If you ask leaders and bosses what is the most important thing that they need to provide to employees to engage them at work, the research repeated over the last 40 years states, that most leaders will say Money. The irony is that if you ask employees the same thing the answer is quite different – Positive Attention from the boss—in the form of knowing what is going on, and focusing on your strengths. Yes, money is important in the sense that workers want to feel that they are paid fairly, but the attention and type of attention a boss pays to an employee makes all the difference in the world in the level of employee engagement.
In a recent Newsweek article by Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman, it was reported America is in a Creativity Crisis and that test scores have steadily declined since 1990. The reasons are not quite understood yet, but the suspect is a shift in engaging in TV and video games versus creative activities. We all know that our school systems are reporting record low scores and that the school day is filled with “must do” subjects.
What struck me in reading the article was neuroscience that is known on how to learn to be creative thinkers and solve problems creatively. (Something this world needs).
“ The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.” And all this time I have been trying to draw only on the right side of the brain.
Reduce your Stress and Be Happier in 3 easy steps
Overall happiness and well being is made up of a variety of components from good work to financial satisfaction to having time to do what you love. One simple way to increase your level of feeling good, healthy, and having overall joie de vivre is to focus on the people you hang out with and what you do together.
#1 Hangout with People who are Happy
What more could you want than to reduce your stress and feel happy. The easiest way is hangout with happy people. The more you hangout with people who are happy your chances of feeling good increases 15%. “People are embedded in social networks and the health and well being of one person affects the health and well being of others,” stated Nicholas Christakis in a 2008 Harvard study.
Combining our need for social interaction with our need for social well-being is a great step in increasing your joy in life. Of course, those relationships also need to be health, supportive, and make you feel good. Take happiness a step further to overall health and longevity, Rath and Harter, in their book Well Being, discuss the risk of dying from heart disease or getting sick is twice as likely for people who have few close relationships. Close relationships affect our health and well-being and even more so if they are in close proximity.
Work Relationships Count a Great Deal
Studies show that people who have a best friend at work are happier. Make friends (if you don’t already have some at work) with whom you can share, talk, laugh, and chat over lunch. If you work alone, make sure you talk to others (as well as social network) throughout the day. Call someone for a coffee chat and up your level of happiness for the day.
In reflecting back over my career, there was a direct correlation between being happy at work and working with not only great people, but a good friend as well. Given this is not always possible, look to build deeper relationships at work with people you enjoy being around and make you feel good.
For many people work is often isolating and doesn’t provide for watercooler chat. As a result it is even more important to find ways to increase socializing into your work day. Some recent data from Gallup-Healthways Well-Being study showed that to have a great day we need six hours of social time. Therefore, it is not just who we are around, but how much we are socializing.
Finding Ways to Schedule Socializing into your work day
- Leave time before and after conference calls with people you like at work to share stories, joke, catch-up on life.
- Email stories, articles, blogpostings, jokes to your work-friends and ask for their comments and thoughts.
- Ask a work-friend to go to lunch once a week – away from the desk.
- Ask a work-friend to go for a walk, to the gym, or a dance class during lunch
- Call a work-friend and just say “Good Morning.”
If you have almost no social time in any given day, you have an equal chance of a good or a bad day. Each hour of social time decreases the chance of having a bad day. This may seem like a lot of time, but people studied who have thriving wellbeing average about 6 hours a day of social time- on the phone, in person, home, work, e-mail count.
We have all learned by now that trying to keep up with the Joneses is no way to live.
Yet, we have this ingrained barometer that ticks off when we hear or see someone with something more than ourselves.
Because we view money in relative not absolute terms we are often irrational in our thinking. We are wired to be “loss averse.” It hurts more to lose money than to win money. At the same time we don’t treat money equally in terms of our “feeling about it.”
Which would you choose,
- Win $50 at Bingo or
- Have $50 cut from your phone bill.
It is the same $50, but we don’t see it that way.
On the other hand when we pay with a credit card we get to experience the pleasure of buying without the pain (yet) of what it will cost. Using this rationale, the Money Gurus tell us to automate the same process in reverse—set up automatic deductions for taxes, IRA, Health Accounts, Savings so that we can use this same system to our advantage. Once they are set up we rarely change them.
Other defaults might include, telling your mortgage broker to contact you when rates drop ¾ to 1 percentage point below what you have now. If in fact, you can refinance you might save thousands of dollars over the course of a home loan.
Some research shows that when an employer automatically enrolls a new hire into the retirement plan, participation increases dramatically. If not, we just get lazy.
Finding ways to set up these defaults will increase your feelings about your financial situation and move you in a positive direction.
Experiences Buy more Happiness than Things
There is no doubt that money impacts short-term happiness in that we have control over how we spend our time. If you have enough money to quit work while kids are young that might impact your happiness for the time being. If you have enough money to change careers and do what you love, that can impact money. And yet, there are a number of interesting studies that show how and what we spend our money on directly makes us happy.
A team of Harvard researches surveyed people on their spending habits and found that spending money on others does boost happiness whereas spending money on oneself does not affect level of happiness.
Then the old Retail Therapy, when you are down – go shopping. Bad moods make more bad decisions and we spend the most when we feel unhappy. No surprise. Let’s take that further, if we want to keep our financial stress low we need to manage our money well. If we are happy, healthy, and joyful we tend to spend less and therefore have more money.
Then there is the choice between the new dress, table or TV and spending on a great vacation – an adventure – a memory that can never be taken away. Our experiences last while our purchases fade away. We relive these memories through stories, writings, photos, books, websites, blogs, and sharing years later about your adventure rafting down the Grand Canyon years later. Carter and Gilovich in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology report that as our income increases (for those with expendable income), buying an experience (i.e. a vacation, a learning event, a play, movie, dining out) provide us with two to three times the level of wellbeing that a material purchase provides.
Rule of thumb, we are less likely to regret buying an experience than a thing. This in turn makes us feel good and not feel regretful, remorseful, or mad at ourselves.
Think about the times that you have felt your best at work or at play. It usually revolves around using your strengths. Yet, we tend to spend so much of our time focusing on improving our weaknesses.
One of the key ways we enjoy life, have fun, feel good is to use our strengths. This is especially true in our work life. In 1958 George Gallup found that Career Well-Being and focusing on our strengths is the one distinction that allows us to live a long healthy life. The Gallup Company continues to do research on the value and benefit of using strengths in all walks of life.
Marcus Buckingham, with his newest book, Find your Strongest Life, reports,
“In the past four decades, women have secured better job prospects,
greater acknowledgement for achievement, wider influence, more free time,
and higher salaries. And yet, recent studies reveal that women have gradually
become less happy than they were 40 years ago, and less happy than men—and
unlike men, they grow sadder as they get older.”
Marcus Buckingham, similar to his other books, suggests that if woman focus on their
strengths they are happier. They don't just try to balance life, but devote their energy
towards using their strengths. An interesting idea to consider, but the notion of the paradox of high expectations and abundance still aren't answered.
This goes for children as well. In the similar book focusing on children, the benefit of focusing on kids strengths far outweighs focusing on their weaknesses in terms of self-esteem, confidence, and willingness to work hard to accomplish a goal.
Combining our need for social interaction with our need for social well-being is a great step in increasing your joy in life. Rath and Harter, in their book Well Being, talk further about the risk of dying from heart disease or getting sick is twice as likely for people who have few close relationships. Close relationships affect our health and well-being and even more so if they are in close proximity.
Studies show that people who have a best friend at work are happier. Since you are around people at work – a lot of the time – make an effort to develop good, fun relationships in which you share, support each other, and laugh together.
If you work alone, reach out, get out, network, and engage socially with friends and family during your waking hours. This can include electronic forms of communicating with others through emails, facebook, twitter, and on the phone.
The past few months this need for pure social interaction has become even more evident to me as I work alone much of the time. To counteract this, I have reached out to some woman I like and connect with who are also working alone. Monthly we call each other to just talk, chat, catch up and share. No agenda, no goal, no purpose other than to enjoy each other and share. Albeit this isn’t daily and is virtually, it is something I look forward to and makes me feel good long after our conversation.
In fact, Harter and Arora at Gallup have collected data from over 140,000 Americans and asked people to tell them if they had a great day or a worry/stressful day. They correlated this with the number of hours spent with friends and family including on the phone, emails, and social networking. They discovered that to have a good day, the daily recommended dose of social time is 6 hours per day. The implications are fascinating for increasing your joy in life and decreasing stress. Remember this includes work and home time, in person, electronic, and telephonic interactions