#HappinessProject for a Productive and Profitable Workplace
“The best gesture of my brain is less without my heartbeat’s power” – E.E. Cummings
The feeling of merriment in the air is perhaps, slowly fading away because the there is a pile of work that needs to be done. People are conditioning themselves to get a hold again of the reality as they report on the first working day of the week. Why not continue feeling good, joyous and cheerful as you embrace the challenges of your reality? People have hard wired a belief in their system that you have to put painstaking efforts into the table first, so you will be able to achieve success and in effect, be happy afterwards. Although I believe in the value of hard work, a lot of people don’t realize that feeling good or having a happy disposition (despite the circumstances that you are in) must come in first in order to achieve heightened productivity levels which would enable you to achieve successes and even reach your breakthroughs. It’s the same thing with managing your time. Emotion plays a major role in time management. Time management is most of the time a “mood management”. Despite a detailed plan on how your day should be spent, when your emotion is not in its positive state – it will surely drag your day in vain. The question here is, how can we start a happiness project in the workplace that will replace fear and anxiety with optimism, joy and playfulness so that your team can formulate solutions that will delight your customers and accelerate your ever-growing and evolving business?
1. Leaders should model a happy and positive mood at all times. Daniel Goleman, an Emotional Intelligence Guru mentioned that an effective leader must maintain a consistently optimistic and high-energy mood. Leaders of the organizations must consider that the employees’ moods depend heavily on their emotional states. If a manager is seen grumpy at his office, he is actually pulling down the energy of his team. Everyone starts panicking of how to approach their manager and present their ideas for the project.
2. Leaders need to trust their people. Anyone feels good about himself whenever he is being trusted by someone. Leaders need to understand that trusting your people evokes powerful and positive emotions that empower them to work at their best. With your clear guidelines on the project, give them the freedom to come up with their own solutions, bring it out to the other team members, integrate their ideas and devise a creative plan to the challenge at hand. We enable and empower our people. We don’t dictate to them every little detail of what they should do. Again, a leader’s trust and support are always the invincible ingredients to bring out the best in his people.
3. Leaders should stop the growing epidemic of “Comparison-itis” – If you have the habit of comparing your people against each other, it will be the surest way to drain their energy, suck the happiness out from them and degrade them at work. What would this leave you with? Well, certainly a collapsed team with brooding envy to one another. You have to remember that every time you compare your people, you reject the invitation of getting to know each one of them and how each is different from another. You are giving them the impression that if they want to be recognized, they have to deny themselves and plunge to becoming a shadow of another person. This results to your team member’s self-doubt, perceived inadequacy, feeling of being rejected and even depression. Teamwork and team accountability now become an illusion because envy gets the best of them. Sadly, what they think really matters are to be recognized even at the expense of their colleague. Since comparison is a losing battle in the workplace, why not shift an others-centered assessment to a self-centered assessment. There is a great wisdom and unlimited possibilities whenever we assess how far we have grown as a person through self-assessment than in looking to other people’s accomplishments.
4. Stay positive whenever they commit mistakes along the way. Traditional leaders want their people to be perfect but when they struggle to be, they become too cautious to experiment and to try new way of doing things. If our people stop trying to be creative problem-solvers, we are losing the future of our business. We cannot simply handle new problems using old solutions. Committing mistakes are basically how we, humans learn. So if your people are not committing mistakes, it is probably because they are not trying hard enough at work. What matters is that our people take full responsibility of their mistakes and do not attempt to cover those up. The organization will even support them even when they got it wrong along the way.
5. Celebrate milestones with your team - Leaders need to show how good they feel after the team achieves a milestone. Congratulate the person or the team personally and in plenary. People get to feel the sincerity of your congratulatory message when you get out of your way to thank and appreciate them. Sharing the good news publicly will also empower the other teams, that they can also have the same feats despite the difficulties of completing a project.
As you start another work week, take these at heart. Most of the time, we set aside our emotions when we talk about business but in reality, our emotion is the power bank of our energy, drive and passion in doing great things. Let’s ensure that it’s a happy one! So, are you ready to start this “Happiness Project” in your workplace?
