Corporate Wellness: Cultivating Happiness at Work

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” Dalai Lama

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Happiness at Work [image source: onlinemba.unc.edu], crowd ink, crowdink, crowdink.com, crowdink.com.au
Happiness at Work [image source: onlinemba.unc.edu]

Let’s face it – everyone wants to be happy. However, what people can take for granted is that happiness, much like anything else worthwhile, needs to be worked towards and is an ongoing pursuit.

Research has shown that the happier you are, the more productive you are. In turn, the happier your staff are, the more productive they will be.

Healthy, engaged employees are your top competitive advantage.

“Happiness is the secret ingredient for successful businesses. If you have a happy company it will be invincible.”  Richard Branson

The simplest and most inexpensive way to build a good team and good team culture is to have happy employees. However, in order to have engaged and happy staff, you need to build a relationship with them.

What better way to make your employees feel valued and important than by investing in them personally?

Not surprisingly, Richard Branson is also an advocate of this philosophy:

“Client’s do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the Clients.” Richard Branson

Happy employees are more productive.
“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” – Simon Sinek

While I’m sure we all agree that while it is the individual that needs to make the effort and time to be happy, businesses are responsible for creating and setting a culture in which it is easy to be happy at work.

In fact, new studies have shown that happiness at work may actually be the most important success factor for a modern workplace and developing happy employees is arguably what twenty-first century management is all about.

There is no single model for how to best implement happiness programs into a business. However, not only are many individuals and businesses understanding the benefits of a happy workplace, many countries are understanding this too, and starting to implement plans accordingly.

Bhutan, a small country in the Himalayas measures ‘Gross Domestic Happiness’ – creating an infrastructure that enables their citizens to flourish.

In March of this year, the United Arab Emirates adopted a 100-day plan to boost happiness and positivity, as set out by the country’s newly appointed Minister for Happiness, with their ultimate goal as a government being happiness as a way of life.

And let’s also consider this – whether your staff members are engaged at work or not, you still pay them the same salary.

So if you want to increase the output of work, implementing plans to increase employee engagement and boost their productivity by investing in their wellbeing and workplace happiness, would seem a logical choice.

The Happiness at Work Program

I realise that all this isn’t rocket science. However, it’s so easy to forget to simply BE happy.

So, we developed a Program to help do just that. The Happiness at Work Program is a workbook that provides 30 exercises, which we recommend are completed over a 6 week period, allowing the habit of a positive mindset to be formed.

The way these questions and this program have been written is to train people to seek out the positive moments in their day, however small, and register them. After doing this for just a few short weeks, thinking in a positive way, should start to become automatic. And it should only take 10 – 15 minutes to do, per day.

The results?

This program affirms that when individuals experience appropriate positivity, they perform better, and when individuals perform better, employers and organisations achieve more.

For more information go to: www.thehappinessatworkprogram.com or email contact@thehappinessatworkprogram