Employees in the FLOW

Employees are happiest when in a flow

“…Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; …” Wordsworth

Alka, a recruiter in my team, was very fussy about office timings. For her, lunch was always 'on the dot' and so was her coming to office and going back home. Even at the pick of the pressure to on-board new hires, candidates and incumbents would have to wait till the right time. Everything had a time and for her the term, time stretch was simply not there. I thought here is a person who values work-life balance and can stand against the trend till one day I found her working deeply in her desk in the lunch time. There she was, absolutely immersed in developing a software algorithm that she wanted to use to test recruitment effectiveness. She was unaware that it was almost past lunch hours, she was not bothered that the office was empty, she never noticed that I was standing behind her for long 15 minutes and watching her playing with the logic of the software. I wondered what put a person, so particular about time, almost in a trance? What made the world around her dissolve into herself? Mind you, the task was absolutely voluntary and outside her KRA (Key Result Area). Both Alka and I were experiencing epiphany albeit for different reasons perhaps.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian positive psychologist, in his pioneering work - Flow: the psychology of optimal experience - theorized that human beings are the happiest when they are in a state of flow - a state of complete absorption with the activity in hand - "…the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter." Everywhere we are in chains said Rousseau. But, Csikszentmihalyi postulates, we all experience times when instead of being buffeted by external forces, we do feel in control of our actions. "On the rare occasions that it happens," Csikszentmihalyi continues, "we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that become a landmark in memory of what life should be like."

These optimal experiences or "flow' is best understood in terms of skill-challenge matrix. Low skill of the performer and low perceived challenge of the task in hand leads to apathy. If a performer's skill is more than the task then the situation leads to boredom. If the job challenge exceeds the skill of the performer then it gives rise to anxiety or worry. It is only when the skill and task challenges are both high and they match that the performer is in 'flow'. This concept of flow is not just an academic subject and has many practical applications. In my experience, new joinees, particularly the fresher ones, in any organization often start from the state of either boredom or agony. The first managerial task thus is, judging by the situation, either handhold to increase the skill or to re-design the job and thus increase the task challenge to put, in both situations, the incumbent in flow. As time flies, the learning curve sets in and the employee tends to get bored (high skill as compared to job challenge). Great managers reverse the person to 'flow' by increasing the depth of the enquiry about the task and thus ensuring greater involvement of the employee. Great organizations institutionalize continuous job redesign, enrichment and rotation to invoke the optimal experiences for the employees that keep them in flow.

A few months back I was in a small town in Assam for some work. On one free evening I attended a live orchestra where the band played Hindi and Bengali numbers of Asha, Lata, Kishor Kumar et al. Whereas the crooners were brilliant in their renditions, the guitarists were clinical in their contributions, the keyboard player was? precise in carrying the harmony, it was the drummer who caught my attention - he was in flow - living every moment of it, challenging himself to do better and better and better, his whole body swaying to the rhythm of his drums - completely oblivious of the audience or the world around - simply immersed in the happiness of creation. This autotelic personality soon influenced and changed the surgical approach of the other members of the band transiting all to a mesmerized reverie. Happiness, as Victor Frankyl has said, “ensued as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”

~ Ranabir Chakraborty

Published on 3rd May, 2017 | ET Accent HR