Trending
Workplace happiness has a valuable ROI
Asking your team to look for gratitude in their every day can feel a little forced at first, but encourage them to persist! You, and they, will find that it makes a difference! We all want to be helpful at work but sometimes it takes a conscious act to make us aware of how we can be and do more. The end result is a positive ROI for everyone.
Like what? Your return on investment in creating happiness with your team can lead to a generally happier environment, better employee retention, more engagement from your team, higher productivity and less absenteeism due to stress/healthcare issues.
Display the behavior you want your team to show too
If you want your staff/team to be happy and share their gratitude with others, you have to step up to the plate and show some yourself. Before your day gets bogged down with meetings, tasks and details, send out a message to a couple of team members, telling them that you appreciate their efforts. Point to specific examples that you’ve noticed.
In addition to showing your appreciation, you need to make sure that the work environment you are creating in is one in which mistakes are forgiven. If a team member feels like they won’t be thrown under the bus for an error, they’re more likely to be engaged and proactively take chances. That’s not to say that errors should be ignored, but if employees feel relatively safe, like you have their backs, they’ll be more productive.
Encourage gratitude behavior in your team
Not only does the leader need to be displaying the behavior they expect to see, but ALL team members should as well. At first, that could be something as simple as asking your team to add something they are grateful for on an online team forum, every single day. At first, you will encounter resistance to this idea. A lot of people are wary of showing any kind of vulnerability at work and personal feelings of gratitude are just that. Still others will resent what they see as yet another task in an already busy day.
Related: Managing Change in a Media Landscape That is Always Changing
Persist! Push them along a little, at first. As they get into the habit of focusing in on what was good about a day, rather than what went wrong, there is a downstream effect of positivity. Over time, your team will learn to distinguish between real issues in their day and things that simply don’t matter as much.
Make positivity part of the corporate culture
At the very highest levels of an organization, taking the time to make gratitude and positivity part of the company’s value statement sets the tone for everyone else to engage and support these ideas. Not in ‘all talk, no results’ kind of ways, but in real, concrete actions that bring gratitude and happiness to the forefront.
Even if all you do every day is express one piece of gratitude you will see a positive benefit.
Get a gratitude journal and start today. Write one thing down that you accomplished, that someone else accomplished or that you are grateful for. Even if that accomplishment seems mundane, you’ll be surprised how it can help you focus in on the positive.