How to be Happy at Work

The Frameworks for Finding Happiness

Do you want to be happy at work? Can you teach yourself to be happy and consciously affect your positive thinking? In this post I will dive deeper into what makes us happy and what you can do to increase your happiness at work.

50% of your happiness is down to your genetics and how naturally happy you are. This is known as your “set point” and you have no control over it. Essentially, you are born that way. A further portion of your happiness is due to your “life circumstances”, and again you can’t affect this. However, it is important to note that these life circumstances account for just 10% of your happiness. This is such a small proportion, yet most of us are guilty of hugely over exaggerating it and letting it take over the large part that we can control, “intentional activity”.

The above stats come from a paper called “The Promise of Sustainable Happiness” from the Department of Psychology at the University of California.

Let’s do some rough maths: 40% of our happiness can be controlled, and we spend 80% of our waking life at work, so 32% of our happiness in life is directly correlated to our happiness at work. We’ve written before about why it’s so important to fall in love with your job, but this makes it really hit home.

So, what else contributes to our happiness and how can we improve it through “intentional activity”?

Does remuneration = happiness?

Your salary matters. Of course it does — you have bills to pay and food to buy. But how happy does a higher salary actually make you? Does it make you any more motivated to work harder? After all, we’ve all heard the saying “money can’t buy you happiness”.

There are a number of arguments that suggest an increased salary makes you ‘less unhappy’ rather than happier. Laurence Stybel states that “salary is more hygiene than motivation”. This comes from Herzberg’s theory of motivation where he argues there are two major factors. Motivator factors make employees motivated and satisfied (i.e. happy), but hygiene factors make employees only satisfied, not motivated. So linking back, Stybel suggests that salary is a factor that must be satisfied, but is not a top priority in happiness [Click to tweet — can be edited].

This also links to the idea that salary is part of your survival. It feeds what Maslow’s hierarchy of needs refers to as your physiological needs. In Maslow’s hierarchy, you must satisfy each level in order to move up to the next. Relating this to happiness, you need food and a roof over your head and therefore a salary to pay for those things, but that is not all you need in order to be happy. Matt Buckland, Head of Talent at Forward Partners, saw this link and used the stages in Maslow’s theory, applying them to the motivations that job seekers go through when deciding to apply for a job. As you can see below (Maslow’s hierarchy on the left, Matt’s on the right), the first motivator he found was ‘financial gain’.

So yes, your salary will contribute towards how happy you are at work, but it is by no means the be all and end all. In fact, one survey found that salary “accounts for just 5.4% of how happy an employee is with the job”.

Does success lead to happiness?

A lot of people live by the idea that if they work themselves into the ground now, even if they are not enjoying what they do, they will eventually become successful, and that success will lead them to being happy.

First we have to discuss what success in a job actually looks like to you. Is it a higher salary? Promotion? Company targets? The problem with all of these things is that your perception of success changes over time.

Once you reach your idea of success today, you’ll raise the bar for tomorrow. [Click to tweet — can be edited]

For those interested, psychologists call this “hedonic adaptation” — where no matter how happy we feel about something, eventually we all emotionally go back to a ‘baseline’.

This was shown in a study of lottery winners who after 18 months were no happier than non-winners.

Shawn Achor argues in his book ‘The Happiness Advantage’, that the common idea that success brings happiness is backward, and that actually it’s the other way round. Happiness leads to success, both personally and in business.

You could argue that this is simply a classic chicken and egg situation, or even that it’s a virtuous cycle so it doesn’t matter whether happiness or success comes first. However, Achor argues that due to the problem of our moving perception of success, “the happiness that results from success is fleeting”, so you really should strive for happiness first. Also, even if you do eventually find happiness from success, wouldn’t you want to learn how to be happy first so as to skip the initial ‘all of this will be worth it in the end’ phase?

Happiness is a Muscle

As the pie chart above suggests, happiness can be improved and worked on through “intentional activities”. In other words, through certain practices we can consciously make efforts to become happier, in general life and at work. In this way, happiness can be seen as a muscle that you can exercise in order to build up.

One such exercise, which you may have heard about, is the 100 happy days challenge. This is where you take one picture a day that makes you happy for 100 consecutive days. This exercise plays on the widely accepted view that appreciation gives you happiness. The crazy thing about this exercise is that over 70% of people fail the challenge, saying they don’t have enough time. Not enough time to take one picture a day. Not enough time to make yourself happy.

For some more ‘outside the box’ things you can do to flex those happiness muscles, check out these exercises / methods suggested by Buffer. They might seem odd or a waste of time, but these are all things you can easily start today, to get happy.

Happiness frameworks

At the end of Tony Hsieh’s book “Delivering Happiness”, he outlines a number of happiness frameworks that he has come across while building one of the most sought after companies to work for, Zappos (see the Zappos careers page). Here is a summary of one of these frameworks along with what you should be looking for to find happiness at work.

“Happiness is really just about four things:
- Perceived control
- Perceived progress
- Connectedness (number and depth of your relationships)
- Vision / meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).”

These are all things you should look for in a job.

1. Find a role where you are in control of something, whether that be performance based pay or any other aspect of the job. At Zappos your salary increase depends on how many ‘skill sets’ you have been certified on in the year — you choose how many you want to learn.
2. Progress is important. Find something where there is a clear route to promotion or progression in some way. The more often you progress, no matter how far, the happier you will become.
3. Join a company where you really think you will not just get on with the team, but become friends with them. We’ve written previously how you should look tojoin a tribe, and this proves it.
4. Being part of something bigger than yourself can give you immense pride. Find a company with a real mission that you can get behind and believe in. This is also known as the “higher purpose” type of happiness in the “Pleasure, Passion & Purpose” framework.

Daniel Pink outlines a similar framework he calls “Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose” in his book “Drive — The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”. Here autonomy is all about control — he talks about companies that have no rules (work where you want, when you want) as long as the job gets done. Mastery to progress and purpose to vision / meaning. He also talks about this in a TED talk.

As a final, simpler piece of advice to find happiness at work, take a look at this venn diagram from Bud Caddell. To find that ‘hooray’ job and company, find something you do well, that you want to do and that you can be paid to do.

Happiness is an incredibly interesting subject, and it’s important to remember that YOU can control 40% of it. There’s a lot of research out there that I’d highly recommend getting clued up on. It could have a huge impact on your life.

I’d love to hear what makes you happy, especially at work, and if you look for specific things in a role or company when looking for a job. Let me know in the comments below, tweet me @LiamNolan90 or @Zealify or email us at hello@zealify.com!

This post originally appeared on Zealify’s blog.