The 3 Keys to Being Happy at Work

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert, and this week I’m happy to share with you a brand new study out of Harvard that’s really quite a good study. It’s looking at life satisfaction and job satisfaction, and one of the reasons why I’m excited by it is it’s quite good research. It’s a longitudinal study, and so whenever you’re looking for causation for happiness, or direction of one thing leading to another, you need really quality experiments, things with the same subject matters, the same research subjects, same people. In this case, over 900 people studied over a long period of time, so that you can make conclusions based on evidence of things changing in their lives, and what the results are. This study is excellent in that regard.

It’s basically looking at the degree to which our life satisfaction, that is the satisfaction we derive outside of work, influences our job satisfaction and vice versa. Does job satisfaction drive life satisfaction? And you won’t be surprised to find that there’s a reciprocal relationship, that one leads to another in both directions. High job satisfaction improves life satisfaction, high life satisfaction improves job satisfaction, no surprise. But here’s some things that are interesting. The evidence is very clear that life satisfaction is deriving or is driving more of the outcomes in terms of job satisfaction than vice versa. So that’s an important finding in and of itself.

But there are couples places where functions of work drive our overall life satisfaction, and specifically, there’s two areas: purpose, the degree to which we feel we’ve got purpose in our lives, and our social connectedness. When those things are doing really well at work, we get high levels of happiness in our life generally. It makes sense. This video’s got three important takeaways for you, so stay tuned and they’re coming right up.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so I’m happy to share this study with you. In fact, David will create a link in the bottom of this description, in the description of the video, where you can get a copy of this study itself. It’s really quite good work, even if it’s academically written. The conclusions are pretty dramatic.

The first thing I want to share with you, that’s not in the study but my own view in terms of coaching workplaces and working as a manager for so many years, is that “shitty life syndrome” is real. And then it’s maybe a callous way to put it, but sometimes in the professional setting, we have to talk about what really is. That some people are coming from really difficult circumstances in their life, and they come to work and guess what, they bring their lives with them. And so, if people are depressed and anxious, and having a really hard time being satisfied with life outside of the workplace, the odds are not very good that they’re going to be highly satisfied at work, which is predictive, sadly, of work outcomes.

Now obviously, that doesn’t mean that we throw these people to the curb. We want great employment programs that support these people, you know, E-FAP programs, that kind of thing, a supportive, good, healthy, emotionally intelligent workplace, that’s obviously ideal. And I want to also point out that there are exceptions. I’ve seen people with “shitty life syndrome”, forgive that turn of phrase, also have really good experiences at work, and there’s something that clicks in them. They have an appreciation that the one stable, high-quality part of their lives is, in fact, their experience at work. Where things may be chaotic and violent, dramatic in their lives outside of work, they can come to work and find things that are predictable, regulated, people are kind, behaviors are within a certain, um, appropriate set of confines, and that makes them happy. It works.

So, this is a one comment that I wanted to add. The second thing is that the study finds very clearly that the degree to which we have purpose in life, which is highly predictive of life satisfaction, happiness, is often determined by where we get our purpose in work. So the really interesting finding, and second thing I want to talk about in this study, is the degree to which purpose is predictive of life satisfaction, which is short for happiness, and purpose is mostly going to be derived from our work. Purpose is a little different than meaning, which is kind of a more existential quality. Purpose is this idea that we have end-directed goals, that we have an achievement orientation. It doesn’t mean our whole lives need to be there, but we have to have some aspects of our lives that are goal-oriented.

And so, goal orientation has to be practical, reasonably short-term, with milestones that we feel we can get at, and in addition, long-term that we feel like we know where we’re going over the longer run. And so, organizations that facilitate this are really helping people have purpose. And even sometimes, in a longer-term perspective, it’s about job families, where we can say, if I get this entry-level job and I do these certain things, then I’ll become qualified for the the next level up, and the next level up. So that career progression makes sense, if it contains both short-term goals and long-term goals. And obviously, work that has milestones built into it on a day-to-day basis is going to help people feel that they’re goal-oriented and achieving things. And then, of course, cultures in a workplace can facilitate this too, a culture of celebration where we simply stop and party, and recognize the good things that we’re achieving as an organization, or the good achievements that individuals achieve, as well as team goals and divisional goals. So that there’s communication about what’s going well in the organization, and that facilitates people having a sense of purpose.

The third really interesting thing from this study, of course, is all about social connectedness, and how social connectedness at work, specifically, drives good life outcomes, drives happiness in our out-of-work context. And this is one of the ways in which work is highly influencing on the happiness in our lives, is to the degree to which we have friendships at work. And when we do have friendships at work, not only is there human flourishing going on, people are doing well emotionally, but it’s also highly predictive of retention. People who have a best friend at work don’t leave those jobs, except in the rarest of circumstances.

So, the social connectedness thing is something that’s especially interesting in the workplace. You note that we don’t have much choice about who we work with. When we’re out of work, we can choose who our friends are, from, you know, theoretically the whole of the world we can choose from. But in work, it’s just the people who are in our teams, in the cubicle next door, or whatever, that we have this opportunity to become friends with. And it suggests there’s something about people who are socially adaptive, who are going to do better in work and in life than people who are not. But that’s just my own speculation that I think probably is pretty well grounded.

So, if you’re looking for people who are going to do well at work, you might be very well looking to see how socially adapted they are. You also want to create deliberate cultures of connectedness in your workplace if this is some place where you’ve got influence over it, or look to see if your own place has workplace has some of these qualities. Things like that there’s honesty and vulnerability in the workplace, people, you know, bear their souls a little bit so that there’s a sense of integrity and a genuine connection that’s going on.

You also need quiet spaces and by this, I mean literally just quiet spaces. If I’m thinking of industrial settings, many, many, many of which I’ve been in, having simple conversation is incredibly difficult. Instead, people are yelling at each other, and they’re pointing at the things that they want to point send people to, and you know, a meaningful conversation is difficult to have. So even in those places and all other workplaces, you need to create environments, communal spaces, that are warm and comforting, and invite people to engage with one another and have a meaningful conversation.

Your workplace needs to be family supportive. You know that it’s got involvement with the community, that there’s good programs for the whole family, EFAP programs and the like, and you also need workplaces that have clubs and activities and maybe, you know, community organizations, charitable giving, something that gives a sense of meaning and purpose for people in a social construct beyond the work itself. And if those things are present, you’re probably getting some life satisfaction that’s derived from your work.

So, thinking of all of these things, the purpose that you get from your work and the social connectedness you get, I wonder if you’d comment in the comment sections below, in what ways is your work facilitating greater life satisfaction? If you like this kind of content, click the like button, share it with your friends and family, maybe with your HR director. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you next week.