Love the money, hate the job? The effect of bulls**t jobs on happiness

Money for old rope - so why am I exhausted?

Many of us have noticed  a strange paradox but been unable to put a name to it. We believe that a job that doesn’t demand too much of us should mean we have plenty of energy left over for our real interests. Furthermore, we anticipate that if that job not only doesn’t demand much of us but also pays us very well, then we should experience happiness: we have beaten the system! We are being paid for doing practically nothing, what could be a better arrangement?

And yet, after an initial sense of triumph, it can slowly become apparent that the logic - lots of money for little work equals happiness and a fulfilled life  - doesn’t work out. Instead we feel, well, that something isn’t right. That despite the income we aren’t happy at work.

This leaves us caught in a trap: we feel we would be fools to leave such a great sinecure. And so we struggle on, wondering what is wrong with us that we can’t make the most of this; that after work we don’t spring into life as the artist, writer, dressmaker we know ourselves to be at heart; rather that we slump in front of the TV apparently exhausted after doing next to nothing all day. We grind through the endless days of non-work trying to look busy. We wonder why what should be great, and is the envy of friends slowing burning out in the caring professions, feels so awful, indeed, soul destroying. It seems there is a cost to taking the money without feeling we are really delivering value in return.

The Graeber hypothesis

David Graeber has put a name to this particular employment conundrum. He calls the jobs with these characteristics that produce these unexpected outcomes, ‘bull**t jobs’. A bullshit job is one that essentially has no meaning either to the job holder, nor, seemingly, to the wider world. It adds no perceptible value to life. As he says:

“Be honest: if your job didn't exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered why not? Up to 40% of us secretly believe our jobs probably aren't necessary. In other words: they are bulls**t jobs.”

This interesting book is highly recommended. It’s an easy with read with lots of quotes from those in bulls**t jobs. He goes on to offer an interesting analysis of the rise and proliferation of these jobs since the 1980s and the growing of the bulls**tisation of other, previously unaffected and otherwise meaningful jobs, such as teaching.

Thinking of ourselves as  rational economic actors the trap we find ourselves in makes no sense, and so we can’t resolve it.

Your job should seem necessary, if only to you

However, it makes perfect sense from a positive psychology perspective. From work in this field we know that meaningfulness is important to engagement and wellbeing at work. We also know that the boundaries between work and outside work are highly permeable and how we are in one sphere of life will affect how we are in other spheres of life. In other words the draining effect of a bulls**t job will adversely affect our ability to be energised at other times.

Pondering this, I related David’s theory to a model about the value of work from Christopher Michaelson, who suggests that the value can be arranged across two dimensions. He argues that work can offer a high intrinsic value i.e. feel  valuable in itself; it can have an instrumental value, such as being well paid. From these two values we can construct a landscape on which to place different jobs.

As you can see below I have had a go at locating where bulls**t jobs fit on this model e.g. high in instrumental value (well paid), low in intrinsic value (pointless).  It appears they are located directly opposite to many caring jobs e.g. looking after the sick or vulnerable.

I am hopeful this understanding might help people caught in the trap of highly paid yet soul-destroying jobs. It helps make sense of the situation and facilitates a discussion about the kind of job that might be, not just bearable but actually engaging, and whether the cost of switching might be worth it 

What do you think?

References

Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit jobs: a theory. Allen Lane UK

Michaelson, C. (2013) The value(s) of work. In Froh, J. J., & Parks, A. C. (2013). Activities for teaching positive psychology: A guide for instructors. American Psychological Association.

Strengths and the Imposter Syndrome: The generative power of world cafe

Last year I ran an evening event I called a Learning Network Event. The purpose of the evening was to provide a space for those interested in positive psychology to share and learn from each other in a gently facilitated way. We used a world café process to stimulate conversation and to ensure cross-pollination amongst those present.

During the event I had a really powerful experience of the cross-pollination potential of the world café process when I had a 'shiver down the spine' moment as I suddenly saw a link between two conversations in which I was involved. 

In the first one we were discussing 'imposter syndrome': one of our group was currently doing a Ph.D. investigation into this common yet disturbing workplace phenomena. It’s a very interesting topic which resonated with those present. 

A short while later I was part of a conversation talking about how knowing our strengths allows us to understand better how we can be a success at our jobs - especially when we don't fit the 'template' for the role. We realised that knowing our strengths allows us to construct an authentic story about how we are succeeding, that may stand in contrast to the dominant story of what is required to succeed in the role. 

During this conversation a story was shared of by one person who was involved in sales. She talked about how understanding her strengths helped her recognise it was her relational strengths that enabled her to be good at sales even though she didn't see herself as a 'typical salesperson'.

Around this point of the evening I had my brain tingling moment as I put two thoughts together. I swear I could almost feel the neurons firing as I realised that we can pull these two thoughts together and put forward an argument about how imposter syndrome might arise. 

Could it be that part of the reason we experience imposter syndrome is because we don't 'see ourselves' as being like the kind of person who usually succeeds in this role; that we have no understanding of how we might succeed and so see ourselves as 'imposters' - getting by on luck and chance? 

If so, then understanding our strengths and how they relate to our abilities in our role can help us construct a story about how it is possible for us to be 'good at this' or 'a success at this' that makes sense to us and feels authentic. Might knowing our strengths and understanding how they help us to succeed be an antidote to the debilitating, anxiety-inducing, vulnerability-creating experience of feeling like an imposter liable to be exposed for the fraud we are at any moment?

For me the event demonstrated the power of world café to produce genuinely generative conversation: I had a new thought and for me that is one of the best feelings in the world!

Did you know? Build in Wellbeing from the beginning

Lots of people feel instinctively that happiness and wellbeing at work must be important. But are they a business necessity or a ‘nice to have’. Surely it makes more sense to ensure your business is profitable and thriving before you start worrying about how people feel?

Increasingly research suggests that investing in employee wellbeing by ensuring positive work relationships, an emphasis on strengths-based development, and worker happiness has productivity pay-offs. So why delay, start promoting positive psychology practices at work today!

Our happiness and wellbeing is at least partly within our control - and it matters!

Here is a selection of evidence-based support for the promotion of positive psychology e.g. happiness and wellbeing at work. It is clear from the evidence that a large component of the happiness we feel is within our control, and that many, more than 50% of the population, are functioning at a less than optimal state. And that our emotional state affects our performance and productivity at work:

1)    40% of the variation we experience in our sense of happiness, compared to others, is within our control. 10% is due to circumstances beyond our control and 50% due to our genetic make-up and inheritance which dictates our set point of happiness. Our 40% is influenced by ‘intentional activity’. In other words we can affect the happiness of ourselves and others. The research behind this assertion is based on twin studies (the genetic component) and the long-lasting effect of changing circumstances on happiness levels (the circumstances) leaving 40% of the variation due to individual actions.

2)    54% of Americans are ‘moderately mentally healthy’ meaning they aren’t mentally ill but they lack great enthusiasm for life and are not actively and productively engaged with the world. 11% languish – just above clinical depression.

3)    Exercise can be as effective at treating clinical depression as medication, and have an effect for longer.

4)    People whose managers focus on their strengths as 2.5x more likely to be engaged at work than those whose managers focus on their weaknesses.

5)    Highly engaged employees take, on average, 3 sick days per annum, actively disengaged employees , 6+ per year.

6)    The least happy employees average 6 days absence a year, the most happy 1.5, in the UK and USA. Liking your colleagues produces the same absence correlation.

7)    Engaged employees give 57% more discretionary effort at work.

8)    Doctors in a positive mood before making a diagnosis make the correct diagnosis 19% faster than those who were in a neutral state.

9)    In a major fast food company an intervention to reduce management turnover (the retention of managers being a major problem for this sector) the approach using AI led to a retention rate 30% higher than when problem-solving techniques were used.

10) The happiest people at work are 180% more energised than the unhappiest, they contribute 25% more and achieve their goals 30% more. They are 47% more productive meaning they are contributing a day and a quarter more than their least happy colleagues per week.

11) The most happy are 50% more motivated than the least happy. 

12) People who are happier are 25% more effective and efficient than those who are least happy.

13) Feelings and behaviour are contagious: negative behaviour has a ripple effect to two degrees, but positive behaviour can reach to three degrees.

14) The more you want recognition, the less you want money in its place.

15) We lose 40% of our productivity flip-flopping between tasks – three lost hours in a typical 8-hour day.

Sources

These findings are collated from various sources, including particularly the work of Pryce-Jones and Lyubomirsky.

Other Resources

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology and Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management'.

See more Engagement, Leadership Skills, Performance Management and Positive Psychology articles articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organisations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

If you want to know more about implementing approaches and processes that positively affect people’s happiness, engagement, motivation, morale, productivity and work relationships, see Sarah’s positive psychology books

How To Keep Your Employees Engaged At Work

Engaged employees are a business imperative: they perform 20% better and give 57% more discretionary effort [1] Organizations with a high level of engagement have better quality, sales, income and turnover, profit, customer satisfaction, shareholder return, and business growth, and success. [2] It is estimated that currently only 19% of employees are highly engaged in their work, while active disengagement cost the UK economy between £37.2bn and £38.9bn a year [3].

Organizations often struggle to understand what creates engagement. Positive psychology research is revealing that employee engagement is primarily a psychological and social process. There are a number of steps organizations can take to increase engagement.

1. Create a positive culture

Actively introduce processes that increase positivity. For example by starting meetings with praise for last week’s achievements; celebrating successes; and creating a work climate of hope and good humour. Introduce ways of measuring people’s experience of positivity at work.

2. Learn to affirm the best

Recognize and develop best practice. Encourage virtuous organizational behaviour such as helpfulness. Recognize team and individual strengths, initiative and innovation, both formally through appraisal processes, and informally by leadership interest and focus.

3.  Turn strengths into talents

When people are able to use their strengths they are more engaged and perform better. Introduce processes that help people get to know and own their strengths, using psychometrics or best-self feedback. And help them develop their strengths into high performance talents.

4. Help teams play to individual strengths

The most productive teams are able to share the team tasks according to strengths, so encourage team members to swap tasks that fall in their weakest areas for those that play to their strengths.

5. Help people re-craft jobs around their strengths

Make the job fit the person, rather than trying to make the person fit the job, most outcomes can be achieved in more than one way. Help people find a way of maximizing their ability to use their strengths and talents, and minimizing the time they spend struggling with tasks for which they have no aptitude.

6. Create opportunities to experience flow

Flow is a psychological state so rewarding that people risk life and health to achieve it (think of mountaineers or starving artists). Find out where people experience flow in their work. Help them recognize it. Help them work out how to increase their opportunities to experience it.

7. Create reward rich environments

People are motivated and engaged by the opportunity to obtain rewards. Many things can be rewarding for people in their work environment: praise, appreciation and thanks, smiles, and opportunities. Create work environments full of small and easily won rewards that are salient to them.

8. Understand goal seeking

Before you set goals for someone you need to understand what they find rewarding. For example some people find public recognition rewarding, while others just like to know that what they have done has been helpful.

9. Help people find meaning in their work

People are very good at finding meaning in what they do. Everyone wants to believe we are spending our time valuably. Help them by making it clear why their work is important, what it means for them, you, the department, the organization, a better world.

Other Resources

Much more about strengths and managerial techniques such as the ones mentioned here can be found in Sarah’s new book Positive Psychology and Change

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology for Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management', by Kogan Page, the second edition is out in September.

See more Engagement, Leadership Skills and How To articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

[1] Corporate Leadership Council 2004 Driving performance and retention through employee engagement: a quantitative analysis of effective engagement strategies. Corporate Executive Board

[2] Stairs, M. and Gilpin, M., 2010. Positive Engagement: From Employee Engagement To Work Place Happiness. In Linley, P. A., Harrington, S. and Garcea, N. (eds), Oxford Handbook Of Positive Psychology And Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[3] Flade, P., 2003. Great Britain's Workforce Lacks Inspiration. Gallup Management Journal, 11.

Bite - Sized Positive Psychology: The success round

Much research has now confirmed happiness has many benefits. One easy way to use positive psychology to bring these benefits into the work place is by opening a meeting with a ‘success round’. All too often in meetings we plunge straight into the business of the day. Starting the meeting by giving people a chance to share a recent success not only boost people’s mood in the moment, it also prepares them to engage more productively with what ever is to follow. As an added bonus,  we learn lots about what makes our colleagues tick.

The exercise is very easy. Essentially as you open the meeting you say something like:

‘Before we plunge into the agenda, let’s just take a few minutes to reflect on what is going well at the moment. What I’d like is for us all to take a moment to think of a recent success we’ve experienced at work. It doesn’t have to be anything huge, just something that gives you a little glow of achievement or success. Then I’d like us to share them.’

Depending on the size of your group you can do this as a whole round, or just ask people to do it in threes or fours and then share a few examples across the groups.

What you do next is up to you. You could just say

‘thank you, its great to hear so many good things are happening even as we ….(are experiencing challenges of some nature)’

Alternatively you might ask:

 ‘Who else needs to hear about any of this good news and how can we do that?’

Or:

 ‘So what have we just learnt about ourselves?’

You may have other ideas of how to build on what you hear.

Either way you should find that the meeting goes a little better for this early investment. And over time you may notice that people start noticing their ‘reasons to be cheerful’ more of the time, ready to bring them to your meeting, and that in turn the group’s sense of themselves becomes more positive.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more How To articles in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

How ‘Change Management’ Can Be A Hindrance To Achieving Organizational Change

We are constantly told that, in today’s world, change is a permanent feature of organizational life. Given this is it surprising the extent to which organizations struggle with the concept of change in organizations. Myths abound. Working with organizations I constantly hear the refrain ‘people don’t like change’ and ‘change is hard’. Neither of these statements are necessarily true, as we see below. What is true is that the way we understand organizations, understand change, and go about achieving change can make the job much harder than it need be.

Part of the problem is that our ideas in this area are outdated. We think and act as if the organization is a perfectly designed and aligned machine that we can plan to reconfigure, and then just systemically and mechanically set about reconfiguring. The organization is not a machine; it is a living system of people with its own internal logic and ways of behaving. We need to work with the dynamic, inventive, thoughtful nature of our organizations, not against it. In the same vein, our views of leadership can be a hindrance to achieving fast, responsive and adaptive change. We act sometimes as if we expect our leaders to be all seeing, all knowing, all powerful. They’re not. However they are increasingly expected to introduce changes in work practices, routines and structures as part of their leadership role. Unknowingly they have often picked up some unhelpful ‘rules of thumb’ about implementing change at work. Here we expose the fallacious thinking behind five of them.

You can’t implement the change until you have thought through every step and have every possible question answered.

Not True. In many situations it is sufficient to have a sense of the end goal, or key question, along with some shared guiding principles about how the change will unfold. For example ‘We need to produce our goods more efficiently’, or, ‘How can we cut our process times?’ With these in place leaders can call on the collective intelligence of the organization as it embarks on learning by doing: taking the first steps, reviewing progress, learning from experience and involving those who know the detail in their areas.

This ‘all-seeing’ belief leads to exhaustive energy going into detailed forecasting and analysis of every possible impact and consequence of possibilities often leading to paralysis by analysis. It slows things down, allows rumours to fill the information vacuum, and creates feelings of disempowerment. Worse of all it disregards the huge knowledge base that is the organization; wasting organizational assets.

You can control the communication within the organization about change

Impossible! People are sense-making creatures who constantly work to make sense of what is happening around them. This means it is not possible to control communication in this way. By withholding information we convey something, usually distrust or secrecy. But more than this, in this day and age with so many communication channels instantly available to people, there is no chance of being aware of everything that is being said about the change. Instead leaders need to focus on making sure they get to hear what sense is being made of what is going on so that they can contribute a different or corrective perspective.

This ‘control’ belief leads to embargoes on information sharing, ‘until we have decided everything’ (see above) and much investment in finding ‘the right words’ to convey the story of the change. Meanwhile people are free to make their own sense of what is happening uninhibited by any corrective input from management. And when the carefully chosen words are finally broadcast, leadership is often dismayed to discover that they don’t work to create a shared sense of the meaning of the change.

To communicate about change is to engage people with the change

Not necessarily. People start to engage with the change when they start working out what it means for them, what it ‘looks like’, where the benefits or advantages might be, how they can navigate it, what resources are there to help them. They find out through exploration and discovery. They become more engaged when they are asked questions. “How can we implement this here?’ ‘What is the best way of achieving that?’ ‘What needs to be different for us to be able to…?’ People have to use their imaginations and creativity to start visualizing what their bit of the world will be like when ‘the change’ has happened. Everyone needs the opportunity to create rich pictures of what the words and ideas in the change mean in their context. The answer to the question ‘What might it mean for us?’ is jointly constructed and evolves as new information emerges.

The belief that communication alone equals engagement leads to an over-emphasis on communicating about ‘the change’. Staff hear managers talking endlessly about how important this change is, how big it is, how transformational it will be, yet no one seems to know what the change actually means for people. To be part of this scenario is to suffer a confused sense of ‘but what are we talking about?’ This in itself is usually symptomatic of the fact that at this point there is only a fuzzy picture of what this much-heralded change will mean for people: much better to get people involved in finding out.

That planning makes things happen

Sadly no! How much simpler life would be if it did. Creating plans can be an extremely helpful activity as long as we realize that what they do is create accounts and stories of how the future can be. Until people translate the plans into activity on the ground, the plans are just plans. For example I might develop a really detailed plan about emigrating to Australia, including shipping and packing and visas and job prospects and everything you can think of, but until I do something that impacts on my possibilities in the world, for instance by applying for a visa, then planning is all I have done. Plans are an expression of intention. Things start to happen when intention is enacted.

This belief in ‘plan as action’ fuels a plethora of projects and roadmaps and spreadsheets of interconnection, key milestones, tasks, measures and so on. People can invest time and energy in this fondly believing that they are ‘doing change’. A much more energizing alternative is to bring people together to start exploring ‘the change’ and generating ideas for action, and then to write documents that create a coherent account of the actions people are taking.

That change is always disliked and resisted

No. If this were true none of us would emerge from babyhood. Our life is a story of change and growth, of expansion and adaptation, of discovery and adjustment. Do you wish you had never learnt to ride a bike? That was a change. Had never had a haircut? That was a change. What is true is that change takes energy, and people don’t necessarily always have the energy or inclination to engage with change. It is not change itself that is the issue, it is the effect imposed change can have on things that are important to us: autonomy, choice, power, desire, satisfaction, self-management, sense of competency, group status, sense of identity and so on. If we attend carefully to enhancing these within the change process then there is a much greater chance that it will be experienced as life-enhancing growth like so many other changes in our lives.

This much repeated and highly prevalent belief leads to a defensive and fearful approach to organizational change, inducing much girding of loins by managers before going out to face the wrath of those affected by the change.

So, what is the alternative? Once we give up the idea of the leader or leadership team as all knowing, of change as a linear and logical process of compliance, and of people as passive recipients of information, we can start to work in a much more organization friendly way with change. Many new approaches that focus on achieving collaborative transformation are emerging such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space and World Café. These approaches recognize organizational change as a collective effort, as a social process that can be inspiring and dynamic with leaps of understanding as well as being messy and confusing at times. They work with the best of the human condition – the importance to us of our relationships, our imagination, our ability to care and to feel and to create meaning in life. In this way they release managers and leaders from the impossible responsibility of foreseeing all possibilities and instead liberate the organization to find productive ways forward in an ever-changing organization landscape, together.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to create change can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more about change in the Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Top Tips For Creating Positive And Flourishing Organisations

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, and an accompanying case study on culture change

Having recently extensively studied the literature, Appreciating Change can exclusively reveal the ten things that you can do that can make your organisation an even more inspiring and positive workplace.

  1. Play to everyone’s strengths

People playing to their strengths are effective, successful, engaged and energised. Their productivity is at its best. Those dutifully struggling with weaknesses are slow, ineffective and demoralised. Their productivity is poor.

  2. Recruit for attitude

People have ‘a good attitude’ when they are using their natural talents, the thing they love to do. Find out people’s natural talents and inclinations because these are the basis of strengths. Recruit for a fit with the core task of the job and to build it into a real strength.

 3. Encourage positive deviation

Encourage performance that exceeds the standard expected in a positive direction. Build an abundant organisation, one that can take pride in excellence. Achieving this takes positive leadership: encouraging, recognising, appreciative, and forgiving. Affirm what is good in the organisation to help it grow and develop.

4. Create a workplace that feels good

Positive emotions are really good for the workplace. They aid creativity, working together, problem-solving, communication and information-sharing, just for starters. Make your workplace somewhere people enjoy being because it makes them feel good.

 5. Build social capital

Invest in the relationships between people. It is through these relationships that information and resource flow to where they are needed. It is these relationships that allow organisations to be responsive to change and to bounce back quickly from trauma.

6. Be an authentic leader

Authentic leaders know their own strengths and how to use them well. They help others develop theirs. They have a strong moral compass and they treat people right. They learn from success as well as mistakes. They admit mistakes, and encourage others to do so too.

7. Create the conditions for change

Directive planned change is ineffective: the evidence is overwhelming. Effective change leaders create the conditions for change to emerge. They work with the emerging process of change. They engage the whole organisation in discovering how to go forward.

8. Create reward-rich environments

People work for many rewards: success, approval, flow experiences, recognition, feelings of satisfaction, thanks, completion, or being with others, for example. The more rewards available to people in their work environment, they more motivated and engaged they will be at work.

9. Make sense together

In this fast-paced, complex world, it is more effective to involve others in a continuous process of making sense than trying to make definitive decisions that will hold for years. Build periods of mindfulness and reflection into your schedule, to help people notice the early signs of a changing world.

10. Be appreciative

Develop an appreciative, eye, ear and tongue. This will help you recognise and grow the organisational strengths and resources. Our appreciative faculties are usually very weak compared to our critical ones; they need positive attention to thrive.

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, and an accompanying case study on culture change

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

How To Keep Your Employees Engaged

This blog article has an accompanying article on organisational flourishing, and an accompanying case study on activating  employee engagement

In 2005 David Bolchover took it upon himself to find out what actively disengaged employees do when at work (and also when not). Scouring the research, he found that:

•   1 in 3 people have taken illegal drugs at work: ecstasy, cannabis, and cocaine
•   1 in 5 people have had sex at work
•   70% of porn site hits happen during working hours
•   The actively disengaged have twice as much time off sick (and many of them are to be found at Alton Towers, apparently)
•   1in 5 people describe themselves as constantly surfing the net, while a majority of people estimate they spend the equivalent of a day a week on non-work websites at work
•   7% send more than 20 personal emails a day
•   1/3 of young professionals confess to being hung over twice a week at work; and
•   A quarter of people have fallen asleep at work

Active disengagement at work costs the UK economy about £38bn a year.

So what makes for active engagement at work?

Using strengths and talents

People encouraged to use their strengths at work are about 2 & 1/2 times as likely to be engaged as those who are encouraged to focus on their weaknesses. They are particularly more likely to be engaged if they get to use their strengths every day. Help people identify their strengths either with good psychometrics like strengthscope, or through Appreciative Inquiry discovery interviews and Feedback Strengths Cards such as those sold on this website.

Experiencing flow

When people are in flow they are engaged. Flow is by definition an engaging experience. Flow experiences occur at work but aren’t always recognised as such. Help people understand their flow experiences. To discover them, inquire into when they ‘lose’ themselves in their work, or ask them when they feel ‘in the zone’

The helpful use of goals and rewards

Much goal setting at work is poorly done. At its best goal setting provides opportunities for people to experience plentiful, positive and meaningful rewards (positive reinforcement). Working for social or self-satisfaction rewards can be highly motivating and engaging. The sustainable reward pattern is one that is self-reinforcing e.g. the more or better I do, the better I feel. The flourishing factor of accomplishment is an expression of this self-reinforcing rewarding activity.

Help people find meaning in work

When people are engaged in work that they experience as meaningful, they are more engaged. People can be helped to create positive meaning at work, particularly when groups are given the opportunity to collectively to discover why their work is meaningful to them, to the organisation, and to the world.

Create positive emotional experience moments

The research into positive emotions continues to demonstrate the powerful positive effects of a high ratio of feeling good moments to feeling bad moments. Create environments where positive moments: a shared laugh, sharing good news, pauses for wonderment at the achievements of others, happens often.

Encourage job crafting

Helping people to shape their roles and tasks in a way that maximizes their sense of meaningfulness, their ability to use their strengths, their self-reinforcement and the pleasure they can take in their work will boost their engagement and their performance.

This blog article has an accompanying article on organisational flourishing, and an accompanying case study on activating  employee engagement

More on using positive psychology to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Engagement 

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

How Working With Strengths Can Improve Performance

Our strengths are those abilities we have that are hardwired into our ways of doing things. They are a combination of genetics we inherited and the environment in which we were raised. By the time we are adults some neural pathways are much more practiced than others. We have habitual ways of being and behaving that we find effortless: indeed almost irresistible. These, in essence, are our strengths. We might use them for good or evil, with or without much skill, but they are our go-to, default way of being in the world. While they can and frequently do get us into trouble when applied badly or inappropriately, they are also our greatest asset. And yet....

'This isn't development, it's damage control'

Many of us have been diligently working for years to get better at the things that we are bad at. Time after time the same things come up in the performance appraisal, 360 degree feedback or the personality profile, time after time we resolve ‘to work on our weaknesses’ In this we are in good company.

•   87% of people believe that finding your weaknesses and fixing them is the best way to achieve outstanding performance. (Buckingham, 2007).

However as Buckingham says ‘this isn’t development, it’s damage control’. As someone with poor attention to detail, I live in fear of sending out incorrect invoices. My diligent attention to them, checking and double-checking is damage limitation indeed! And it takes me a disproportionate amount of time.

However, recent research suggests that we are wrong because:

• Excellence is not the opposite of failure
• Strengths are not the opposite of weaknesses
• We will learn little about excellence by studying failure
• We will learn little about our strengths by concentrating on our weaknesses
• By studying our mistakes we will learn more about how we make mistakes
• By studying our weaknesses we will learn more about ourselves at our worst
• If we want to learn about success, we must study our successes
• If we want to learn about our strengths we need to study ourselves at our best

Know your weaknesses

This isn’t to say that we don’t need to attend to our weaknesses, clearly we do. However we can be cleverer about how we do that. In an ideal scenario we fit the tasks to the strengths profile. My ideal bookkeeper (for my invoicing for instance) would be someone for whom attending to detail isn’t an anxiety-ridden, fraught activity where a mistake lurks undetected in every line, but is a delight, an engaging dance with perfection. While I emerge from the task with a sense of ‘fingers crossed’ they would emerge with a sense of ‘job well done’. (For those of you who are worrying about my ability to stay in business, I do now have an assistant who helps with the double-checking!). This of course is another way of dealing with weaknesses: getting help.

Invest your time where you get the best returns

With the time and emotional energy we save by not ‘working on our weaknesses’ we can concentrate on understanding and maximizing our strengths. The research demonstrates very clearly that excellence in individual and team performance is related to the awareness of, and exercise of, our strengths, on a daily basis.

• People who get the chance to play to their strengths every day are 50% more likely to work in teams with a low turnover, 38% more likely to work in productive teams and 44% more likely to work in teams with higher customer satisfaction scores. (Buckingham and Clifton, 2002)
• In high performing teams, people say they call on their strengths more than 75% of the time.

However,

• Only 17% of people use their strengths at work everyday. (Buckingham, 2007)

The jury is out – working on your strengths can help achieve great performance

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Sources

Buckingham, M. 2007 Go put your strengths to work, Simon and Schuster

Buckingham and Clifton,, 2002, Now discover your strengths. Free Press Business

Five Ways to Get Your Team Working More Effectively

Teams are the building blocks of organizations. Teams are groups of people who work together to achieve things, but not all groups are teams. Teams are characterized by interdependencies, in other words team members have to work together to get things done. While this interdependency creates the potential for the whole to be more productive and creative than the sum of the parts, it can just as easily be a recipe for frustration and conflict. How can you help your team get the most out of working together?

Create a positive working culture

Very few people like to be in an atmosphere that is critical, hostile, unfriendly or cold. Yet many teams manage to create precisely this culture because they overly focus on achieving the task and fail to account for basic human nature. Research over the last 10 years has convincing backed up what many of us intuitively knew, a good working atmosphere makes a huge difference to a team’s productivity. What the research found is that the key to the difference between high performing and low performing teams is the ratio of positive to negative comments in team meetings. Interestingly this doesn’t need to be in balance, it needs to be weighted in favour of positive comments, at least by a ratio of 3:1.

A number of things seem to happen once this magic ratio is reached and even more so if the ratio moves closer to 6:1. There is more positive affect ‘good feeling’ generated by the group when they are together. When people feel good they are more able to think well, be creative, and to work with others. In addition people become more willing to contribute ideas, and to work with goodwill through the moments of uncertainty, disconnection or confusion in the conversation until something new emerges. The benefits continue beyond the immediate team meetings, as team members’ actions in their own domains are more in sync with their colleagues, and so the departmental interface issues are lessened.

Help people play to their strengths

Many people have put much effort into attempting to address their weaknesses over many years to little avail. I know this because I meet them at their 360 feedback sessions somewhere mid-career where they say ‘yes, that always comes up as a weakness, I do try...’. This is usually a depressing conversation for both parties.

Recent thinking is that attending more to our strengths will reap greater benefit in terms of performance improvement. This is because when we are using our strengths work feels effortless, we are energised and confident, we are engaged and probably experience moments of flow. Feeling like this we are more able to be generous and patient with others, so the benefits flow onward. Strengths are an expression of highly developed mental pathways and neutral connections that take minimal effort to enact. Help your team members discover their true strengths and then find ways as a team to utilize everyone’s strengths to achieve the team task. Think of your team as an economy of strengths, and work out how to create extra value by trading your strengths.

Create commonality amongst team members

Teams are often made up of people with different skillsets and areas of expertise that tend to see the world, and the priorities for action within it, differently. This can lead to a great awareness of difference, and the differences can come to be seen as insurmountable. Yet at the same time there will be areas of commonality amongst team members, often in the areas of core values and central purpose.

A very productive way to access these commonalities is through the sharing of stories. When people are asked to share personal stories of their moments of pride at work, or moments of achievement or success, or the part of their job that means the most to them, they are expressing their values and sense of purpose in an engaging, passionate and easy to hear form. The listener will undoubtedly find that the story resonates with them, creating an emotional connection at the same time as they begin to see the person in a different light. In the best scenarios as people share their highlight stories a sense emerges in the room of ‘wow, these are great people I’m working with here, I’d better raise my game!’

Move from the habitual to the generative

Groups can get stuck in repeating dynamic patterns. When this happens listening declines as everyone believes they know what everyone else is saying – they’ve heard it all before. And so does the possibility of anything new happening. To break the patterns we need to move from rehearsed speech (which means exactly what it says, speech that has been thought or said so often it just tumbles out) to generative speech (which is the delightful sensation of hearing ourselves say something new).

To help the team make the shift you need to ask questions, or introduce activities that mean people need to think before they speak, that brings information into the common domain that hasn’t been heard before. Positively or appreciatively framed questions as suggested above are particularly good for this. So too are imagination based questions, or example ‘If we woke up tomorrow and we had solved this dilemma, how would we know, what would be different?’ ‘If we weren’t spending our time locked in this conversation, what might we be talking about?’ Or ‘as if’ questions ‘If we discuss this as if the customer was in the room with us, what will we be saying?’ Sometimes just getting people to all switch from their habitual seating pattern breaks old and creates new dynamics.

Create Future Aspirations

When teams suffer a crisis of motivation or morale it is often associated with a lack of hope. A lack of hope that things can get better, a lack of hope in the power and influence of the group or the leader, a lack of hope or belief in the possibility of achieving anything.

Hope and optimism are both great motivators and also key in team resilience. In hopeless situations we need to engender hopefulness. Appreciative Inquiry as an approach is particularly good at doing this as it first of all discovers the best of the current situation, unearths the hidden resources and strengths of the group, and then goes on to imagine future scenarios based on these very discoveries about what is possible. As people project themselves into optimistic futures clearly connected to the present, they begin to experience some hopefulness. This in turn engenders some motivation to start working towards those more aspirational scenarios of how things can be.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we can help Top Teams and how we can help your organisation with Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

How Does Positive Organisational Behaviour Turn Into Positive Organisational Performance

Positive organisational scholarship researcher Kim Cameron reports that flourishing organisations, that is organisations that are success as well as being described as great places to work, exhibit three key cultural characteristics.

A strong interest in learning from positive deviance

All organisations have an interest in learning from negative deviance, that is, when things go wrong. Rather less have an interest in learning from positive deviance, when things go right. But they are missing a trick. We now know that very often the root causes of success are not just the polar opposite of the root causes of failure. Taking an active interest in learning from exceptionally good performance allows organisations to increase their ability to succeed.

The modelling and promotion of virtuous actions

There is still a strong organizational story that suggests that a successful organizational culture is hard, macho and dog-eat-dog with little time for sentiment. By contrast Cameron’s research has found that organisations that promote virtuous actions, by which he means things such as kindness, patience, humility, generosity and forgiveness reap the benefits in organizational performance. A moment’s thought suggests this makes sense as such an environment means people are likely to take more learning risks than in a blame orientated culture with a minimal toleration of mistakes or errors. Of course the learning process still has to be managed, but the recognition that people are human and that in any human system error is inevitable helps liberate learning behaviour and reduce blame avoidance and buck-passing.

A strong bias towards affirming the best in people and situations

Cameron found that his exceptional organisations had a real bias towards noticing and affirming the best in people. We might say they had developed skill with their appreciative capabilities as well as their critical ones. Being affirmed in your essential goodness as well as your particular strengths helps boost confidence and morale. It also affects motivation. People grow towards the best reflections of themselves. Reflecting back the best of people helps them attain their potential.

This collection of behaviour actively promotes two organizational processes that lead to improved performance

Upward virtuous circles of positive emotion and behaviour

When we see others displaying exceptional virtue, we are inspired to emulate them. People behave better in the company of the better behaved. The kind of culture described above contributes to a self-reinforcing virtuous circle of people feeling good, therefore being more inclined to do good things, therefore more likely to be observed by others behaving well, who in turn are more likely to be inspired to behave at their best, with colleagues, customers and suppliers. All these little bits of behaviour add up to a performance culture.

Social Capital

These three key organizational behaviours also contribute to the development of good social capital. Social capital describes the levels of trust and connection between departments or divisions in an organization. High levels of social capital promote good information flow and low-level decision-making and problem-solving, all of which contributes effectively to local and global performance.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we can help with Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

What engaged employees want and how to find out if they're getting it - from a report by Roffey Park

A three-part model

Roffey Park research suggests that there are three key components to employee engagement: my job, my organization, my value. Their report ‘The human voice of employee engagement: understanding what lies beneath the surveys’ gives a full and readable account of the factors that make a difference. A key finding is that pride is at the heart of employee engagement.

People want:

• To be treated as individuals
• To be consulted and informed about things which affect them
• To feel valued for themselves and what they do
• To be supported with work issues
• To have clear and fair process for performance evaluation and development

 They want their leaders to be:

• Strategic
• Visible
• Communicative
• Trustworthy

They want a good relationship with their manager. Effectively they want to be able to feel pride in themselves, their work, and their organization. When they do, they are highly likely to be engaged employees.

Finding out what lies behind the survey data

One way to help explore employee engagement survey data is to assemble focus groups of organisational members and to ask them to record on post-its the immediate feelings they experience when someone asks them the questions

 ‘Where do you work?’

 ‘Who do you work for?’

‘ What do you do?’

These post-its are then organized, by question, under red, amber and green headings (traffic lights), and a discussion takes place.

The beauty of this process is that this raw data can be presented to the senior decision makers not able to be present at the focus group. It allows them to get a real feel for the sentiments, practicalities, and personalities behind the bland statistics of the engagement survey results: what they should treasure, what they should notice, and what they need to change.

This article is based on information shared by Roffey Park at the ABP conference 2011

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Not only can we help you understand what your results mean using processes such as that outlined above, we can also help you to grow employee engagement and pride in your organization by working in an appreciative and strengths based way with your people. Find out more about how we can help you with Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715