“In life and in business: surround yourself with joyful and virtuous people. Stay away from the bitter and vicious”, a recommendation I sent through Twitter, inspired by recent knowledge in my personal life and a chat with Raquel Origel, the General Manager of Risaterapia, a non-profit organization that aims to help people discover the joy in their life.
Risaterapia began as an organization that cares for vulnerable groups of people, such as the very sick, the elderly or those affected by natural disasters. They promise to bring joy to those who need it the most. It is a necessary task with an inspiring nobility, something not new or exclusive to this organization.
The happiness of each of us depends to a great extent on those who surround us or have influence over us.
However, an innovative move by Risaterapia was to look at another type of vulnerable group: people within companies. Humans are social beings and, whether we like it or not, the happiness of each of us depends to a great extent on those who surround us or have influence over us. In business, we are never alone and the influence, for good or ill, is inevitable. It is a great risk for an organization or group of people not to attend to the happiness of its members, and in order to fight this vulnerability, Risaterapia Empresarial was created, under the premise that companies — which are made of people — need the joy to be healthy and productive.
A place that brings together many people who do not smile can only be a nest of bad practices and vices.
That our team is always happy is a constant concern for me, as the COO for my own company. Years ago, when I worked as an employee, I had several unenviable experiences in places where joy was absent. A place that brings together many people who do not smile can only be a nest of bad practices and vices, a place where corruption flourishes, thus withering prosperity.
The so-called “work environment” or “organizational climate” is nothing more than the general mood of people, determined by the customs — Ethics — under which a group of collaborators coexists. Joy is indispensable, but it is only one of the virtues that we must promote among our people.
In other words, joy should figure in the catalog of virtues — not values — that every company should practice. This catalog, although variable according to the nature of the company, is part of its strategic statement. It is not a list of nice and cheesy things, it is a compilation of good daily practices that should be seen and treated as relevant requirements, such as punctuality or productivity, at all levels of the organization.
The importance of this list cannot be underestimated. As we saw with the absence of joy, it is certain that if we do not create a catalog of virtues, the neglected company will generate another one, but full of vices. The strength of habit is fantastic when habits are good, but fearsome when they are bad. How many times have we thought that fighting a current of corruption is impossible, “because that’s the way things are”?
The catalog of virtues by Eudoxa includes one that was born out of the need to generate an integrated and smiling team: friendship. Friendship in the company? Yes, it is a taboo subject. We are regularly advised not to mix matters of our personal life with those of work, but this recommendation is misunderstood and interpreted as if whatever happens inside the company should not affect us emotionally.
For that is how virtue works when it is in abundance: contagious.
However, all that does not affect us in our emotions causes apathy and in the long term ceases to be relevant. Friendship involves us emotionally with our team and favors the conditions for other virtues, such as honesty and joy itself, to develop fully. Of course, we cannot force anyone to be friends with someone else, yet we cannot force them, in any sense, to be virtuous either.
So, what to do? A person, no matter how virtuous, will hardly remain so if he or she is submerged in the turbulent current of a vicious group. As individuals, we must try to keep ourselves safe from those marshy environments and surround ourselves with people who infect us with their own joy, their own virtue. For that is how virtue works when it is in abundance: contagious.
If we are responsible for promoting virtue among our people, what we must do is avoid hiring or integrating people who have nothing good to contribute in terms of it to our work groups. Or, in the worst-case scenario, handle the conflicting people, the “sick ones”, for them to heal through the rest of the team.
It is important to consider that whatever happens in the company also happens in the non-working life. It is impossible to be virtuous at work without being virtuous outside of it and vice versa. So, go get infected by the good things!
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Alberto de Legarreta is Chief Operations Officer (COO) in Eudoxa.
