Unleashing Employee Happiness: A Guide for Business Visionaries

Covid burnout

Amidst the chaos of 2020, I found myself navigating a demanding role as a digital and social marketing coordinator for the Leeds Covid communications. The constant barrage of updates and stress left me feeling adrift and purposeless. However, everything changed when a colleague shared an email announcing Coursera’s offer of free access to personal development courses. One course, in particular, caught my attention—the immensely popular Yale course on the Science of Well-being.

During this transformative journey, I learned valuable insights about happiness that shattered common misconceptions and opened new possibilities for personal growth and employee satisfaction. I want to share this knowledge with you and how you can practically apply it for yourself and your business to increase performance, motivation and happiness.

Challenging our notions of happiness

We often base our understanding of happiness on false assumptions, leading to decisions that may not truly fulfill us. For instance, we might believe that a good job, money, or material possessions will guarantee lasting happiness. However, science reveals that these external factors only provide temporary satisfaction.

To harness the true essence of happiness, we must recognize and address several biases:

• Mis-wanting: Our imagination often leads us astray, making us believe certain things will bring joy when they won’t.
• Reference Points: We tend to compare ourselves with others, using irrelevant standards to gauge our happiness.
• Hedonic Adaptation: We quickly become accustomed to positive stimuli, dulling their emotional impact over time.
• Predictive Fallacy: Our predictions of what will make us happy are often inaccurate.

Strategies for thwarting these biases in the workplace

As a business owner, understanding these biases empowers you to implement strategies to tackle them. . Encouraging yourself and your staff to take on these approaches in their personal and professional life will enable a fair fight against mis wanting, lack of motivation and demoralisation

• Prioritise Experiences: Encourage yourself and your staff to invest in meaningful experiences rather than material possessions. Experiences create lasting memories and foster deeper connections. You can do this with volunteer programmes, team building away days or even simply changing the space in which you and your staff work.
• Embrace Savouring: Cultivate a culture of mindfulness, encouraging your employees to savor and appreciate the present moment, both personally and professionally. This could mean more regular breaks away from your desk and space to meditate and have peaceful moments alone.
• Re-experience and Observe: Help your team revisit past accomplishments, acknowledging how far they’ve come and how they felt during those milestones. Talking about this together will certainly boost this exercise.
• Manage Social Media Exposure: A strange one to hear from a marketeer, I know! Social media is great for your business for the same reason it can be harmful for you personally. Despite all it’s glory when it comes to business growth, we have to acknowledge that excessive social media use can lead to detrimental social comparisons. Encouraging you and your staff to limit personal usage or follow accounts that promote positivity and inspiration will massively help alleviate feelings of anxiety around social comparison.
• Encourage Variety: Support your employees in pursuing diverse experiences and learning opportunities, which can rewire biases and stimulate personal growth. Variety is the spice of life, as they say!

Cultivating Sustainable Happiness at Work

Now, let’s explore how you, as a business owner, can amplify the factors that genuinely contribute to your employees’ happiness:

• Leverage Signature Strengths: As part of the course, we took a quiz to determine what our core signature strengths were. You can find the quiz here. Help your staff identify their unique strengths and align them with their roles. By applying their strengths, employees will find greater satisfaction and engagement in their work.
• Embrace Flow: Foster an environment where your team can experience the state of flow—when they are fully immersed and absorbed in their tasks. There is a lot you can search for online to find out more about flow, but put simply the activity is intrinsically rewarding and there are clear goals that, while challenging, are still attainable. This will lead to increased focus, productivity, and serenity.
• Nurture a Love of Learning: Encourage intrinsic motivation by promoting continuous learning and development. Celebrate the process of growth, embracing both successes and failures rather than just focusing on the end result (a deadline, a sales target etc). Ensuring your staff are feeling developed and nourished throughout the work they do will massively increase happiness levels.
• Value Time Over Money: Recognize that time spent on meaningful activities with loved ones contributes significantly to overall happiness. Offer flexible working arrangements to allow your employees to strike a better work-life balance. It’s important staff are paid fairly and paid according to their value, but money will only get you so far in the goal of achieving happiness.
• Healthy practices: This encompasses both mental and physical well-being. As mentioned earlier, meditation stands out as a powerful tool in reducing mind wandering and enhancing presence—a vital component of overall happiness. Encouraging your staff to adopt meditation practices can yield significant improvements in their happiness levels. Furthermore, promoting physical well-being is equally crucial. Adequate sleep and regular exercise have been proven to be strong contributors to overall happiness. By prioritizing these aspects of health, you can support your employees in leading healthier and happier lives.

Getting Your Staff Committed to Happiness

Now equipped with the knowledge of what truly fosters happiness and how to address hindrances, it is time to empower your staff to commit to their long-term well-being. Here are some strategies to achieve that:

1. Situational Support: Encourage your employees to identify potential challenges in their lives that might hinder happiness. By mapping out their weeks and recognizing stumbling blocks, they can proactively address these issues. Consider providing spaces for quiet reflection and meditation at the workplace, as well as implementing policies that foster open communication and idea-sharing among your team.
2. Goal Setting and Visualization: Guide your staff in setting SMART goals for their happiness journey. Additionally, encourage them to visualize these goals and conduct SWOT analyses to assess potential obstacles and opportunities for success.
3. Goal Planning and Habit Formation: Intentionally implementing happiness goals will aid in turning them into habits. Applying the WOOP strategy—Wish, Outcome, Obstacles, Plan—can be particularly effective. Your employees can identify their wishes, envision the desired outcomes, anticipate potential obstacles, and create specific if/then plans to overcome these challenges. If this happens, then that will happen.

Investing in happiness

By integrating these practices into the fabric of your business culture, you can foster a workplace environment that prioritizes holistic well-being, amplifying the happiness and commitment of your staff.

Ultimately, as a business owner, investing in the happiness of your employees is an investment in the future success and prosperity of your organization. A content and engaged workforce will not only excel in their roles but also contribute to a positive and harmonious work environment. Let us embark on this journey together, redefining the workplace landscape by embracing the power of happiness and well-being for our business and staff alike.