The Globe awards have just been awarded, the BAFTA nominations have already been announced. With all this talk of glamour, maybe it’s time to roll our your own happiness carpet.
It might sound a bit hippy-dippy, but happiness at work continues to attract the interest of psychologists and neuroscientists alike.
I set up a training business with one goal in mind: to enable people to be happy at work. Okay, two goals in mind, to enable people to be happy at work and make a living out of it. For me, the most effective way of doing this is to work with managers and leaders in organisations, as they have the ability to influence other people’s happiness at work.
By being happy at work, I don’t mean elated (although that could sometimes be the case). I mean being engaged with the work, challenged but not threatened, pleased to be working with those around you and feeling like you make a difference. Even through setbacks, I can be happy if I feel like they are temporary and part of a learning curve. Even routine work can make me happy, if I feel it would be missed if I didn’t carry it out. When the work itself is not particularly challenging, I might enjoy the company of others who seem supportive of what I do.
Yes, it pays to have happy people at work.
- Happy employees show, on average, 31% more productivity.
- Happy employees show, on average, 3 times more creativity. (There goes the whole myth of the unhappy creative person out of the window.)
- Employees scoring low in “life satisfaction” (the standard metric for measuring productivity and happiness) stay at home 1.25 days a month.
So, a happy employee is more likely to use their time wisely, be more able to solve problems and turn up for work.
I think I can stop now advocating for the need to have happy teams and begin to talk about what we can do about it.
A HAPPY YOU
The first step in creating (or, if you’re lucky, sustaining) a happy team is to make sure that you are happy yourself.
If you feel like you could be happier at work, here are some simple things you could try out. There is no way that I am going to attempt to understand your individual situation without having met you first. However, in order to change, you will need to develop new habits and those I am about to suggest, have been proved to work. When these activities were taken up by a group of tax managers during a time of high pressure (Dec 2008), their life satisfaction scale moved from 22.96 (out of 35) to 27.23 after four months.(Source: Positive Intelligence by Shawn Achor. HBR Jan/Feb 2012.)
So, why not give them a try?
Choose one of the following five activities and carry it out every day for 3 weeks. (Don’t give yourself a hard time if you skip a day or two, we don’t want to create unnecessary pressure!)
- Write down (or type), three things you were grateful for.
- Write a positive message to someone in your social support network.
- Meditate for two minutes.
- Exercise for ten minutes.
- Write down briefly the most meaningful experience of the last 24 hours.
Chances are, that one of these will work to make you feel happier or help maintain your sense of thriving. Furthermore, if you respond to this exercise in a similar way to those who took part in the study, you will rip the benefits for months.
CATCHY HAPPINESS
Happiness is contagious: we can’t help feeling good when we’re around those who are happy. I mean genuinely happy, not in-your-face absolutely fantastic. It is therefore worth continuing to invest in yourself and lead by example. One of the things you can do which will raise your happiness levels, is to help others. Yes, in the words of psychologist Daniel Gilbert (author of Sumbling on Happiness):
One of the most selfish things you can do is help others.
Sounds good to me – if you go out of your way to help your team members, you will benefit both your team and yourself. If you want the data to support this argument, here it is.
In a study involving Harvard students, Shawn Achor found that those who went out of their way to help others were 10 times more likely to be engaged in their work. (Source: Positive Intelligence by Shawn Achor. HBR Jan/Feb 2012.)
Being happy, engaged, connected, in flow… all different ways of describing the desired state when at work, where we spend an enourmous amount of our life.
NEXT WEEK: To Change or Not to Change – how solving that dilemma can make us happier.
