Well-Being: How the Structured Workplace Environment Plays a Role in Human Happiness
Picture this: it’s 7 am, you get up, get ready, and arrive at your office by 8 a.m. to start your shift. Your desk is piled high with papers, proposals, and projects from the days before, not too far from their deadlines. Your boss comes to your desk and requests that you create the presentation for next week’s clients. You immediately answer “yes” without any hesitation or even thoughts of the already existing mounds of work sitting back at your desk, accumulating yet again. You better get started or else you’ll be replaced. The boss has a keen eye on those who are unproductive. Meanwhile, you check emails that require immediate attention. After that, you finally decide to start on an assignment. Which one should you choose? Can you put this onto the pile and do it later? Once your shift ends, you find out that there’s still some work left to be done. But what about the presentation? Thoughts of either pulling an all-nighter or starting it in the morning linger into the next day. The cycle repeats. These are the common experiences of your average working person residing in companies. They’re so busy with their work schedule that they miss out on one of the simplest actions vital to increasing work productivity: organization. Much like how we get carried away with numerous assignments on hand, workers forget to tidy up the workspace. This leads to unnecessary stress and dissatisfaction in the workplace environment. Marie Kondo, an organization consultant known for teaching her clients lessons on how to properly tidy up the home environment, is aware of this issue persisting in the front lines of the workforce. Her book, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life, analyzes work productivity in an office environment in part with economists, deriving that happiness could be maximized if workers take the time off work to tidy up their office space. In application, her Konmari method could have a positive impact on increasing both the revenue of corporations and the overall utility of the residing employees.
Marie Kondo uses the book to promote her Konmari method, a self-development guidance towards giving office workers the subjective feeling of life satisfaction. Like a household environment, Kondo believes that the workplace is similar in many aspects. Her consulting career explores the options of promoting pleasure in both the home and work, as she explains in her book (Kondo 5). Her consultant career assists and guides unorganized office workers to overcome the challenges of low utility levels in work. Uptin Saiidi confronts the issue of the excessive hours of work in Japan in his work: Japan has some of the longest working hours in the world. It’s trying to change. His findings suggest that “Nearly one quarter of Japanese companies require employees to work more than 80 hours of overtime a month, … And the Japanese aren’t taking enough time off, either.” Working in Japan, Kondo was exposed to the long hours, stress, and endless work that her firm(s) demanded. She and her co-workers became aware of their disorganized workspace that was doing more harm than good. Upon realization of this issue, she decided on a goal to spread her solution to creating an efficient and more productive way to find joy at work. Her book explores the boundaries that needed to be established: time and frequency. Workers need to find the right time(s) to set aside their enormous pile of work and direct attention to cleaning up the workspace. The frequency of the amount of times done in a day should be more than once. Combining continuous efforts with passing days at work, surely the action of tidying will become more habitual and natural for individuals. From physical objects to the technological aspects inside the computer, all can be evaluated through her guidelines for maximizing wealth and self-satisfaction.
For physical objects around the desk, people who neatly organize with very few instruments typically project strong virtues that managers and coworkers alike reminisce as the ideal work atmosphere. Having many items on the desk doesn’t add more productivity, it narrows the potential of further growth on productivity. Actual findings from A new look at employee happiness: How employees’ perceptions of a job as offering experiences versus objects to customers influence job-related happiness, suggests that the more objects cluttered and messy the desk becomes, the less happiness an individual feels. The experiences matter more than objects which ultimately hurts productivity. Moreover, Kondo adds the point that “Several studies on employee evaluations in the workplace have shown that the tidier a person’s space, the more likely others are to see them as ambitious, intelligent, warm, and calm ”(114). Presenting the work environment to co-workers shouldn’t be undermined by fellow employees. This could help employees attract co-workers to feel comfortable when engaging in conversations and getting work done through cooperation. Furthermore, how workspaces are organized can influence the general friendliness and joy experienced throughout the workdays. By removing the unnecessary files, paperwork, or post-it notes, it’ll help revise the mentality of how employees think of their work environments. Corporations should find a better alternative to the wasted time in meetings. At the end of the day time is money, but time is also needed to organize potential profits. Along with the physical possessions on the desk, another big feature of work is tied to the technical aspects of the computer.
For emails, digital documents, and programs on the computer, they too can be systemized into promoting higher levels of productivity or earnings in the long run. In addition to a messy desk, the online information involving work should also be organized. As Kondo mentions in chapter 4, “The point is to say goodbye to each piece of data, down to the most insignificant file, with gratitude for the role it played in your life” (82). By piling unnecessary information of documents and other projects into the computer, it may cause an overload of information, slowing down the computer and the employee’s work contribution. Typically, people who don’t organize the exterior also won’t find organizing the interior components of the computer joyful. Failure to arrange important components to engage in work, such as passwords, can lead to at least US$420 lost per employee annually, in the United States and United Kingdom(Kondo 20). With insignificant changes in these two areas, it only drags the problem further with the feeling of a never ending cycle of assignments accumulating at the desk. Her proposal, to keep things on track to maximum efficiency, requires workers to answer the same question: “Does this spark joy?”. If it does, they should save it through the usage of folders applying labels to identify which one to use for different assortment of files. Names of clients, companies, and documents can all be sorted out so that it would be ready with just a click of the computer mouse.
There are claims from individuals that unproductive meetings bring down work productivity, and as feedback, they believe there should be a decision from the people with higher positions to accommodate time from meetings to organize the office instead. The cost of the average unproductive meeting comes out to around US$400 billion annually (Kondo 20). In the U.S, not only does the $400 billion become a loss for the businesses, but also a loss for the government because they can’t collect fees or tax those losses. Consequently, if workers claim they are in ineffective meetings rather than doing other important things, like organizing, they should confront managers or bosses to distribute most of the time, if not all, from meetings to be used as clean-up hours. Kondo proposes this as a plausible solution, rather than a perfect one. Surprisingly, corporations and employees should not only take note of the missed revenues, but also the lost time as well; as Kondo suggests, “Meetings also take up a large percentage of our working time. The average office worker wastes two hours and thirty-nine minutes a week at ineffective meetings” (200). Converting the numbers to estimate the annually lost amount of time, that would be around 138 hours wasted annually in an inefficient state characteristic of those meetings. If meetings aren’t as effective as they should be, why have meetings in the first place? Instead, replace meetings with segments of the day for tidying up. Kondo strongly believes that when people tidy up, they become more open to choosing things that spark personal joy, or not. As soon as people get rid of the distractions stemming from extraneous items, the workforce will surely see a significant change in happiness and productivity.
Despite the heavily advocated message of generating happiness and productivity in the workplace through the portioning of space for organizing, there’s a theory that disagrees with happiness being remedial to the work environment. That approach is known as the Set Point Theory. As a notion of the economics of happiness, the Set Point Theory suggests that individual happiness is constant and will never change. Although there is empirical evidence showing temporary fluctuations, happiness will stay constant in the long term. Economist Bruce Headey, the author of The Set Point Theory of Well-Being Has Serious Flaws: On the Eve of a Scientific Revolution? argues that the Set Point Theory “was of limited scope and stultifying in its implications”. Although set point theory articles are expansively published, the articles do not provide the adequate piece of information that is needed: subjective goals and admirations. Set Point theorists believe that happiness is hereditary or pre-determined early on in development. They primarily based evidence on the natural side of the life domain, leaving out the nurture aspect of life. Set Point doesn’t take into account the relationships, subjective experiences, and emotions humans evoke throughout the journey of life. These are the true qualities that researchers should centralize on; the intricate data imperative to painting the bigger picture of pursuing well-being. By disregarding nurture’s side and vindicating nature, the outcome is the Set Point proposition. Life experiences such as goals bring joy to living as studies have shown positive subjective results from researching human behavior. According to the results of the Impact of life goals on the life satisfaction of mature age adults (25–64): OLS regressions (Headey 18), studies find that goals do in fact show increases/decreases in life satisfaction. The significance of family goals and altruistic goals taken from the 8,271 samples of males and 8,026 samples of females, shows test significance for a positive correlation to happiness. Having family goals show a 26% increase in happiness for males and a 32% increase for females. On the contrary, altruistic goals show an 18% increase in happiness for males and a 16% increase for females. No matter what type of occupation an individual performs, they need to have family goals and most importantly, the experiences of cooperation with fellow co-workers. The people around us change who we are concurrent with the dynamic environment. Exceedingly, it has become quite important to build strong positive relationships in the workplace to obtain the satisfaction individuals need.
In conclusion, Marie Kondo and economists believe that the workforce can certainly improve upon the worker’s utility while maintaining losses at a minimum. Kondo has demonstrated throughout her book a technique called Konmari, which can help bolster productivity in the workplace. Seeing how organization plays a vital role in achieving efficiency, people who share similar experiences working in an office space should take a dive into her book if they want to improve their relative positions at work. Time, frequency, and intensity should all be taken into consideration when determining if space should be adjusted for the process of sparking joy. With more economists entering the field of subjective well-being, more support will present itself to uplift welfare at work. Economists should examine Marie Kondo’s values in making people genuinely happy at work, which can be practical in developing a mutually beneficial workplace environment.
Works Cited
Bastos, Wilson, and Sigal G. Barsade. “A New Look at Employee Happiness: How Employees’ Perceptions of a Job as Offering Experiences Versus Objects to Customers Influence Job-Related Happiness.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol. 161, Elsevier Inc, 2020, pp. 176–87, doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.06.003.
Headey, Bruce. “The Set Point Theory of Well-Being Has Serious Flaws: On the Eve of a Scientific Revolution?” Social Indicators Research, vol. 97, no. 1, Springer, 2010, pp. 7–21, doi:10.1007/s11205–009–9559-x.
Kondo, Marie. Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life. BLUEBIRD, 2021.
Saiidi, Uptin. “Japan Has Some of the Longest Working Hours in the World. It’s Trying to Change.” CNBC, CNBC, 1 June 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/japan-has-some-of-the-longest-working-hours-in-the-world-its-trying-to-change.html.
