The ingredients to achieve happiness at work

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31/12/2018

The ingredients to achieve happiness at work

They say that happiness at work is a concept that, like talent or leadership, is being spent on so much use in people management. Job happiness was incorporated into the jargon of human resources as a synonym of well-being and motivation with one goal: to increase the productivity of employees. It is not a free perception: an investigation carried out by neurologists Richard Davidson and V.S. Ramachandran and academics like Shawn Achor, says that happy people are better workers. It is easy to deduce that, on the contrary, unhappy people are not fun to work with, they do not add much value and they negatively impact the company.

Proof of the importance of happiness is the Institute of Happiness that created a well-known signature of soft drinks to promote policies that would provoke the satisfaction that companies pursue in their employees. And, going even further, companies such as Sngular or Comunica + A have incorporated the figure of the chief happiness officer (CHO) as the person who looks after the motivation, the work environment, the professional development and the happiness of the employee.

It is not so much a question of creating a position that will encourage happiness in the company, but rather of identifying the ingredients that turn a workday into an element of motivation and personal self-realization. David Tomás, co-founder of Ciberclick and author of The Happiest Company in the World (Ed. Empresa Activa), says that in order to achieve this state of work well-being, it is fundamental to look for a sense of work, that you feel good: "My natural state is to be well and serene when I get a brown. " In one of the post that includes in his blog mentions some words that should be eradicated from the vocabulary used in the company as deadline, department, target, human resources, bad, problem, late, error, sad and a long string of insults that all they bring are negative connotations and bad rolls, the great enemies of a healthy work environment.

Achieving happiness at work is possible but ... as always, it's a two-person thing. On the one hand, companies have to generate the right policies for it and, on the other hand, professionals have to put a bit of their part in order for everything to work. A good start to achieve this is what Santiago Vázquez, author of Happiness in Work and Life (Ed. Lid) states: "We must be able to distinguish people from their opinions and not take the possible differences of opinion as something personal".

What is it?
María García, co-founder of Smart Culture, defines happiness at work as "the positive gap between the employee's experience and the expectations it has, and in the event that these perspectives are superior to the reality experienced, unhappiness occurs. or work frustration. " He adds that happiness has to do with "the productive management of emotions, self-motivation and the concept of responsibility". And to escape the demagogy in the treatment of these values, he proposes "an effective management of the expectations of the people for which a value proposal is necessary to the employee transparent and aligned with the reality, so that a candidate understands what can and can what can not be expected from the company with which you are going to commit yourself It is also important that professionals dedicate time to reflect on their needs and values in the workplace for their incorporation into different projects ".

The politics
Nine out of ten Spaniards say they take into account happiness policies when choosing a job in a company. This is one of the conclusions of the VIII Adecco Encuesta Happiness at work, a strong fact that does not correspond to another no less striking: only 15% of the 3,500 workers consulted to make this report believe that companies are incorporating measures related to happiness at work in a serious way; 35.5% think that they are doing it timidly; and the majority, 49.3%, considers that the organizations are not yet carrying out sufficient policies of this type. Some of the most popular initiatives among employees are those related to well-being and health, priority for 79.9% of those interviewed, followed by remuneration (70.6%), and occupational risk (37 , 6%). All of them with the permission of the measures that promote the conciliation of professional and personal life: the Spaniards value as the most important to be happy in their work enjoy a schedule that allows to reconcile, with 8.22 points out of 10.

Who it depends on
There is no work or the perfect company. Neither do the management policies of people capable of satisfying the entire workforce: organizations have long since decided to eliminate coffee for all from their discourse, so they try to develop initiatives tailored to each employee. According to Adecco's report, 21.3% of employees believe that job happiness has to do with the motivation that bosses can transmit; 15% think it depends on the company; and only 11.2% consider that happiness depends on the attitude of the worker. Maybe this last data has to do with leadership, since 23.2% think that to be satisfied in their position the boss must know how to listen to their teams and take their opinions into account, followed by empathy and knowing how to put themselves in his place (20.3%). The ability of the leader to organize their teams and know how to manage their tasks and conflicts (17.4%) does not seem so relevant.
Sodexo's 2018 Global Trends report also helps find out who are the culprits of more or less unhappy organizations. 80% of professionals are convinced that empathy in the workplace has to evolve and, according to this analysis, the ability of a leader to be empathetic has the highest correlation with profitability and productivity. Emotional intelligence becomes, in this way, the most powerful tool to generate happiness in all facets of people management: selection, recruitment, retribution, career development, recognition, and so on.

The tools
Welfare and health in the workplace are a priority for employees, one of the excuses for work happiness. This fact has led Sodexo employees to design Boundless, an incentive-based program that includes components that support healthy eating, stress management, sleep, and good financial management. The coaches are available 24/7 for support. Tested in Fortune 500 companies, universities and communities of health care providers, it has a high participation rate and, most importantly, it results in a change in behavior: between 40% and 61% see improvements in the index of body mass; and between 45% and 59% substantially reduced the level of stress and exhaustion risk.

The manuals
Is there a happiness manual? Are the rankings of the best companies to work a reference to identify the happiest companies? The experts in people management are unable to pronounce themselves on this. Table football in the workplace to make equipment, reconciliation programs, and even facilitate access to a healthy diet do not give happiness. Satisfaction is a consequence of all these policies, but not an end. Anyone can make a catalog that groups a series of measures, but it is useless without communication through channels with the minimum of hierarchy, an evaluation of effective performance, real challenges that improve self-esteem and professional development tools. In short, the essence of effective people management.