Tag Archives: Tony Hsieh

The Happiness Tipping Point

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I am thrilled to have just been offered a place to study for an MSc in Positive Psychology at The University of East London beginning in September.  My ongoing personal studies of the science of happiness literature, my participation in an excellent 10 week course in Positive Psychology at City University and my writing of The Happiness Experiment blog have all created a perfect storm in my life where I felt the need to learn more about this fascinating science. You could say that I have reached a happiness tipping point. It turns out I am not alone. This great article by Sunnie Toelle, published in The Huffington Post on 3rd June, investigates the fact that many other people seem to have reached a happiness tipping point too. The science of happiness is everywhere in the news and media at the moment as people become increasingly aware that economic success does not necessarily equate with a happy and fulfilled life. This article reviews whether the time has come for the science of happiness. Have we reached a happiness tipping point?  Read the article and decide for yourself.

The Happiness Tipping Point

 

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“I think it’s here,” Prof. Martin Seligman said as he made a blue dot only millimeters to the left of the tipping point on the diffusion of innovations graph I had sketched in my Moleskine notebook. Martin Seligman, the “father of positive psychology,” had just lectured on Well-being at Work to over 500 business professionals at the Positive Business Forum in Milan. The two-day conference can be understood as the latest manifestation of a larger global phenomenon, labeled by the media as the “happiness movement” or “happiness industry.” With initiatives springing up in every sector — academic, cultural, spiritual, economic, public and private — what is the big picture? Does it matter? And are we actually approaching a tipping point?

The origins of this growing phenomenon go back to what has popularly been called the “science of happiness” or, in more scholarly terms, Positive Psychology. In his book Flourish, Prof. Seligman explains that while the goal of psychology has traditionally been to relieve human suffering, the goal of positive psychology — a field that is just 15 years old — is different. It is about actually raising the bar for the human condition and enabling individuals and communities to flourish.

Since the field’s humble beginnings in the late ’90s, it has seen considerable growth. In 1999, the late Philip J. Stone, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, taught one of the first positive psychology courses to just 20 students. Ten years later, the landscape had changed. You can find over 200 university courses across the United States, a master’s degree program at the University of Pennsylvania and almost 1,000 articles related to the field published in peer-reviewed journals. Other fields have taken notice, too. In 2003, London School of Economics Professor Richard Layard founded the Wellbeing Program after giving a series of public lectures titled Happiness: Has Social Science a Clue? The publication of his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, soon followed and set the stage for a major upswing in interest in “happiness economics.”

As with several big, potentially game-changing ideas in the past 15 years — think Facebook, Google and WordPress — university students are at the forefront of their implementation. The happiness phenomenon is no exception to this pattern. On a national level, USA Todayran a story just last month on how “Happiness Clubs Spread Positive Vibes on Campus.” In the same month, the topic also surfaced in the oldest student-run daily newspaper, the Yale Daily News, which devoted its monthly magazine to college happiness movements.

So might this indicate that Prof. Seligman is right? A tipping point is defined as the point at which the buildup of minor incidents cause a larger, more significant change. So, is all this activity at universities going to tip this world towards happiness? Certainly, some of the world’s most influential social movements started on university campuses. And yet, I’ll refrain from carving out this argument any further because it is not just about what is unfolding on some American college campus. The most powerful evidence can be uncovered in “the real world.”

On a policy level, happiness made its debut on the world stage on March 20, 2013, when the first official United Nations International Day of Happiness took place. This was only months after the UN had released its inaugural World Happiness Report and England adopted the “Wellbeing Index.” As the first country in the Western hemisphere, England now complements the Gross Domestic Product figure with the Wellbeing Index “to measure what matters most.”

Politics is a reactive force rooted in a wide array of community organizations, artistic initiatives and popular support. In the case of happiness, the most notable community organizations are the London-based non-governmental organization Action for Happiness, Sustainable Seattle’s Happiness Initiative and the New York-based H(app)athon project. As for the arts, the popular documentary HAPPY comes to mind, as does graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister’s currently displayed Happy Show exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Jonathan Harris’ remarkable interactive art project, Balloons of Bhutan.

When academia, politics and the arts are on to something, business cannot be far. On the consumer side, a keen observer will note the ever-increasing number of books, magazines, blogs, online courses and conferences on happiness-related topics. But it is not just a consumer demand that the business sector seeks to satisfy. Ever since Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, authored the #1 New York Times bestseller Delivering Happiness – A Path to Profits, Purpose and Passion, and Google became famous for its culture of workplace satisfaction, happiness is perceived as a powerful competitive advantage in the job market as well. This idea received so much traction that the Harvard Business Review picked it up and devoted its entire January-February 2012 issue to the Value of Happiness: How Employee Well-being Drives Profits. This argument has also recently gained momentum in Europe, in part due to the inaugural Positive Business Forum in Milan in March 2013. Hundreds of human resource professionals diligently took notes as Shawn Achor lectured on The Happiness Advantage and Paul Zak explained the neuroscientific link between purpose and employee happiness.

The forum also brings me back to Prof. Seligman. After decades of scientific study, he makes one point very clear: happiness is not about smiley faces, unicorns and light-hearted merriment. Nor is it about self-proclaimed gurus and their self-help anecdotes of supposed enlightenment. When put in these contexts, happiness becomes an unworkable term for science or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or even just changing your personal life, according to Prof. Seligman. Rather, happiness — or “well-being” as he prefers to call it — should be understood as a comprehensive, holistic framework consisting of five measurable and buildable components summarized by the acronym P.E.R.M.A. (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Positive Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment). It is this scientifically grounded understanding that lies at the heart of the global happiness phenomenon this article and many “happiness” experts seek to portray. And it is a much needed understanding too. With burn-out, stress and depression rates skyrocketing and mental health costs in 2010 hitting $2.5 trillion globally, we must find ways to reverse this shocking development.

Coming back to my initial question of whether we are reaching a tipping point, the answers appears to be as follows: Some fascinating and potentially powerful happiness-related frameworks and initiatives exist on multiple levels and across geographic regions. Happiness matters for many reasons, but most of all, because business as usual is leading to a staggering increase in mental disorders, mental health costs and a massive loss of human potential. Arguably, it should therefore become a key agenda item in boardroom meetings and at policy roundtables. Yet, it remains to be seen who and what will hit off the tipping point.

 Follow Sunnie Toelle on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@sunniejaye
Posted by Shona Lockhart on 4th June 2013

How to profit from the happiness business

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Yesterday’s blog post took a brief look at how happiness is good news for both business and employees.  This video with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, looks at his reasons for publishing the very successful book Delivering Happiness which tells the story of the launch and amazing success of Zappos, an online shoe store.  The book has now morphed in to a happiness movement also called Delivering Happiness and in collaboration with NEF the happiness message is taking the business sector by storm through the launch of the new Happiness at Work survey.   The article below from The Guardian examines the example which Zappos has set and looks at how other companies can learn from their business model - an amazing success story which puts employee and customer happiness at the heart of profits.

How Zappos profits from the happiness business

By focusing on the happiness and wellbeing of workers, companies can create a positive workplace culture that’s good for growth and profits, says Jim Witkin

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Tony Hsieh, chief executive of Zappos. Photograph: Zappos

Zappos, America’s largest online shoe retailer, has achieved success by nearly every conventional measure. Founded in 1999, the company reached $1bn in annual sales in less than 10 years and was acquired by Amazon in 2009 in a deal worth $1.2bn. Yet, it’s the company’s unconventional culture and a business model based on happiness that Zappos’s chief executive, Tony Hsieh, wants to share with the rest of the world.

Hsieh recently brought his message to the UK parliament, where he spoke on a panel discussion entitled Happy Workers = Business Growth? hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics.

By focusing on company culture, he told the parliamentary group, everything else such as building a brand with sustained revenue growth and passionate employees, fell into place. Zappos’s culture is guided by a set of core values which aims to empower employees, create a sense of community in the workplace, and serve a higher purpose beyond bottom-line metrics.

Employees should have a sense of control and progress in their careers, says Hsieh. Zappos developed a set of skills for their call centre reps, rather than a one-size-fits-all job description. Employees directly control their salary increases as they acquire the skills that interest them at their own pace, rather than waiting for fixed review periods or annual raises.

Zappos encourages employees to “create fun and a little weirdness” in the workplace and build personal connections with co-workers. To protect this feeling of community, Zappos carefully vets each new applicant for a cultural match. The company even offers new employees $4,000 to quit after their first week of training to weed out people who are there just for the paycheck.

“Is this someone I would want to have a beer with?” is one of the simple questions Hsieh asks himself when interviewing applicants. For companies examining their own values, he advises: “Ask yourself what are the values that the company is willing to make hiring and firing decisions on apart from job performance.”

Even measuring call centre performance takes an unconventional twist at Zappos. The amount of time the rep spends on the phone with a customer is the traditional measure of call centre efficiency, with an emphasis on reducing that time. Instead, Zappos has developed their own scorecard, tracking the personal and emotional connections made with customers, measured by the number of thank you cards and cookies the call centre reps send.

Profits are key to any enterprise, admits Hsieh, but he ultimately realised that a great company culture should serve a higher purpose. At Zappos, this means delivering happiness and “wowing” customers with exceptional service. By concentrating on the happiness of those around you, Hsieh believes, you dramatically increase your own.

All this focus on employee happiness seems to be paying off, as Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best places to work in annual workplace surveys from industry watchers like Fortune magazine.

Hsieh described his adventures on the entrepreneurial trail in the 2010 book, Delivering Happiness, which has been translated into 20 languages. He is now involved in a new venture, Delivering Happiness at Work (or DH@work), offering coaching and workshops for other companies hoping to get their culture right. DH@work has teamed up with Nic Marks, a social economist from the UK-based New Economics Foundation and founder of the UK’s Centre for Wellbeing.

Trying to impose the Zappos culture and values on other companies is not the point of DH@work, according to James Key Lim, chief executive of the new venture. “It’s about taking the DNA of what worked at Zappos – things like purpose, happiness, culture, and profits – which anyone can use as a framework to make happiness as their business model,” he says.

Jim Witkin is a journalist and regularly contributes to the New York Times

Article originally published in The Guardian on 14th June 2012

Can happiness be a good business strategy?

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Happiness at work is big news.  Take a look at this new video by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) who have worked together with Zappos to create a new happiness at work survey.  This new tool which was launched recently gives companies a simple way to measure happiness and well-being in the workplace and to implement improvements to create a happier workforce. According to the article below from the Guardian Sustainable Business section, having a happy workforce actually makes good financial sense.

A happy workforce is more engaged, creative and more focused, increasing the overall productivity of a company, says Tim Smedley

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The link between happiness and productivity at work is increasingly understood. Photograph: Alberto Incrocci/Getty Images

How happy are you at work? Maybe you’re reading this at work right now? Which could indicate that you work in a friendly workplace culture where you’re empowered to do as you see fit and read whatever you want online. Or it could mean that you’re bored out of your brain, whiling away the hours until the clock clunks to home time. The former suggests that you’re a happy and productive worker; the latter, quite the opposite. And this link between happiness and productivity at work is becoming increasingly understood.

Nic Marks, of the New Economics Foundation (Nef), has spent the last 10 years of his life working in this field. It used to be known as ‘well-being economics’ until it was discovered that “normal people didn’t know what that meant”, says Marks. Happiness is what it’s really all about.

“People who are happier at work are more productive – they are more engaged, more creative, have better concentration”, says Marks. “The difference in productivity between happy and unhappy people at work can range between 10-50%. That’s 10% for non-complex repetitive tasks, or up to 40-50% in service and creative industries.” And that’s an awful lot in terms of business revenue.

The current poster boy for happiness in business circles is Tony Hsieh. A beneficiary of the dot-com boom he became a multi-millionaire in his early 20s by selling his web company LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265m. He then took over fashion start-up Zappos in 1999 because he missed working in a happy environment. “It began selfishly for me”, he admits. “I was in the financial position of not having to work again… so if I’m going to go back into an office it better be around people I would choose to hang out with. Otherwise, what’s the point? But it actually turned out to be a good business strategy.”

By 2005, Hsieh decided that a happy company culture was Zappos’s number one business priority, from which everything else would grow. In an ironic echo of the General Electric CEO Jack Welsch who advocated axing the bottom performing 10% of managers each year, Hsieh removed the 5-10% of employees who did not buy into the same vision. “The best way to make [a happy culture] stick is to get rid of the whatever percentage of people who aren’t living up to the company values”, he argues. “What we found is that short term pain was totally worth the long-term gain of strengthening the relationships with everybody else.”

By removing the cynics, says Hsieh, the remaining 90% “became super-engaged”. Empowerment policies then came thick and fast. The company moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas where they could recreate a college campus environment; the sole communication policy reads “‘be real and use your best judgement”; call centre staff are hired on friendliness – only 5% of calls result in sales but long-term relationships are built over time. By 2008 the company reached $1b in gross merchandise sales. In 2012, it is now over $2bn, with 5,000 staff. That sort of growth – especially through a prolonged recession – is hard to ignore.

The UK government is not ignoring happiness. For the last two years Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson has chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics. When it started out, two people came. The last sitting in May was standing room only. “Anyone who has worked in a business knows that when colleagues feel motivated, empowered and wake up looking forward to going to work – then they will work better. We all know that”, says Swinson. “And increasingly businesses are recognising that too.”

In light of this groundswell of interest, Nic Marks and Nef have just launched an online tool to help businesses measure and manage the happiness of their employees. Marks feels that the employee engagement surveys run by many businesses are too extractive, based on what employers can get out of their employees rather than what employees want. To avoid disappearing down an HR blackhole, as Marks puts it, Nef’s happiness survey gives employees instant results – including personalised action plans – as well as collating the results anonymously for the business.

One company who trialled the Nef approach – The Works, a recruitment agency in the north of England – ended up changing its working hours and internal communications practices on the back of the survey. “It’s given employees empowerment, hopefully it’s given them more job satisfaction”, says Joanne Shires, the firm’s head of people and talent. “And for us it’s a return on our social investment.”

So can happier people at work actually lead to a happier and more prosperous society? In down town Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh and Zappos are putting that to the test. Having bought the old Las Vegas city hall to house the new company headquarters, planning the obligatory cool workplace trimmings – funky break-out areas, an internal pub – all felt too insular, says Hsieh. So Zappos set up and funded a $350m project to invest $100m in local real estate, $100m in residential development, $50m in small businesses, $50m in education, and $50m in technology start-ups.

“What started out as a new office move has actually turned out to be a project to revitalise down town Vegas,” says Hsieh. And guess what, “we’ve seen our employees become engaged on a whole new level because of this. It all feeds back into the Zappos brand… we can do well and do good.” Which has to be more than just a happy coincidence.

Article by Tim Smedley originally published in The Guardian on 20th June 2012.