The Happy Secret to Better Work

March 23, 2012

When your employees wake up in the morning, turn off their alarms, and roll out of bed, are they excited to go to work? Are they driven by doing something special, entering and leaving the office every day feeling a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment?

If so, that’s great. But you’re company is probably in the minority.

Most people dread everything about their work. The commute, the meetings, the constant badgering by their bosses to meet quarterly goals. Then there’s the water cooler gossip and bickering between employees, and a corporate culture that demands perfection, even if it doesn’t really exist (for more on that, read this post from my colleague Brian Zimmerman).

Pretty depressing, isn’t it?

The truth is, no one really wants to live or work that way — not even the managers or executives that sometimes subconsciously create that negative culture. After all, there’s a reason that companies like Netflix and Zappos don’t have any trouble recruiting top talent: Those businesses consistently rank among the best places to work and still slaughter their competition when it comes to productivity, performance, and results.

So why does the average business struggle to achieve a similar balance?

Shawn Achor seems to have a pretty good explanation. In a recent talk for TEDxBloomington, Achor, a Harvard-educated psychologist and consultant, suggests it’s a matter of how we view the world around us. More specifically, it’s that our society has created what he calls a “cult of the average.” And, ultimately, it’s that cult of average — paired with disproportionately negative feedback and structure in the workplace — that keeps most companies from driving their employees to meet or exceed their potential.

That’s why Achor suggests changing the formula that most of us use to measure happiness and success. His research has found that positive psychology can affect reality, and that, when it comes to happiness in the workplace, positive thinking improves virtually every business outcome, while intelligence, creativity, and energy levels all rise in the process.

Translation: If you can create a corporate culture that raises your employees’ level of positivity, then they’ll work harder, quicker, and happier for you. And better work — tangibly or intangibly — has a huge impact on your bottom line.

Here are some quick points from Achor’s talk to validate his research:

  • Contrary to popular belief, 25 percent of job success is predicated by intelligence, while the rest is tied to optimism, social support and the ability to see stress as a challenge, rather than an opportunity for failure
  • The human brain at “positive” is 31 percent more productive than when it’s at negative, neutral or stressed.
  • At “positive,” salespeople are 37 percent more productive and doctors are 19 percent faster and more accurate. Those numbers vary slightly by profession, but their better across the board than any comparison against negative, neutral or stressed work environments.

Blows the mind!

In his full talk, Achor shares a handful of easy-to-implement tactics for re-training the brain to avoid negative psychology, allowing you to create a ripple of happiness that will wash away all the other nonsense.

I don’t want give away all of Achor’s best insights. So, if I’ve piqued your interest, feel free to check out the full video. It’s about 13-minutes long, but it’ll be well worth your time — especially if you get the sense that your employees are in that aforementioned category that would rather walk across fire than sit down at their desk every day.

Other reading:

Can You Answer the Question WHY?

The Chief Executive Officer

Firas was previously a venture capitalist at Openview. He has returned to his operational roots and now works as The Chief Executive Officer of Everteam and is also the Founder of <a href="http://nsquaredadvisory.com/">nsquared advisory</a>. Previously, he helped launch a VC fund, start and grow a successful software company and also served time as an obscenely expensive consultant, where he helped multi-billion-dollar companies get their operations back on track.