Written by Mark Price
In the UK, businesses are currently feeling the impact of ‘worklessness’, a term that describes the economically inactive: people not in work and not actively looking for work. That’s about 9.4 million people aged between 16 and 64. This acute labour shortage that employers are facing means it’s imperative they seek to retain the current workforce and reduce sickness absence. This can be achieved through effectively assessing and improving their employees’ happiness at work.
Improving happiness in the workplace is so important because it is key to driving commercial success. At WorkL, we collect data from millions of workers in 106 countries across the globe and have found an important pattern: the happiness scores for the UK align precisely with where we are for productivity, and that is the same for every other country we measure. People who are happier at their work perform better, work harder, give more and help businesses to outperform their competitors.
How to measure happiness
It’s important for employers to regularly measure whether their workforce is happy. Engagement surveys are effective as they allow employers to really understand what might be stopping their staff from being happy at work. Our test asks specific questions such as if they’re fairly paid, if their views are heard at work and if they feel empowered to make decisions. Developed by a team of behavioural scientists, data analysts, psychologists, business leaders, academics and other independent experts, the test aims to provide an insight into employee engagement and wellbeing, crucial for talent retention and recruitment.
Going the extra mile
If you want to identify employees who are happy at work, you can see it in people who go the extra mile. A happy employee gives more by going above and beyond the remit of their job description. We call this ‘extra discretionary effort’ (EDE) and we’ve analysed that EDE can increase profitability by up to 36 per cent. There is unrivalled power in EDE and a happy employee will most likely showcase it.
What drives workplace happiness?
We’ve identified six key motivators of workplace happiness that employers should be aware of.
- Reward and recognition – if you’re not earning a fair salary, no amount of recognition for a job well done will be enough to make you forget you’re not being paid enough. Your pay scale has to meet expectations and encourage EDE.
- Information sharing – not sharing information makes employees feel like an unimportant part of the business. Engagement and commitment can be eroded by this. If you are a business that wants to get the best out of individuals on the team, openness is key.
- Empowerment – the aim of any business must surely be to make their employees feel empowered, and this means making them a key part of the decision-making process, listening to their ideas and integrating their suggestions to build and refine your strategy.
- Wellbeing – health and wellbeing can be broken down into three key areas: physical, emotional and financial. By addressing all three, employers will improve engagement levels and productivity.
- Instilling pride – employees who love what they do and feel proud of where they work will speak openly and positively about it to colleagues, potential employees, customers and people in their community.
- Job satisfaction – research shows that the two biggest drivers of satisfaction are respectful treatment and trust between employees and senior management. A poor relationship with your manager is often cited as the number one reason for leaving an organisation, no matter how great the brand.
The importance of leadership
How well do you get on with your manager? This question is almost perfectly correlated to overall satisfaction levels in the workplace. The importance of managers is central to the happiness of organisations and employers must acknowledge this and promote effective leadership.
Having supportive management and a good working relationship with your manager will mean employees are more likely to be engaged and motivated, as well as take fewer sick days, and retention rates are higher, all leading to enhanced performance.
The importance of learning and development
Every individual who works in a business, at whatever level, needs to feel like they are being developed. This feeling has a huge impact on our liking for the job that we do, and many people fall into jobs they don’t particularly enjoy. We’ve recently found a correlation between poor career development opportunities and people wanting to leave their job. If employers are not developing people, it leads to a lower job satisfaction score for employees and increases the possibility of them looking elsewhere for fulfilment.
From coaching to formal training programmes, there’s many ways in which employers can develop their workforce effectively. But businesses also need to recognise that offering an all-round approach to supporting individuals means giving them time to look at their personal development – whether it be through direct line management support, coaching or letting the staff member utilise resources they find themselves.
The importance of individual action plans is key to driving an individual’s progression and happiness. When individuals are given training and opportunities for career enhancement, it not only boosts employee confidence it also instils pride in their evolving expertise and contributions to the organisation. Forward-thinking companies will think beyond job training too and endeavour to find out about the personal aspirations of each individual on their teams. In doing so, companies can start to see the long-term commercial and cultural benefits of a happier workforce.
Mark Price is founder of WorkL and author of Happy Economics.
