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{ 2009 08 07 }

Happiness at Work

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From a Fortune article on happiness and success at work:

“The two most important predictors of success are, first, whether we believe our behavior matters, that is, whether we think we can make a real difference — and many people lose that belief in hard times, because so much is out of their control,” [Shawn] Achor says. “And second, how do you manage stress? Does it paralyze you, or does it move you forward to action?”

Yup. I first grokked this watching people respond to the 9/11 attacks. People will do amazing things if they think that what they’re doing matters. If they feel that they’re out of the loop, given unclear or implausible goals, or going to find their efforts negated by the next decree from above… not so much.

Workers will bust our butts if we can tell — not just from metrics but from interaction and experience — that grateful customers are happier because of what we do, or if we are recognized and rewarded by management for our efforts. (And the reward needs to be more upbeat than “Congratulations! We’re not firing you today!”)

I have and have had managers who will, in passing, note things that we have done well, and thank us for doing so. When done sincerely, that is strikingly effective in getting us to keep working hard and well.

Anyone interested in encouraging flawless execution of projects needs to take this into account.

(Thanks to Judy Rosen on Facebook for the original link.)

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Posted by joseph.zitt on Friday, August 7, 2009, at 4:07 pm. Filed under Uncategorized. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

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