Nuns from Tyburn Convent, Marble Arch perform a sponsored skip to rebuild the convent front, 17 August 1989. (Archive ref. GUA/6/9/2/1/1). Photo by Graham Turner from the Guardian story: Memorable shots: Moments from Graham Turner’s Guardian career – in pictures
Welcome to this month’s new Happiness At Work collection.
These are some of the highlights I have especially enjoyed and drawn ideas from during the last six week’s trawl for stories, research and practical tips about how to make greater relationships, happiness and resilience for ourselves and the people we work with.
As this burgeoning new field of inquiry expands and gains more and more momentum, it is becoming harder to slim down our selection rather than to find relevant material, and we really hope you will find something amongst this mix, and in the rest of the collection, to use to nourish your own aspirations, learning, leadership and flourishing.
some articles about Happiness At Work
The 5 Most Important Finding from the Science of Happiness that apply at Work
Happy workplaces are more profitable and innovative, attract the best employees and have lower absenteeism and employee turnover rates. Simply put, happy companies make more money.
But how do you create a happy workplace? We believe some of the answers are found in positive psychology…
Traditional psychology looks at everything that can go wrong with our minds – psychosis, neurosis, phobias, depression etc – and asks how it can be treated/cured. It’s an incredibly important field but positive psychology asks the opposite question: When are we happy? What does it take for people to live good lives and thrive psychologically? The field has been especially active for the last 30 years and we are learning some really interesting and surprising things about happiness.
Here are the five findings from positive psychology that we believe are the most relevant in the workplace.
1: Positive emotions have many beneficial effect on us and on our job performance…
2: Emotions are contagious…
3: Small actions can have a large effect on our happiness…
4: Unexpected things make us happy…
5: Making others happy, makes us happy…
The Benefits of Peer-to-Peer Praise at Work
by Shawn Achor
I am now working with (my wife) Michelle Gielan and Amy Blankson from the Institute for Applied Positive Research to find out how long a happiness boost lasts from a single pay increase versus more frequent organic boosts like digital praise. Our hypothesis is that if a company gives a pay increase, the engagement bump is short-lived, as the new income level becomes the mental norm — necessitating another raise later to maintain the same level of engagement. This is in line with current research on extrinsic/intrinsic motivation as described in the HBR article “Does Money Really Affect Motivation?” But because the peer recognition program is ongoing, there is no indication of a tolerance point at which the engagement scores return to a baseline.
As our companies continue to grow and expand and technology advances, we are finding ourselves increasingly fragmented from our social support networks both at work and at home. The digital revolution has increased our speed of work dramatically. And this research suggests that technology may also be one of the keys to connecting us back together — creating the type of effective, organic and peer-based praise people need and deserve as they endeavor to lead their teams to greater success…and hopefully greater happiness.
27 Insights for Creating and Sustaining Workplace Happiness
by PAUL JUN
Psychologist and author Martin Seligman posited that “authentic happiness” is a combination of engagement, meaning, and positive emotions. He studied people from all over the world and discovered that when a person exercises certain traits or virtues—like duty, kindness, and leadership—it promotes authentic happiness.
The two realms of life that are most likely to elicit engagement, meaning, and positive emotions are our social relations and the workplace. And yet, if you ask around, you’ll sadly come to the realization that most workplaces hinder engagement and positive emotions.
Here are 27 resources from great thinkers, researchers, and leaders on helping you hone in on happiness so that you can cultivate it within your team and your day-to-day activities.
some articles about Making Great Relationships at work
The Biggest Performance Management Mistake
by Jacob Shriar
Every employee has a desire to do great work. Companies need to create an environment where employees can achieve great work.
Most companies focus on improving employees’ weaknesses, when they should be focusing on their strengths.
Marcus Buckingham, who worked at Gallup for 20 years researching employee engagement, discovered that the best performing leaders were the leaders that focused on their employees’ strengths.
People produce the best results when they make the most of their unique strengths rather than focusing on their weaknesses or perceived weaknesses…
continue reading this article here
How Expressing Gratitude Might Change Your Brain
This result suggests that the more practice you give your brain at feeling and expressing gratitude, the more it adapts to this mind-set — you could even think of your brain as having a sort of gratitude “muscle” that can be exercised and strengthened (not so different from various other qualities that can be cultivated through practice, of course). If this is right, the more of an effort you make to feel gratitude one day, the more the feeling will come to you spontaneously in the future. It also potentially helps explain another established finding, that gratitude can spiral: The more thankful we feel, the more likely we are to act pro-socially toward others, causing them to feel grateful and setting up a beautiful virtuous cascade.
Your coworkers are more important than you think
According to a meta-analysis by Gallup, one determinant of positive employee attitudes — in addition to having learning opportunities and adequate office supplies — is answering yes to the question “I have a best friend at work.” Perhaps company policies could include 45-minute lunch breaks, since American researchers found that this length of time spent in substantive conversation — not small talk — fosters a sense of closeness between mere acquaintances. Exchanging weekend war stories at your neighbour’s desk has more value than you might think…
The Power of Treating Employees Like Family
“Parenting is the stewardship of the precious lives that come to you through birth, adoption or second marriages. Leadership is the stewardship of the precious lives that come to you by people walking through your door and agreeing to share their gifts with you.” This insight ultimately transformed how Chapman runs his company. In a new book Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, Chapman and coauthor Raj Sisodia explain how any company can integrate this perspective into their organization.
Here is the Knowledge@Wharton conversation with Chapman and Sisodia about their book.
some articles about Resilience and Personal Mastery
Resilience isn’t just a nice-to-have. Here’s why.
‘How do I tend to respond to difficult or challenging times at work?’
The workplace throws up a steady stream of obstacles and challenges e.g. colleague relationships, organisational ways of working, workloads etc., and it’s our resilience or the ability to cope with the obstacles that come our way, to bounce back, learn from mistakes, to make amends when necessary, and most important of all, begin again without rumination or regret, which determines our wellbeing at work.
Resilience was once seen as a rare human feat – but now, research shows that within a well-functioning emotion system, resilience can be standard and that people’s levels of resilience are not set in stone, but can be improved through experience and training.
So how do you develop a resilient workforce?
read these five tips for developing greater resilience here
Why Resilience Is Good for Your Health and Career
by Laura Landro
Resilience is often defined as the capacity to adjust to change, disruption or difficulty and move on from negative or traumatic experiences in a positive way.
Studies find people with the most resilience tend to be more productive, less likely to have high health-care costs and less often absent from work. Now, some employers are offering programs to help employees become more resilient. They are providing webinars and group coaching to teach skills and habits that help people stay focused and functioning during stressful times at work or home…
A recent review of more than a decade of studies, led by researchers at the University of Nebraska and published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, found resilience training in the workplace can help improve employees’ mental health and subjective well-being, and offer wider benefits in social functioning and performance.
continue reading this article here
How People Learn to Become Resilient
In December the New York Times Magazine published an essay called “The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience.’ ” It pointed out that the word is now used everywhere, often in ways that drain it of meaning and link it to vague concepts like “character.” But resilience doesn’t have to be an empty or vague concept. In fact, decades of research have revealed a lot about how it works. This research shows that resilience is, ultimately, a set of skills that can be taught. In recent years, we’ve taken to using the term sloppily—but our sloppy usage doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been usefully and precisely defined. It’s time we invest the time and energy to understand what “resilience” really means.
see also
Is Resilience Written in our DNA?
an examination of the different research findings…
The Only 7 Things You Can Control in Life
We make millions of little decisions all the time, and the result of each one is either net positive, net negative, or neutral. The more net positive decisions we can make (and the fewer net negative ones), the better. Net positive decisions—brushing your teeth before bed, eating healthy meals, and regularly going to the gym—help you feel good and bring you one step closer to your goals despite the effort they entail….
While the healthier choice may seem harder, it pays off bigger. And you’ll be surprised by just how easy these choices can be once you make the effort. By learning how to master the seven things that are within our control, you will start to make more net positive decisions, fewer net negative ones, and find that empowering, positive behaviors become second nature. So let go of all the stuff you can’t control and start using your time to master what you can control. Before you know it, you’ll be living your best life ever!
1. Your Breath…
2. Your Self-Talk…
3. Your Gratitude…
4. Your Body Language…
5. Your Mental and Physical Fitness…
6. Your Diet…
7. Your Sleep…
read more about these seven things here
some articles about Performance & Productivity
Multitasking is Killing Your Brain
by Larry Kim
Our brains weren’t built to multitask.
Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time, and bombarding them with information only slows them down…
New research suggests the possibility that cognitive damage associated with multi-tasking could be permanent.
A study from the University of Sussex (UK) ran MRI scans on the brains of individuals who spent time on multiple devices at once (texting while watching TV, for example). The MRI scans showed that subjects who multitasked more often had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex. That’s the area responsible for empathy and emotional control.
The one caveat is that research isn’t detailed enough to determine if multitasking is responsible for these effects, or if existing brain damage results in multitasking habits. Still, no matter how you spin it, multitasking is no good.
The lesson? Multitasking is not a skill to add to the resume, but rather a bad habit to put a stop to. Turn off notifications, create set email checking time slots throughout the day (rather than constant inbox refreshing), and put your mind to the task at hand.
some articles about Making a Better World
The World’s Happiest Man on Altruism
Matthieu Ricard, also known as ‘the world’s happiest man’, spends much of time now trying to teach the world how to be happy, and how to show empathy, kindness and compassion to one another.
His latest book, Altruism, provides a complex look at a remarkably simple approach to solving the ills of the world. Ricard’s work has always revolved around positive transformation, and now he has published an 800-page guide to using one of the traits most inherent to human nature to overcome the challenges of the 21st century.
Ricard summarises his work: “I used everything I could learn through 70 years, and I researched for five years to point out that altruism is not a luxury or utopia, but the only answer to the challenges of our times.”
The book took him five years to write, and contains an impressive 1,600 scientific references, providing a convincing argument on how important the widespread adoption of genuine concern for the wellbeing of others could be for changing the world.
He takes a three-pronged look at the world’s main challenges: the economy in the short-term, life satisfaction in the mid-term, and the environment in the long-term.
“People are basically good. If you look at evolution, one of the difficult points was how evolution can explain altruism; now you see all the great evolutionists like Martin Nowak with ideas that actually say cooperation has been much more creative to evolution than competition. Those are not just eccentric guys; they are the core of the science.”
Ricard believes that we are perfectly placed to start tapping into what is already a part of us, to create something better: happier societies, a more compassionate business environment, and a less damaging approach to the environment.
read the original article here
some articles about Stillness, Solitude and Mindfulness
13 untranslatable words for happiness
In order to widen the scope of the psychology of happiness, Dr Lomas gathered a list of hundreds of what he said were “untranslatable” words for positive sensations.
Some of the best are listed below:
- Sobremesa (Spanish): time spent after finishing a meal, relaxing and enjoying the company
- Tepils (Norwegian): drinking beer outside on a hot day
- Remé (Balinese): something both chaotic and joyful
- Desbunar (Portuguese): shedding ones inhibitions while having fun
- Sabsung (Thai): being revitalised through something that livens up one’s life
- Feierabend (German): the festive mood at the end of a work day
- Tilfreds (Danish): satisfied, at peace
- Geborgenheit (German): protected and safe from harm
- Flâner (French): strolling leisurely on the streets
- Shinrin-yoku (Japanese): relaxation gained from ‘bathing’ in a forest
- Gökotta (Swedish): waking up early with the purpose of going outside to hear the first birds sing
- Suaimhnaes croi (Gaelic): state of joy after the completion of a task
- Tarab (Arabic): musically induced state of ecstasy
The End of Solitude
by William Deresiewicz
Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.
What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone…
continue reading this article here
How Easily Distracted Are You? Here, Distract Yourself With This Game to Find Out
By Melissa Dahl and Sarah Ruddy
Overall, the link between creativity and distractibility ties in nicely with one of the main assertions Kaufman and Gregoire make in their book: that a creative mind is an open mind. This may even help explain why experiments since at least the 1960s have discovered a link between creativity and mental illness. “Being open to and curious about the full spectrum of life — both the good and the bad, the dark and the light — may be what leads writers to score high on some characteristics that our society tends to associate with mental illness,” Kaufman and Gregoire write, “at the same time that it leads them to become more grounded and self-aware.” Having an open mind means a lot more stuff is going to wander on in there, for better or for worse. “Everything is interesting, and you want to pay attention to it all,” Carson said.
But in the annoying, everyday scenarios, this can be a problem, for the obvious reasons. Sometimes you do have to filter out distractions. Alas, it’s not yet clear from the research whether it’s possible for a person to temporarily improve their latent inhibition. Instead of trying to train yourself to ignore distractions like email or texts, it may be better to avoid them completely, at least while you’re trying to get creative work done. Marcel Proust is said to have worked while wearing ear plugs; the 19th-century novelist Franz Kafka once said, “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ — that wouldn’t be enough — but like a dead man.” Both men have a point.
take the test and read the full article here
articles about Contemporary Trends in Work & Organisations
Time to say goodbye to the open plan era?
‘We shape our buildings, afterwards our buildings shape us.’ Winston Churchill
Most employees spend around 40 hours a week in the workplace. It’s the space in which they reason, react, collaborate, build relationships and think creatively…
With employee wellbeing moving up the organisational agenda it isn’t surprising to find businesses re-examining how their workspaces affect employees, for good or for bad.
But other forces too are pushing them to think differently. There has been much discussion about the impact of the multi-generational workforce and of the complications that arise as the requirements and preferences of different generations play out in the modern workplace.
Nor is it just generational differences; different kinds of job roles, work patterns, skill sets and perhaps even personality types also need to be taken into consideration. There is a growing appreciation of the need to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to workplace design, towards one that appreciates the diversity of employee needs.
As businesses seek to gain and maintain competitive edge and remain agile in a world of increasingly flexible work patterns, the need to rethink the working environment is almost inevitable.
With more organisations recognising this, it’s becoming clear that the office of the future is going to look very different from the workplace of the past.
10 Job Skills You’ll Need in 2020
The world of work—and the world in general—is changing. People are living longer, new technologies are emerging, and we’ve never been more globally connected. That means the skills we use now in the workplace are not necessarily the skills we’ll need in the future.
To get a sense of what skills you might want to start investing your time into developing, check out the infographic here.
Holacracy: The System To Make Your Team More Productive
by by Jacob Shriar
Holacracy is a management framework that not only makes things more transparent, but empowers employees and fully utilizes their strengths.
Holacracy is so far removed from a traditional way of running an organization that it takes a while to understand and you need to have an open mind…
Holacracy is a management framework focused on self-management. It’s a way of running your company in a very organized way, with clear roles and responsibilities.
With Holacracy, I can play multiple roles and have multiple functions depending on what my skills are.
To fully understand why this is such a powerful system, we need to look at the main differences between Holacracy and traditional company setups.
- Roles Instead Of Job Descriptions…
- Decisions Are Made At The Team Level…
- Constant Optimisation…
- Incredible Transparency…
read this article in full here
for more about this radical new organisation framework, watch on youtube:
Frederic Laloux on Reinventing Organisations
Brian Robertson’s Google talk on Holacracy
Jos de Blok l Organisation without management l Meaning 2015
The Positive Organization: Time for HR to leave the ‘bandage business’
In this three-part series, Professor Robert Quinn looks at how HR can stop being in the ‘bandage business,’ and how they can harness the findings of his research on Positive Organizations to emerge as a strong strategic business partner. This is part one. Read part two and part three too.
…in a world where 70% of the global workforce is unengaged and 52% of the management workforce is unengaged, how do we create cultures where people flourish and exceed expectations?
Leadership development and cultural vitality are big HR challenges that face every organization.
Part Two: The Positive Organisation
Do you aspire to survival, or to flourish?
The questions that drive positive organizing are these:
- What are people, teams, organizations and communities like when they are at their best?
- How do we learn from excellence and spread that excellence?
- Instead of engaging in managerial problem solving how do we engage in organizational purpose finding?
- How do we continually recognize the reality of constraint while we simultaneously orient to the reality of possibility.
Part Three: The Positive Organization: Doing the impossible – Amy’s courageous story
…the story of a Chief People Officer who got out of the bandage business. She altered the culture of a major business school. In the process she reinvented herself and became invaluable to her organization.
Happiness At Work edition #132 – February 2016
You can find all of these articles, and many more, in our new HAW collection…
Filed under: 21st century leadership, 21st century work, Changing the World, Happiness & Wellbeing At Work, Leadership, Mindfulness, Positive Psychology Tagged: altruism, balance, career, contemporary trends in business, creativity, focus, gratitude, Happiness At Work, happiness experts, holacracy, job skills, leadership, learning, managing time, Matthieu Ricard, mindfulness, multitasking, neuroscience, office work, open plan, positivity, professional development, relationships, relationships at work, resilience, self-mastery, solitude, stillness, team working, technology, Wellbeing, work-life balance
