Happiness in the workplace - a CSR objective

Happiness is not depending on riches, beauty or health. Happiness is much more related to relationships and achievement of objectives. Today I had an epiphany, all my co-workers prefer to share open-space above the status of larger desks and more room.
Photo by Lip Kee Flickr CC
Francis Bacon famously said that:

Human relationships double our joys and halve our sorrows.

If you have a friend to share your joys, the feeling is reinforced. Likewise, when you have trouble, a friend can console as well as help in finding a solution. This sounds like great management principles. To increase the combination of happiness and productivity is definitely a Corporate Social Responsibility objective worth pursuing.

Being in control

The feeling that you can control your life is an important factor in happiness, both Dan Pink with his focus on "Autonomy" and many other researchers have came to that conclusion. To have that sensation of being responsible is called an "internal locus of control" and belongs to the field of attribution within psychology. According to Weiner, there are three factors:

1. If the event is caused by myself, or someone else.


2. If the event is stable or un-stable, meaning if it happens each time you did what you did.


3. If the event is controllable or not, meaning if you can do something about it or not

I will try to clarify this a bit more using an example from Danielle Monegalha Rodrigue's doctoral theses: If I a young woman, already engaged and with a date set for her wedding, finds out that her fiancee has an affair, she can see it in several ways. If she feels that it is because the way she is, that it will happen every time (a stable event) and that there is nothing she can do - then she might brake the engagement and possibly never go into a relationship again. But, if she thinks that it is because of her, that it is un-stable and controllable, she might just possibly try to do something differently to save her relationship and go on with the wedding.

Four rules of Open Management

Maybe the examples we have just seen, all taken from the area of Positive Psychology, can be brought into management and leadership in the form of four simple guidelines:

Create an environment where friendship can thrive - it will bring happiness to success and thus increases the chances of it happening over and over again, as it will bring help to those in need and thus shorten the "break-down" time.

Create conditions for responsibility - clear division of responsibilities, maybe inspired by the SCRUM model for project managing and other coaching based initiatives.

Create a stable context - a culture of shared values, through clear communication around goals and visions.

Create conditions for a sense of controllability - if equipment used is impossible to understand, what the Total Quality movement calls black boxes, then the productive process is, in practice, out of control. Through a combination of simplification and training, the process can be understandable and thus controllable.

What do you think, is this a way forward?