10 Tips To Improve Workplace Happiness

In 2011, a multinational survey of 14 countries ranked Singapore employees as the least happy. 41.7% of those who were surveyed indicated that they were dissatisfied or more than dissatisfied with their jobs.

Three years later, after a continent-wide survey conducted by global recruitment company, Randstad Workmonitor, Singapore was ranked second in Asia Pacific, behind Japan, with regard to the number of employees who were discontented with their current jobs.

Then, only a couple of months after, another similar survey conceived by the Singapore Human Resources Institute and consulting firm, Align Group, found that Singaporeans, by large, fall within the band of ‘Under-Happy’ on the overall workplace happiness index. With that, a new word has since been added to our local lexicon – a word that speaks volumes about our general discontentment of our professional life.

It is truly disheartening to find my home country being listed on such unfavourable indices, and I sure hope that working professionals in your nation or organisation could be happier in their jobs. However, if by the off-chance that you are getting increasingly disengaged at work or are struggling to improve the morale of your team, perhaps these following tips can help you ignite a wave of positivity in the workplace.

Praise and Praise Often

In a recent research conducted by a team of Japanese scientists, three groups of adults were asked to learn a simple task and then perform it. One group included an evaluator who would compliment participants individually, another group involved individuals who would watch another participant receive a compliment while the third group involved individuals who evaluated their own performance on a graph.

When the participants were asked to repeat the task the next day, the group of participants who received direct compliments from an evaluator the day before performed better than participants from the other groups. These results simply echo the far-reaching mutual benefits that an organisation and its employees can enjoy just by “building positive qualities”. When was the last time that you praised your direct reports? Instead of being overly critical about our subordinate’s need for improvement, can we consciously make it a habit to look for opportunities to praise that person?

Reframe The Meaning of Work

Is work good or bad? Essentially, whether it is good or bad, this is ultimately a choice. Many of us choose to entrench our minds in a negative perspective of work simply because it is often easier to do so. Reframing is essentially a technique that allows us to adopt different ways or perspectives of looking at the same thing or situation. Often unwanted stress happens and worries creep in when we let ourselves be seduced by an easily-framed meaning of a situation when we should also be looking at the same situation in another frame as well.

Thus, for example, you could view the dreaded situation of communicating with a difficult customer as an opportunity for professional growth rather than an undesired chore. So if you could identify a part or parts of your job that could be enjoyable, focus your attention on them and reframe the entire perspective. It may be your salvation for workplace happiness.

Focus on Strengths

Imagine your company's sales revenue is dropping, and you are desperate to stem the tide. One approach is to focus on the things that are not working, and think about how to fix them. However, it presents a potential rise in fault-finding behaviours which can jeopardise morale. Another approach is to look at things that are working, and build on them. By focusing on positives, you can build the unique strengths that bring real success. This is the premise behind Appreciative Inquiry, a method of problem-solving pioneered by David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University in the mid-1980s.

Appreciation means to recognise and value the contributions of things and people around us. Inquiry means to explore and discover, in the spirit of seeking to better understand, being open to new possibilities.

When combined, we can discover and learn about ways to effect positive change for the future. Coupled with regular praise, a culture of positivity creates a more resilient and optimistic workforce even in trying times. This helps to reinforce the bond between the employee and organisation.

Get into the Flow

University of Chicago psychologist Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, who has studied the psychology of engaged workers at all levels, found that they create a hyper-focused state of mind. He calls it flow. People in flow are exhilarated and are remarkably unstressed even when doing challenging work. They lose themselves in a task they love and feel out of time.

One way that you can engage your team members better is to ensure that an individual’s key performance indicators are clearly defined, because flow occurs most often when tasks are tightly aligned with the person’s goals. Also, a workstation with the most minimal of distractions would encourage flow. From simple actions like switching phones to silent mode to temporarily removing any instant messaging notifications, flow levels can be heightened.

Exercise Your Body

It is a well-known fact that health and happiness are fundamentally linked. When you exercise, your brain releases feel-good chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline and endorphins. These neurotransmitters combine to improve our moods and emotions. It is suggested that a 30-minute workout at the gym or brisk walking on a daily basis would suffice in stimulating these chemicals and thus promote happiness.

Conversely, happiness can influence our health. Years ago, in a groundbreaking finding, Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Professor, Sheldon Cohen, discovered that people who are happy, lively, calm or exhibit other positive emotions are less likely to become ill when they are exposed to a cold virus than those who report few of these emotions. Hence, with this positive cycle of health and happiness, both organisations and employees benefit. So hit the treadmill now!

Own Your Job

Many of us go through the motions at work, trying to stay out of trouble with our bosses and do what is enough. One way to inject meaning into your work is job crafting – a fresh approach to the traditional manner in which job roles and responsibilities are designed. Job crafting enables employees to customise their jobs by being responsible for more or fewer tasks, expanding or reducing the job scope, or changing how they perform their tasks.

For example, an accountant can be given time and opportunities to think of a new method of filing taxes to make her job less repetitive. A marketing manager might take on additional event planning duties because he enjoys the challenge of organising people and logistics for product roadshows. If job crafting is enacted properly, it becomes a definite way for employees to change their lives at work for the better and it also gives them an opportunity to make valuable contributions at the workplace.

Practise Respectful Engagement

Sometimes, the smallest actions can create the biggest waves. Respect – the honouring and/or acknowledgement of another person’s existence or value. This is an impression often formed during our interactions with other people that subtly gives us the signal whether one is giving another due attention or not. The absence of respect conveys a message of distrust and unworthiness. Have you ever had the experience of making a request to your boss in his office and all you receive in response was ‘ah huh’ or ‘whatever’? Sounds familiar?

Truthfully, respectful engagement gets triggered through active listening. This means that one must combine both empathy and active engagement during any interpersonal interaction. Empathy should be exhibited by the behaviour of tuning into the words of the other person so that one can imagine the actual meaning and even emotions of that individual.

Task-Enable Your Co-workers

Task enablement is a technique that helps form higher quality relationships when we facilitate the success or performance of another person on a task or towards an objective. The most obvious task enabling practice at the workplace is mentoring or coaching. However, many a time, task enabling occurs informally, when a colleague reaches out willingly to help another co-worker simply because he has something to offer and can make a difference.

Hence, putting office politics aside, sustained task enablement supports the thriving of workplace relationships, and when two people are task enabling each other, respectful engagement gets positively influenced as well. So right now, think about just one person in your office whom you can task-enable immediately. What can you do straightaway? Provide assistance whenever she needs help? Give emotional support during stressful times?

Employ The Pygmalion Effect

The Pygmalion effect says that the greater the belief in the potential of a person, the better he/she performs. In the popular Rosethal-Jacobson study, researchers showed that when teachers were told that certain children in their classes were expected to perform above the average child, (known as spurters), these students showed enhanced results by the end of the academic year. Based on the baseline IQ scores, these students reported a significantly greater gain compared to children who were not identified as being spurters.

The interesting bit? The children who were identified as spurters were in fact chosen at random! These students didn’t have any advantage over the other experimental groups. Yet, because the teachers were told that they were spurters, the teachers expected and believed more in these children and that led to subtle changes in their mindsets, attitudes and teaching. This can be applied in the workplace. If you can realistically believe in the capabilities of your team members and encourage them, their levels of self-belief would increase, thereby improving productivity.

Propagate The Use Of Emergenetics

I may be stating the obvious but as practitioners, we must constantly apply our knowledge of the varied and complementary thinking and behavioural preferences in our own workplaces. Ideals cannot be preached and not practiced. The Emergenetics Profile has helped to demystify the seemingly undecipherable thoughts and actions of others, which more often than not, contribute to unhealthy workplace conflicts. For instance, a person with an Analytical preference may unintentionally come across as someone cold, blunt and critical without his/her realisation. Since we frequently see the world through our own lens, a person with this preference may just be very driven by goals and results and not know that friction is being created between him/her and another person who may not share this preference. The same can be said of another with a Conceptual preference who may appear whimsical and unrealistic to other team members in a brainstorming session, but in his/her perspective, simply prefers to push the boundaries of creativity.

In addition, the Profile gives you a practical framework to recognise the vast individual differences that your team has. Quality relationships begin to grow when we can engage each person based on his/her preferences. As wrong as it may sound but in truth, we cannot do unto others as we would others do unto us, because as Geil has proven, we all have different preferences. A person on the First-Third Expressive spectrum cannot assume and expect that everyone works best in a quiet environment. A person on the Third-Third Expressive spectrum would beg to differ since to him, productivity comes from the interaction with other co-workers. When a manager understands how his/her subordinates behave and think, he/she can then develop a cohesive team culture built on the insights of Emergenetics, through an informed perspective based on personal preferences.

These tips are by no means the exhaustive list yet an attempt to bring any one of them into practice would set the path towards workplace happiness.

Happiness at work is not a myth but in order for this reality to be actualised, the organisation, its leaders and the individual employee must understand the benefits that this notion brings and work towards it. If all parties can see each other as equal stakeholders for mutual gains, job dissatisfaction would be a thing of the past and productivity would improve by leaps and bounds. Then perhaps, happy work may no longer be a pipe dream after all.

About Andy Pan, Associate of Emergenetics International – Asia Pacific

Andy is the Director (Training) of Right Impact Training. Being a dynamic, eloquent corporate trainer and employee engagement consultant, Andy has been designing and delivering corporate training programmes for a decade.

This year, Right Impact Training has won the Top Independent Tip Sheets Sales Leader. In 2014, Andy was awarded the Best WEevaluation Score for being the highest participant-rated independent Emergenetics trainer for 2014 in Asia-Pacific. In addition, he was a conference speaker at the Emergenetics Brain Summit 2015 held in Assisi, Italy.

He has also recently published a book titled “Happy Companies Healthy Profits”.