Why employee happiness matters at the workplace?

Happiness has been such a tenet in life that many strive to obtain it. The significance of achieving happiness is not just held by individuals but also by a nation. It is encoded in our Singapore National Pledge as the ending statement.

…… so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation.” (National Pledge, n.d.)

According to distinguished professors (Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E.) in ‘The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?’ psychological bulletin, it was believed that the high frequency of positive emotions will lead to success and flourishing and results in the enhancements and improvements of daily life and work-life, including physical, mental, social, institutional and even income (read more). These enhancements, in someway, is either directly or indirectly related to work. Let’s explore how positive emotion can be an intervention at the workplace.

Positive Emotion Defined

There are many definitions of emotions. A simple definition states emotions as being a state in feeling while some define emotions as multicomponent response tendencies, high-intensity and high-hedonic pleasure/displeasure. Thus, to improve our wellbeing or happiness, we have to pay more attention to positive emotions. As a whole, positive emotions are likely desirable emotions to experience for everyone, and striving to increase these positivity is a worthy effort.

Power of Positivity

The power of positivity is a powerful thing. It has been proven that people with positive emotions are more likely to explore their environments and take action towards their own learning and development, resulting in them growing as individuals over time! This means if you want your employees’ productivity levels or job satisfaction on point, make sure they are constantly surrounded by supportive energies from team members, managers or external coaches.

Positive Emotions and Workplace Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is the feeling employees get when they meet expectations for work outcomes. When employees are satisfied with their work, they are more likely to be engaged and productive. This in turn helps them meet the expectations set on what should happen to improve business outcomes – leading even further towards satisfaction!

  Satisfied employees lead to high engagement with their work, resulting in higher productivity, lower turnover, loyalty and increased profits.”

What can companies do to help employee find happiness to build positive emotions? Creating an organization coaching culture is one of the many ways to accomplish this. The International Coaching Federation (ICF), defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential”. By focusing on individual fulfilment, and in line with Broaden-and-Build Theory, positive emotions can elevate practical personal resources by broadening one’s thinking and behaviours, increasing one’s capacity to succeed and flourish as mentioned above. These enhancements produce many ripple effects, including empowerment, job satisfaction, and leadership effectiveness.

Personalised coaching will nurture positive emotions of employees by:

• Helping employees discover their passion
• Coaching works on both attitude and aptitude
• Coaching helps employees prioritise their focus, analyze and take action
• Coaching helps employees identify their strengths and weaknesses
• Coaching improves communication between leader-subordinate for leadership effectiveness

There are many more ways how coaching helps develop positive emotions for your employees. Speak to one of BestOfMe’s consultants to explore more.

Conclusion

The above discussion proposed that cultivating positive emotions at the workplace increases psychological wealth, leading to increased job satisfaction with the work both as a leader and follower. Job satisfaction at work has a direct linkage with employee wellbeing, stress management and lower turnover intentions.  The results are improvement in the organisational cost of operation and increase in potential revenue due to higher employee productivity and task performance.

The investigation of positive emotions application in the workplace is not just a worthwhile research topic, it makes good business sense and is an attractive value proposition for your organisation to investigate and invest in.

Written by: Seok Heng Wah

BestOfMe Coach

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