How to introduce Scandi-style happiness into your work life

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How to introduce Scandi-style happiness into
your work life
Yes, it’s cold, wet and you’re back at the grindstone with most of winter
still to get through. But the Danes could have the answer, discovers Joshi
Herrmann
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Factor in feelgood: managers should look for any chance to warm relations between workers
with the tenacity that they pursue profit, says a Danish life coach
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Published: 07 January 2014
Updated: 11:32, 07 January
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Lifestyle
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Updated: 11:32, 07 January
2014
JOSHI HERRMANN
This month is supposed to be the nadir of our unhappiness, the
bleakest reach of our wintry discontent. The festive half of the
cold season is over, so now starts the longer, darker period of
waiting; attended by tedious calls for abstention or exercise, and
— according to leading recruiters this weekend — furious
searching for new jobs. The chairman of recruitment firm Reed
told a newspaper that the first Monday back — yesterday —
sees more traffic to his company’s website than on any other.
The biggest back-to-work moment in our calendar is universally
equated with collective unhappiness by advertisers, radio DJs
and the kind of marketing opportunists who thought up Blue
Monday (the most miserable day of the year, supposedly on
January 20). But could salvation lie not in a transfer but in a
book?
One of those who believes so is jolly Danish life-coach and
author Alexander Kjerulf. He is the chief happiness officer at his
trendy professional consultancy, which describes him as “one of
the world’s leading experts on happiness at work”, and the
author of a new book called Happy Hour is 9 to 5: How to Love
your Job, Love your Life and Kick Butt at Work.
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His offering is interesting: can we introduce smiling Scandi-ness
into our work lives? Is that happiness real? And if it is, do we
even want to?
The idea that happiness can be coaxed out of us if we think the
right way and do the right things has gained currency. Anthony
Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, has announced that
the boys at his school will be receiving lessons in happiness: a
couple of hours of coaching per month, which Wellington says
ranges from “advice on getting to sleep to more complex
cognitive methods for dealing with adversity” — all based on “a
growing body of scientific evidence on the causal factors around
happiness and well-being”. The rise of a certain strand of selfhelp literature and coaching makes the same claim about our
ability to summon happiness.
And Kjerulf thinks it can even happen at work. “This is not
about being deliriously happy — that’s utopian, it’s impossible,”
says Kjerulf. “It’s about feeling good at work most of the time.
“It is okay to have a bad day, I have to stress that. But regular
bad days can ruin people’s health, their marriage and certainly
how they are working.”
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In the book, he says we have to think about addressing
happiness as practically and seriously as we do our normal work
tasks, and focus on our relationships as much as we do on our
professional results. Kjerulf suggests writing a “happiness-atwork log” to record positive experiences, because research
shows that we are more likely to forget them than negative
ones.
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He also thinks managers should look for any chance to warm
relations between workers with the tenacity that they pursue
profit opportunities, such as the firm that put its executives
behind the bar at the office party, and the one that made a prize
that workers award to each other to spread goodwill. Those that
do will surely have fewer of their employees scouring the job
sites this week.
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The book suggests small daily gestures that will make your
colleagues happier and therefore more receptive to you,
including bringing them tea unprompted, greeting them when
they arrive in the morning, leaving sticky-notes on their desk
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they arrive in the morning, leaving sticky-notes on their desk
and taking a moment to look at work they have done and give
them your (positive) feedback.
Scandinavians have a head start over the rest of us when it
comes to happiness at work, Kjerulf argues, because the
concept has been around longer. They even have a word for it:
“arbejdsglæde” in Kjerulf’s native Danish. He quotes a 2005
study that found Scandinavians are the happiest workers in the
world, more than 20 per cent happier than us, which he calls “a
major factor behind the success of Nordic companies like Nokia,
IKEA, Oticon (the world’s largest producer of hearing aids),
Carlsberg, Ericsson, Lego, and many others”.
But persuading cynical Brits to follow suit might be difficult.
Philosopher Alain de Botton, in his 2009 book The Pleasures and
Sorrows of Work, describes modern ambitions that our work
should make us happy as “the most remarkable feature of the
modern workplace”, and “patently out of synch with what reality
can provide”. “Certain jobs are certainly fulfilling but the majority
are not and never can be,” wrote de Botton — a line he quoted
when I asked him for his response to Kjerulf’s book.
Kjerulf concedes that: “If your work is not obviously purposeful
or meaningful then it is obviously more difficult to be happy.” He
would advise workers in cigarette or landmine factories or any
other firm doing work that isn’t obviously meaningful to quit
their jobs rather than try to make their roles fulfilling, which
shows rather starkly the narrow group to which his wisdom
might be useful.
If the only people who can achieve work-happiness are
comfortable professionals in fashionable, ethical companies who
can switch careers at the drop of a hat then it’s hard to see us
Brits softening our cynicism towards the idea. But Kjerrulf
maintains that arbejdsglæde is “10 per cent about your job —
and 90 per cent about you”. In January’s air of mingling gloom
and solidarity, we might as well all give it a go.
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