What to do to increase employee happiness?

The Tribe for Career Happiness went on a lunch break. On May 20 together with John from Allianz F200, I hosted the very first Learn & Lunch of the Tribe for Career Happiness. The Tribe connects like-minded people, that want to grow personally and build up skills by sharing knowledge and supporting each other. I founded it back in 2019. Ever since we did workshops with over 1.000 participants online and offline and I am happily hosting events monthly or bimonthly. ?? Check out my Linkedin page to stay updated.

Since we shifted events online from March 2020, I realized that Motivation, Connection, and Missing distance between work and free time were major issues we have to deal with. So I thought: Let's create something that is entertaining and gives valuable and usable tips for Hr professionals that they can use in their work to help employees to be happy and resilient.

Since we had the last successful online Workshop with John Ismailoglu's at Allianz F200 in Friedrichstr. in Berlin, I thought it is time to reconnect in the digital realm, and John said, let's try @Butter . Once we decided on the format and the Platform there was only one important thing to do, which I incorporate in all of my workshops or better, before my workshops: Create a survey to understand the participants' wishes, fears, and problems. Here are the results in a nutshell:

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is the happiness of your employees?

100% of the respondents answered with a score around 8-10 terming it as a priority. Ok, well we can interpret this data in two way. One: Everyone thinks employee happiness is important or two: Those who thought it's important answered and came to the workshop. Let's go with the second interpretation then. :)

Also see the most mentioned problems in the slide, maybe you can relate to. :)

To fully understand the problems, systemic analysis is crucial, methods and ideation come next.

I believe that Employee Happiness is a very crucial aspect of any organization and maintaining a positive psychological atmosphere is of utter importance in a faster-moving work world. This is backed by science. At present, there is an easy-to-understand study that I often use to state my point which is the Google re:work-study .

Let's do some groundwork before:

In my work, I help people to be happy, to feel energized, be resilient, creative, and create constructive (New)Work environments. Generally, a lot of my work is helping clients to be motivated, understand more about their personality, transform limiting beliefs and create aspiring objectives and reach them. My toolkit consists mainly of systems analysis, thinking and innovation and agile methods and always lots of Constructive Communication. :) But the two magic and not-so-secret ingredients are positive psychology and a genuine passion for people and their happiness.

One of my main works involves running a Tribe for Career Happiness, you can know more about it below. And this is one of the main things I always start with. The “five pillars” of happiness.?

So let me share some thoughts on Martin Seligmann's The five pillars of happiness.?

As you can see from the picture the presence of each pillar is a very important step to happiness for any individual being. This concept allows asking some particular questions like:

Confidence & Selflove

How can you enable your employees to develop and strengthen confidence and self-love?

Meaning & Purpose

The google rework studies say its important to look for meaning and purpose. Then the question arises: how to connect to employees' purpose.

We talked about the importance of a general match of employees values and company values. I see this a lot in my Coaching. A lot of people quit, because they don't find meaning in their work anymore. So you should always be willing to understand what drives your employees and be open to connect to their values or at least don't stop them fulfilling their values. Because if you do, chances are - they leave.

If you want to dive more into his foundational work on happiness also check out the PERMA Principle by Martin Seligmann.

But back to the Event: Let's look at a picture we took:

In the photo, you see us playing around with some interactive features of @butter. Playing and informally enjoying each others company is often underestimated and very important, both to engage and get into a creative and trusting mindset. "Yeah, but the results count" you might say. Yes, I agree, but it's crucial to create a positive and trusting atmosphere before you can really be productive. Not the other way around.

So we co-created ideas of how to help employees to be happier on three levels: Personal Level, Team level, and Company level. See the results below. On the post you will find some ideas of what to do, to increase employee happiness.

Thank you for co-creating these ideas with everyone involved. I hope you can take some inspiration out of it. Please contact me if you have any questions. I would be happy to help you to help your employees to be happy. This should be a crucial cornerstone for any organization that wants to slowly start getting its grip on the “new normal”

My name is Niv Now - A career happiness coach and if you want to know more about employee happiness or career progression, please contact me at [email protected] . You can also visit my website here: https://www.niv-now.com/