Archive for Blog – Page 17

The Value of Happiness: How Employee Well-Being Drives Profits

Do you have any idea how happy I was to see my January/February 2012 issue of the Harvard Business Review with this cover? “The Value of Happiness: How Employee Well-Being Drives Profits.” My good cheer was palpable. This further confirms all that I have learned about the Science of Happiness at Work and the Performance-Happiness Model.

The issue has several articles that make good points.

The Economics of Well-Being: This article points out how GNP and GDP (which measure wealth by income generated) don’t take into account the unpaid good in society (volunteering, child rearing, etc.) yet do include the paid “bad” such as the money generated by building prisons, paying lawyers for divorces, etc. It talks about metrics like the Human Development Index (we’re 4th after Norway, Australia and the Netherlands) and Human Development, Adjusted for Inequality (we don‘t place). The main gist of the article is about the history of how well-being intersects with economics and what direction it’s headed. Good news: it’s headed toward looking more closely at happiness and quality of life as indicators of wealth. The countries of Bhutan and Great Britain are on the leading edge of that new measurement.

The Science Behind the Smile: Researchers are now measuring happiness and defining what really makes people happy. It’s not what you think. Yes, people who are rich, in a good relationship, actively participating in their church and healthy are happier overall. But events like getting a promotion, a new house or car or acing an exam only create more happiness for about three months. The frequency of positive experiences is more important than the intensity. And at work, what really contributes most to happiness is feeling appropriately challenged—when you’re striving to achieve goals that are ambitious but not out of reach. Managers take note: happier workers are more productive and creative. Years of research on rewards and punishment present a very clear finding: rewards work better.

Creating Sustainable Performance: “If you give your employees the chance to learn and grow, they’ll thrive—and so will your organization.” How do you create an environment where employees feel that they are learning, achieving their potential and contributing to something that matters? Do all of the following:

  • Give them decision-making discretion.
  • Share information.
  • Minimize incivility.
  • Offer performance feedback.

These four tactics work together to create a culture where your employees can thrive. This mindset is contagious. And drives better performance in a sustainable way.

Positive Intelligence: More research shows that when people work with a positive mindset, every business outcome shows improvement. That includes greater productivity, creativity, customer service and sales, and less sick time and turnover. And while we believe that happiness is mainly determined by genetics and environment, there is much that we can do to increase our levels and frequency of happiness. Three activities the author recommends:

  • Develop a habit that trains your brain to be happier (i.e., meditate at your desk for 2 minutes, exercise for 10 minutes, write a positive message to someone in your social support network or write down three things each day that you are grateful for). See my blog on What Went Well for more details on this.
  • Help your coworkers—research shows that people with high levels of social support reap many benefits including better health, more promotions and better customer experiences.
  • Mitigate stress. Although stress is an inevitable part of work and can sometimes enhance your performance, getting stressed out about things outside of your control is harmful. Next time you are feeling overly stressed, make a list of the things that are causing the stress. Separate these stressors into two types: the things you can change and the things you cannot. Then choose one that you can change and take one concrete step toward mitigating that stressor.

I’d like to help you become happier at work. Start by taking a free assessment at http://tinyurl.com/free-Capiche-survey. Then call me for a complimentary coaching session to explore what you can do to increase your happiness at work—and increase your productivity and value to your company.

 

Change Your Business; Transform Your Life in 2012

With the start of the new year, many of us reflect on areas in which we hope to improve, leading us to a more fulfilled life. Perhaps one of these challenges resonates with you.

  • You are a manager who is trying to improve the performance of a struggling employee.
  • You are unhappy at work and wonder if you’re the problem.
  • You supervise a unit that has been downsized; yet you are challenged with increasing profits and productivity – doing more with less.

Consider hiring an executive coach. A coach can help you evoke excellence in yourself and in others. Don’t worry – coaching isn’t prescriptive; it isn’t someone else telling you what to do (you probably get enough of that already!). Coaching helps you tap into your own inner wisdom. It begins with the shared understanding that you are creative, resourceful, and whole. In other words, you aren’t the problem; you are the solution.

Why hire a coach? A coach will:

  • Provide you with someone outside of your office to work with on sensitive work-related issues
  • Help with goal setting
  • Create accountability for your actions
  • Help you measure your progress toward your goal(s)
  • Provide unbiased perspectives
  • Guide you toward balance, fulfillment, and processes necessary to create an environment for your professional and personal success.

If you are wondering if coaching can help you, take our free happiness at work assessment. There may be areas at work where you could use a little boost. (Take the free assessment here to see how you score.) Then, contact me for a free consultation. You can transform your life, increase your profits, and enhance productivity. I look forward to talking with you.

 

Holiday Festivities Showcase Inspiring Leadership

Last week, I was invited to take part in a local client’s holiday festivities (and I mean festivities)! I am so grateful that I could say yes because it gave me a better understanding of why this company is successful.

During this generous and genuine flutter of festivities (dinner theatre at the Oregon Cabaret Theatre, followed the next day by fun games, gift-giving and a brunch at the Ashland Springs Hotel), I got an even better picture of this company’s culture and leadership. The attendees included corporate office staff, regional theatre managers and several key advisors/vendors including the company attorney, accountant, Coke rep and me. What an honor for me!

This was a time of great happiness and celebration, with much praise and recognition for the years’ accomplishments along with a strategic vision for 2012. I was impressed with the loyalty and desire to perform that this leader has inspired in his team, with many of them being part of the company longer than 5 years, and some for 10, 15 and 20 years.

This leader inspires his team by leading with his own core values of integrity, loyalty, concern for others, accountability and fun. When he learned about my work with the Science of Happiness at Work and the Performance-Happiness Model, he engaged me to work with the corporate team to increase happiness and productivity. Since then, he’s told me that this work has paid off in various ways. In his words:

“Christine has helped me become a better executive. I’m a better listener and I’m handling stress better by realizing when to let things go that I can’t change. During this time of extraordinary challenges in the entertainment business, Christine has helped us come to a common vision, function as a team and communicate better using a shared language. This has made a difference in bringing organization back into the company,” according to John C. Schweiger, chairman and CEO, Coming Attractions Theatres, Inc.

This is the most gratifying thing I can hear. My mission is to spread the Science of Happiness at Work to the masses, helping businesses and organizations create a competitive advantage while doing the right thing for their workforce. Greater profits and doing the right thing DO go hand in hand. Email or call if you’d like a free consultation on what your organization has to gain in terms of happiness and profits.

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http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=809

What Went Well?

What are you grateful for today? What good did you do today? How were you helpful today? What went well today?

How did it feel to answer these questions? (It felt good, didn’t it?)

Most of us get so caught up in what’s going wrong in life that when something good happens, we often overlook it. When our minds are focused on the bad and the wrong we fail to notice the good and the right.

Here’s a little exercise that you can incorporate into your life to help you notice the good more readily and increase your feelings of happiness and gratitude. It’s called “What Went Well,” and while there are many variations, I especially like Marty Seligman’s. He suggests that at the end of each day, you take a few minutes to write down three things that went well. These things don’t need to be earth shattering in importance (“The corner store is carrying a new flavor of ice cream that I’ve been looking for”), but they can be important (“My daughter was accepted at her first-choice university”). Next to each positive event, answer the question “Why did this happen?” For example, if you wrote about your daughter being accepted at her first-choice university, you might write “because she was focused on her goal and took the steps necessary to succeed” or “she was very thoughtful in answering the essay on the admissions application.”

It may seem a little awkward at first to write about positive events in your life, but stick with it. It will get easier. You will begin noticing the positive events as they are happening and have the opportunity to RELISH them. I bet that six months from now, you will be less depressed, happier, more grateful and maybe even addicted to this exercise.

Are you already doing a variation on “What Went Well?” Please tell us about it in a comment below.

References

Seligman, M.E.P. (2011). Flourish. New York, NY: Free Press.

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Naito8 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What You Think About Is What You Think About

A Google search for gratitude + happiness yields 14,600,000 results (in .20 seconds).

Now that in itself is something that I’m grateful for AND it makes me happy. This Thanksgiving season, I explore the connection between gratitude and happiness and how to get more of both.

I’ve noticed that people tend to spend more time thinking about what goes wrong and not enough about what is going right in their lives. People in professions like tax accounting, auditing and law may be even MORE focused on the wrong – the mistakes – because that’s what they are trained and paid to do. To find the wrong and fix it.

What happens when we focus on what’s wrong more than what’s right and good in our lives? Harvard researcher Shawn Achor calls it the “Tetris Effect.” I call it “What You Think About is What You Think About.” Granted, Shawn’s title is a bit catchier, but mine is more descriptive.

Here’s the deal: 27 Harvard students were paid to play Tetris for multiple hours a day, three days in a row. For many days after, the students reported that they couldn’t stop seeing the Tetris shapes everywhere they looked, with their brains trying to re-arrange everything – from buildings and trees on the landscape to cereal boxes on the shelf in the grocery store – so that they would fit together to form a solid line so as to move on to the next level of the video game. Put simply, they couldn’t stop seeing the world as being made up of sequences of Tetris blocks!

This is caused by a normal physical process that actually changes the wiring of the brain. These new neural pathways warped the way these students viewed real-life situations. So when people are focused on something – anything – their brains adapt and hone in on those circumstances and events. A tax accountant may be terrific at her job, but when she brings her way of looking at the world home, she will miss seeing all the good in her life and may be on the road to depression. The same goes for the great attorney – terrific in court, but not so much at home where family members feel like they are participants in a deposition!

So think about what you think about. Make notes. Later this week, I’ll share some proven techniques to help you focus on the good things in life, and this will increase your happiness AND gratitude.

References

Achor, S. (2010). The happiness advantage: The seven principals of positive psychology that fuel success and performance at work. New York, NY: Crown Publishing Group.

Trying to do more with less – less personnel, less cost and less time?


Earlier this week I spoke to a group of human resources professionals from the Rogue Valley about their most pressing challenges. What rose to the top? Finding ways to retain and motivate good employees without increasing payroll. Why is this important? Because their organizations are trying to do more with less – less personnel, less cost and less time.

I shared some startling statistics with them related to retention, sick leave, time on task and energy levels of the employees – and then I tied it to The Performance-Happiness Model.

Fact: The least happy employees take 5+ sick days per year compared with their happiest counterparts, who take .75 days.

Fact: The least happy employees plan to stay on the job for 1 year compared with their happiest counterparts, who plan to stay 5 years.

Fact: The least happy employees focus on task 20 percent of the time compared with their happiest counterparts, who are working productively 80 percent of the time.

Fact: The happiest employees are 180 percent more energized.

An organization of 100 people with an average pay of $40,000 per year can save more than $650,000 per year in sick pay, employee turnover and lost productivity by increasing employee happiness by just one standard deviation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How does an organization do this? By employing The Performance-Happiness Model (see https://capiche.us/services/organizational-development/performance-happiness-model for details).

Contact me if you are interested in seeing if your organization could benefit from using this model. I will provide you with a free team report and consultation. You may be surprised!

Is Happiness a Luxury Small Businesses Can’t Afford?

As I am preparing for next week’s “Leveraging the Science of Happiness at Work” presentation to the Rogue Valley Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), I’m reflecting on a comment a Facebook friend made the other day when I shared results from a Wall Street Journal survey on happiness in the workplace.

She wrote, “As a small business-owner, no matter the type of business, my primary concern is to make a living, to pay my staff, my taxes and my vendors. Since 2008 when the recession slammed all of us, it’s been a very, very hard slog. Like many other businesses, we’ve laid off employees and we’ve cut costs to the bone. I’m concerned about survival – of my business and of my family. Frankly, ‘happiness’ on the job is merely a luxury, an afterthought that I cannot afford.”

I expect that many people are feeling the same way. What business owners don’t understand is that happiness at work – defined as “a mindset that enables action to maximize performance and achieve potential” – actually saves them money.  In fact, research has proven it can enhance revenue.

Empirical research by iOpeners Institute for People and Performance, involving 9,000 people from around the world, reveals some astonishing findings. Employees who report being happiest at work:

  • Stay twice as long in their jobs as their least happy colleagues
  • Spend double their time at work focused on what they are paid to do
  • Take ten times less sick leave
  • Believe they are achieving their potential twice as much

This means greater outcomes and profits for employers.

And the “science of happiness at work” has big benefits for individuals too. If you’re really happy at work, you’ll solve problems faster, be more creative, adapt fastest to change, receive better feedback, get promoted quicker and earn more over the long-term.

So the next time start to feel that happiness at work is a luxury you can’t afford, think again. Give me a holler if you’d like to see how you can be happier at work. I’ll provide a free individual or team happiness assessment to the first person that contacts me.

 

 

 

Most employee problems are directly related to . . .

I’m presenting tomorrow at the University of New Mexico’s Mentoring Institute Conference on Leveraging the Science of Happiness at Work. Excited! Also doing a poster session and getting my paper published in the proceedings. A copy will soon be on this website.  

Today’s offerings opened with renowned researcher and publisher David Clutterbuck. I was pleasantly surprised that most of what he said was a refrain of the learning and research I have been doing – always nice to confirm!

He is colorful and has some pretty interesting points of view. 
1. Most employee problems are directly related to their supervisors. 
2. If succession planning works, then why do the wrong people keep getting to the top (I think his next book is on succession planning). 

Also, he shared some very powerful questions to use in coaching. 
1. What’s the risk in succeeding?
2. How many lies are you telling yourself about this?

He noted that men and women consistently tell themselves different types of lies. I invite you! Who wants to guess what the differences are?

 

What Would You Do If You Could Not Fail?

Three simple questions . . .

  1. If you knew you could not fail and those around you would wholeheartedly support you, what would you do?
  2. Are you doing it?
  3. If not, then why?

Oh, and one final question . . .

If your reason for not doing something is that you’re afraid of failing or being judged . . . how much worse would that be than never having tried?

Think about it . . . and share your thoughts below . . . if you dare . . .

And remember this: it’s better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing perfectly.

(Thanks to Robert H. Schuller)


 

Playing to the Edge in Las Vegas

What an incredible week as I attended the International Coaching Federation’s international conference! The theme was Playing to the Edge. With more than 1,000 coaches from around the world, we gathered together to continue our studies in the art and science of coaching and share perspectives on how we can help businesses and employees achieve their potential in our global economy.

Some of my personal highlights:

Having returned from the conference, renewed and invigorated, I was today’s guest on KCMX 880AM’s “Southern Oregon Live,” where I talked about happiness at work. In the next few weeks, I’ll be speaking at the 2011 Mentoring Conference at the University of New Mexico’s Mentoring Institute; return as a guest to KCMX, where I’ll appear on the “Open for Business” program; and also address the members of the Southern Oregon Chapter of the Society for Human Resources Managers in Medford, Oregon.