How to be happy at work
How do you know if you’re unhappy at work? That something is not right and that it’s time to either make some changes at work or move on to a new job?
Helping people obtain Happiness at Work is my Job. I’ve talked to a lot of people who hate their jobs and I’ve noticed some common warning signs.
If you’re wondering if it’s time to quit, take the test to see how many of these warning signs you exhibit.
I’ve been with my current company for 9 years, and our “engagement score” just hit an all time high in a year when I have heard more employee concerns about the company than ever before.
Over the last five years, I have personally seen a combination of rewriting survey questions and “teaching to the test” that I believe solely explains the reason for the current score that clearly doesn’t match reality.
Staff satisfaction surveys… many people mistrust and dislike them and yet most workplaces have them.
Conducting, analyzing and acting on these types of surveys can take up a lot of time and money and I suspect that they are just not worth it. I’ve rarely seen job satisfaction surveys have much of a positive impact on a company.
I suspect that the typical approach used by most companies is fundamentally flawed. Here are the the top 10 problems I see with staff satisfaction surveys.
A client sent me their annual job satisfaction survey recently. It had 138 question (I’m not even kidding) and among them were gems like:
Surveys can have upwards of 100 questions and consequently take a long time to complete. I have visited several workplaces where employees complain from “survey fatigue.”
Typically, staff satisfaction surveys are done annually which means that there can be a huge lag from when an issue arises in the workplace until it’s discovered and addressed.
As a tool for improving workplace conditions and employee happiness, this makes them nearly useless.
One major flaw is that these surveys don’t actually measure how happy people are at work – they measure job satisfaction. While happiness and satisfaction are certainly related concepts, they are not the same thing.
Basically, job satisfaction is what you think about your job. When you weigh all the pros and cons, what do you think about your job? It’s a rational judgement.
Happiness at work is how you feel about your job. When you are at work, do you mostly experience positive emotions (pride, happiness, gratitude, etc) or mostly negative emotions (anger, frustration, sadness, etc).
Of the two, happiness is by far the most important and the most relevant, because happiness more than satisfaction affects employees’ job performance, health and general well-being.
Here’s how it may go in many workplaces:
In many cases months pass from when employees fill out the survey until they see the results. By that time, no one remembers the survey questions any more and the results will most likely be outdated before people ever see them.
This is the age of instant gratification and instant data, so why the huge lag between survey and results?
I have never seen any step taken based on job satisfaction survey.
I recently talked to a client that conducts an annual job satisfaction survey. They told me that every year for the last 5 years, the same handful of teams in this company have scored very low on the survey. Everyone knows why: The managers of these teams are bad managers. And yet, nothing has been done about it and these teams continue to be miserable.
Asking employees about their situation creates an expectation that the workplace will act on the survey results. Why conduct the survey, if the workplace doesn’t act on the results?
And yet, survey results often aren’t acted upon, leaving employees with the (often correct) impression that this is a sham process and that the company wants to create the illusion that it cares, when really it doesn’t.
All of this means that responding to the survey becomes a chore for employees who can’t see the value of the survey and have no expectation that it will improve conditions in any way.
This again leads to very low response rates in many workplaces which is no wonder. Why should they waste time filling it out, if they can’t see the value?
I gave a keynote at a bank recently and just before I went on stage, an HR consultant presented the results of their latest employee satisfaction survey.
While their overall results were quite OK, he spent 95% of his presentation talking about the areas where the scores were low compared to other banks or where they had fallen since the last survey.
Looking at the numbers, I could see several areas where results were really good, but zero time was spent examining what those areas were and what the company was doing right. Also, while some teams were clearly much happier than others, they got no attention – all the focus was on the lowest scoring teams.
Of course a survey should be used to pinpoint problems so they can be fixed, but if that’s all it’s used for the company misses a huge opportunity to identify best practices and spread them by learning from the best performing areas and teams.
I worked for a bank for many years that used annual Gallup surveys. As a member of management, it was my job to inform the employees about the questions they would be asked pertaining to their satisfaction with their jobs, co-workers, management, and the company’s values.
It was drilled down to me that these marks needed to be the highest (10 out of 10) in all categories to ensure maximum “satisfaction.” In actuality, if you had worked for the company long enough to take a second survey, you knew that you’d better just put a 10 to avoid the drawn out action planning after the branch results were reviewed.
I recently heard of a company that wanted to do really well on the Great Place to Work national rankings, which are determined in part by a satisfaction survey among employees. So before the survey ran, management sent out an email to everyone saying how important it was for the company to score well and how it would really help their image and business results. But, hey, no pressure!
I have seen several ways that management can influence the survey results. In some companies, results are not presented to the whole company, before HR and top management have had a chance to see them first and remove any results that are deemed too “explosive” or bad for the corporate image.
Apparently the director of my particular group was unhappy with her ratings. A week after the results were shared, she called an urgent meeting with our entire team, where each of us had to go up to the whiteboard and write down the areas we had ranked highest and lowest.
So much for anonymity — and the credibility of the survey.
While these surveys are supposedly anonymous to allow employees to be brutally honest, many people don’t trust that. In a recent survey we did, 40% of respondents didn’t trust the anonymity of job satisfaction surveys in their company.
The survey is “owned” by either the whole company or HR. Individual departments have no say in how or when the survey runs.
That way there is no local ownership over the process or the results that come out of it and therefore much less incentive to act on the results.
So if job satisfaction surveys are so useless, why does everybody do them? I believe there are three main reasons:
So what to do instead? I would suggest a process that reverses each of the 10 problems above. Some way of surveying employees that lives up to this:
It wouldn’t even have to be electronic. Some companies measure workplace happiness with tennis balls and buckets.
And mostly we can do one thing: We can talk. We can create forums where employees and managers can have an actual dialogue about the current state of the workplace. This will always trump a survey, no matter how good it may be.
Would you agree with me or do you think job satisfactions are worth the effort? What does it take for them to actually work and improve conditions for employees? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your take on this.
Related posts
We’ve spoken in countries starting with every letter except L, M, O, Q, V, W, X, Y, Z. That bugs me. This is how my mind works :-)
The perfect workplace does not exist. All companies have problems. But great ones fix them and move on to newer and better problems.
I’ll be in NYC on March 23-29 to promote my book.
Let me know if you want to meet up while I’m there.
If you think that happiness at work is about comfort, serenity and an easy stable work life you’ve got it all wrong.
True happiness at work comes from going up against impossible odds together with great people for a noble purpose.
Comfort’s got nothing to do with it.
I love this video. The fear before and the triumph after. That’s happiness right there.
When was the last time you did something scary at work?
The worst accident in the history of aviation happened on the Spanish Island of Tenerife on March 27 1977 when a KLM 747 taking off crashed into a Pan Am 747 that was still on the runway.
A long chain of events led up to the crash, but one of the major causes was that the captain of the KLM flight chose to ignore a crucial warning from his co-workers in the cockpit.
The KLM captain was no novice – in fact he was one of KLM’s most experienced pilots, the head of pilot safety training at KLM and featured in some of the company’s ads.
On the day of the crash the flight was already significantly delayed and any more delays would have forced the plane to stay on Tenerife overnight to comply with pilot rest requirements.
The captain, being eager to get off the ground, misheard an instruction from the control tower. He thought he was cleared for take off even though another plane was still on the runway, though he couldn’t see it in the heavy fog.
Then, and this is crucial, he ignored concerns from both his co-pilot and his flight engineer and proceeded to take off down the runway, eventually hitting the other plane. 583 people died.
As a result, “less experienced flight crew members were encouraged to challenge their captains when they believed something was not correct, and captains were instructed to listen to their crew and evaluate all decisions in light of crew concerns” (source).
This is obviously a horrific example but the learning that applies to all workplaces is that much is gained if:
However, the implicit power imbalance between employees and managers means that this is not something people do automatically. You have to explicitly train both of these aspects in order to make sure that it becomes part of the corporate culture.
There are three reasons why a company should do this.
If the KLM captain had listened to his subordinates that accident would have been avoided.
How many accidents, mistakes and errors are allowed to happen daily in workplaces around the world because employees are too intimidated to disagree with the boss or are ignored when they do so?
I recounted that story with great sadness, as it had been agonizing to watch my patient suffer through treatments that I believed he would not have chosen had he known the harm they could cause and the unlikeliness of being cured.
He eventually was admitted to hospice and died, but only after the chemo had left him with unstoppable and painful bleeding in his bladder, robbing him of a more peaceful and more comfortable end to his life.
This is from a NYT story written by a nurse who believed that one of her patients was receiving an unnecessary and incredibly painful round of chemo. She raised her concerns to a doctor and was promptly ignored. Reading the story makes it clear that this made her unhappy. Not only was her patient suffering needlessly but her expertise and judgment was being ignored.
The nurse goes on to write this:
Many of the nurses I know could share their own, dramatic stories of rescuing patients or catching frightening errors by other health care workers, including doctors.
And finally, giving employees permission to disagree and managers the obligation to listen and act on disagreement could help weed out those managers who are pathologically incapable of ever admitting error or admitting that they might not know everything already.
That kind of boss is endemic (and is even celebrated in many workplaces) but is ultimately incredibly damaging to business results.
Furthermore, when managers keep screwing up, it’s usually up to employees to keep fixing their mistakes and dealing with the fallout which clearly makes people frustrated and unhappy at work.
There are plenty of articles out there with tips on how to disagree with your boss but most of them suffer from one fundamental problem: They take it as a given that the boss has the power, and therefore it is the responsibility of the employee to raise their disagreement in a respectful way that doesn’t bruise the bosses ego.
Also, many bosses see disagreement from subordinates as a sign of disloyalty and disrespect. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Disagreeing with what you see as a bad decision is in fact a sign of engagement and bosses should learn to appreciate that.
So I say we should turn that around and create workplaces where anyone is free to disagree with anyone else.
And this should apply not only to imminent mistakes but also to workplace practices, workloads, task assignments – everything. Every time you as an employee see something you disagree with or think is wrong you should be able to speak up and know that your concerns will be taken seriously.
Are you free to disagree with your boss at work? Will your boss listen? What if you can see your workplace doing something silly or wrong – do you know how and when to raise that?
Your goal shouldn’t be to be perfectly happy all the time. That’s impossible. If you’re always happy, there’s something wrong with you :-)
The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. Get an in-depth background in happiness at work, hear about the latest research in the field and learn how to use this in your own business.
