The most common objections to happiness at work and why they are wrong. Part 1.
Greetings, everyone!
I would like to share the concept that happy people do a better job — they are more productive, more committed, more involved to business challenges, more solution-oriented, more creative, healthier, and, as a result, they are more valuable as employees for any business.
Why do I need to do this?
To support a lot of people all over the world with their work-related issues. To let them know that they are not alone with their feelings, and that their own feelings matter not only in private life, but at the workplace too.
To support socially responsible companies. To inspire their leaders to drive changes and improvements to make business more successful and sustainable through increasing employee happiness.
Objection #1. We can’t define what happiness at work is.
For most of us it could be truly difficult to define clearly what happiness at work is. The main reason why is because we never or very rarely think about it.
Most of us have seen how hard our parents work, how very often they are dissatisfied with their jobs and do their work without any joy, mostly because they must pay bills and raise kids. Us.
We absorb this behavior and repeat the same in our own lives. We think that work is not a place to be happy. A vast variety of people think this is a completely usual thing to work just because we need money. This is the case for most of us. For many many people all over the world.
I’ll open to you one secret — there are enough definitions of what happiness at work is that exist due to lots of incredible research findings and to the amazing job of psychologists.
You just have to question yourself and invest a bit of time to search among answers. Even Wikipedia has good information about what happiness at work is.
- Good organizational culture
- Employee salary
- Job security
- Career development
- Job autonomy
- Work-life balance
- Working relationship
- Group relationship
- Leadership
Each of these definitions is an enormous topic that deserves separate articles. Following articles will give more detailed information for each definition on how it works, how it impacts you and business itself. Just follow this blog.
And the second secret I would like to open for you is this is not OK to be unhappy at your work. This is a direct way to decrease the quality of life and to the different sorts of health problems.
It is one of your core rights — to be happy everywhere , in a private life and at work. You personally and your company have to work hard to bring on the table for all your managers the topics about people’s happiness.
If you want to get more information right now, feel free to ask Wikipedia: happiness at work.
So, you can’t define what happiness at work is only if you don’t want to.
Objection #2. We can’t measure happiness at work.
Right. You can’t if you don’t want to.
If you want — you always can find opportunities that stand directly in front of you.
The easiest way is to ask your people — are you happy with your work? What goes wrong? And you will get an honest answer. At least at first times.
Be aware if you do nothing with their feedback, with their pains, you have no right to expect an honest answer next time.
Some leaders ask these questions only to create visibility of the importance of your feelings, but actually they are not really ready to listen to and don’t want to do their direct job to process these feedbacks and to bring desired changes and necessary improvements to make corporate life much nicer.
Definitely, to measure happiness in your company could be a challenge, you can face many different problems and challenges as there is the risk of getting bad data, wrong data or bad decisions based on these data. At the same time our lives are full of different kinds of problems and challenges. We just have to be ready and be full of determination to search solutions.
In any case it is always a good idea to measure your employees’ happiness to get real hard numbers to boost organizational commitment to happiness initiatives.
The way with thousands of miles starts with one step.
Be honest with your team and be ready to hear not those nice, but very truthful words about the job you do and how it impacts on people’s feelings in your surroundings.
Objection #3. We don’t really know what makes people happy at work.
There is much research on what makes people happy at work. Great leadership. Great corporate culture. Great salary. Great career opportunities. And so on and so on, just take a look at objection #1.
But I have bad news for you — the things that made people happy yesterday might not work tomorrow.
Surprise-surprise!
Did you personally notice that when you buy a car you’ll start to dream about a better car the next day? When you buy a new MacBook, you’ll start to dream about a new model next year.
Then why are you surprised that the benefits and offers aimed to make your people satisfied with your company and job itself, that you offered yesterday, will stop working tomorrow?
Do you think your employees have a different behavior compared to yours? Not. Your employees are absolutely the same people as you are. With absolutely similar behavior.
To care about people’s happiness is a continuous endless process. It is a process that can never be completed. It is a huge field for activities where you must use all your creativity, passion, innovation and bravery to experimentation.
Usually HR departments don’t do much work related to increasing the happiness level in your company, simply because many of them don’t have many resources and are limited by their daily work aimed to cover important business needs.
As a summary, nobody knows what exactly makes us really happy, we are continuously chasing happiness during all our lives. Your company simply has to do the same for your employees. And you have to force your leaders to focus on people’s needs.
It is always a fun to search things that could make us happy.
