beings have emotions.
“Emotions are alien to me. I’m an employee of Acme Inc.” That is not how we work.
It’s important that we show our positive emotions because that is one of the best ways to spread happiness to others, as we saw in Chapter 2. If you’re really happy and don’t show it, the feeling will quickly die away in you and in others.
It’s also important to deal constructively with negative emotions. If something at work makes us angry, disappointed or sad and we don’t act on it, three things could happen:
The emotion becomes stronger — Because the situation doesn’t get resolved the feeling is likely to become more intense.
Saving it for later — Instead of dealing with your anger at the meeting that sparked it, you lash out at a co-worker later, at the server at Starbucks who forgets to put soy milk in your latte, or even at your family.
The ketchup effect — Feelings bottled up over a long time suddenly get released all at once and you blow up over some small matter.
All in all, it’s healthier to recognise negative emotions as a sign that something is wrong and then to do something about it. I’m not saying that we should all be hyper-emotional — there are constructive ways to deal with negative emotions at work. If you’re dissatisfied with something, complain constructively.
Love
Thyra Frank was head of a nursing home in Copenhagen for almost 25 years. She is now in her mid-fifties, outspoken, constantly cracks jokes, and has a loud, infectious laugh. Working in the public sector means facing a certain set of constraints: not much money, a lot of red tape, and very little leeway. In the face of this, she created what may be the best functioning nursing home in Denmark.
The employees love working there, and the clients (the elderly) love living there, because of the positive mood and the happy employees, but also because of the weekly gala dinners with great food, wine, live piano music, and after-dinner brandy. The residents also live on average twice as long as in other nursing homes. The only people who aren’t crazy about her work are the authorities, because she continues to flout the rules and do things her own way.
During her first Christmas as head, her husband persuaded her to give the employees Christmas presents. This is not normally done in the public sector, and the
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