What is it that most people seek in life? We’ll give you a hint. It’s not money or success. It’s not even friendship or love. It’s what we think all these things will bring us. Happiness.
Being grateful for and finding joy in what we have is an important part of happiness. Happiness is directly tied to physical and mental health, our relationships, and overall well-being and quality of life. Sadly, though, there are many contributors to unhappiness and one of those contributors is work.
According to BambooHR, happiness at work is hard to come by. Employees have never been unhappier, and guess what? It’s getting worse. BambooHR’s employee satisfaction data showed a 9% decrease in happiness over 2023, which was 10 times faster than the previous three years.
The unhappiness epidemic is here and has been on the decline since 2020. This begs the question of what is happening and what employers are getting wrong about happiness at work.
We can’t begin to answer what employers are or are not doing to contribute to unhappiness without first understanding what’s happening in the world. In the US, the downward trend in happiness levels started in the 2000s but more quickly decreased in the 2010s.
There are many factors impacting happiness and well-being. Most behavioral scientists would point to major events like 9/11, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic—and they wouldn’t be wrong but is there more to it?
Today, we have more access to information than ever before and can connect with people all over the world at the snap of a finger. While the advancements in technology have led to the most connected world in human history, they also have a dark side.
The constant flow of information in today’s world can be detrimental to our well-being, especially if it is not left in check. Let’s be honest, negative news sells, and we rarely see the “bright side” anymore, which has a tremendous effect on the brain and well-being.
Now, we hear the sentiment that we can’t just ignore what is going on around us and that’s why we wouldn’t suggest trying to tune it all out, but we need to understand the ramifications of not offsetting the negativity.
Our brains are hardwired to have a negativity bias, one that gravitates toward negative thoughts over positive ones hence why consuming negative news can have compounding effects.
Negativity is often more powerful than we even realize, affecting our moods by triggering stress responses and shaping our perspective while it’s at it.
Not only do we prioritize negative information, but we can also become addicted to it making it harder for us to break the habit. Worse yet, it’s unavoidable with the 24/7 news cycle and social media.
Want to see for yourself? Check out your algorithm and take note of what the vibe is. While it may not seem like negativity, look for the more subtle signs like the things you see but don’t have such as expensive cars, luxurious vacations, and the perfect life, which is all smoke and mirrors, but our brains can’t always reconcile the reality.
These constant stimulators can leave us in a state of high anxiety and depression. So, maybe work can be an escape, right? Wrong. Instead of offering a reprieve from stress, for many, work only exacerbates it.
Over the last two decades, employers have caught on to the downward spiral of happiness and started to offer more programs and benefits to support mental health and well-being. Not only does it make work life better with happy employees, but it also helps the bottom line.
A study done by the University of Warwick on the correlation between happiness and productivity found that happy participants were 12% more productive than those who were not. Those with a lower level of happiness were associated with less productivity.
While this research is fascinating, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. We know that we are our best selves when we’re happy—that happiness is forged in the battle between the negative and positive.
With this correlation between happiness and productivity, it’s no wonder why employers take it seriously. It makes business sense, but employers have been getting it wrong. Their focus has been on employee engagement, not employee happiness. Let us explain.
Employee engagement assumes that the workplace experience is the sole predictor of engagement but fails to recognize the overwhelmingly large role life outside of work plays.
Perhaps, employers don’t think they can impact life outside of work or worry that it would be too much of an investment to try and tackle, so they focus only on the workplace to dismal results.
Of course, many employers do provide support targeting employee well-being including both physical and mental health-related resources. This support can include Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) and encouraging health and fitness with on-site gyms or discounts to community fitness centers. Sadly, though, most employees either aren’t aware of these resources or don’t utilize them.
Uprise Health reports that the average use of available EAPs is 3-5% across all industries. Often employees are not even aware of the resources available through their organization to support well-being unless they have disclosed to their manager or HR that they are struggling.
For these reasons, organizations need to consider how best to meet employees where they’re at versus providing a reactive service. By that point, there may already be a loss of production and engagement.
While EAPs can be helpful and affordable options for employers, they are often only scratching the surface and ineffective if they don’t get the workplace right first or as the saying goes “all style, no substance”. So, what should employers do? Focus on happiness at work.
Seriously. Focusing on happiness at work is deeply rooted in positive psychology and workplaces that make positivity a priority see increased retention, engagement, and employee well-being.
There are many ways to meet employees where they are such as flexible work schedules, self-care days, and health and wellness-related benefits, but simple philosophical changes can change the workplace for the better. The best part is they come at no cost to the employer.
- Identify and leverage strengths including job crafting to best utilize talent.
- Champion well-being from the top down.
- Develop a caring and supportive culture through actions.
- Build a learning culture that encourages innovation and openly discusses and accepts mistakes.
- Leadership and HR model positive relations and foster collaborative environments.
- Prioritize people over function.
- Actively listen.
- Run toward change not away from it.
- Never avoid a tough decision if it’s the right decision.
- Practice gratitude and recognition daily.
If this list seems too simple, that’s because it is. Many times, positive psychology is just a change in the way we conduct ourselves or, in the workplace, the way we conduct business.
These are philosophical changes that any organization can make but they must start with leadership. Employees need to see their boss and their boss’s boss walking the walk.
Positivity in Motion
In collaboration with HR, the leadership team at a mid-size company of about 500 employees in West Virginia decided that enough was enough. For the fourth straight year, the engagement results were disappointing and at the lowest point in the organization’s ten years of collecting engagement data from the workforce.
The Chief Operating Officer (COO), Erin Branson, explained that the disappointment was palpable. As a leadership team, they took the annual engagement survey results very seriously and had worked hard in the weeks and months since the last survey to respond to concerns.
“It seemed like each year we had all this momentum and then we got the results, and some area of concern came up that just killed our overall engagement score,” Erin explained.
That last survey was a breaking point for the team. Instead of trying to find a positive takeaway to focus on, the team got real with each other and shared their insights and perspectives on the culture.
“We all agreed, there was a lot of negative energy in the building,” said Erin.
It was at this moment that an executive in the room shared what he had recently read about in the book “The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work” by Shawn Achor. That’s when it hit Erin.
“I just blurted it out, half-jokingly, that we all needed to read the book and then regroup,” Erin shared.
After the leadership team read the book, they decided to put a plan into place, and they called it “The Smiley Project”. Each member of the leadership team would smile and say hello to anyone they crossed paths with at work.
“It was every meeting and every hallway interaction. It did not matter. I was always smiling,” Erin laughingly stated.
Then, eventually, something wonderful happened. The organizational mood shifted as if it had changed overnight.
“It was really exciting. People just seemed happier. It was as if work had gone from this place of doom and gloom to a place of sunshine and rainbows,” stated Erin.
While the team credits much of the pendulum swing to the “The Smiley Project” they also admit that it evolved into something much more than just smiling at people. It became a culture of happiness.
When we think about employee well-being, we’re inclined to believe it is about providing support to employees, which isn’t wrong, but it’s how we support them that matters.
Sometimes the support we all need is positivity. It doesn’t mean we are always going to be happy, but it means making the workplace an escape from the negativity not an extension of it and finding happiness at work.
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