productivity – 3minuteleadership

A Chief Executive once said to me ‘I don’t believe in happiness at work’ and I thought ‘that’s a shame because happiness truly can be a superpower’.

On average, people spend 3,515 days at work which is about ⅓ of your life. Imagine if those days are miserable. That creates a lot of stress and unhappiness which impacts everything in your life such as relationships with friends and family. We’ve probably all had those jobs where we have to drag ourselves into work and a day feels like a lifetime in itself.

Now, imagine creating a workplace where people are happy. Just writing about it, I can feel my vibration lift to an energy that allows success and achievement. So, what if true happiness at work is the key to long term success?

The fact is, there are two types of happiness and the first one, hedonic happiness is the type that is very short lived.It’s the kind you get from a party. Like a caffeine or sugar boost, it picks you up and throws you back down fairly quickly. It’s the dopamine hit you get from a new email or a LinkedIn notification. It’s pretty meaningless and about instant gratification. We all feel it because it’s built into modern workplace tools with a constant influx of information.

Eudaemonic happiness is the type we need to strive for in all parts of life and has very high value in the workplace. It’s the kind of happiness that lasts. It’s about satisfaction and fulfilment. It’s the happiness we feel when we are connected to our purpose. It’s the type that sustains and keeps us going.

I’m sure we have all heard the saying ‘find a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life’. What I say to my teams is ‘I appreciate that work will never be your top choice of how to spend your time when compared with family or a sunny beer garden, but how can I make it the second best place to be?’.

I want to be happy at work and enjoy my time and I want everyone else to have that too. My best workplaces have felt like home and I have been equally happy spending my time there.

The evidence is clear that happy people achieve more. They are positive, optimistic and believe in themselves and each other. Gallup’s 2024 report found that happier employees are up to 17% more productive.

Happy employees are more likely to be engaged in their work, feel a sense of purpose and are motivated to go the extra mile. They have better ideas, offer a better service and have high levels of resilience.

What should leaders aim for in boosting happiness at work?

Connect people to purpose – when people understand their role in delivering the vision and are clear about the difference they are making, they will be more satisfied and motivated.
Inspire growth – learning is key to motivation and boosts resilience. Consider how you can provide opportunities for learning and inspiration for your teams.
Create a sense of belonging – that feeling of home that I described comes from a deep sense of inclusion and belonging. Cultivate that and you will be on the path to happiness at work.

The fact of the matter is that the CEO who didn’t believe in happiness, wasn’t happy himself. It limited performance in the organisation and led to a high turnover of colleagues. If he had embraced happiness, I think he would have been more comfortable with his own vulnerability and created an environment where colleagues could try new things, laugh in the face of failure and really appreciate success.

Imagine how your workplace could thrive if happiness became a priority. Give it a try and let us know how you get on.

Image: This_is_Engineering from Pixabay

In the teams I lead, the happiness of individuals is something that matters to me and the reason it matters is because people spend a lot of time at work and I want that time to enhance their lives in some way.

In a previous blog post, I wrote about helping people to experience ‘flow’ and I acknowledged that we would all probably prefer to be at home, in a sunny garden, with our friends and family, enjoying our time. Instead, we probably all spend more time than we would like at work with many of us racing the clock to get everything done and the sad fact is that too many people have jobs and managers that make them miserable.

Figures show that ‘over half of the British workforce are unhappy at work which is both a tragedy and a waste of potential’. The stress that unhappy workplaces create seeps into our personal lives, leaving us in a situation where, even at the weekend, that time with friends and family cannot truly be enjoyed.

So often, I have talked about the importance of happiness in the workplace and I know that many senior leaders misunderstand why this is important and think happiness is a ‘nice’ thing rather than something critical for success. They see happiness as a concept that is too soft and fluffy for a serious working environment.

It’s understandable that they think this to a certain extent but if they fully understood the concept of happiness, they might well take a different view.

Happiness and Change Coach, Samantha Clarke, describes happiness in the workplace as being something which allows people to ‘bring their whole self to work’. When I speak about the importance of people being happy at work, this is what I am referring to. It isn’t happiness for happiness’ sake, it’s about making work satisfying so that they are not stressed and miserable for a start but more importantly because if they are happy at work, then they are likely to be loyal, committed and productive.

In measuring staff engagement, one of the indicators in the Gallup q12 index is whether people ‘have a best friend at work’. This doesn’t seem like an important question for satisfaction at work but Gallup say their ‘research has repeatedly shown a concrete link between having a best friend at work and the amount of effort they expend in their job’. Really, it’s about connection. We spend so much time at work that when individuals feel a greater sense of belonging, it makes them feel more engaged.

What we need to realise to understand this fully is that happiness has two components:

Hedonic well-being is the feeling of pleasure in the moment. It’s the kind of happiness you might get from going to a party. It’s a feeling of heightened enjoyment which is sensory and short-lived. It’s like a dopamine hit – a high that feels immediately satisfying but quickly fades away.

Lasting happiness is what we gain from having meaning and purpose in our lives. In positive psychology, this is known as eudaimonic well-being and is about fulfilling our potential and feeling we are part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s about having a purpose and links to a range of work on leadership and motivation such as Dan Pink’s ‘Drive’ and Simon Sinek ‘Start with Why’.

The key to understanding happiness is noticing the difference between pleasure and satisfaction. Most probably, those who have been less convinced about the importance of happiness at work, connect the concept of happiness with that of pleasure. The concept of satisfaction however, is what you need to consider for this to make sense. For an engaged workforce, these feelings of happiness need to be encouraged.

If you are asking yourself now how you can create this in your organisations? This blog is founded in positive psychology so if you look through, you will find lots of ideas for motivating and engaging individuals. My top 3 articles to read next if you want to increase the levels of happiness in your teams would be the 80/20 balance, results-only working environment, how ‘warm and fuzzy’ motivates teams.

If you have successes to share or questions about how to raise the levels of happiness in your teams, please add them to the comments below.

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Tag: productivity

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