Savoring, Celebration, and Gratitude

I am currently taking the "Science of Wellbeing" course through coursera - this is described as the most popular class at Yale University. It is all about defining what actually makes us happy versus what we think will make us happy. There is certainly a lot that we can learn from this for our day to day lives, but as business leaders, there is plenty that we can learn for our teams too.

According to Gallup (as of 2015), only 32% of the workforce is engaged, a whopping 68% is disengaged!

How does understanding happiness impact engagement and work satisfaction? It is simple, by understanding what actually drives someone's happiness, you can implement more effective engagement programs and create happier employees. Often times, raises are given, promotions are granted, and leaders make statements of recognition to try and impact employee engagement. However, we know money is a short term fix. According to Monster and human-capital consulting firm Capital H Group, the average employee stays for less than one year after accepting a counter offer. You think money will make people happier, but it is proven not to (after a certain threshold) in our day to day lives and in our workplace. Promotions often expose people to greater frustrations as politics or bureaucracy often increase and these factors, plus an unchanging level of autonomy can actually increase dissatisfaction. Finally, forced praise once a year during a soft review are so artificial that you question if your boss is like a traveling rock band, simply inserting the current cities name in their script to seem invested.

Three things that do greatly impact happiness is gratitude, celebration, and savoring. Seemingly easy to implement, it requires greater attention, more consistently to change disengagement and unhappiness to a happy and engaged employee.

Gratitude: This is not a once a year review type of praise. This is genuinely catching your employees on a day by day or week by week basis doing the right thing at their job or for the team. A simple thank you and acknowledgement of the work done goes very far in real time. After projects, spend time with the team talking about what went well, how people enjoyed working together and have people call out each others contributions to bring something to completion. It sounds basic, recognize people in real time and they will want to work harder. Simple, yes, alive and well at most workplaces - NO!

Celebration: Do not forget to take some time and get your team out of the office to truly celebrate completing a big project, winning a new client, or renewing your best client. Celebrating an accomplishment is a type of gratitude and savoring. However, it needs to be more intentional and unique for the team to recall being out amongst each other to feel appreciated and connected to each other.

Savoring: This trick is really exceptional to boost happiness and engagement. Give your team time to interact with customers to understand how their job impacts someone. Give them time to reflect and understand how they feel when hearing from customers. Have them right it down, create a video, create a customer board...allow your team to take in the emotion of hearing a customer acknowledge your companies contribution to their life. This has shown over and over again to help employees drive higher levels of production.

It is time that we work to engage more than half of our workforce. If we understand what makes people happy, we can implement more effective and often lower cost operational tactics to drive better productivity, better creativity, and improved retention. Giving your company the biggest differentiator out there - engaged and happy employees.