From our archive. This article was published on 18 December 2019. Rules and amounts may have changed since.
More and more people understand how happiness at work is the flip side of stress and burn-out. More and more companies today are willing to work on happiness at work. And at the same time, more and more companies are falling into the trap of a few “happiness killers” that do away with happiness at work. Mostly unconsciously. Always unintentionally. Tryangle’s Chief Happiness, Griet Deca, comes across these four happiness killers almost daily in workplaces everywhere.
Happiness killer #4: You celebrate happiness at work once a year
It is unimaginable how much money is wasted on extravagant bashes that give the false impression that something is really being done about happiness at work. Quite a few companies narrow happiness at work down to a New Year’s reception, an annual company ball or a one-off outing in search of adventure with your colleagues.
This bling-bling approach overlooks the very first basic condition for a successful happiness-at-work strategy, namely a culture driven by job satisfaction and trust. In an organisation where employees are not treated as equals or paid fairly, there can be no question of happiness at work. Only when the foundations for job satisfaction have been laid firmly and durably can the employee begin to think about his or her own well-being, a necessary step on the road to happiness at work. And that is a daily process full of baby steps, in which an exuberant party can have its place, but not on its own.
Happiness killer #3: Negative feedback
“This is a mess.” “Can’t you ever be on time for our meetings?!” “You went about that the wrong way.” Just three examples from an endless list of remarks that give the person you are talking to little chance of happiness at work. And negative feedback just happens to be very deeply ingrained in our culture: when things go well, there is no need to talk about it, but woe betide anyone if something doesn’t go by the book! Then you look for the culprit and give them a good telling-off. At best, this behaviour stems from good intentions, because of course you don’t want that mistake to happen again.
Wouldn’t there be a nicer, more comfortable way to reach that goal? An approach that makes people learn from their mistakes and even be pleased with the feedback on the things they did less well? Of course there is! And that road happens to be exactly the “motorway to happiness at work”: it is a one-way ticket to happiness at work when you choose growth feedback, in which you honestly say what was less strong, but don’t focus on destruction. You do exactly the opposite: you put the constructive emphasis on plenty of tips for doing it better next time. That way you turn mistakes into learning moments, and the CEO of WD40, Garry Ridge, knows better than anyone what wonders that can do within an organisation.
Happiness killer #2: it’s all about the money
With a compass steered by a money mindset, happiness at work has a particularly hard time. Usually the topic of happy employees dangles somewhere at the bottom of the priority list of money-driven companies. Moreover, in such a money-hungry environment people are often also convinced that (work) happiness can be bought. And that is where it goes fundamentally wrong.
After all, there is a good deal of scientific research showing that employees do not become lastingly happier at work through one-off bonuses, shiny gyms or frustrating ping-pong tables. This rather causes frustration, since the overworked employee has no time to make the most of them (even though it would do them a world of good!) and languishes further under the workload. That workload could be solved by having more people in the team, but there turns out to be no budget for extra man- or woman-power (of course not! It’s all about the money, remember?!) The money mindset therefore not infrequently takes all the oxygen out of the organisation’s air, making happiness at work all but impossible.
Happiness killer #1: the cactus at the coffee machine
If you really have no appetite for happiness at work, then by all means start growing your own stock of company cacti. The cactus is the type of colleague you would rather not bump into on your way to your cup of comfort. It is the colleague who, on a good day, grunts something at you when you say a friendly hello (on a bad day you get silence). The cactus is the first to shout that a particular task is not part of his or her job description. It usually makes the rest of the team very happy when it turns out that the cactus is once again not joining in with an after-work team activity. Nobody wants to spend time with the company cactus because it hurts just to be nearby.
Every one of us knows a cactus at work. And that is of course a pity, because besides being a dreary plant, a cactus can be very valuable. And that value often doesn’t (or no longer) come to light. Did you know that a cactus never just blows into a company or a team out of nowhere? It is therefore an especially instructive process to investigate why the cactus underwent its prickly transformation. This search often brings answers that make the whole team, and sometimes even the entire company environment, stronger. After all, the spines very often point to malfunctioning issues such as (causes of) conflicts, drivers of toxic stress or real sickness-makers within the company culture. It should come as no surprise that Tryangle is a master at this kind of investigative process, tracking down and healing the causes, so that the cacti often transform at lightning speed into a less painful species of plant.
Did you know…?
Did you know, by the way, that it is often a cactus who helps steer a colleague towards burn-out? On top of that, that cactus is often at risk of becoming much more susceptible to that same burn-out phenomenon. So you will want that cactus within the team or organisation tracked down, because that way you can map out (potential) stress and burn-out problems much more quickly.
Want to know more?
Do you want to work on happiness at work and financial well-being in your organisation? Take a look at our services for Employee Financial Well-Being and our EAP, or get in touch with us.
Guest contribution by Tryangle (2019).