Work less, do more - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Work less, do more - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Heres a quote from the horrible book ?You Can?t Win a Fight With Your Boss by Tom Markert, the global chief marketing and client service officer at ACNielsen. Markert says: You can forget lunch breaks. You can?t make money for a company while you?re eating lunch . . . if you don?t put in the hours, someone just as smart and clever as you will. Fact of life: the strong survive. [If you ignore this] you might just end up as roadkill lying dead by the side of the corporate highway as others drive right past you. I have always made a habit of walking around early and late to personally see who?s pumping it out. If they are getting results and working harder than everyone else, I promote them. Riiiiiight. Remind me never to go work for this guy! Heres how you do it instead, from a comment from Sarah S. on this post about implied overwork: I began working at my organization about a month ago. During my first ?get to know my staff? meeting i informed everyone that i would prefer they work no more than 40 hours per week and that everyone take a full hour lunch. My staff was so used to working long hours that they would not leave on time. We had a big meeting last week where i used another tip from this blog and asked everyone to write all their tasks on post-it notes and hang them according to a three-point scale 1-hate it 2- it is ok 3- love it! After rearranging tasks to be better suited for their career desires people were getting things done more quickly and leaving on time. One of my employees still felt the need to work late every day, so i started going to her every day at 5pm and asking what she was working on and offering to stay late with her to help her. I sometimes offered to take the entire responsibility off her plate (in a non-judgemental way) to ensure she could get home a a decent hour and get re-energized for the next day. The productivity of my team has sky-rocketed lately. People come in at 8am ready to work and excited to bring ideas to me. We all leave at 5pm now as often as possible (4 out of 5 days usually) and the rest of the office seems miffed that we can ?get away with it?. However, with priorities realigned, people more energized about their work and people with more time to appreciate friends and family our work is reaching a higher caliber and output is actually increasing. Sarah S. Yes!!! This is great stuff!!! I love it!!! Exclamation points!!!!! I cant say this enough: Work is not about maximizing your hours, its about maximizing your results, and sometims you get more results with fewer hours. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related