Happy Hour is 9 to 5 (3 page)

1. What Is Happiness At Work?

All over the world, people are taking charge and changing their work lives for the better. A group of young nurses rebel against the hospital’s sour mood and turn their ward into a happy place. A sales manager finally has enough of the bickering and competition in his workplace and quits for a much better job. A temp worker cheers up her co-workers with small, random acts of workplace kindness. A programmer at a bank learns what it takes to turn his department from boring to fun. You’ll find their stories and many more throughout the book.

But what exactly is happiness at work? Let’s start by learning a very strange looking word.

Arbejdsglæde

We Scandinavians have an advantage over the rest of the world when it comes to happiness at work: while most other nations are fairly new to the concept of happiness at work, we already have a word for it. In Danish, my native language, the word is
arbejdsglæde
, and while that may look utterly indecipherable to the rest of the world, it’s a concept that is deeply ingrained in Scandinavian working culture and one that most Nordic businesses focus on to a large degree.

Consequently, Scandinavian workers are the happiest in the world. According to a study from 2005, 68% are happy or very happy with their current job, compared with 47% in the UK or even 35% in Belgium
¹
. This is a major factor behind the success of Nordic companies like IKEA, Carlsberg, LEGO, and many others.

Arbejde
means work and
glæde
means happiness, so
arbejdsglæde
literally translates into work-happiness. In case you’re wondering, it’s pronounced ah-bites-gleh-the. And you thought
Fahrvergnügen
was a mouthful!

The wonderful thing is that this idea is spreading all over the world. Happy companies exist in every industry and in every country, and while happiness is not yet the main focus of most businesses, more and more companies have decided to go happy.

So what is it?

What exactly is happiness at work? This question seems like a good place to start, and I’ve been working long and hard to come up with a definition of happiness at work, precisely because so many people ask me just that.

Working with clients, big and small, private and public, got me closer and closer to the answer, and after long deliberation I came up with what I believe is a concise, spot-on definition.

This will amaze you. Are you ready? Here it is:

Happiness at work is…

A feeling of happiness derived from work.

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?!

Happiness at work is that feeling you get when you:

• Really enjoy what you do.
  
• Do great work you can feel proud of.
  
• Work with amazing people.
  
• Know that what you do is important.
  
• Are appreciated for your work.
  
• Get to take responsibility.
  
• Have fun at work.
  
• Learn and grow.
  
• Make a difference. Are motivated and energised.
  
• Know that you kick butt.
  

Most of us already know that feeling. We’ve been there at least some of the time in our working lives. The question is: How do we get there more of the time?

Simply put, it’s about experiencing positive emotions at work, rather than negative emotions. It’s about feeling good, rather than feeling bad.

From Barbara Fredrickson’s book Positvity, here’s a list of the 10 most common positive emotions according to researchers:

• Love
  
• Serenity
  
• Forgiveness
  
• Awe
  
• Joy
  
• Interest
  
• Hope
  
• Pride
  
• Amusement
  
• Inspiration.
  

How often do you experience these feelings at work?

Here’s a list of the 10 most common negative emotions:

1. Alarm
   
2. Aversion
   
3. Indifference
   
4. Fear
   
5. Anger
   
6. Sorrow
   
7. Frustration
   
8. Hate
   
9. Embarrassment
   
10. Avarice.
    

How often does that describe how you feel at work?

Happiness at work does not mean feeling deliriously joyful all the time. It’s not about being relentlessly positive and optimistic even when the situation doesn’t call for it. It’s simply about doing what it takes to feel good and make others feel good as much as possible, and to avoid doing things that make you and others feel bad as far as possible. And the effects are unmistakable: being happy or unhappy at work has a huge impact on our lives. People who are happy at work not only enjoy work more, they have a much higher quality of life overall. They also do much better at work. People who are unhappy at work not only suffer mentally, but are also more prone to stress, depression, and a variety of diseases including heart disease and cancer. Make no mistake about it: in the worst cases, bad jobs kill people. You’ll get the chance to find out what more happiness at work can do for your life, both at work and outside of it, in Chapter 6.

But let’s lay down some theory first. Here are the most important things you should know about happiness at work.

One person’s happiness is another’s living hell

Here are Allan and Tom. They’re both men in their 30s and work for the same advertising agency. They have similar backgrounds, but what makes them happy at work is wildly different:

• Allan enjoys working closely with others, Tom prefers working alone.
  
• Allan hates writing reports, while Tom loves it.
  
• Allan likes lots of new challenges, and Tom prefers predictability.
  
• Allan likes risk, but Tom tries to avoid it.
  
• Allan hates having to focus on only one project, but Tom loves it.
  

While there are definitely some things that make most people happy at work, we need to remember that happiness at work is different for everyone. One person’s happiness at work is another’s living hell. That’s why happiness at work means treating everybody differently, because treating everyone the same only makes very few people happy.

Happiness at work is contagious

Three Italian scientists placed electrodes in the brains of macaque monkeys to study the neurons that control the actions of their hands, for example, when they pick up an item. During each experiment, they recorded the activities of a single neuron in the monkey’s brain while the monkey was allowed to reach for pieces of food, so the researchers could measure the neuron’s response to certain movements.

One scientist explains: “I think it was Fogassi, standing next to a bowl of fruit and reaching for a banana, when some of the monkey’s neurons reacted. How could this happen, when the monkey did not move? At first we thought it was a flaw in our measuring or an equipment failure, but everything checked out OK and the reactions were repeated as we repeated the movement.”

A mirror neuron is a brain cell which is active both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another animal. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behaviour of another animal, as though the observer himself were performing the action. These neurons have been observed in primates, in some birds, and, yes, in humans, and some scientists consider them to be one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade
²
.

This may explain why happiness at work is so contagious - why one determinedly happy employee can lift the spirits of an entire department, and one happy executive can spread a positive mood throughout the whole organisation. To parts of our brain, there is no difference between being happy ourselves and seeing someone else being happy.

The bad news is that unhappiness is even more contagious than happiness, probably because humans are conditioned by evolutionary forces to be more attuned to negative emotions
³
. This makes fear and anger in the workplace more contagious than happiness, meaning that we must actively work to spread happiness instead.

This also means that your work-happiness depends on the people around you. I’m sure it’s theoretically possible to be the only happy employee in a department with 20 unhappy people, but I’m also sure that it’s really, really difficult! But being happy, surrounded by 20 happy people - now that could be a lot of fun…

Happiness at work is long term

Having fun and being happy is not about blowing off work that must be done. It’s not about avoiding unpleasant tasks to enjoy yourself in the moment. And it’s not just about being happy here and now.

It’s about happiness for today and tomorrow and next year and 10 years from now. It’s about realising that without long term happiness and enjoyment at work, you will not be your best, contribute as much, make as many people smile, or make as much of a difference.

You can’t force people to be happy

“I have a co-worker who takes it upon herself to act as the happiness police, and it has had the result of creating an antagonistic attitude towards positive thinking! I had to calm down one team member who was genuinely insulted by her attempts, because by constantly goading him to be happier she was strongly implying that his current life just wasn’t happy enough (and thus, the implication was, not worthwhile). Having someone try to control your “happiness” can be a very unpleasant experience indeed!”

Share your comment on
www.pinetribe.com/alexander/discussion

If you intentionally or inadvertently create a mood at work where it’s somehow right to be happy and wrong not to be, people will be less happy. You can even end up making happiness at work a dirty word — something people ridicule and actively resist.

That’s why happiness at work must always be an invitation. You can open the door and invite people in, but you can’t push them through the door against their will. The more you try, the more they will cling to the doorjamb, kicking and screaming.

Job satisfaction is not happiness

People always ask me why I use the term “Happiness At Work” rather than more traditional terms like “job satisfaction” or “employee satisfaction”. And by always, I mean two or three times a year. At least!

And while the two terms are definitely related, they’re still very different. Job satisfaction is what you
think
about your job - when you sit down and weigh all the pros and cons, how satisfied are you with your work situation. This is very much a rational, intellectual, thought-based process and it takes place only when you make a conscious effort to think about these things, e.g. once a year when you complete a staff satisfaction survey.

As we saw previously, happiness at work is how you
feel
about your job. On a regular, perfectly normal workday, how do you feel? This is automatic and takes place all the time, and hence tends to affect us much more deeply than satisfaction, which only matters when we are consciously making an effort to think about it.