The Happiness Revolution is finally happening, and it’s starting in the most unlikely of places… our workplaces.
All around the world, millions of employees have started rising up and taking control of their lives and their wellbeing. They’re saying “no” to corporate platitudes and mediocre work environments. They’re saying, “enough is enough.”
You see, since early 2020, we’ve all been thinking… we’ve been thinking about what’s important in life… a global pandemic will do that to you.
We now know we want to work to live, not live to work. We don’t value long work hours and bad work environments. We do value time with our family and friends, a slower pace of life, less stress, more time. Better wellbeing.
As organisational psychologist Adam Grant writes, “For generations, we’ve organized our lives around our work. Our jobs have dictated where we make our homes, when we see our families, and what we can squeeze into our downtime. What if we reversed that, and started planning our work around our lives?”
So, our jobs have to change. They have to enable, not hurt, our wellbeing. We don’t want to work 50-hour weeks, in horrible work environments with horrible bosses and colleagues. We want jobs that we’re passionate about. We want meaning and a sense of satisfaction from the work we do.
We also want flexibility. Not flexibility to work more hours, blur the lines between home and work and eventually burnout. No, we want flexibility to put our lives first and our jobs second. If we want to take a class at lunchtime, or pick up the kids from school, then we’re now looking for jobs that can fit around our personal wellbeing priorities, not the other way around.
Finally, we want positive, happy work environments, and we will no longer put up with bad bosses or teams. If we do have to spend 40 hours a week with a group of people, we want to at least enjoy their company and feel like a solid team working together to achieve a goal.
In a Wired article called The Great Resignation is here and no one is prepared, recent job quitter, Ashley said, “I want a job that suits my life and means I’m not tied to a desk all day, every day. And if I don’t feel happy, I can just quit. There are more than enough jobs out there.”
Ashley is the face of the Happiness Revolution.
You might be thinking that I’m exaggerating. Surely, I’m just talking about a handful of those pesky entitled millennials. This phenomenon can’t be that endemic, can it?
Sorry, it is, and we’re seeing it across all generations, all around the world. People are voting with their feet, by leaving their jobs in droves.
Global consulting firm McKinsey surveyed employers and employees in Australia, Canada, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S. and found that forty per cent of employees were at least somewhat likely to quit in the next three to six months. In the U.S., an astounding 11 million people quit their jobs between April and June, according to the US Department of Labor.
It’s the Start of the Happiness Revolution
The conditions are now ripe for mass disruption. For the first time since the first Industrial Revolution – before the slow degradation of organised labour over the past century – workers have the power, not the large corporations. We know there are plenty of jobs in the market, and thanks to social media we can easily organise ourselves and share information about the wages, conditions and benefits others are getting. Not only that, but we’re seeing the start of a post-Covid boom as economies pick up again, leading to more jobs than qualified people.
Now that we, the workers, have the upper hand, we’re calling out the long-ignored disconnect between the rhetoric at the top (or from the HR department’s glossy brochures and web pages), and the lack of any hiring processes that screen for true leadership. We’re saying “no” to bad bosses, who communicated poorly – or not at all – during the past 18 months. We’re saying “no” to the leaders who only care about making their bosses happy, who take all the credit for the team’s work, and who couldn’t even tell you whether you have a family, let along know that little Johny has been sick. We’re saying, “good luck micromanaging us from home!”
Employers need to up their game, and pronto. They need to realise they can’t just throw around empty statements like “employee engagement is important” and “we value our employees,” while hoping that the jerk they just promoted because he gets the job done will remember to use the corporate reward and recognition platform a couple of times a year. Nope, thanks to Covid, employees now expect more.
As millions of people around the world quit their jobs – sometimes in response to terrible leadership and wellbeing support during Covid, sometimes due to the fear of a mandated return to the ‘pre-Covid’ office environment, and sometimes in search of greener pastures – it’s clear there is no going back. No matter which way you look at it, the Great Resignation is here, and the Happiness Revolution is underway!
Sidebar: Before we move on, I do want to apologise to those ‘entitled Millennials’ who spent the past decade asking for jobs with purpose, true opportunities for growth, and flexibility – because they had already realised that life isn’t only about work and the rat race. After a couple of years of burnout, anxiety, soul-searching and eventually (for most of us) growth, the rest of us are now onboard. We finally get it. Sorry it took us so long.
3 Steps to Retaining and Attracting Employees During the Happiness Revolution
Leaders, this is your wake-up call. If you want to retain any of your top talent, or attract any of the talent currently, or soon to be, on the market, you need to get onboard with the happiness revolution. The good news is that happy employees are more productive and more successful, so it’s a win-win.
All it takes is a bit of effort and time. Listen to your employees, get to know them, and as much as possible, have authentic conversations with them about what they want. The research in this space has been around for years, it’s time to finally prioritise it. Here’s what you have to do…
Help you Employees Find Purpose and Meaning – and not Necessarily With you
Leaders need to get back to mentoring their team members, being their biggest cheerleaders and helping them to reach their potential. This starts with having conversations to find out who your employees are and what they want out of life. It means knowing and caring about their lives outside work. It means knowing what drives them and what they care about. And once you know what they want, it means actively advocating for your team members, promoting their achievements and taking their career advancement into your hands.
More than anything, it means helping them find meaning in their job, or helping to craft a role that can provide that meaning. And if that’s not possible, it means helping them build the skills to eventually move onto another job that will deliver purpose and meaning. This might seem counter-intuitive, but they will work harder for you while they develop those skills and be an advocate for you and the organisation when they do leave (which they would have done anyway). Maybe one day they’ll return with deeper skills and more appreciation and loyalty.
None of this is new, but in a post Covid world, and in a fight for talent, there is no longer any time to dawdle. As organizational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant says in this Wall Street Journal article, “The Great Resignation isn’t a mad dash away from the office. It’s the culmination of a long march toward freedom. Flexibility is more than choosing the place where you work. It’s having freedom to decide your purpose, your people, and your priorities.”
We know the best way to succeed is to help others succeed. So get to it, because if you don’t invest time into helping your employees find purpose, they’ll look for it elsewhere.
Related reading: What Makes a Job Meaningful and Why That Matters
Provide True Flexibility – for all
Somewhere in the past 18-months – between Zoom calls, stretchy pants, and sourdough baking – we realised we no longer want “work-life balance.” We just want a life. A good life.
We’ve realised the dichotomy of work and life that is implicit in the term ‘work-life balance’ is false. We were not put on this earth to hate our jobs, work 50-hour weeks, work through our lunch breaks, never take leave, and suffer such severe burnout and stress that it impacts our physical health.
Meanwhile we try to cram every good experience into the remaining evening and weekend hours. Constantly ticking off our to-do list and never feeling rested. Then eventually we die.
NO THANK YOU.
That is not life. And that is not living.
The great thing about the global Covid work-from-home experiment is that we now know we can be productive when working from home. Despite leaders’ fears, nothing fell apart. In fact, the stock market has boomed since early 2020.
The work-from-home experiment also shone a light on inequity. Caregivers – who are disproportionately women — don’t necessarily want to go back to a world with an additional two hours of commute time, on top of an eight-hour workday and a few hours of caregiving squeezed into the remaining hours of the day. People on minimum wage don’t want to have to come back into the office, spend money on expensive work attire and CBD-priced lunches.
This experiment has shown we work 100% from home and still deliver results. So why then are some leaders talking about everyone coming back into the office? Flexibility doesn’t mean everyone gets to work one day a week from home, it means you ask each and every worker what works for them, and you accommodate their needs. Nothing short of this will lead to retention of good employees.
Related reading: How to Move on From Job Burnout
Happiness Matters – Have Some Fun
I don’t know why organisations are so tied to employee engagement as a metric of success. No employee wakes up thinking, “Jeez, I hope I’m engaged today.’ But many millions of people are leaving poor-fit roles, depressing teams, bad bosses and in-flexible companies because they are not happy. Ask any parent what they want most in life for their children, and they’ll say “happiness.”
It’s simple really. Happiness matters. As psychologist and happiness author Shawn Achor found in his research on workplace happiness, happier workplaces are more successful. “When we are happy—when our mindset and mood are positive—we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it,” he said.
As we enter the happiness revolution, and employees expect their happiness to matter, we need to bring some fun and joy back into workplaces and teams. Spend time laughing and learning together. Ask your employees, “what makes you happy?” Then make them responsible for contributing, but also take charge yourself for building a happy culture.
“Each one of us is like that butterfly in the Butterfly Effect. And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.”
― Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work
Related reading: Fun Isn’t Only for Children – Here’s How to Make Your Life More Fun!
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