How to make a happier workplace? Words.

How to make a happier workplace? Words.

There have been a couple of instances of raised eyebrows when I have highlighted a potential employee’s qualities by saying they are humble or self-deprecating, only I confuse deprecating with defecating, so I’m essentially saying that I admire someone for sh*tting on themselves.

I also tried to tell my husband the other day that I had chopped apart one of the hedges in the garden so I said that I’d “desecrated” it, but this means I’d “violated the sanctity of it”, then corrected myself to, “desiccated” but this means “dried up” (as in coconut) before finally settling on “decimated”, though I wished I’d just used “chopped apart” as I felt I’d rather lost face by then.

Sometimes it’s what you say and sometimes it’s how you say it.

This is never truer in the workplace and our choice of words or the intonation in our voice can make or break an employee’s esteem. The presence of ego in the workplace has a nasty habit of infiltrating our language from time to time and it’s easy to forget to check whether our comments sound the way we would like them to be received. What we really want is words of appreciation – genuine appreciation, not to be confused with recognition, which is about past achievements, appreciation is valuing someone for who they are. Sometimes you have to look carefully for what you appreciate in someone as it’s not about whether you like them or whether you agree with them, as Mike Robbins points out in his TED talk, The Power of Appreciation.

Much like the gym, but less sweatily, the more you practice appreciation the easier and more habitual it becomes, and it has a wonderful snowball effect too – people receiving appreciation are more likely to consciously pass on kind words to others too.

Most of us have a deep yearning for helping other people and kind words are an excellent way to fulfill that need. Before you know it, a culture once permeated with a little too much ego and jostling for position can be reformed to one where people like being who they naturally are. We must nurture esteem like the precious commodity it is – fulfilling esteem needs creates happier, more productive employment – amazing to think that so much can be achieved from something as little as words.

We can create happier workplaces by being conscious with our words. So just as the 1st of the 5 agreements (created by don Miguel Ruiz) states…Be impeccable with your words.