How exactly does compensation affect employee happiness? I covered that in my latest webinar… where I also proposed something HIGHLY controversial 😲
Watch the full webinar and get my slides and other materials here.
I met a manager recently who claimed in no uncertain terms that companies should forget all about employee happiness and focus only on engagement. He argued that people can be happy at work without performing well, whereas employee engagement leads directly to better performance.
I’ve actually heard this claim a few times recently, but it is still wrong. In this article we’ll look at why.
But first let’s define the two terms. Both can be defined in many different ways, which will confuse any discussion, so here are the definitions I will base my argument on.
This is the first result that comes up when you google “employee engagement definition”:
Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization, and put discretionary effort into their work.
And this is the definition of happiness at work that we use:
Happiness at work is the extent to which employees feel good about their jobs.
Both are clearly emotional at their core (the word “feel” appears in both) but the key difference is that engagement is more about the work and less about the person. It’s not really about how you feel in general, it’s how passionate you feel about your job, how committed you are to the workplace and how much extra effort you put in.
Happiness at work, as we define it, is how work makes you feel more broadly. It’s not about feeling good every second of every work day, but it is about experiencing mostly positive feelings about your job.
Just to make it clear: We think employee engagement is a useful concept and we are not arguing against it. We just want to argue that of the two, it is much more effective for a company to focus on making their employees happy than on making them engaged. Here are the four main reasons why.
Whether you’re looking to create employee happiness or engagement, you need your employees to be active partners in the process. This is not something you can do to them without their active and willing participation or (even worse) against their will.
Employee engagement, being directly related to commitment and effort, is a very easy sell to managers and companies. Every manager wants employees who are passionate about their work and go above and beyond to do a better job.
But seen from the employee side, it’s a much harder sell. When a manager states that they want their employees to “be more engaged in their work” or “give more discretionary effort” it can easily come off as if they are simply demanding more passion and work from people, without giving anything back.
On the other hand, when a manager sets a goal to create a happy workplace, the benefits are immediately clear to employees and it’s much easier to engage them in the process.
Ironically, happiness can be a harder sell towards managers, many of whom are skeptical of “all that happiness crap”. This video covers their most common objections and why they’re wrong:
How engaged can someone really be if they’re unhappy at work?
This happens. One of our International Partners, Sheona McGraw of Cloud 9 to 5 in Canada has seen it first hand:
Having worked in a number of charities, non-profit orgs and social enterprises, I can tell you that most of these employees are passionate and committed about their org’s cause but unfortunately a lot of the orgs don’t have a very happy work environment and it’s not uncommon at all to find super engaged yet super unhappy employees working in these orgs.
This is something I talk a lot about in my discussions with potential clients. I myself have been in this circumstance a number of times, being super engaged but miserable. And while I performed satisfactorily, had I been happy I would have blown the job out of the water.
A person can be incredibly passionate about their work and totally committed to the workplace, but still be miserable at work. I’ve seen this happen for instance when people are treated badly by their coworkers or manager or when they can’t do their job in a way that satisfies their own professional standards.
In this case, two things can happen:
So even if you want an engaged workforce, you still need to focus on making them happy because engagement without happiness is not sustainable.
Sure, engagement leads to better performance – but given the definition above that includes commitment and extra effort, that’s almost a tautology.
Furthermore, we know from a large amount of research, that happy employees perform much better. Ed Diener, one of the world’s leading happiness researchers summed it up like this:
In the workplace we know that happiness causes more-productive and more-creative workers.
If you know academics, you know how careful they are about using the word “causes.” In this case, we know that happiness at work causes higher:
So employee happiness has been shown to directly cause increased performance.
You’ll notice that both loyalty and discretionary effort were part of the definition of engagement that we presented above.
Given that (as we saw in the previous section) happy employees are more loyal and are more likely to go the extra mile, it’s clear that happiness doesn’t only cause better performance – happiness also directly causes engagement.
Of course, the effects are circular and engagement and happiness will cause each other. But given the results above as well as the fact that engagement cannot last in the absence of happiness, it seems clear to me that happiness causes engagement more than engagement causes happiness.
Gallup does a lot of great work on employee engagement and their Q12 survey is one of my favorite metrics. They also acknowledge that many factors play into engagement, including happiness / well-being, writing:
Leaders have to think about everything from culture to well-being to purpose and meaning — and make it all come to life in a personalized way for employees.
Engagement is a great concept but ignoring employee happiness in the pursuit of engagement makes no sense.
At the very least, sustainable engagement requires happiness at work, meaning you can’t ignore the happiness aspect.
When do people feel “passionate about their work, committed to the workplace and give discretionary effort?” When they’re happy at work!
So if you want engaged employees, focus on making them happy and engagement will follow.
Do financial rewards motivate employees to work better? I really don’t think so.
Companies that use rewards and bonuses to make employees happier and more motivated are largely wasting their money. The promise of a bonus has never really done anything for me personally, and the research in motivation is very clear: Rewarding people for better performance tends to reduce performance. See the book “Payoff” by Dan Ariely for some great real-life studies.
But maybe I’m wrong – it wouldn’t exactly be the first time :)
So I recently asked this question on twitter and LinkedIn:
Have you ever received a bonus or other monetary reward at work, that was given in a way that made you happier at work and/or more motivated? If so, what about the reward was it that worked for you?
The replies clearly show that we can’t completely dismiss the use of monetary rewards and bonuses at work – and they also reveal when they actually make people happier and more motivated.
Here are 5 lessons from the replies I got.
One factor that showed up in may comments was that surprising rewards work much better than expected ones. This is a crucial finding because many companies promise certain rewards when employees achieve certain goals, making the rewards expected and reducing their effectiveness.
Here are some examples:
“My husband recently received an unexpected bonus, for exceptional service. It was not asked for, not expected but welcomed with great warmth and happiness.”
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“I have this clear recollection of my former manager handing me a gift certificate for a lunch. Compared to my other bonuses and incentives this was nothing – in a monetary perspective and yet it made a huge impression the reason being that it was unexpected. He just wanted to appreciate my work.”
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“Yes I have – the fact that it came out of the blue and was accompanied with a handwritten card from the bosses meant all the difference in the world.”
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“One time. It came as a complete surprise (as opposed to those ‘entitled’ bonuses) + some nice personal words to go with the $$$.”
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“It came as a surprise, so was a reward rather than incentive, and with a genuine, and face to face, conversation about why it was being given.”
People also found rewards motivating when they were given as recognition for good and meaningful work.
“Yes, when it was clearly linked to the result we as a team had made. Everybody got paid from the hard work and because we succeeded. Being part of a result and seeing that in your wallet – I believed made us happier.”
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“I was fortunate to work for an executive who understood the value of appreciation. The company didn’t have a bonus system as such (at least not for my level) – yet, from time to time, when I had done a particularly good job – he would come to my office, give me feedback on the extra value of this effort, an gave me 3 bottle of good red wine, paid for a pair of expensive sunglasses I was looking at, … smaller tings like that.
He frequently gave med feedback on what I have done – but sometimes, it was just a tad more than that – and it made me feel good and truly appreciated … and really wanting to do what it takes to experience that again.
Oh – by the way – the executive was not my immediate manager, but the managers manager.”
Many people mentioned that they’d gotten rewards that were given as a good experience rather than as a monetary amount.
“At one of my workplaces the bonus system allowed me to study an MBA. The reward system was built on pretty simple financial KPIs and depending on the result my employer would pay for the following year’s tuition….that affected my motivation positively.”
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“Yes – anything you can share with your family is great! They also ‘suffer’ from us working hard :-)”
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“Good question Alexander ! I worked during 5 years for a Hotel group chain in the world, with work contracts of limited duration for each mission. One day, between two contracts, my manager offered me (to reduce my waiting of my working visa for Kenya and to thank me), a free Flight where I wanted in the world. 10 days after, i left with my best friend for Mauritius island !! Beautiful reward of my work : to offer me a moment to rest !!!”
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“Looking back I am more happy with a dinner my great boss gave me many years ago than a loyalty bonus of substantial value from an ahole years later.”
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“Does “go on vacation and bring me the receipts – you look like you need it” count? If so, yes – and what worked was the fact that this particular boss noticed that I was run down and ragged and did, in fact, sorely need a vacation, and that I was going to find an excuse not to go unless she did something about that, too. Also, I couldn’t really afford a trip at the time, so the money did actually matter, too.”
This one ain’t exactly a mystery – if employees need money, giving them money makes them happy.
“A friend of mine once told my managers manager that I was so tired (I was working 14-16 hours a day, seven days a week for 3 months) I had fallen asleep in the cinema watching the latest 007 movie (so, not something by krzysztof kieslowski). My managers manager said that he’d reimburse my ticket. I thought nothing of it, but got a note from him saying that there’s money for a dinner also, and then a 2.500 USD extraordinary payout. It made a huge difference and impact, I felt really appreciated (because money was a factor in my life back then). Today, it wouldn’t make any big changes.”
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“Once, when I was young and working at my first real job. When Christmas arrived I got a box full of Christmas related food and snacks. This was also my first time living on my own – I expected nothing and was very happy to get food and snacks that I could not afford on my own back then.”
I got so many replies from people who said that they had never received a financial reward in a way that worked for them. In some cases, they even made things worse. Here are some of the replies:
“I have also tried being incentivized where it felt more like a stressful factor than an incentive. I think – for me at least – the task has to hold meaning and the reward has to be at a reasonable level to balance out the extra effort.”
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“Never. I was always rewarded with recognition, a new problem to solve and more responsibility. The pay was always more than I wanted to spend, and I never thought about it”
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“Nope. Did once get one so small the entire team thought of giving it back. As a reward for our efforts it was actually a demotivating insult. No bonus is better than a belittling bonus IMO.”
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“Yes, momentarily. Because the amount was substantial. Another time, yes, because I didn’t expect it. Both times, the feeling lasted about a week….. then it was ‘same old, same old’🤨”
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“Honestly, no, I don’t think I have. I’ve valued the money, and sometimes felt trapped in my role and retained by the expectation of receiving it, but not felt motivated by it. Achievement, thank yous, helping my team, making things better and purpose all motivate me more.”
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“Only ever earned sales commission as a bonus, and never has it had any effect on my motivation or behaviour.”
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“In the past I’ve received a surprise bonus at the end of a big project and it was a moment of happiness and motivation. “Hey, these people appreciate the work we did!” But when the next three projects finished up and no such bonus appeared, it was demoralizing in that the Board appeared to have lost interest or appreciation for the years of work that went into the projects.”
Monetary rewards are one tool that companies can use to motivate employees and keep them happy – it’s just that for some companies it’s the only tool they use reliably and that is doomed to fail.
If your employees need money, giving them money will make them happier. If they don’t, you might find it much more effective to:
And note that these three can easily be combined, making rewards that much more effective.
And ESPECIALLY note that if when companies give “bad” rewards they can actually backfire and make employees less motivated. How dumb is that?
I have a question for you for an article I’m writing: Have you ever received a bonus or other monetary reward at work, that was given in a way that made you happier at work and/or more motivated? A BRILLIANT study found that:
When given a choice between cooperating or competing, chimpanzees choose to cooperate five times more frequently.
And also that:
The chimpanzees used a variety of enforcement strategies to overcome competition, displacement and freeloading, which the researchers measured by attempted thefts of rewards.
These strategies included the chimpanzees directly protesting against others, refusing to work in the presence of a freeloader, which supports avoidance as an important component in managing competitive tendencies, and more dominant chimpanzees intervening to help others against freeloaders.
This indicates that cooperation is hardwired into humans on a biological level by evolution.
Which makes you wonder why so many workplaces heavily emphasize competition over cooperation.
Amy Wrzesniewski is a professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management. Her main interest is how people find meaning at work which is a fascinating topic and her work has been a huge inspiration to our work here at Woohoo inc. We recently had a chance to talk to her about it and here’s the transcript that reveals some real surprises about what makes us happy and motivated at work.
Read the interview below and learn:
One of the main distinctions that you’ve found in your work is, that there are three ways people find meaning in their work. They can see it as a “job”, as a “career” or a “calling”. That’s a brilliant concept. Could you please explain each of those.
Sure. This is together with many collaborators and co-authors of mine. We’ve for a long time been interested in understanding the nature of the relationship between people and the work they do, with the idea that it isn’t necessarily a property of the job itself, how people think about or connect with their work.
So we’ve developed a measure and have studied people in lots of different kinds of occupations and have found that people, regardless of occupation, can see the work that they do as a “job” where the focus is primarily financial, where you get a paycheck out and the work is primarily about the economic exchange with the organization more than about the work itself.
Or people can see the work that they do more as a “career” where the focus is on advancement within that occupation or within that field, within the same organization or across different organizations over time. For people who have a stronger career orientation, their focus is on advancement and moving forward, with the accompanying increases in prestige and power and so on that come with that.
The last orientation we study is the “calling” orientation, where people are working not for career advancement or for financial gain, but instead for the fulfilment or the meaning that the work itself brings to the individual. People who see their work more as a calling see the work as an end in itself that is deeply fulfilling and regardless of the kind of work they’re doing, they tend to see the work as having a societal benefit.
That is absolutely fascinating. How common is each of these orientations. How many people fall into each of these three buckets?
We looked across wide swaths of different occupations and what we find is about a third, a third, and a third of people, one of these is strongest for them.
Interestingly, if someone strongly identifies with one, they won’t strongly endorse the others. We know this both from a sort of vignette kind of paragraph measure that we use but also lots of single item measures that we use to study this.
If you look in, say, caring professions where you would imagine that there are more people who see the work as a calling, you do find that. The propensity to have a calling is stronger there, but interestingly, it isn’t necessarily universal. People who are engaging very much in work that we might idealize in our culture to be callings, may very well see that work as just a job or as a way to advance to become, say, head of the department or something like this.
Is there a difference between low wage and high wage jobs or low education/high education? There might be a perception that you might find more people with a calling orientation among doctors or engineers and maybe less so among fast food employees serving burgers.
It’s a great question. What we find generally is that people who have stronger calling orientation tend to have higher incomes and tend to be more educated.
However, if you think about the kind of work that people go into, if you are coming from a level of income or a level of the education and educational opportunities that would allow you to pursue something that you find to be more meaningful, you would expect generally that people in that group would be more likely to have found something that they feel is a calling.
What’s interesting to me, very interesting in my opinion, is that even when you look at jobs that are at the lower end of the educational, income or status hierarchy, you also find people who see their work as a calling, just as you find people at the top of the education and income hierarchy who see their work as just a job.
And they look more similar to each other on the basis of their approach to the work they do, because that predicts how happy they are in their work, how satisfied they are with their work, and how satisfied they are with their lives.
So even across the income and education spectrum, identification with these orientations and the pattern of relationships between the orientation and people’s well-being is the same regardless.
So you don’t need a university degree or a CEO title to find this calling orientation.
No. In fact, people we’ve studied who are doing groundskeeping work, laborers, people doing janitorial work - again work that in society we tend to view as being perhaps not necessarily as meaningful – can be experienced in incredibly meaningful ways and seen as a calling by people who are doing that work. Just as you also see people who do that work who see it as just a job or who see it as a career where they want to move up and say manage people who do this kind of work.
It’s not the province of the work itself it really is a function of the relationship between the person and the work that they’re doing.
Interesting. That means that it is accessible to most people. Do you have any great examples? Have you met any people in, which on the face of it are low status jobs, but who had this calling orientation?
Yes. You know, people who work as trash collectors, who collect the garbage in the town in which they work, who experience their work as being critically important to society, who feel that every day they are beautifying the world by removing the things that we don’t need and taking them away and who feel that this again this work is something that the entire region couldn’t function without it, which is true. And it’s work that gets them outside, they’re in touch with people who live in the town, they’re in touch with nature, and see the work in very positive terms. And certainly much more positive terms than people who study work from the perspective of the design of the job would have expected.
Same thing in a study that I did with colleagues of mine, looking at people who clean hospital rooms for their job. That involves a lot of dealing with cleaning products and seeing pain and suffering since you’re in a medical environment. Again, there were people who saw the work very much as a job. It’s a way to get benefits, make a paycheck, and so on. But there were also people who saw that work as a way to fulfil a calling, where they could play a role in the lives of the people who were in the hospital. They’re doing the same kinds of duties, they have the same kinds of job descriptions, but they redefine it in terms of how they think about what the work is, why it is there, and what it is they’re doing, in very different ways, that again is reflected in a much deeper enjoyment of the work and sense of importance of the work to other people.
Is it fair to say that people with the calling orientation generally are happier in their jobs?
Yes. People who have a calling orientation, regardless of the kind of work they’re doing, have a significantly higher job satisfaction and also significantly higher life satisfaction.
It’s not, again, a province of what the work is or what the job is, it’s how the person is relating to that work, how they think about what it is they’re doing there.
And what about the other two groups? Who is the least happy?
You know it’s an interesting question. When we had originally begun to study this question, we had thought that the job orientation would perhaps be the least happy, because there’s less of their identity invested in the work, because it’s simply more of a financial exchange than anything else.What we find, to my surprise, is that people who see the work as a job or a career are equally less satisfied with the work and are equally less satisfied with their lives.
In the research I have done, one of the things that I wonder about is, in the job orientation, there’s a focus on the instrumental; it’s a means to an instrumental end. In a career orientation, there’s also an instrumental end. It’s just what that end is, it’s different. It’s about advancing, it’s about increasing your status and so on.
My sense is that they’re more similar than we might think. When it’s focused on instrumental ends, or things that are about the self, it seems to carry less meaning for people.
There’s a more recent paper done by Jochen Menges and his colleagues, Grant and others are on this paper as well, that look at people who see the work more as a job, but they’re engaging in this job as a way to give income or pay to their family members. This makes the work much more meaningful to them, again because it’s not so much about the self. That’s been the surprise of this, that job and career are more similar than we might think.
That’s absolutely fascinating. So what are some ways to cultivate his calling orientation? What are some things I can do for myself as an employee somewhere to achieve it? And what can the organization or the manager do for the employees to have that calling to feel that sense of meaning and calling orientation?
It’s a great question and I think it’s a complicated question.
This may be somewhat of a surprising thing for me to say, but there are many people for whom work is not a domain where they are seeking this kind of experience. They have put a lot of their identity, of where they see themselves fulfilling their purpose, outside of the domain of work. So the place to start off with, is to understand, is the employee seeking this kind of meaning in their work?
Many of them are, and are not finding it. I think for them, the best thing for these employees, would be to think about how they might act upon the design of their jobs. In other work I’ve done with with Jane Dutton and Justin Berg and other colleagues, we’ve looked at the practice of “job crafting.” How is it that people in the job they’re in, change elements of the tasks or of the relationships or interactions in a way that brings more of the kinds of things that they find to be useful, that they care about, passions that they feel into the work. I think this can transform the meaning of the work. And it’s very agentic, it’s done by the employee. That’s probably the best path for this within the job you have if it’s not possible to, say, move into a job that feels more like a calling.
For managers, this is somewhat tricky. Job crafting is a bottom-up activity, it’s an employee based activity. So rather than, say, advising managers of organizations to try to design jobs so that they’ll feel like callings, I think the best thing that they can do is create environments where people feel empowered to make changes to the kinds of work they’re doing, while obviously fulfilling their responsibilities to the organization right? You have to keep doing what it is that the organization has hired you to do. But can you approach that in a different way? Can you spend some more time in particular aspects of the tasks that are engaging to you? Can you build relationships in directions that, again, sort of will infuse the work with more meaning?
I think giving people permission to do this, and encouraging them to do this while fulfilling their duties to the organization, can be a very powerful and supportive move that managers and organizations can make.
This reminds me of the huge trend right now in self-managed organizations where you give employees more freedom. In a lot of these organizations, you’re not hired to do a job, you’re hired because you’re a great person with great skills, and then you have to create your own job. That would basically open the door for more of what you’re describing.
Yes, absolutely. I think even in organizations that we’ve studied, where people have a lot of latitude over how it is they’re spending their time and energy, what’s interesting is that over time even when you’ve defined it yourself, as time passes you move into this sort of more crystallized definition of the job. So even though it’s a job design you created, people can end up treating that job design as very static where it’s a set of things they must do and so on.
So even for people who have had the opportunity to design it themselves, we would encourage them to revisit this and think about “okay well how and where could you revisit this, to make it a more optimal way of expressing what it is you care most about, what it is that you find most meaningful, in a way that brings a lot of value to you in terms of the meaning that you’re finding in the work but also a lot of value to the organization. And make it an ongoing process not just a one-off design.
Fascinating. The reality is that even if we do see our work as a calling, we still do it for the money, okay? Unless you’re born to filthy rich parents, you have to work and you’re dependent on the paycheck. So these motivations, to some degree, have to coexist for most of us. You did a study recently on how they affect each other. Could you talk a little about the West Point study?
Yes, absolutely. So together with a number of colleagues, Barry Schwartz, Tom Colditz and others who supported this study, we studied about 10,000 West Point cadets. We followed them for a period of up to 14 years and the first thing we were interested in studying at West Point was what was the nature of their motivation for attending.
It’s a huge undertaking to make this commitment. You’re in a very intensive and rigorous academic environment and also military environment for four years, and following that time you are a commissioned officer for five years. So it’s a nine year commitment that people who are 18 or 19 years old are making.
You might imagine that all of them go because they want to serve their country and it’s about more internal motives about service and so on. But there’s a lot of variance as to why people are there. Some of them are there because it’s a free education that pays a small stipend. Some of them are there because they know that after they’re nine years of service they can leave and they will be likely to be employed and very attractive to organizations where they could have a rewarding career.
If you think about it, people who’ve gone through West Point and have become officers and so on really truly know how to lead. They’ve got a great education. So some of the people who go are there primarily because they know there will be a big career payoff later. So that particular motive we characterize as more of an instrumental motive. We studied them upon their arrival to West Point.
They rated all of these different reasons for why it was they undertook this course of action and we were interested in studying the question of whether one motivations was fine but maybe having two or three different motivations could be even better because then you have more legs to your stool. There are more reasons, perhaps, propping you up for why it is you’re there.
But what we found is something that has gotten also support in economics and psychology. Some people are motivated by internal reasons, things that are more akin to a calling. I’m doing this because it’s an end in itself, in this case, I’m here because I want to be an army officer, so that the aim of the institution and all of these activities is my aim. I’m not doing it for some other outcome that will follow from this – like being hired by fortune 500 companies or making more money later.
So we looked at that internal motive and we also look at this instrumental motive of going to West Point because you hoped to be in a more high-powered career later on. And we found that in every case the stronger the internal motivation of the cadet, the more likely they were to have positive outcomes over time. Those positive outcomes were:
And what’s interesting is multiple motives. For those cadets who who held these internal motives but where that instrumental motive was also apparent, the stronger the instrumental motive was, the poorer the outcomes were for each of these different categories. And so it undermined in essence the positive effect of the internal motivation on whether they made it through West Point, how well they did as army officers, and then how long they stuck it out in the military.
We feel this is really important because what it means is in anything we do, whether it’s being a student, whether it’s our jobs you know anything we do, we may have internal reasons for doing it, but if you do well in it, you will get instrumental rewards. You’ll get pay raises, you’ll get accolades, you’ll get these other kinds of things.
The distinction that we would make is between being pleased that you’re getting these things, versus being motivated by them, so they become the reason why you’re there. Like you said, most of us need to work unless we’re independently wealthy. It’s a given that we must work and we do need to pay attention to salary or the wage rate or whatever it might be. But make sure it doesn’t become your reason for being there. Keep it this secondary thing that you must sort of attend to, but it’s not a motive
We feel the power of internal motivation or the power of a calling orientation can really carry people to a different level of job satisfaction. In the case of West Point it drives performance and excellence as well. I think there’s a hugely important lesson there for companies, because they constantly try to tie performance to rewards.
What your what your study underlines, is that whenever you do that, the instrumental goal will crowd out the internal goal over time and make you focus more on the external motivator – the reward – than on the internal motivation, the calling, on the purpose of what they’re doing, right?
Yes. I think the best advice I could give to organizations would be to pay employees as well as you can. Then move the emphasis from that. The more that organizations narrate for people that the reason they’re there is to be making money, and what they want when things go well is more money, and that it all comes down to, you know, that they’re working there because they have these instrumental goals, the harder it is for someone to sustain in the face of that the feeling why it is they’re there, that has to do with the ethos of doing the work itself or the work as a focus of you know striving for excellence or wanting to accomplish the things that happen naturally as a result of the work, whether that’s teaching students or cleaning a street or cleaning a patient’s room.
If you are removing the focus from that and constantly reminding people that they’re really there because they’re getting money, I think both organizations but also individuals suffer.
We have now published all the amazing talks from our 2017 International Conference on Happiness at Work.
You can watch every single talk from the event above or at this link.
And if you think that looks awesome, join us in Copenhagen on May 17+18 2018 for the next conference. Sign up here to be notified when ticket sales start.
Work has moved from cow to computer, but workplaces still favour early risers and an industrial-age view of productivity.
Camilla Kring has a PhD in Work-Life Balance and as owner of Super Navigators, makes workplaces happier by increasing the Work-Life Balance of their employees. She is specialized in creating flexible work cultures that support our differences in family forms, work forms and biological rhythms.
This is her talk from the International Conference on Happiness at Work 2017 in Copenhagen. Flexibility is among the keys to well-being, and management must have the courage to address the flexibility of their company’s work culture because culture determines whether employees have the courage to make use of flexibility.
The first step is to set people free from 9-5 and that work is something that only can take place at the office. Work is not a place – it’s an ongoing activity. Second, focus more on results and less on visibility. Third, give people the tools to improve their individual Work-Life Balance.
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.