Have you ever had an ungrateful, power-hungry boss? Or how about one or two toxic colleagues whose negative attitudes bring everyone down? Or a bad workplace culture where people are unfriendly, unmotivated, and, frankly, eager for the work day to end? I expect you can relate to all these sadly common scenarios. This sucks because all of us have to spend so much of our time working.
Shouldn’t it be fun, engaging, rewarding?
Science has come a long way to show us that happy businesses are much more successful than those with bad workplace cultures. This video is going to reveal the science behind happy, successful businesses. Now, old fashion command and control management styles do not work over the long run, and positive work cultures can, in fact, be intentionally built.
So what are the benefits when an organization builds a positive culture, aside from workers just feeling good? Researchers have done what’s called a meta-study on this very topic. A meta-study is a study of the studies. Scientists put aside all the poor quality research and instead gather all the good, peer-reviewed, published articles in leading scientific journals.
They look for overarching conclusions. And this is basically how we reach consensus science, and the consensus is that workplaces with abundant, positive emotions not only have loyal, happy workers, but they get superior outcomes. The workers themselves have much less stress and far higher job satisfaction. This translates into much better customer service, less turnover, and even things like injury rates going down.
Employees take fewer sick days, and they even go out of their way to do some tasks that aren’t part of their job description. This is called organizational citizenship. They just do it because they want to help the business. Now, specifically, the multiple studies found commonalities in positive workplaces. They were distinguished by one or more of the following characteristics: workers self-reporting less stress, the presence of frequent positive emotions, good employee engagement, and high job satisfaction.
Workers have more energy, and productivity and, obviously, profitability all go up. Now, big bureaucratic organizations, like small ones, can sometimes find change hard to do, but there’s every reason to believe that any business can make the shift and get the results they want.
It simply takes conscious commitment to creating a positive culture and sustaining an effort towards that end over long periods. For large companies, I would highly recommend getting some training and coaching to bring a culture about that you really want over time. Now, I hope you enjoyed this short look into one small aspect of positive psychology.
Here’s a link to a positive workplace checklist. Go down the list, and check off what’s working in your business. What checkboxes is your business missing?
That’s where you need to turn your attention to.