Even the happiest person can struggle in a negative and unhappy environment. It’s basic science. While happiness is proven to be contagious, negativity and pessimism have a similar domino effect. And that can affect your happiness at work.
You could love your job and feel very confident about your work and still not feel happy at the office because of several aspects. It could be a general feeling imposed by a strict normative way of working, it could be the lack of social interaction and communication or it could be the constant lack of light and air, in a basement office.
There are several factors that could affect your happiness at work. While felling happy and satisfied is an inner feeling, one that you can control, staying this way takes an effort that is usually sustained or impaired by the external environment.
We thought of some of the happiness barriers that you might experience at work:
- A stressful atmosphere based on a “no room for error” policy
- Lack of communication and social interaction between colleagues
- The constant absence of your manager or team leader
- Too many rules in the way of working
- You don’t get the support you need when you have a new idea or suggestion
- Your schedule is very closely monitored
- Lack of a proper channel that you can use to give feedback to your colleagues or to your manager
- No team activities outside of work
Sounds familiar?
If you want to remove these happiness barriers at work, you need to have a strategy.
If the main barriers are triggered by your management you need to find the right moment and the right tone of voice to offer them feedback and to suggest a new way of doing things. Approach your team leader and express your honest assessment of the workplace and how you think it could improve. You can use Hppy Apps to give anonymous feedback and to let them know how you feel.
When these barriers are related more to your team and your colleagues, be the first to take the initiative and start changing things, one step at a time. Lead by example and encourage conversation, social interaction and a more relaxed way of collaborating. You could be surprised to find that some of your colleagues may have felt the same way you did but didn’t have the courage to do something about it.
Trust yourself to speak out and identify the things that diminish your workplace happiness and your overall satisfaction at the office. Things won’t change if someone doesn’t point out a problem and suggests a solution.
Have a quick one-hour brainstorming session at the end of the week, with your entire team, and identify the things that make you happy at work, that you want to keep, and the things that you want to improve or change. Make a list and assign a responsible for every point. You can improve your workplace happiness in a short while.
If your team is not comfortable with a brainstorming, you can use Hppy Apps to give anonymous feedback and improvement suggestions, or simply use a classical pen and paper approach.
Also, it’s important to give feedback every time you feel like something affected you and you want to address it.
Here are 3 things to keep in mind when offering feedback.
Image via StockSnap.io under C.C.0 license
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