Can You Be Happy at Work?
It is okay to feel the place where we spend most of our adult lives as a form of “pain”?
If you think about it for a moment, the workplace is where we spend most of our adult lives. It changes little if we work on-site or remotely.
Have you ever thought about it?
Now that I'm sure you've thought about it and also realized that this is exactly the case, let's ask ourselves one more question: Is it right that we should be spent this time waiting to go home? Waiting for the weekend? Or for holidays?
We have designed our work and the places where we carry it out as voluntary prisons where we reluctantly go in the morning and from which we leave with great joy in the evening. We have even introduced yard time for lunch …
We generate and share a big number of memes and posts about the difficulty of Mondays, the arrival of holidays or weekends and the like … indeed, if you try to access any social network right now, I’m sure that you can find at least 1 of those memes in the feed (please check it after reading the article 😉).
The consequence of this massive communication on “sad work” is that we now think that there is no other way, that work is a necessity, a means of subsistence. We never ask ourselves why we're doing it this way. The phenomena - which we read a lot about - are reactions to this: the acceptance ("Quiet Quitting") or the refusal ("Great Resignation") of this model by the workers.
Therefore, what we should do is ask ourselves more questions and maybe someone is starting to ask those. Someone already answered some of them quite a few years ago.
“I want [my company] to be not just a factory, but a model, a lifestyle. I want it to produce freedom and beauty because they, freedom and beauty, will tell us how to be happy [...]. Work should be a great joy and for many, it is still misery, the misery of not having it, the misery of doing a job that does not serve, does not help a noble purpose”.
This quote is from one of the most famous and innovative Italian entrepreneurs - Adriano Olivetti -, founder of a company that operated according to traditional hierarchical models. It was pronounced at a time when the changes in the world of work that we see today were not on the horizon.
These words came to my mind recently during a meeting with a General Manager of one of our clients who gave only one direction to the people he works with: "If you ever stop having fun at work, you should let me know immediately. Together we are going to find a way to get back to have fun".
Fun and joy should be the sensations of our working days to fully enjoy most of our days.
If these are the principles, why, are we increasingly witnessing the phenomena described above?
The answer can be found in the final part of Olivetti's quote (among other things, I find the word "misery" very suitable for some situations), the difficulty of seeing the way in which one's work contributes to what we are passionate about (the noble end) and the difficult to see what our work allows us to achieve.
Nowadays there are very few teams that can effectively link their work to business goals. In fact, in a recent study of 6,000 knowledge workers, only 26% of employees said they have a clear idea of how individual work contributes to the achievement of company goals, and only 16% said their company defines and communicates goals effectively.
Yet when teams have clarity on how they contribute to business goals, their engagement at work doubles. With clear objectives, each team member can see how their work contributes to the achievement of the organizational goals, why certain work is prioritized, and what impact that work has on their company's mission.
How is it possible to be happy doing a job for which we do not understand or do not see the ultimate goal? How can we ever appreciate the days we spend performing tasks necessary to achieve a goal assigned by others that we don't fully understand? How can we passionately contribute to fulfilling an organization's purpose if that purpose is not clear to us?
Before the great revolutions, before diversity and inclusion, before the employee experience, I would start from this: the clarity of the purpose that we want to fulfill together and from the enhancement of the contribution that each member of the organization provides for progress towards that purpose.
This is the starting point for building workplaces where we can be truly happy.