A while back I attended a leadership seminar at work titled "Fired Up or Burned Out? Creating a Connection Culture" by Michael Stallard and Jason Pankau. This was part of their talk's announcement:
Seventy-five percent of Americans, on average, are not engaged in their work and 20 percent of the disengaged work against their organizations’ interests. For many this raises the question: What work environment enables everyone to perform to the best of their abilities and align their behavior with organizational goals?
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Employees in an organization with a high degree of connection are more productive, more engaged, more collaborative, and less likely to leave. In fact, research demonstrates that there is a set of learnable leadership behaviors that can ignite the workforce so individuals do more than survive – they thrive.
Speakers said emotional factors are four times as effective as rational factors in engaging employees at work. They emphasized the importance of feeling connected. Lack of connection at work results in loneliness, isolation, confusion, distrust, disrespect, and dissatisfaction. On the other hand, connections result in enthusiasm, satisfaction, and involvement. We feel fired up rather than burned out.
Speakers argued we all have certain needs that should be met in order for us to be happy with our jobs. They emphasized the word needs, they are not wants, not things that would be nice to have. If these needs are not met, our mental and physical health will be jeopardized.
This was their list of needs that should be met at our jobs:
1) Respect
2) Recognition
3) Belonging
4) Autonomy (Freedom)
5) Personal Growth
6) Meaning
I am often asked if I plan to get a new job. So far, I have responded no. I do not see any reason or need to do so. The above list helped me understand better why. During the past eight years, I never felt items 4-6 were at risk of not being met at my work. I almost always felt good about items 1-3, with the exception of one difficult team I had to work with for a while. Even during that time, working on multiple projects came to my rescue: those needs were satisfied via other teams and projects. While working on multiple projects with different groups can be inefficient and counter productive, it can also come to your rescue. By not putting all your eggs in one basket, one person/group/project won't have all of the power to deprive you from meeting your needs. You go to a meeting with a different group who respect and appreciate you more, and you get enough satisfaction to carry on. So, I am not going to complain anymore about being on multiple projects each with their own meetings and deadlines. They are all working together to cover my six above mentioned needs.
11 comments:
Did you ask yourself who these speakers work for? Are they free-thinking individuals? To which group of people do they belong? Whose interest do they maintain?
Who says their 6 criteria is a scientific fact that everyone should follow?
Personally I see them as agents of a system that benefits from our work and needs to give us some kind of satisfaction- real or not real- to keep us working for them.
I don't like boxes like this. As a human I am so diverse and so much multidimensional.
I value the kind of work that leaves me with enough time to enjoy life for its own sake,and a job that leaves me with enough energy to enjoy my life outside work place too.
Mehrnaz jaan,
I was just giving a report of the talk I attended. No one claimed their criteria is a scientific fact that everyone should follow.
Although their classification may not be the best one or the most scientific one, it seems reasonable to me. I personally would not be happy at a job where I am not respected, do not feel I belong to it, do not learn anything new, etc. Also, you need to make a distinction between a "career" and a "job". We may not have many expectations from a part-time job, but we have higher expectations from where we peruse our "careers": doing what we want/like, what we prepared for over our lifetime, spending at least 40-50 hours per week there. It is hard to have even a few of the needs they mentioned satisfied and most employers fail miserably at that.
You may be happy to have a job that leaves you with enough time to do whatever you like, but you may not enjoy the hours you spend at that job. They are trying to make people feel good while doing their jobs and as a result want to do more, and thus yes, employers benefit too. They were talking about how to make people happy at work, not outside work.
I think more people become happier than sadder if their employers respected them, recognized them, etc. So, whether their list is complete or not, it would not hurt the workers.
Speakers specialize in leadership and management techniques and teach such courses to businesses. You can learn about the speakers and their own business here:
http://www.fireduporburnedout.com/the-authors/
Apparently they have a book and blog too.
Being happy outside work was not the focus of this talk/post. That is a different discussion.
Work is a huge part of our lives. Life goes on while we are at work. I do not view work as something that stops me from living my life. If that is the case, it means I have chosen the wrong job that is not related to any of my interests, and I should change that job. Whether we are living to work, or working to live, it is important to be happy at work. Since we have to work to earn a living, we may as well enjoy it, or else find something we better enjoy doing.
Also I would think people who are unhappy at work may carry the stress and negative feelings to their lives outside the work environment and thus are more likely to be unhappy outside work too.
I think you are talking about what exists and I am talking about the alternatives that I believe would be better if they could be.
How many people do you know who are satisfied with their jobs or careers?
What do you mean by this:"Being happy outside work was not the focus of this talk/post. "
Does that mean that I should not talk about happiness outside of work place and cannot relate it to this talk?
We can always challenge the existing circumstances and question their worth or their credibility or other attributes of it. The fact that one part of a situation is perfect does not mean we cannot question the other aspects of it.
As I said, the relationship I find is that being happy/unhappy at work affects being happy/unhappy outside work. So, I would think "If one is working, it is better to be happy while doing it". Is there something wrong with this sentence? What are we arguing about?
What are the alternatives that would be better if they could be, that you are talking about?
Of course you can talk about being happy outside work. What I meant was that speakers were not talking about that, just like they were not talking about proper nutrition, communication skills, child raising techniques, couple's relationships, and so many other factors that can affect happiness outside work. They were talking about "how to make employees at a work place happy to be more productive".
I don't argue about your point. Your point is valid, but it is not what I am talking about.
I posed you a question in my first comment that you failed to address properly and relate it to what I want to say. That's ok.
The alternative would be a more balanced working schedule in which we have equal hours of work and not work so we can live. YOu can argue that work is part of life, in which case I argue back that if it is according to our interest which in many cases is not.
Again I ask how many people are out there satisfied and happy with what they do regardless of their working environment?
Alternative would be 3-4 days of work and 3-4 days of not working so we can spend the time on our interests.
You are right: there are many many people out there that are not happy with their jobs. That is why the trainings and business (yes the business) of such speakers even exist and is important. Even in their talk announcement that I quoted, they mentioned seventy five percent of Americans are not happy at their jobs.
As who speakers work for, I provided you the link to their website for you to read. They have their own company. They earn money for services/trainings they provide, similar to how therapists, physicians, or teachers earn money for services they provide. Their customers are companies and organizations who want to increase their productivity by making/keeping employees happy at work. Their interest is the satisfaction of their customers which are companies/organizations who hired them.
Why should it matter which group of people they belong to? We can hear what they have to say and judge for ourselves if what they say makes sense or not. Why should we have a biased opinion about what we are going to hear by putting speakers into boxes? What they say can either be logical or illogical to us, helpful or hurtful for us, we can be the judge of that ourselves.
Again, even if we work 3-4 days per week, we better have 3-4 happy days than sad ones.
We humans have so many different interests and needs that one would hope we could find a job that can be at least close to one of our many interests or hobbies or at least satisfies some of our needs. Life is too short to spend it doing what one does not like, even for 3-4 days a week.
Well my question was not a fact question. It was supposed to lead you to a bigger picture. It helps to know which system they belong to, not because we could then stereotype them, but because we would have more information to process what they say and we would be able to analyze their speech better. They don't talk in a vaccum and we don't live there either.
Yes, we always get some general information about the speakers (their bio, education, achievements, employment) before/during the talk, and are often given references to their work and research to learn more about their work and thoughts if interested.
and sometimes we should read between the lines or hear other stuff (not just general information) from between the words we hear, if we think out of the box!
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