Now that 2008 is nearly over, it makes a lot of sense to reflect on the year that passed. Unfortunately, most people do this by looking back and making a tally of everything that went wrong. The things they should have done. The goals they should have reached. The progress that didn’t come.

I think you will learn much more if you turn this approach upside-down, so here’s my suggestion for a new-year’s exercise in happiness at work.

Simply because the best way to be happy at work in 2009 is to find out what worked for you in 2008 and get yourself more of that.

So think back on your working life in 2008 and answer the following 10 questions. It’s important that you write down your answers – it helps you to reflect more deeply about the questions.

1. What went really well for you at work in 2008?
2. What did you do that you’re proud of?
3. Who have you helped out?
4. How have you grown and developed professionally?
5. How have you grown and developed personally at work?
6. Who has really appreciated your work?
7. Who has helped you out and been there for you?
8. Who have you admired at work in 2008?
9. What have been some fun moments at work in 2008?
10. Which 5 things from 2008 would you like to have more of in 2009?

If you like you can share your answers in a comment here.

Have fun – and have a happy 2009 at work!

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Here’s an important thing to know about happiness:

“Happiness is a social emotion. It’s an emotion that we derive from social events… Happiness is not simply about me.”

A fascinating study published online yesterday in the British Medical Journal has confirmed what we already know, namely that happiness is contagious and that we are all affected by the moods of the people around us.

But his study goes a step further by mapping those connections and influences among nearly 5,000 individuals over 20 years and the

Here’s the skinny:

Fowler and Christakis were able to map the social networks of 4,739 individuals with data from the Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing cardiovascular study. Participants in that study listed contact information for their closest friends, family members and neighbors, connecting the pair of researchers to more than 50,000 social ties.

The researchers used the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Index — a standard set of questions psychologists use to measure happiness — to analyze the cheeriness of the study participants.

They found that when someone gets happy, that person’s friend experiences a 25 percent increased chance of becoming happy. A friend of that friend experiences a nearly 10 percent chance of increased happiness, and a friend of that friend has a 5.6 percent increased chance of happiness.

That means a stranger’s good mood can do more to lift your spirits than a $5,000 raise, which only increased happiness 2 percent, Fowler and Christakis found.

Whoah!

So what about bad moods? Surprisingly (to me anyway), this study found that sadness is less contagious:

Sadness doesn’t infect a social group as reliably happiness does, researchers found. Within some friendship networks, sadness had a significant effect on the members of the group, but on others, the effect was very small.

Why? Because, the study says, sadness makes you pull away from others, thus giving them less exposure to your bad mood.

This is really interesting with respect to bad moods at work – because at work, if you have a really rotten day, there’s really no way to pull back from social interactions, meetings and conversations, exposing your co-workers the full brunt of your bad mood.

Related

• The Feel Factor – Why no workplace can afford to ignore how people feel at work.
• The Connnection Culture
• How to deal with anger at work.
• Top 10 reasons why constant complaining at work is so toxic.

A while back, I wrote a blog post about dealing with constant complainers. The main point is that offering possible solutions rarely works on inveterate complainers because they’re not really after suggestions – they’re after empathy.

Well, one reader tried it out, and found that… well, read it for yourself:

Holy Crap it works. My wife is a constant complainer and when ever I voice my opinion or offer a suggestion she gets mad. I literally used what was suggested in the article, I said, “You know, that sounds terrible. I don’t know how you deal with all of these problems.”

She thought I was being super sweet and understanding… to make a long story short, I got laid. It was worth the effort.

I’m still laughing about that one. And if this whole “happiness at work” gig ever goes sour I’m going into marriage counselling instead :o)

My good friends at jiibe have come up with a really cool little game that let’s you play God with another person’s career. Mwah-ha-ha-ha.

In this career version of a matchmaker TV show, you first watch a short video where job seeker Claire introduces herself and her career dreams. You then see three suitors (ie. three workplaces) describe themselves. Your job is to figure out where Claire would fit in best.

Go play Connection at jiibe.com. There ARE prizes :o)

We’re all different and every companies is different. One person’s ideal workplaces is another person’s living hell. Jiibe helps you look at that.

It’s really simple – the website asks you a series of questions, and you tell it how things are at your current company and how you’d ideally like them to be.

At the end you get a description of your ideal corporate culture and a list of the companies that match it best – based not on how those companies define themselves but on how other jiibe users rated their workplaces.

Go try jiibe. My ideal culture is:

consensus
encouraging
empowering
improvising
innovating
fun
flat
cooperative
transparent

What’s yours?

I got this in an email today:

You know, if we all lived in a comic book, your super power would be making people happy. You really do have a knack.

Thanks Greg, that would be my super power of choice :o)

Interestingly, though I am a comic book fan, I can’t think of a single superhero or -villain who has that particular power. There are plenty that can generate fear – but none that have happiness as their primary talent.

Maybe the time has come for… Happyman!

Another email came in from Rodney North from Equal Exchange who also spoke at the best business conference ever (WorldBlu Live in New York):

I just wanted you to know that one, good thing that I definitely got from the WorldBlu conference was your talk. More specifically it was the importance of making eye contact, and maybe a touch, and saying — and really meaning — “good morning” to my colleagues.

It has, of course, made a positive difference for me, and I think to others, too.

It’s like I always say: Happiness at work is not rocket science. It doesn’t come from reports, strategies, policies or white papers – it comes from the little things that you and I do here and now. Of course stuff like saying good morning and making eye contact is banal – that’s why it works!

Top Dog Live 2008

I spent Tuesday in London at Top Dog Live, an innovation conference arranged by WhatIf Innovation, the world’s largest independent innovation agency.

I’ve been a long-time fan of WhatIf, both for the cool way they do business and for the amazingly nice people who work there, and this event did not disappoint. It was interesting, different, fun, inspiring and worth every penny of the (fairly high) ticket price.

The theme of the event was innovation in tough times. With a recession looming, many businesses are cutting back on innovation and that’s precisely the wrong thing to do. Remember: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

The speakers were many and varied – my favorites included Rachel Mooney, head of HR at Google, Lars Gejrot, head of HR at IKEA, Mike Addison og Procter & Gamble and Wim Roelandts, chairman of the board of Xilinx.

And here’s my main take-away from the day: Though the conference was about innovation, 80% of the talk was about people – and more specifically about making employees happy at work. That’s what they do at Google and IKEA and that’s why they’re innovative.

Furthermore, there was very little talk about compensation schemes, bonuses and stock options and much more focus on praise, recognition, good leadership, openness, trust, freedom and fun in the workplace.

I’ve written about this before. According to research by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, happy people are more creative:

If people are in a good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day.

There seems to be a cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover, an incubation effect, to the next day.

So most of the speakers who could’ve been talking about innovation processes or creativity or brainstorming techniques or reward structures for new ideas were basically focuses on making people happy at work, knowing that that will make them more creative.

I like it :o)

Related posts

• Happy companies change more effectively.
• The Feel Factor – why no workplace can afford to ignore how people feel.
• Death to job titles.