Full transcript: Alex Kjerulf on London Real
6:54 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. We are sponsored today by the folks at Bulletproof Coffee, which is a coffee that’s free of molds and toxins. You mix it up typically with grass-fed butter, some MCT oil, and boom you have kind of a breakfast replacement in the morning. They are big into biohacking, which is little things you can change about your body that gets you kind of in a better space. I’m actually gonna be doing some sleep hacking videos with these guys over the next two months, some of it obvious, some of it not.
7:26 I’m actually been monitoring my sleep every night, you know, with an iPhone app and that kind of thing. So just thanks to those guys for sponsors. If you want to check them out, it’s bulletproofexec.com for their web, for their blog or upgradeitself.com for their products. My guest today is Mr. Alex Karof.
7:43 Alex Kjerulf: Very good.
7:44 Brian Rose: And Alex is the Chief Happiness Officer and founder of WooHoo Inc., which is a company where he speaks and consults worldwide for businesses like IBM, Microsoft, Hilton, IKEA, Hewlett-Packard. Those are big companies.
7:58 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah. I should probably correct you there a little bit because the company is actually called WooHoo.
8:05 Brian Rose: Oh, really?
8:06 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, yeah. Kicking up the phone is awesome. WooHoo. It’s Alex.
8:10 Brian Rose: It’s like Homer from The Simpsons.
8:11 Alex Kjerulf: I know.
8:12 Brian Rose: Okay. There’s no trademark there that you grabbed or anything.
8:15 Alex Kjerulf: I hope not.
8:15 Brian Rose: Well, fair enough, yeah. They should come at you. You are the author of this book, which is called Happy Hour is 9 to 5. How to Love Your Job, Create a Great Workplace, and Kick Butt at Work. Welcome to London Real.
8:28 Alex Kjerulf: Good to be here.
8:29 Brian Rose: Thanks so much for being here. I appreciate it. I’ve been reading through your book and it’s really weird because today is what they call Blue Monday. Now, this episode will be published a little bit later, but that’s January 20th.
8:40 It’s like the first Monday, you know, a couple weeks after Christmas. I think it’s one of the shortest things. Supposedly the unhappiest day of the year.
8:47 Alex Kjerulf: Right. Supposedly unhappiness for a lot of reasons.
8:49 Christmas is over. The days are short. It’s still cold. Weather’s miserable. The day’s dark.
8:53 Brian Rose: Yeah. I personally, right now, am not miserable. And you don’t seem miserable. But I’ve been there before. I used to work in the city, kind of in banking.
9:01 And I remember dragging my ass to work in January. And I think Christmas was created to trick us all into not thinking about winter. And it works. but I remember really dragging myself in and just, you know, you’re looking at the whole year ahead, you’re wondering, you know, why am I working? Why am I here? And, and it’s very, very fitting that you’re here on this day. And you talk about happiness in the workplace. And I know it’s not very simple, what you talk about, but I wondering if you could break down a bit of what you talk about as far as happy hour is nine to five, you must get a lot of people that are just like, Oh, Alex, you know, I know where you’re going, and I don’t want to hear it. So what do you tell people when they first hear about you in your book?
9:41 Alex Kjerulf: Well, the message is not that complicated. The fact is that unless you’re filthy rich, you’re going to have to work. And not only are you going to have to work, you’re going to spend more of your waking hours in a workplace than on anything else, okay? Anything else. Any hobby, any TV, any children.
9:57 We know, you know, they’ve done time studies to figure out what people spend their time on over an entire lifetime. And number one is sleep, and number two is work. Okay? So you’re going to spend more time at work than you are with your children, with your family with your spouse and your hobbies and anything else and the question is given that you’re gonna spend that much time at work do you want that time to be you know something that makes you stressed frustrated unhappy miserable scared or do you want it to be something that you enjoy something that you feel good about you want to wake up in the mornings you know being excited about going to work that’s basically the proposition given that we have to work Why not be happy you know and enjoy our jobs
10:36 Brian Rose: right and in Britain?
10:37 It’s like I’ve heard different studies, but like half of all people are happy at work
10:42 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, maybe it’s more than that it could easily be it could easily be the studies I’ve seen say it’s around around 40 40 to 45 percent of people in Britain don’t like their jobs I like their jobs
10:52 Brian Rose: now in Denmark you have a word for loving your job.
10:55 Alex Kjerulf: We do indeed
10:55 Brian Rose: Can you hit me with that word and tell me what that means well?
10:59 Alex Kjerulf: I’ll start by saying that I know Danish is a horrible horrible language, okay?
11:03 Brian Rose: How can you guys get so much hate, you know?
11:06 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, I know, but here is the word is Apaitzglührer in Danish. Yeah.
11:10 Brian Rose: Why do people find that horrible? Just because it’s difficult?
11:14 Alex Kjerulf: It’s the sound. Yeah, yeah, Danish is a horrible language. Anyway, Apaitz means work and glührer means happiness, gladness, basically.
11:22 Brian Rose: Okay. So it just means work, happiness.
11:24 Alex Kjerulf: But the interesting thing is that this word exists only in the Scandinavian languages. This word does not exist in English or in German or in French or in Japanese or in Russian.
11:35 And this is not a coincidence. The reason we have a word for this in Scandinavia and Denmark is that it’s just a normal part of our workplace culture. In Denmark, when people have a job, they fully expect to have a job they enjoy, a job they like. And if they don’t, they will do something to, you know, they will either quit and find a different job or they will do something to become happy where they are. This is not the case in the rest of the world.
12:00 You know, when I go to Britain to speak, especially when I go to the US, attitudes are completely different and people are like, one guy in the US told me, he said, well, of course I hate my job. That’s why I get paid. You know, a lot of people fully, they expect to hate their jobs. They think that’s normal. They think that’s the way it is everywhere.
12:19 And that is just not true. I realize that right now, most people don’t like their jobs, but that’s not the way it has to be. And there are so many great workplaces out there and so many people who love what they Do
12:29 Brian Rose: it’s interesting you say America because I’m from America and you know, there’s so many stereotypes when you think of Americans, you know That they they work hard. Yeah, they not only work hard They tell everyone how hard they work exactly work the long hours But then you look at the productivity index and you find that the French workers are more productive And then you know America is a country of immigrants who you make your fortune on what you’ve done Yeah, Americans don’t care about what your last name is or what your accent is like they might in this country They care about what you’ve done, you know, but at the same time like you said It seems to be like people are always talking about the money. Yeah work to get the money. I work to get the money Yeah, it doesn’t seem to be this You know, I work because I enjoy what I do exactly and feel from America that is that is that’s very much.
13:13 Alex Kjerulf: That’s very true I mean, I think Americans very much identify with their status in life and with their success Certainly to a higher degree than people do in Scandinavia. But here’s the thing though Yeah, is that if you are happy at work you are much more likely to be successful at work. It’s not like you have to choose,
13:28 You know, you can either be successful or happy. It actually turns out that if you like your job, you do a much better job and you are much more likely to be successful. And there are studies that show that people who are happy at work, on average, have a higher lifetime income than people who are unhappy at work. So this idea that you, you know, the harder you work, the more you struggle, the The more you hate your job, the more successful you will be.
13:52 That actually turns out to be exactly wrong. And if you really want to be successful at your job, you should find a job you love.
13:59 Brian Rose: Right. Fair enough. If that’s what works, then that makes sense.
14:02 And we were just looking outside my window here, and we have a couple of workspaces here in East London. And we’re looking at it, and you kind of see like some that are a little bit upgraded, some that aren’t. You showed me some pictures from Detroit about different workspaces. And from Quicken Loans. Yeah.
14:14 Brian Rose: We know that Google supposedly has it right. You know, they have the gym memberships. They got the snacks. interactive spaces. Is it as simple as making it a nice workplace?
14:22 Alex Kjerulf: No, that’s actually a thing that’s actually a thing people get wrong about Google. I actually went to visit the Google headquarters in in Mountain View, California.
14:30 Brian Rose: Yeah, the Google, the Googleplex, right? The official mothership.
14:33 Alex Kjerulf: The big one. Yeah, and when people talk, you know, everybody knows Google is a great workplace. They’re in top of the best workplaces list in the US and they are awesome. But when people talk about Google, they talk about the free food and the swimming pools and the gyms and the fact that, you know, Barack Obama will come by and give a speech, and Lady Gaga will come by and give a concert, that kind of thing.
14:52 But when I talk to people who work at Google, and I ask them, so why do you like your job? That’s not what they’re saying. Instead, they talk about, one guy talked about, I get to do cool shit. I get to do stuff that no one has ever done before. I get to develop groundbreaking technology.
15:08 So he made a difference. He did something really cool. I talked to this lady who said, I’ve been at Google for three months. I have made friends for life because Google is such a pressure cooker and everybody’s always working really hard, but they also take care to hire good people. So you get really good relationships in the workplace.
15:28 People like each other. There’s a good mood. You can work together. You can talk together. And those are the things that make people at Google happy to work.
15:35 It’s not about the gyms and the free food and all of that. Okay. That just happens to come along with it. I think that’s very visible. And also I think you can use that to hire people, because that can pull in new hires, but it’s not what makes people happy or unhappy at work.
15:51 Brian Rose: Perhaps it’s an extension of the whole ethos of really thinking about the employees and keeping them happy. And by doing that with their work and keeping them creative, they just take it to the next level and make them physically happy.
16:03 Alex Kjerulf: That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it.
16:05 Brian Rose: Now, in your book, you broke it down to a couple of words, and you said happiness at work is results and relationships, which it’s a bold thing that you try to simplify that in two words.
16:14 Alex Kjerulf: And I realize it’s probably an oversimplification, but if you look at the science, if you look at the research in this area, I think that at least 80% or 90% of our happiness at work comes from those two things, results and relationships. And very briefly, results is when you do a good job, like this guy at Google who was working on groundbreaking technology, right? When you are good at what you do, when you kick ass, that feeling of pride you get from doing a good job, that makes us really happy, feels amazing, especially if you work on something that is meaningful, you know, where you make a difference for someone who needs it.
16:49 Let’s say you’re a teacher and you can see your students are getting smarter and getting good grades, or you’re a nurse and you can see your patients are getting better. That’s meaningful results that feels amazing. And the other thing is relationships. You know, when you like your co-workers, a good relationship with your co-workers, with your boss, with maybe your clients and your customers. Those two things represent our most basic psychological human needs.
17:17 And if you have that in the workplace, you will be happy. And you know, a lot of people look at stuff like salaries and promotions and bonuses. And that’s what they chase their whole lives. And a lot of those people end up being miserable. You know, I met a lot of those people there, you know, lawyers or doctors, and they have the million dollar salary and, you know, the fancy title or whatever, and they’re miserable.
17:40 They hate their jobs.
17:41 Brian Rose: I was about to say, where’s the cash in there? Where’s the cash? Results and relationship, you know, where are the stock options? Where’s the, yeah, where’s the big money, you know?
17:49 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah. Well, I’m not saying that salary and compensation doesn’t matter because it does matter. You should absolutely get the salary you deserve. You should get a fair salary because being paid unfairly can make you unhappy, but a high salary, no matter how high, will not make you happy. Okay.
18:07 Brian Rose: We had a guy by the name of Daniel Pink who was sitting in a chair about nine months ago. He had a book at the time called To Sell Is Human. He found the same results. They found that once you paid someone what they were worth, the incremental pay didn’t get incremental results.
18:21 Alex Kjerulf: Not at all.
18:22 Brian Rose: Exactly. He broke it down. It’s very similar to what you said. Mastery and purpose. Yes, what he wanted, you know, which is is kind of another simplification But it’s in his awesome book drive.
18:34 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, and if I can criticize that book just a little bit
18:38 Brian Rose: Please do
18:38 Alex Kjerulf: we always he’s missing one thing which is the relationship aspect. Okay, you know, we are intensely motivated by the relationships we have and by wanting to be Let’s say accepted and like maybe even love for who we are And I think that’s missing from Dan Pink’s model.
18:55 Brian Rose: Yeah. That’s a good point. It’s actually not in those three words.
18:58 Alex Kjerulf: No. Because purpose is really more results.
19:00 It’s not really relationships.
19:02 Brian Rose: Exactly. Exactly. You know, so I used to work for nine years as a broker in the city and I was literally I had a meter of space and I had about 30 other guys around me and our job was to come in every day and make as much money as possible. And if necessary, take it from the other person, you know, it was it was stinky.
19:20 It was nasty. Sometimes you get hit in the football, some days the guy didn’t shower, one guy would be eating Mexican food and it would smell and not only was it kind of nasty, also your clients were really giving you a hard time and it wouldn’t be uncommon for a client to tell you how bad you were at your job for three or four minutes and just tell you how much you suck and why you suck and why you’re useless. This is like constant city banter and I remember remarking to the guys, I’m like I spend more time with you than I do with my girlfriend because it was 10 hours a day, 50 hours a week.
19:50 And I just, you know, ultimately I left, you know, and it wasn’t about the money. Maybe I wasn’t finding results, but I definitely, I’ll write a book about it someday, but I don’t have a lot of those relationships anymore. Maybe that was missing from my workplace. But I was sold the American dream, Alex. I was told that the money would make me happy.
20:09 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah. And interestingly, it turns out that this materialism, once you get infected by that, you know, and you’re always chasing the next quarterly bonus or the next promotion or the next sale against the next guy. It turns out that once you’re in that mindset, you’re actually less able to form good relationships with other people. There are competing centers in the brain, and you can either be materialistically oriented or you can be relationship oriented, but you can’t really be both at the same time.
20:42 So there’s little doubt that a workplace that does what you describe actually keeps people from forming good relationships with the people around them. At work or even in personal life. That’s a very good question. What was your experience? Did it spill over into private life here?
20:55 Brian Rose: I think it did in retrospect. Now that I do this where I’m trying to pump as much positive energy into the world, I find I’m just, I get, I have so many better personal relationships. So maybe there was a bit of a suspicion or competitiveness with other people subconsciously.
21:11 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah. And I think that’s a terrible mindset and what I’ve certainly seen is that a lot of people, they work really hard on their jobs, they hate the people they work with, they hate what they do, but they become very successful.
21:24 And then around the age of maybe 45, maybe 50, some of them wake up and they go, oh my god, I have all the outward signs of success. I have the fancy title, the company car, the high salary, the quality bonus and all of that. But I hate what I do. I hate the people I work with. I have stress, I have an ulcer, I’m on my third divorce, my kids won’t talk to me.
21:53 And a lot of people, a lot of those people just break down and say, oh my God, what have I done? What have I done with my life? But I want to make this point, you don’t have to choose between financial success and being happy at work. It’s not either or, it’s in fact both and. Because if you love what you do, you will do a much better job on average and you will have a much larger chance of becoming financially successful in what you do.
22:18 Brian Rose: Now, we’re seeing a lot more, I think, more lately in these days that people are actually looking at their work schedules. And I think you interviewed some very famous people and some media personalities, and they said, look, I’m working 40 hours a week. We had a guy on here on our parallel show called Silicon Real, and he says he leaves by example, as in he gets out of the work at 6 o’clock every night, and he wants people to see that. And he’s like, look, you know, I understand you have personal lives, you’ve got to be productive so are we getting better even in America are people looking at the way their relationship with work and making the changes
22:52 Alex Kjerulf: it seems like it seems like some people are actually waking up to that and and talking about this cult of overwork you know this this mindless worship of people who just work the most hours yeah as if you’re you know as if you’re worth more to the company when you work 80 hours than when you work you know 40 which turns out startups it’s also especially the startup yeah which turns out not to be I mean, they’ve done the productivity studies, and it turns out that if you work 60 hours every week, you actually don’t get more work done than the people who work 40 hours a week.
23:22 Because when you work that many hours, 60 hours a week, you become stressed, tired, you make more mistakes, and you’re less creative. You’re in a completely different cognitive space. You talk about sleep earlier. You can’t sleep as well. You can’t enjoy your free time as much.
23:36 So it’s a stupid, stupid thing. And what I think companies need to do is forget all about the hours. There’s a software company in San Francisco called GitHub. And they say it very clearly. They say hours are bullshit.
23:51 What matters is results. What kind of results do you get? Do a good job. And if you do that, we don’t care how many hours you work. Okay.
23:59 Brian Rose: Now, there’s going to be corporations, guys that work in corporations listening right now, managers, maybe even some CEOs. And they’re probably thinking, Alex, what do I really need to do if I walk in to work the next day, you know, what are some just basic changes I can make to get say I’ve got a team of 20 working for me, what kind of basic changes I can make to make them happier address some issues or make them at least feel happier? Yeah, that’s got to be a lot of it.
24:25 Alex Kjerulf: Well, happiness is how it’s about how you feel, you know, do people when people are at work when they’re at their desks doing their jobs, how do they feel? Are they in a good mood? Most of the time, you know, do they feel proud, fulfilled, engaged, motivated, appreciated, happy? Or are they at their desks most of the time feeling nervous, depressed, stressed, frustrated, angry, and sad? That’s really what it’s about. And we know from the science that when people are in a good mood, when they experience positive emotions, they are much more productive at what they do, they’re more creative, and so on. So the question is really, how can I make my people happy at work? And it comes back to results, relationships. That’s what as manager, that is what you need to create for your employees.
25:07 Do your people have everything they need to do a really good job, and do you tell them when they do a really good job? Do you make sure to praise people who perform well? Do you make sure to celebrate success? In a lot of companies, they only talk about the things that go wrong, and if something goes right, it’s never mentioned again, and I think that’s incredibly stupid.
25:27 Brian Rose: That’s the last chapter of your book is called Celebrate, right?
25:30 Alex Kjerulf: Celebrate, exactly. We’ve got to celebrate success.
25:32 Brian Rose: You see a lot of startups doing that. You see a lot of startups that have that, you know, big celebration, let’s, let’s reward ourselves. Let’s go out for the night.
25:39 Let’s do that.
25:40 Alex Kjerulf: Yes. And I think that’s a fantastic thing to do.
25:42 Brian Rose: And then somewhere along the way, they become corporate and they lose it, right?
25:47 Alex Kjerulf: Right.
25:47 When they become too big or too successful, right? And they think we need to be like everybody else and they start making the same mistakes that all the other big workplaces are making, right? Right. And so, so think in terms of results, do my employees have everything they need to do a good job? Am I giving them the right education, support, backup, whatever they need, and also relationships?
26:07 Do these people feel personally valued in the workplace? How do you do that?
26:11 Brian Rose: That’s complicated.
26:13 Alex Kjerulf: That’s actually not complicated. I’m not saying it’s easy because it takes a lot for a manager to actually connect with your employees, but that’s how you do it.
26:22 Here’s a very, very simple thing you can do. You can say good morning to your employees. A lot of managers don’t. They just come in. into their own office, close the door, start working.
26:32 And that’s a mistake. Go around to your employees, say a cheerful good morning. Show your people that you value them, that you look forward to a day together with them. It’s such a simple thing to do, but your employees will notice if you do it. They will also notice if you don’t.
26:48 Connect with your people. Make sure that you understand your people. Make sure that you understand their needs and their dreams and their ambitions. I was, for my book, I interviewed the most famous business leader in Denmark, a guy called Lars Kohland. He led a turnaround of a Danish company in the 90s that became a business case that studied all over the world.
27:09 And I asked him, Lars, what is your most important skill as a manager, as a leader? And he said, my most important skill is that I can understand the different needs of different people. So this ability to connect to people, to understand who they are, what their needs are, what makes them tick, who they are as people, that is what we need from a manager. This ability to create relationships. A lot of managers will be out there and be like, look, Alex, I got to worry about the figures.
27:40 I got to worry about this. I got to do this. I got to do this. I didn’t become a manager to be, you know, chief cheerleader.
27:45 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
27:46 What do you say to that?
27:48 Alex Kjerulf: I say, interestingly, the best way to get results is to create those relationships. There was a study recently where they looked at manager and found out which managers are good at creating results, which managers are good at creating relationships, and which managers are both. I think we need both in managers. It turns out that only 1% of managers had both.
28:11 Brian Rose: Do we need to be more careful when we select our managers?
28:14 Alex Kjerulf: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course, what happens in a lot of workplaces is they will take the best, whoever is best professionally and they’ll make that person the manager. Like if you have a new sales manager, you take the best sales person and make him or her the manager, which is usually a mistake because the best sales person may not make the best manager.
28:35 You know, the best software developer would make the best software manager. You need to look at not who’s the best, you know, has the best skills, but who is the best leader and that may be a completely different person.
28:45 Brian Rose: Okay. Now flip it over to the people that are listening and their employees that are half of the people listening are not happy at work obviously if they’re in Britain and you know they say oh yeah it’s my manager’s fault and I’m going to go to a better job or someone’s going to do it better.
28:59 Blah blah blah blah blah blah. But in your book you address the fact that you can take some of it into your own hands right? Oh yeah. What can I do to go in and I mean how do you change the workplace?
29:09 Alex Kjerulf: Well sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t okay.
29:11 Let’s say if you’re in a really bad workplace you know a toxic culture, your boss is a complete jerk, your co-workers are, you know, annoying jerks as well. Maybe you can’t change that, okay? And maybe the only real thing you can do is to get out of there, quit, find something else. And I realize this is not an easy decision. But if you really, really hate your job, it may be the only option.
29:38 Brian Rose: Is there any way to know when you’re at that breaking point?
29:41 Alex Kjerulf: You know. You know. I get that question all the time.
29:43 Brian Rose: On your blog, you had like top 10 signs you’re unhappy about.
29:46 And you can list those, and if you procrastinate a lot, if you spend most of Sunday evening worrying about Monday morning, that kind of thing.
29:55 Alex Kjerulf: But you know, deep down people know. But people are scared of pulling the trigger and making the jump. And I totally understand that, because if you quit your job, you have a very clear picture of all the things you will lose. You’ll lose your salary, you’ll lose your co-workers, you’ll lose your title.
30:14 Your sense of identity a lot of times. Your identity is very much tied up in your job.
30:18 Brian Rose: Maybe you do need to lose that though.
30:19 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, maybe you do. If you’re in the US, you may lose your health care if you quit your job, which can have massive impact on you.
30:25 But the question no one ever asks themselves is this, what can I lose if I stay?
30:32 Brian Rose: Opportunity cost.
30:33 Alex Kjerulf: Exactly. If I keep going in every single day to this job that I absolutely hate, if I keep coming home from my work days, stressed, nervous, tired, frustrated. What can that cost me?
30:49 And we know from the research that the cost can be incredibly high. It can cost you your self-esteem, you can lose your career, you can, you know, it can cost you your relationship. And ultimately it can make you sick and it can kill you. We know for a fact that people who hate their jobs have a much higher risk of getting sick. And we’re talking serious diseases like heart disease, some forms of cancer, stress and depression, and type 2 diabetes.
31:14 So if you really, really hate your job, you gotta do something. The only thing you can’t do is nothing. You have to act. And if the workplace is so bad that you will never be happy there, you have to get out of there.
31:29 Brian Rose: And how do you find your next job?
31:31 How do you choose the company that’s not gonna be a repeat of the same thing?
31:35 Alex Kjerulf: Well, that’s the thing you gotta do. And I think a lot of people, a lot of people come out of a bad job with a very clear picture of what they want to avoid. Okay, I want a workplace that doesn’t have a jerk manager, I want a workplace that doesn’t have this culture, but that’s not enough. You can’t just pick your next job based on what you want to avoid.
31:55 You need to have a pretty clear picture of what you want. Okay, this is what you want to avoid, but what do you want in a good workplace? What would make you happy? What would make you really excited Monday morning when you’re thinking about your work week? And you got to have a pretty clear picture of what kind of workplace you want and then you go out and look for that.
32:15 And basically, in my opinion, it’s about looking for a workplace that can give you results and relationships. Again, what- That’s what you want to keep looking at. And we keep coming back to that. Where can you kick ass and do a really good job? And where can you work together with awesome people and feel valued as a human being?
32:30 Brian Rose: So, and I think you’ve also said before, you said, ultimately work is work and you can’t lose sight of that. We go to work to work. We don’t go to work to be happy. Explain what you mean by that.
32:40 Alex Kjerulf: Well, you know, it’s a workplace, right?
32:42 You know, you’re there to, you know, you get a salary, the company pays you, and you should earn your salary. You know, you should be really, really good at your job. So we don’t go to work to be happy. This is not about creating some social club where you can go from nine to five and hang out and have fun, right? You’re there to do a job, and preferably you’re there to do an awesome job that you can be proud of that’s helping someone who needs it, right?
33:03 But that being said, if you do create a happy workplace, people do a much better job. We know that from the research that when people experience positive emotions, that has a lot of great effects on their performance and it makes them more productive, more creative, more helpful, they give a bit of customer service, they are more motivated, have more energy and so on. So you don’t go to work to have fun, but you should have fun while you’re there.
33:31 Brian Rose: I think you had an experience with a startup company, didn’t you?
33:35 And you had started and you were very happy. It was just a bunch of people that didn’t know how the corporate environment worked. And then later it changed for you and it stopped for you. And like I said, we have a show called Silicon Real World. We interview these entrepreneurs that are starting off that don’t even know what corporate culture is.
33:50 And I mean, you go and see the IKEA’s and I’m sure you talk with a lot of startups. I mean, how do you deal with this, almost like this innovator’s dilemma?
33:59 Alex Kjerulf: It’s just the saddest thing ever, is when you have this startup company with a really good culture, and they’re having fun, and they’re doing a great job. And then they become successful, and it grows, too. It typically happens around maybe 40 or 50 people, maybe a little more.
34:14 And at that point, they think, oh my god, we need structure. And that’s when they start, they make org charts, and they hire middle managers, and They get rules and bureaucracy and red tapes and all of that crap. What was a fun, innovative culture becomes something that is staid and boring and just like everybody else. Fortunately, some companies avoid that. I mentioned GitHub earlier in San Francisco.
34:45 They are awesome. For instance, they have abolished meetings. One of their developers wrote an article that said that, what was it, calling a meeting is probably a hate crime.
34:57 Brian Rose: I used to hate meetings. Meetings suck.
35:00 Alex Kjerulf: Oh, they’re so bad. And everybody has them, right, because you have to have a, let’s say, weekly department status meeting. Well, who says? Is that meeting actually creating any value, or would things go even better if you didn’t have that meeting?
35:15 Brian Rose: So what do you do instead?
35:17 Alex Kjerulf: That’s a very good question. and there are so many ways you can handle that. I visited, there’s a company in Ann Arbor, Michigan called Menlo Innovations, software development company, 50 people. They have a 13 minute meeting every day where all their 50 employees stand in a circle. Standing too, yeah.
35:36 Standing, standing in a circle and everybody just very briefly says, here’s what I’m working on, here’s what I’m doing today, here’s something you guys all need to know. Goes in a circle, takes 13 minutes and then, boom, they’re done. And they have no other meetings. There are no meetings in this organization and they love it.
35:53 Brian Rose: Okay, so time limit, standing, these are the kind of things to at least make those things bearable.
35:58 Alex Kjerulf: Yes.
35:58 Brian Rose: Okay, and obviously we can learn from the Googles of the world, we can learn from people that are always just trying to make sure they don’t fall down into that trap, I’m guessing. And when you go into like an IKEA or an IBM or Lego or something, what’s the first thing you usually notice? I mean, do you walk around the company? Do you try to get a vibe?
36:16 And like, what’s one of the first things you do? Do you tell them to cut out middle management? Do you tell them to take everybody on a retreat? I mean, like, what do you tell them?
36:26 Alex Kjerulf: Well, I tell them, first message for companies is happiness at work matters, right?
36:31 If you want better sales, you can focus on sales or you can focus on making people happy. And that will actually increase sales. We work with IKEA and Denmark on that because they wanted to sell more furniture. And we said, best way to do that, make your employees happy, and it worked. So that’s sort of the first thing to establish that link, and sometimes you have to shake people out of their thinking and make them realize that if you focus more on sales, maybe that will actually hurt your sales.
36:59 But if you focus more on making your employees happy, that will improve sales, right? And then the next thing is, okay, so how do you do this on a daily basis? Because that’s where a lot of managers, they get a little confused. What can I do day to day, right here, right now, in order to make myself and my employees happy. And that’s really what we try to teach people.
37:20 Cause I’m not saying it’s easy cause it’s not, if it was easy, every workplace would be happy and obviously they’re not. But it’s not complicated, it’s not rocket science. It’s about how people feel and it’s about results and relationships.
37:32 Brian Rose: I guess that’s the competitive advantage you can offer to get those employees. I guess it’s just to create that happy environment, as opposed to something else that you might be thinking about.
37:42 I wanna get your thought on stock options Because many, many years ago, I went to New York City and I started at a dot-com startup. It was 1999. Everybody was getting stock options. The NASDAQ was going through the ceiling. It was something that was on people’s mind.
37:56 Obviously, it was a big way to recruit people because the talent was happening, the buzz was happening. One thing I noticed was that after the options were granted, about a month or two later, everyone started losing their interest. Because they had already calculated maybe how much they got. And coming to work was almost just coming to work watch a stock price. And you could see that they were no longer getting any inherent value for what they did. It was just about their future wealth. And I found it counterproductive.
38:24 I think if they had not granted the options, they might have got more interest and excitement and it tapered off. But in this world of startups, how do you combine those two?
38:34 Alex Kjerulf: Well, one thing here is this is about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivators, right? Extrinsic Intrinsic motivators is any reward that comes to you from the outside. If you do a really good job on this project, I will give you stock options or a thousand dollars or whatever.
38:50 Intrinsic motivators are when you want to do a good job, motivation that comes from the inside basically. And it turns out, and this has been replicated in so many studies, it turns out that extrinsic motivators kill your intrinsic motivation. So whenever you reward someone for doing something, that actually kills their own innate, this desire to do the same thing. So the next time you want them to do the same thing, you have to offer them another reward and you actually have to offer them a bigger reward than the last time because there’s a diminishing return on those roads, just like on heroin.
39:26 You need a bigger fix the next time to get the same high. So that’s one thing. The other thing, what I really like here is shared ownership. Making your employees owners of the business, co-owners of the business. That I really like because that way you are invested in the success of the company and any contributions you make to making the company more valuable will actually come back to you but not in the form of a bonus but in the form of whatever you’re helping create becomes more valuable.
40:02 So I like that aspect of it and there are great workplaces out there that have done that.
40:06 Brian Rose: So they just breed a sense of ownership like everyone’s part of this company.
40:10 Alex Kjerulf: Yes. The success of the company is everyone’s success.
40:13 Brian Rose: Exactly.
40:13 Instead of a, you know, a carrot, a reward, that’s tangled in front of your nose. If we do really well, if you achieve this goal, then you get this whatever. It’s interesting what you say about like when you reward someone. So many people have something they love like a hobby and they go and they do that for a living. Yeah.
40:30 And they hate it because they’re, that’s what’s the, what’s they’re being paid for. That’s what’s making their living. And they’re like, I used to love this until it became my job.
40:39 Alex Kjerulf: Yes. And that’s probably the extrinsic motivators killing your own intrinsic desire to do that very thing.
40:44 I think so. And interestingly, and at the same time what Dan Pink found in his research was that offering people rewards for doing a good job actually hinders their performance. That’s hard to believe. If their work is in any way creative. If you’re working on tasks that require no independent thinking or no creativity, then rewarding people to do a better job leads them to a better job.
41:11 If people have to be creative and come up with new ideas, rewarding performance hurts performance. Because it stresses them that they have to get… Because it moves the focus from the task to the reward. Okay. Even from one side of the brain to the other, you might even argue.
41:25 Yeah. So actually, they gave people these creativity tasks. They told them if you’re in the top, we’re gonna measure how long it takes you to solve this. If you’re in the top 25 percentile, you will get $20. And it turns out that when you offer people that reward, they are on average 30 to 35% slower in solving the riddle compared to people who were not offered a reward.
41:47 Brian Rose: Okay, now I have to ask you, when does it go too far? Have you ever walked into a company where they are just, they’re swinging? You are too damn happy. They’re taking slides, a lot of the companies have pubs in their own companies, but where does it go too far? Where they’re working 30 hours a week, they’ve got to where they’re screwing around.
42:07 Have you seen that happen?
42:09 Alex Kjerulf: No, I’ve never seen that happen. I’m not sure it couldn’t happen, I guess it could, but I haven’t seen that yet. What I have seen in some workplaces is that they focus on the wrong things. They try to create a good workplace and it becomes all about the foosball tables and the slides and the gyms and the French chef in the cafeteria or whatever.
42:30 And that’s doomed to fail because that’s not where you create a happy workplace. I’ve also seen workplaces where they institute kind of a happiness tyranny. You have to be happy. And if you’re unhappy, there’s something wrong with you and you have failed personally. And I think that’s really stupid because nobody’s happy all the time.
42:51 Everybody has a bad day once in a while. Also, some companies breed an atmosphere of not being critical. Not exactly. That can be bad too, right? Yes.
43:01 Exactly. You need to embrace the fact that people have good days and bad days. If people are critical of something, you need to listen to them. This is not about eliminating dissent. In no way.
43:11 In fact, if people are critical, you need to listen to them.
43:14 Brian Rose: But hopefully, that’d be a good environment where you can take that criticism.
43:18 Alex Kjerulf: Well, the thing about happy workplaces is that they’re much better at solving conflict and solving problems because it’s not like happy workplaces, it’s not like they don’t have problems. They have massive problems, they’re facing constant challenges just like everybody else. It’s just that in happy workplaces, they’re very good at talking about their problems and getting them solved.
43:38 Brian Rose: I wish I had read your book like five years ago. It’s funny because like I said, I used to work in this environment in the city. I remember I had an idea, I was like, yeah, we should all go on a retreat and we should to do this and this because I was just thinking if we just had a bit better interpersonal relationships, we would all make more money, we would all do well because ultimately, even though this situation I described to you, it sounds very autonomous, you actually need other people to do good work, which is why everyone’s in the same room anyways.
44:04 Alex Kjerulf: That’s resulting relationships. I did a workshop for a group of salespeople and these were pretty hard-nosed salespeople. I mean, they were very invested in meeting their monthly goals and getting whatever sales bonus they had. And I’m talking about happiness at work and how awesome it is to love your job. And I can tell they’re a little skeptical, but at one point, one of the sales guys, he’s very pensive, I can see his thinking, and suddenly he says, you know what, I just realized I create all of my results through my relationships.
44:34 And that was actually true for him. He was very good at creating personal relationships with his clients, with his customers, and that’s why they bought stuff from this company, because they liked and trusted him. Right. So that was just one example of realizing that you’re not in this alone. This is not a dog-eat-dog world.
44:54 This is not survival of the fittest or the toughest or the meanest. This is actually survival of the people who are really good at connecting with other people and working together. That is how you ultimately create success. And you will have a much better time along the way than if you’re just in this to beat everybody else, including your co-workers. Yeah.
45:15 Brian Rose: It can be a little lonely, that existence. Oh, yeah. There’s a famous phrase, which I think was done by an Englishman, which said, the customer is always right. The Americans always repeat it, but I think it was the guy in Selfridge, which is the big department store here in London. There’s a TV show now called Selfridge.
45:33 Alex Kjerulf: Oh, there is. Yeah, yeah, I heard about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just started. I have to check that out.
45:38 Now, it’s a mantra that is repeated constantly. And it is, of course, complete bullshit.
45:44 Brian Rose: Okay, so tell me why. Tell me why.
45:46 Alex Kjerulf: Here’s the thing, what happens in a lot of workplaces is that customer-facing employees, your customer service people, get beaten over the head with this mantra.
45:56 Let’s say you’re a cabinet’s N.D., you’re a salesperson, you’re a clerk, you’re whatever, and you have this really rude, unpleasant, demanding customer, and you’re just trying to enforce the rules, and the customer will come in and say, well, the customer is always Right. I demand to talk to the manager, and the manager will come in and just side immediately with the customer. It’s standard operating procedure in this case. Yes, and just give the customer whatever they want.
46:25 And the salesperson feels horrible, right? This is such a betrayal, basically, right? And what happens is that I think this is wrong on so many levels. First of all, I think it’s a betrayal of the customer service employee. And that person will feel awful.
46:40 They were just trying to do their job. They were just trying to enforce the rules. And now they get criticized for that. But what also happens is that the worst of your customers actually get exactly what they want. You know, the nice people, the nice customers who don’t complain, they get nothing.
46:56 But the people who are rude and demanding get whatever they want. And I think that is really unfair as well. So in my mind, what you got to do in this situation is stick up for your employees. As a manager, you got to come in and say, you know, I realize that you as a customer really unhappy, but this is the policy, my employee did the exact right thing, I’m sorry. I think that is what you need to do.
47:20 And I’ve heard from workplaces where this is what they do, and it just reinforces this sense of trust in the employees. Because you know, I follow the rules, I do the right thing, and I don’t get criticized for it. In fact, I get rewarded and praised for doing the right thing. And that makes much more sense than this, the customer’s always right crap.
47:39 Brian Rose: Okay, yeah, you know Tim Ferriss from the the four-hour workweek He was our guest about a year ago and in his book He talks about these really critical customers that would always harass him and give him the hardest time and he would just get rid of them Because they would you know, they would give him like 80% of the stress and 20% of the return and he said look You know, this is as far as my service goes and I can’t do business with
48:02 Alex Kjerulf: my favorite story is from Southwest Airlines Which are a very happy workplace.
48:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, very famous company
48:08 Alex Kjerulf: Yes.
48:08 And apparently one of their VPs was at the airport waiting in line to get a ticket. And in front of her, there’s a really rude customer. And he’s just berating the customer service employee. He’s just really rude and unpleasant. And at one point, the VP, she’s just had enough.
48:27 So she goes up, she takes him by the arm, she says, excuse me, sir, I’m a vice president of Southwest Airlines, please come with me. And she goes, she takes him over to the Delta counter. And she buys a ticket on Delta Forum and she’s like, yeah, you please fly somebody else. Okay. Yeah.
48:44 Brian Rose: That’s a very bold statement. I like that. Um, you know, Alex, you’re from Denmark and uh, I want to get your thoughts on coming into London. You know, I want to, I want to see, I mean you, you’ve been downtown today, you know, you know how kind of the vibe is and how the businesses are obviously the, the Danes and the English are different people as are the Americans. But what do you see that, that, that Londoners in general are doing right and then maybe doing wrong?
49:06 What could they learn from the Danes and what could they teach you guys?
49:11 Alex Kjerulf: Well, the first thing I’ve noticed is that there is a deep-seated skepticism in the UK in general about happiness. About happiness. About happiness. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
49:21 Right. Oh, you’re happy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s fine. I believe that.
49:26 Brian Rose: Yeah. Britain has a very interesting relationship with its own emotions, right?
49:30 Alex Kjerulf: Yes, exactly. I did an interview with the BBC radio station and you know I’m talking about happiness at work and how awesome it is to love your job And I can tell the interview is really skeptical and at one point he goes maybe uncomfortable too a little bit I’ll come maybe yeah, and at one point he goes in this awesome British accent. He goes, but what if I’m happy being miserable?
49:51 And that to me just sums up the British attitude, you know I’m I’m not happy and you can’t make me happy right and I think it’s it’s fine to be skeptical And I’m not here to say that we should all be ridiculously ecstatic every single moment of every single workday, because that is obviously impossible. I’m just trying to show people that it’s possible to have a job you like, and that if you do, it actually has a lot of very positive effects on both your work life and your private life. And it’s something we can all do.
50:21 There are so many great workplaces out there. There’s no reason to work for a really bad workplace.
50:26 Brian Rose: I think you need to be able to convince the British that you can be happy, but you You don’t have to show that emotion. They might like that.
50:33 Alex Kjerulf: Well, that’s the thing.
50:34 Happy people can look very different. Being happy does not necessarily mean running around the workplace screaming with joy. You can sit at your desk very quietly, doing your job with no outward signs of happiness, but feel awesome on the inside. And that’s perfectly fine too. By the way, the French are even worse.
50:54 The French have a massive mistrust of anyone who shows any sign of happiness.
51:00 Brian Rose: Okay, I believe that. Yeah, yeah. There’s the, what was it, the French philosopher Flaubert once said that the only thing required to be happy is good health and stupidity. Ignorance is bliss.
51:14 Alex Kjerulf: Ignorance is bliss. And they have, you know, if you’re a really smart person, you must be unhappy because then you understand the true misery in the world. That’s very French.
51:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s very French. And then the other way around, what can the Danes learn from not just the British, but the Londoners?
51:31 What do you see here that you’d like to replicate back at home?
51:34 Alex Kjerulf: I would like to see more people dressed like Londoners. Oh, really? Oh, Londoners look awesome. They’re beautiful people and they’re snappy dressers and here I am in a t-shirt and jeans, right?
51:44 Brian Rose: Yeah. It’s more of an American look.
51:46 Alex Kjerulf: You could say that. I have been accused of being a closet American.
51:51 Brian Rose: Okay.
51:51 So they take their fashion a little bit more serious over here.
51:54 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah. Yeah. And I like that. People look awesome on the street here.
51:58 Work wise, I got to say I like the Scandinavian attitude to work, you know, where we don’t live to work, we work to live. We expect to be happy at work. We create great workplaces. We have a management style that’s very inclusive and democratic. And I got to say, and people work fewer hours, way fewer hours in Denmark than they do here.
52:22 And I got to say, I like that system. And it certainly works for us. And I think that explains why when you look at happiness at work in different countries, Denmark and the Scandinavian countries are consistently at the top of that list. And number one is always Denmark. Okay.
52:37 Suck it, Sweden.
52:38 Brian Rose: Yeah, there you go, Sweden. There you go, a little rivalry there. Now, we’ve talked about Brits. We talked about Yanks.
52:43 We talked about people on the continent. How does what you talk about transfer to, say, South Africa, to, say, Tokyo, which is completely different than Beijing, India, all these places that are very different culturally? I mean, you know, going to a Japanese workplace, I think you spoke about this at one of your talks.
53:00 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah. Yeah.
53:01 I mean, there’s a whole different cultural attitude to even expressing happiness. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
53:14 From overwork. And that tells you something about the cultural difference. But when I spoke there, people loved the idea. I mean, in a lot of countries, people have to get used to the idea first. They’re like, they have to, OK, yeah, happiness is where I guess that is possible.
53:32 I spoke in South Africa recently, and a lady came up and thanked me for the speech and said, you know what, I had never realized that it was possible to have a job you like. That was a completely new idea to her. So that’s sort of the first hurdle we face in a lot of countries. And the second one is, of course, in nations like India, where you have massive numbers of poor people. And if you’re poor in India, do you care if you’re happy at work?
54:03 Isn’t it just enough to have a job so you can feed your family? And obviously, that’s the first priority. Okay, that is to have a job so you don’t starve. right? And your kids are not starving. But once you make it into the middle class and you know, massive numbers of Indians and Chinese are now middle class and you know, they have nice homes and cars and TVs and everything we have. Once you get to that point, that’s when you start thinking about, okay, but you know, I’m working, but do I like my job?
54:36 What is my job doing to me? What’s the effect it has on me? Is it slowly killing me? Or Or is it actually fulfilling me? And you see that movement.
54:45 You see that desire for a good job in any country in the world, except for the very poorest ones where it’s all about surviving. And there is definitely that hierarchy. And if you’re starving, you just want a job. You don’t care if it’s a good job or a bad job. You want to feed yourself and your kids.
55:04 And of course, that comes first.
55:06 Brian Rose: And what about China? Are they listening to you in China? be easier to sell
55:10 Alex Kjerulf: I have not yet spoken in China my book is out in Chinese okay but I think it’s a hard sell there but that being said even in China there are happy workplaces even in China there are great bosses and in China there are more and more young professionals who are switching jobs to find not just the highest paying job but that job that they will enjoy where they can use their skills and where they can be value for who they are it seems if
55:35 Brian Rose: If you’re a businessman, say in China, say you’re at Foxconn listening to us right now, if you could make an intangible change in your business that doesn’t necessarily require a big investment, but makes the happiness like double, and you have to infrastructure cost to say 1% of sales, then of course you would choose that as opposed to working up salaries by 5%.
55:56 Alex Kjerulf: So at first you might be like, yeah, yeah, enough with Alex and his happiness. Then again, if you look at it again, you might think, this is a relatively even cheap way of making my workforce more productive and all that stuff. But more and so it pays off and we know that from a lot of research. We know that happy companies make more money. And there’s one more aspect to it, which is that there are workplaces out there that are slowly killing their employees.
56:23 Where the culture is so bad and the hours are so long and management is so horrible that it’s making people stressed and sick and frustrated and tired. And that is just wrong. I hesitate to use the word evil, but it kind of is evil because you’re slowly killing your people and that is just ethically wrong and people should not get away with that.
56:47 Brian Rose: And probably financially not sound in the long run.
56:51 Alex Kjerulf: Exactly, but also it’s wrong for financial reasons, but also for purely ethical reasons.
56:57 And the question I often ask myself is, if I’m a manager and I punch one of my employees in the face. I’ll go to jail. No doubt about it, right? That’s assault. You’re going to jail and you deserve it. But if you are a horrible manager who slowly over years wears your people down, slowly killing them, making them stressed and frustrated, what happens to you? Probably nothing. You get away with that. You might even get promoted. We cannot Allow that it’s ethically and morally wrong to run a workplace in a way that slowly kills your employees.
57:35 Brian Rose: Okay. Well said. Who are your MVPs? Like, who, if you think of three people that you think do a great job of promoting happiness in their companies, CEOs or, you know, anything spring to mind?
57:46 Alex Kjerulf: Oh, yeah.
57:47 Oh, yeah. And there are so many of them out there. Okay. Zappos.com, online retailer of Vegas and their CEO, Tony Shea, just visited the company several times, just a month ago in December, awesome, awesome workplace, really, really happy. Okay.
58:03 Brian Rose: Who else?
58:04 Alex Kjerulf: I got to mention, I got to mention, I talked about this software company, Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan, their CEO, Richard Sheridan, he’s a great, great man and has created such a happy workplace. And he just wrote a book about it called Joy, Inc., which is absolutely phenomenal. And then on a very personal level, there is a lady in Denmark called Tura Frank who is famous for creating the happiest nursing home in Denmark. And nursing homes in Denmark are not normally happy workplaces, okay?
58:40 But she just came in 20 years ago, she transformed this nursing home from being horrible to being absolutely fantastic, a place full of love and respect for the old people who live there. And she just did that with common sense and human values and nothing else.
58:55 Brian Rose: What about Richard Branson? Does he come to mind here in the UK?
58:59 Alex Kjerulf: Richard Branson is absolutely awesome.
59:01 He’s always been about fun, right? Yes. And he even said that the number one reason for Virgin success is fun. So he’s absolutely a great guy.
59:10 Brian Rose: Yeah, you can see him embody it.
59:12 Yeah, go ahead.
59:13 Alex Kjerulf: The thing is, there are so many great workplaces out there, so there’s absolutely no reason to settle for a workplace that is bad, that is toxic, that is horrible. There is no reason to do that because there is probably this bad workplace, probably has a happy competitor right across the street and you could go work there instead. In fact, how awesome would it be if all the people who work for a horrible workplace has quit tomorrow? Right.
59:38 Yeah. And then we could abolish this once and for all, right? Yes. They would just die out. And I think that’s what’s going to happen.
59:43 Brian Rose: Kind of like sweatshops have died out and child laborers died out.
59:46 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think what’s going to happen is over time, not from one day to the next, but over the next few decades, we know that happy workplaces are more productive and more profitable. And I think that over the next few decades, not in every industry, but in most industries, the happy companies are going to out-compete the unhappy ones and they’re going to be the market leaders.
1:00:06 Brian Rose: Should every company have a chief happiness officer?
1:00:09 Alex Kjerulf: I absolutely think so. who’s in charge of making sure that the company’s actually fostering happiness and not unhappiness.
1:00:16 Brian Rose: And there’s some country in Bhutan that has a gross national happiness product, right?
1:00:21 Alex Kjerulf: Gross national happiness index, yeah, instead of gross national product, yeah.
1:00:26 Brian Rose: I think that’s a fantastic idea. Can you imagine a chief happiness offer? It seems like a no-brainer to me. Then the chief technology officers didn’t exist 20 years ago, and now you have to have one. I was just thinking, in some way, We all are managers, you know, whether I’m at London Real and I’ve got different people that you know volunteer or people that edit or maybe you’re a mother and you have basically a family that you manage I mean should we all be looking in the mirror and thinking about how we should promote the happiness in our own Workforce as big or small as it might be.
1:00:57 Alex Kjerulf: I think that’s a great. I think that’s a great point That could be a point of the next book for you that could easily be and and if I may say so it all Goes back to results and relationships, right?
1:01:07 In terms of your kids, can you help your kids create great results? Can you help your kids get great grades in school? Can you help them volunteer, do volunteer work so they know they’re making a difference in helping other people? And of course, relationships. Do you understand and know your kids?
1:01:26 Do you have a great relationship where you trust your kids and they trust you in your romantic relationship, in your marriage, results and relationships with your friends, In your free time, with your hobbies, you can think of it in terms of results and relationships in pretty much anything you do. And this is not strange because it does represent the two most fundamental psychological human needs. It’s the need to make a difference and the need to belong.
1:01:54 Brian Rose: Fantastic. Good stuff. I always ask everyone that’s here a couple questions at the end and I’m going to hit you with them. Alex, if you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old you, what would you tell that young man?
1:02:08 Alex Kjerulf: That is such a great question.
1:02:10 Something along the lines of, don’t worry dude, it gets better. I was not a happy 20-year-old.
1:02:17 Brian Rose: Were you stressing about the future?
1:02:20 Alex Kjerulf: I pretty much was. I was also a bit of a loner and a really massive geek.
1:02:25 Okay. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. And I made some changes in my life around when I was 27, 28.
1:02:35 And and things got so much better. Yeah. Yeah.
1:02:38 Brian Rose: Okay, that’s good. Those are tough years 2728, right?
1:02:42 Alex Kjerulf: I think those are tricky years and not for me. They were awesome. They were awesome
1:02:46 Brian Rose: I find it’s kind of like when the mid-20s parties over and then you’re trying to figure out who you want to be for the Next 10 years. I find it can be an interesting time of your life. Yeah on that same note What’s the the best advice you’ve ever received?
1:02:57 Alex Kjerulf: Good question Or some good advice I Yeah, when I started out doing this, speaking about happiness at work, I didn’t believe so much myself, maybe, and I’d set the prices for a speech pretty low. And then I talked to this, I mentioned Lars Kohlen, most famous Danish business leader. I talked to him once he’d seen me speak, and he says, Alex, you should charge the same as me. So I doubled my speaking prices, and I instantly got twice as many gigs, twice as many speaking gigs.
1:03:30 Raise the price again got even more gigs. That was awesome advice.
1:03:34 Brian Rose: Wow, that is fantastic
1:03:35 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, and and do you do you know why that happened is a way of valuing yourself? It’s it’s It’s you know corporate speaking gigs if you set the price low It’s a sign that you don’t really believe in your product. Okay, right if you set the price high You better be worth it, right which it turned out I was but you actually Increase the perceived value of your product by increasing the price
1:03:58 Brian Rose: that makes sense That’s good, if you’re listening, that’s very good.
1:04:02 Brian Rose: The last bit of this question is to the 20-year-old listening to you right now, that person could be in China, could be in the States, South Africa, India, wherever. What advice do you give them? Maybe they’re about to enter the workforce. What’s the one piece you can tell them?
1:04:18 Alex Kjerulf: You got to focus on being happy at work.
1:04:20 Don’t believe the myth that you got to work really hard, and if you work really hard and suffer a lot, that will make you successful and success will make you happy. That turns out to be wrong. And what you got to do is find a job where you have results relationships, right? Find a job you love, where you do meaningful work that you’re really good at together with great people. That will make you happy and happiness will make you successful.
1:04:47 That is, that’s got to be your focus.
1:04:50 Brian Rose: I have to agree with you on this. Alex, how do people get a copy of your book, and how do they find you?
1:04:58 Alex Kjerulf: The book is on pinetribe.com, and I am on the web a lot, but it’s probably best to find me on my blog, which is positivesharing.com, one word, positivesharing.com.
1:05:10 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a good blog, I like it.
1:05:13 Alex Kjerulf: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. I’ve been blogging for 10 years now, I have millions of readers. It’s awesome.
1:05:18 Brian Rose: 10 years, so you were doing it early on.
1:05:20 Alex Kjerulf: Early on. The geek side in you.
1:05:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, exactly. Was ahead of the curve. Do you Twitter or the usual social medias?
1:05:27 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, and all of that is on the blog as well. So that’s probably the best place to go. And there’s the Twitter feed, the Facebook, the LinkedIn, all of that.
1:05:36 Brian Rose: Okay, excellent. What’s up for you this year? Is it trying to do more speaking engagements, work with bigger companies? What’s kind of what’s on your plate? What are your goals? What makes you happy?
1:05:47 Alex Kjerulf: What makes me happy is making a difference. I’m a very results oriented person and I love making a difference and reaching a huge audience and knowing that what I do helps someone. Next for me is a lot of international speaking engagements. We’ve been to 31 countries now. In two weeks, I speak in Antigua, in the Caribbean, and that’ll make it 32.
1:06:07 Brian Rose: Fantastic.
1:06:08 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, in the Caribbean, right?
1:06:10 Alex Kjerulf: Yeah, yeah. I’m speaking in Russia later this year.
1:06:13 Brian Rose: We have a lot yeah, and also we’re do happiness in Russia. I don’t think so
1:06:17 Alex Kjerulf: Well, that’s good, but maybe I can get them to start that would be awesome But also we’re working on some very cool things and one of the coolest is probably that we’re working on a tool to measure Happiness at work. That would be which nobody has yet really done a lot of people measure satisfaction Which is not the same thing as happiness, right?
1:06:36 Brian Rose: Right, right And that would be interesting a great feedback loop and to know how you’re doing and yeah. Oh, yeah Yeah.
1:06:42 Brian Rose: Yeah. Okay. I like that. All right. The book is called Happy Hours 9 to 5.
1:06:47 I’m going to think about all this stuff myself because, you know, I think it’s your responsibility as a manager, whether it’s a workforce of one or ten or a hundred. And if you want to be competitive and you don’t want to basically hurt people the rest of their lives, like you said, with abuse, then you should check that out. Thanks so much for coming in, Alex. I wish you all the best.
1:07:04 Alex Kjerulf: And you too.
1:07:05 Brian Rose: As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey, which I guess is about results some relationships, and I wish you the best of luck.
1:07:26 Alex Kjerulf: Thanks so much. My pleasure, thank you.
1:07:32 Brian Rose: All right, take care.
