This article was written by Woohoo inc’s newest employee Thomas Christensen.

Have you ever wondered why you have to walk all the way to the back end of the supermarket to get milk? Or why there are mountains of candy close to the checkout, where you always have to stand in line and wait? It is a carefully planned ploy to ensure you walk through the entire store to get to your everyday groceries, thus increasing your exposure to other items, which makes you more likely to buy something more than milk. Similarly, candy is placed where it is most likely that you will stand around bored for the slow eternity that is queuing in the supermarket. This increases the chance of you given in to your urges and purchase some candy.

You are probably familiar with the term “Nudging”; it has been thrown around a lot in relation to health initiatives and government legislation. Nudging is the latest branch on the tree of buzzwords, thus nudging has plunged behavioural science into the mainstream. Numerous articles and books has been written on what nudging is, so we will not go deeply into that. However, we will discuss just how useful nudging is when it comes to workplace happiness.

The main thing to be aware off with nudging is that it is not a magical solution, obviously. At its most basic level, nudging is about choice management. The idea is that you present the choices available to your customers, clients or people in general, in such a way that a particular choice or set of choices seems more desirable. This sounds easier than it is. The nudge should be almost invisible, and non-invasive. Plastering large brightly coloured signs around the office with quotes on how to be happy, is not close to being nudging – nor is it likely to work.

Because nudging revolves around choices, you will have to break down complex behavioural patterns, into smaller more manageable chunks. Looking at workplace happiness, it is quite complex. Being happy at work requires a large number of things to go right, as happiness is an inherently complex behavioural pattern. Luckily, you can break down workplace happiness into two categories of effect: results and relationships. Watch the video below for more information.

This makes nudging for workplace happiness much easier.

However, one of the most severe limitations of implementing nudging, and other behavioural sciences, is their symbiotic nature. What we mean is that nudging can only enhance an existing process. It cannot create a new. Let us image that you want to create an environment where there is an added focus on results. You want to encourage employees or co-workers to share their results, but in order to nudge them towards your goal, there has to be a process in place that you can nudge them towards using. Which means that in order to use nudging you need to have a very good idea of how people interpret the processes in your organisation. This symbiotic nature also means that it is incredibly difficult to give advice on how to nudge people towards more workplace happiness within the confines of a specific organisation.

Nevertheless, we do have some tips.

• Start by determine whether to focus on results or relationships. Workplace happiness can be complex, so it can help to focus on one of the two. Establish a specific goal you want to solve within one of the two areas. Such as “how do we make people celebrate their victories?”
• List the processes your organisation have in the chosen subject. If your organisation is lacking in processes that can facilitate either results or relationships – you have bigger problems than nudging can fix.
• Once you have both chosen an area of focus and have a list of the existing processes, you can begin to examine them both. You need to focus your attention on how people interpret these processes. Their original or intended purpose is less relevant compared to the interpretation.
• Then you can rate your internal process based on which one is most beneficial to your goal.
• Using your customers or employees sense of purpose and expectations, you can begin to shape how you want them to perceive the choices you present to them.

Now comes the fun part

As you have defined your goal such as “people should spend more time in my store” and a list of processes such as “people mainly walk around in my store”. You can start combining them to find nudging solutions. However, nudging has to be almost invisible and non-invasive. Therefore, you cannot remodel your store into a labyrinth and expect it to be anything less than totally awesome.

Unfortunately, you will probably not sell more. The key is that your costumers or employees have a sense of purpose and a set of expectations. You do not mind walking 20 meters more in a supermarket, because you expect there to be walking and browsing when entering a supermarket.

Let us look at the example presented above, how we nudge employees to “celebrate their results”. A key component of the results-oriented part of workplace happiness. For the sake of argument, let us assume that you have several processes that highlights the results of your employees, but no one uses them. In order find out which one is more likely to yield the results you want, you examine how your employees interpret the processes already in place, so you can rank them. Sometimes the process does not have the desired effect, for example, having a “scoreboard of achievements” where your employees can list their achievements could be interpreted as being a place to brag. Instead, your employees might celebrate their successes with small post-its on their keyboards, because they interpret this process so be more personal and sincere. The point is then to either reframe the “scoreboard of achievement” to make it less about bragging, or to try and bring to light all the praise left on post-its stuck to peoples keyboards.

The main take away is that is nudging for increased workplace happiness requires awareness of 3 things.

1. Processes available to your employees/customers
2. Knowledge of what your employees/customers expect
3. Knowledge of how your employees/customers interpret your processes

This article was written by Tais Lyager Rasmussen and Woohoo inc’s newest employee Thomas Christensen.

In a previous blog post we explored the concept of synthetic happiness at work and how it can be a powerful tool to relieve the stress of having to achieve. In this post, we will explore more deeply how synthetic happiness or personal happiness might be a sorely needed way of thinking in society today.

To recap the previous article:

1. Synthetic happiness is what you make when you do not get what you want. This is in contrast to natural happiness that is when you get what you want.
2. Synthetic happiness is just as real and genuine as natural happiness. Having many choices is great for natural happiness but bad for synthetic happiness because choices hinders the internal validation process that occurs when you are “stuck” with something.
3. This means that natural happiness, being reliant and influenced primarily on external forces and validation, can safely be called external happiness.
4. Synthetic happiness in contrast, can be labelled as internal happiness as it is reliant and influenced primarily by internal validation.
5. We ended on the idea that the relationship between the two could be a driver behind overall happiness.

This article will explore how difficult it can be to navigate in a world skewed towards external happiness.

In today’s society, there have never been more opportunities available than there is now. The possibilities in what career you can pursue, hobbies you can take up, clothe you can wear, TV-shows you can watch and the list goes on. All of these options provide you with the opportunity to design and create whatever life you want. However, this large amount of possibilities ends up becoming a problem as you might experience choice overload. Choice overload is when an individual’s decision-making process is hampered by too many options. When a decision has too many alternatives, it becomes so complex that it is impossible to rationally evaluate every option against each other. When this happens, people become overwhelmed and might chose not to choose at all. This can lead to stress and potential regret from believing that you have chosen the wrong option.

When we combine the idea of internal happiness with choice overload, you get a society where individuals’ decision-making processes are being sabotaged by the number of options they have. This results in potential stress and regret but it is also a terrible foundation for internal happiness. As proposed earlier, choice is good for external happiness but bad for internal happiness.

How do you train yourself to appreciate internal happiness in a world geared towards highlighting external happiness? How can you make yourself be happy where you are right now, when everywhere you look you are expected to grow, to surpass, to go somewhere and buy something; in short use the endless possibilities there exist.

Social media is generally a wonderful thing, but it can be easy to look at other peoples’ adventures and consider them missed opportunities for you. It is natural and intrinsic to human nature to compare ourselves to other people, but what is really happening is that you are comparing yourself to a highly stylized ideal presented through a media of your choice, not an actual person.

This is also true in work situations where the idea of growth is ingrained in the way we think of ourselves in the workspace. In a performance culture, you are compared to other people and the benchmarks of other people. Your own contributions are rarely seen in comparison to yourself, they are most likely seen in comparison to your coworkers or company benchmarks. This could rob you of the ability to be satisfied with your own work.

With all of that in mind, here are 4 tips for living in an environment skewed towards external happiness

1. When contributing to a shared project at work, or anywhere else, you should not continuously compare your efforts with other contributors. Instead, you should focus on the work you have contributed with and compare with your own previous work.

2. A small dosage of nostalgia is advantageous. Try to key significant memories to items, this adds value to them, and makes you less likely to feel the need to replace them.

3. Try always placing yourself in a situation where you do not have the possibility to change your choices. This will initiate the internal validation process and act as a catalyst for internal happiness.

4. Be critical of the notion that happiness is getting what you want. The world might be geared for external happiness but at the end of the day happiness is a perceived experience, and whether it comes from getting what you want or enjoying what you get, it is still reliant on each individual’s own perception. The difference is that learning to like what you get is much more stable than getting what you want, as it does not rely on external forces for validation.

Related posts

• Natural and synthetic happiness at work – here’s why you need both.
• Top 10 signs you’re unhappy at work.
• How to deal with a bad boss.