Managing for Happiness

Games, Tools, and Practices to Motivate Any Team

Jurgen Appelo

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119268680
• eBook ISBN: 9781119269014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

A practical handbook for making management great again

Managing for Happiness offers a complete set of practices for more effective management that makes work fun. Work and fun are not polar opposites; they're two sides of the same coin, and making the workplace a pleasant place to be keeps employees motivated and keeps customers coming back for more. It's not about gimmicks or 'perks' that disrupt productivity; it's about finding the passion that drives your business, and making it contagious. This book provides tools, games, and practices that put joy into work, with practical, real-world guidance for empowering workers and delighting customers. These aren't break time exploits or downtime amusements—they're real solutions for common management problems. Define roles and responsibilities, create meaningful team metrics, and replace performance appraisals with something more useful. An organization's culture rests on the back of management, and this book shows you how to create change for the better.

Somewhere along the line, people collectively started thinking that work is work and fun is something you do on the weekends. This book shows you how to transform your organization into a place with enthusiastic Monday mornings.

• Redefine job titles and career paths
• Motivate workers and measure team performance
• Change your organization's culture
• Make management—and work—fun again

Modern organizations expect everyone to be servant leaders and systems thinkers, but nobody explains how. To survive in the 21 st century, companies need to dig past the obvious and find what works. What keeps top talent? What inspires customer loyalty? The answer is great management, which inspires great employees, who then provide a great customer experience. Managing for Happiness is a practical handbook for achieving organizational greatness.

© 2015 Jürgen Dittmar

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Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.

Franz Kafka,
Austro-Hungarian author
(1883–1924)

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There are many wrong ways to reward employees. A simple but effective approach is to install a kudo box, which enables people to give each other a small reward. The kudo box fulfills the six rules for rewards and works much better than bonuses and other forms of financial motivation.

In 2001, Enron, an American energy and services company, collapsed into bankruptcy because its managers liked their bonuses more than they liked the truth. They incentivized themselves to maximize their own paychecks, not the success of the organization. Similar creative financial practices occurred at Parmalat, WorldCom, Bernard L. Madoff, AIG, Barings, and many other companies. Corporate history is littered with the remains of organizations that allowed individual greed and egos to outgrow the solvency of the company. And bonus systems are still implemented all around the world “to incentivize performance,” despite the fact that experts have known for decades that there's no proven correlation between bonuses and performance.¹

Indeed, excessive greed might be the biggest problem in free markets. Bankers in the United States and Europe have been so focused on their personal results that they collectively plunged the world into one of the deepest recessions we have ever seen.²

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It may come as a shock to many to learn that a large and growing body of evidence suggests that in many circumstances, paying for results can actually make people perform badly, and that the more you pay, the worse they perform.

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Nic Fleming, “The Bonus Myth”³

Excessive greed
might be the biggest problem
in free markets.

Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation is defined as behavior that is driven by external rewards (given by others), such as money, grades, and praise. Rewards are among the trickiest and least understood tools in management. When applied in the right way they can generate significant results. Unfortunately, a common assumption among managers is that nothing works like money when you want to make people work harder, longer, or more effectively. Also, it is often assumed that extrinsic motivation works quite well when implemented as a financial bonus.

These assumptions are both wrong.

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Money is as important to knowledge workers as to anybody else, but they do not accept it as the ultimate yardstick, nor do they consider money as a substitute for professional performance and achievement. In sharp contrast to yesterday's workers, to whom a job was first of all a living, most knowledge workers see their job as a life.

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Peter F. Drucker, Management.⁴

Scientific research has revealed that incentives for performance actually work the other way around.⁵ The anticipation of a reward (either money or something else) works counterproductively, since it kills people's intrinsic motivation. The incentives ensure that people stop doing things just for the joy of the work. It is called the overjustification effect.⁶ Instead of expecting and feeling enjoyment, people expect a reward.

Incentives ensure
that people stop doing things
just for the joy of the work.

Another problem is that rewards based on outcomes increase the risk of cheating, since people's focus is on getting a reward instead of doing a good job. When you reward employees based on outcome, they will take the shortest path to that outcome.⁷ Bad behaviors with dysfunctional side effects undermine the organization's performance, while the employees walk away with a bonus or with their colleagues' pension fund.

Extrinsic motivation, with big incentives based on outcomes, is like a hot air balloon wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface: Better Management for Everyone
• Introduction: What Is Management 3.0?
• Chapter 1: Kudo Box and Kudo Cards: Motivate People with Better Rewards
• Chapter 2: Personal Maps: Improve Communication and Understanding
• Chapter 3: Delegation Boards and Delegation Poker: Empower Workers with Clear Boundaries
• Chapter 4: Value Stories and Culture Books: Define the Culture by Sharing Stories
• Chapter 5: Exploration Days and Internal Crowdfunding: Make Time for Exploration and Self-Education
• Chapter 6: Business Guilds and Corporate Huddles: Share Knowledge, Tools, and Practices
• Chapter 7: Feedback Wraps and Unlimited Vacation: Learn How to Offer Constructive Feedback
• Chapter 8: Metrics Ecosystem and Scoreboard Index: Measure Performance the Right Way
• Chapter 9: Merit Money: Pay People According to Their Merits
• Chapter 10: Moving Motivators: Discover Real Engagement of Workers
• Chapter 11: Happiness Door: Aim for a Happier Organization
• Chapter 12: Yay! Questions and Celebration Grids: Learn from Successes and Failures
• Conclusion: Never Stop Experimenting
• Index
• End User License Agreement