What contributes to employee and workplace well-being?

What factors actually make people happy in the workplace?

In reviewing the literature on the subject, Joseph Sirgy frames some of the important work conditions that are positively related to work well-being:

Opportunity for personal control, performance on the job, opportunity for skill use, opportunity for interpersonal contact, supportive and empathic supervision, pay compared to others, valued social position, task clarity, and variety in job tasks, while externally generated goals are generally negatively related to well-being.

This is a long list, is it perhaps possible to simplify this a bit, to be able to focus on just a few work conditions.

What could be a more general set of important work conditions?

Some research focuses on just three factors that are conducive to well-being in the workplace: autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Autonomy refers to making autonomous decisions and being free of coercion. In work life, a large degree of freedom in deciding how and when to work in order to reach general goals would be desirable.

Competence refers to the experience of performing your work in a satisfactory and effective way, and the absence of the opposite experience.

Relatedness entails interacting with others and related experiences such as feelings of connectedness.

These factors are widely used in many studies so when evaluating different work environments and your own behaviour, it might be useful to focus on these conditions.

An interesting question is how this compares to the jobs we are in or the companies that we are interested in working for.

Will there be room for autonomy, competence and relatedness? Will the environment be supportive or not?

Perhaps we may not pay enough attention to autonomy and relatedness, and perhaps one might spend too much time on the pursuit of societal status. While it is true that status in face-to-face groups is important, the pursuit of societal status may be less worthwhile.

Sources:

• Sirgy, 2012, The Psychology of Quality of Life: Hedonic Well-Being, Life Satisfaction, and Eudaimonia.
• Deci & Ryan, 2000, The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior.
• Selfdeterminationtheory.org/domains/organizations-and-work-domain