Happy, engaged employees are good for an organization. They are more creative and produce better results. There are various ways to cultivate team happiness at work. Karen Fernandez, senior project manager and scrum master at Stubhub, shares her way of creating a happy work environment in her recent blog.
As per Karen team happiness is:
I define team happiness as that state in which every team member feels they are in a safe and nonjudgmental team space, respected, heard, and part of the group rather than being an outlier. Each team member feels productive and wants to be with the team, working toward a quality, value-driven project or product.
Vanessa King, board member at Action for Happiness in action 50 focuses on happy environment at work.
Happiness at work is a win-win. Happy, engaged people are healthier, more productive; they have more ideas, are more likely to contribute over and above the responsibilities of their job and help out colleagues, are less likely to leave or be off sick and are more likely to get to work on time.
Vanessa said changing an organization’s culture or incentive system can be complicated and takes a long time. She shared her ideas that can make a difference and are likely to be possible for most supervisors, managers and leaders.
- Build your understanding of the drivers of motivation and happiness
- Focus on individual strengths
- Use strengths as a primer
- Give 'growth-minded' feedback - People with growth mindsets are much more likely to work through setbacks than those with a fixed view, and to feel better about themselves overall.
- Improve your team's positivity ratio - Positive emotions are important, not just for feeling good, but for building our psychological and social resources, learning, creativity and problem solving.
- Give people scope to craft their jobs - A sense of autonomy, of having choice and control, is fundamental to people's psychological well-being and motivation.
Vanessa, shares the tips to find happiness at work. He says that employees should help colleagues, customers, our partners, external advisers and suppliers and try to enhance the relationships with them. Employees should appreciate each other and try to find out whether their goals are aligned with their definition of happiness or not.
Karen, shares the process, she follows to deduce the team happiness. She starts the exercise by collecting the definition of happiness and the needs of each person. Then she discusses all the points and asks everyone to vote to make a team agreement. Finally, they revisit the agreements frequently and update them as necessary.
Rebecca Greenfield, reporter at Bloomberg Business, shares the views of Eric Richard, VP of engineering at HubSpot on team happiness. The transparency is helping employees and making them happier, said Richard. HubSpot uses Tiny Pulse, an anonymous polling app, to gauge overall employee happiness. Richard has found through Tiny Pulse that the engineers are happier because of the transparency and communication, when before they felt opaqueness, confusion, and a lack of understanding.