The Happiness Habit

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There are an estimated 40 million working days lost due to work-related illness and injury in the UK each year, costing over £12 billion in direct costs.

Unhappiness at work potentially drains billions of pounds each year from workplace productivity.

It is a widespread but little-known problem thats becoming worse every year!

A recent study of productivity in the workplace revealed that workers spend on average eight percent of their workday doing nothing. This statistic takes on greater significance when we find that unhappiness impacts employee productivity loss by an even greater percentage.

Unhappiness can affect as much as 35% of the workforce and can be “toxic to employees” attitudes and work performance.

You may have known this intuitively. After all, you will probably recognise that when you are in a good mood, you get more done, more easily. Your work is better, too! It's as though your mind snaps into action and you can get more done in less time.

So, how does this translate into the workplace?

Employers are increasingly becoming aware of the direct and indirect costs of absence to their organisations. The direct costs include statutory sick pay, cost of replacement staff and loss of output, which is estimated at over £12 billion to the UK economy. The indirect costs are harder to quantify. These include low morale among staff who have to carry out additional work to cover for those who are absent because of sickness, the cost of managing absence and the impact on training and development. All of which impact on the overall levels of output for the organisation.

Recently we heard that Willie Walsh, chief executive of BA, was desperate to control the number of sick days taken off by staff, after bringing it down from a “completely unacceptable” average of 22 to 12 in the past two years. So, when the national average is seven days, do we conclude that BA staff are actually more sick than eveyone else – or is there something else going on?

FACT: Two-thirds of both men and women say work has a significant impact on their stress level, and one in four has called in sick or taken a "mental health day" as a result of work stress.

FACT: 20% of employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives

FACT: Problems at work are more strongly associated with health complaints than are any other life stressor

FACT: Workers who must take time off work because of stress, anxiety, or a related disorder will be off the job for about 21 days

FACT: Depression results in more days of disability than chronic health conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes

FACT: One in four of us will have some sort of mental health problem in our life. This means there are millions of people in Britain who are either encountering problems themselves or know someone else who is experiencing them.

...but it doesn't have to be like this!

Down with stress!
When we're under stress at work, it can affect our performance and our confidence levels can suffer as a result. The impact of this on an organisation is unquantifiable, yet employers know ‘gut feel’ that there has to be a better way. Stress seems to be endemic in modern society, especially inside the workplace - and the rate of increase in recent years has been considerable.

Bill Callaghan, Chairman of the Health and Safety Executive says, "Many people talk about 'stress-management’. The key to reversing the upward trend is to avoid stress in the first place.”

Why put up with that? As an employer, you can do something about this sorry state of affairs IMMEDIATELY.

FACT: 68% of workers say that their employer should offer a program that helps build resilience to stress.

Dr. Debby Swallow's one-day Happiness workshop can help minimise work stress. Click here to see how you can reduce stress and help bring more positive performance back into the work place - and have a happier workforce.

FACT: Companies with higher revenue growth are better at motivating employees and provide more opportunities for growth and development. Employee engagement levels in these high-performing organizations are more than 20% higher than those of their counterparts

Negative emotions hinder your chances of thinking clearly ...

Recent scientific research has proved that being consumed by negative emotions hinders your chances of thinking clearly. Also, anger and resentment are the most contagious of emotions. So, if you are near resentful or angry people, you are more prone to become like that yourself. Social scientific research has largely confirmed this because attitudes, beliefs and behaviours can indeed spread through populations as though they were infectious diseases. There’s even a name for it - it’s called emotional contagion

However, if you were around one or more people with a potentially harmful infectious or contagious disease, you would probably take steps to protect yourself in some way. And if you were the contagious one, you'd likely take steps to protect others until you were sure the chance of infecting someone else was gone.

But that doesn’t happen at work with doom and gloom...

Find yourself in a room full of fed up people and feel the smile slide right off your face! Listen to people complaining endlessly about work, and you'll find yourself starting to do the same. How many of us have been horrified to suddenly realize that we've spent the last half-hour caught up in a moan-and-groan session when life had seemed to be OK for us. The behaviour of others we're around is nearly irresistible.

When we're consciously aware and diligent, we can fight this. But the stress of maintaining that conscious struggle against an unconscious, built-in process is a non-stop, stressful drain on our mental, emotional, and physical bandwidth.

If you want to accomplish something that demands determination and endurance, you need to surround yourself with people possessing these qualities of determination and endurance. Try to limit the time you spend with people given to pessimism and expressions of futility.

Unfortunately, negative emotions exert a more powerful effect in social situations than positive ones.

This sounds harsh, and it is, but this recommendation is based on the FACTS as the neuroscientists interpret them today. This is not new age self-help, it's simply the way the brains work. This phenomenon, known as emotional contagion, has been scientifically proved.

This is what the experts say:

"When we are talking to someone who is depressed it may make us feel depressed, whereas if we talk to someone who is feeling self-confident and buoyant we are likely to feel good about ourselves.”
(Emotional Contagion by Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson)

Neuroscience has made a long, intense study of the brain's fear system, which is one of the oldest, most primitive parts of our brain. Anger and negativity usually stem from the anxiety and/or fear response - known as the ‘fight or flight’ syndrome. For our ancestors, there was not time to stop and think. Those who stopped to weigh the pros and cons of a flight-or-fight decision were eaten. In many ways, fear/anger and the ability to think rationally and logically are almost mutually exclusive.

In other words, happy people are better able to think logically.

Some people believe that happy people are just vacuous or shallow. The idea being that happy people are oblivious to the realities of life, in a fantasy of their own, and without the ability to think critically. The science, however, suggests the opposite

No one would suggest that the Dalai Lama is vacuous and yet he says:

"The fact that there is always a positive side to life is the one thing that gives me a lot of happiness. This world is not perfect. There are problems. But things like happiness and unhappiness are relative. Realizing this gives you hope."

Of course it's still a myth that "happy people" don't get angry. Of course they do! Anger is often an appropriate response. But there's a big difference between a happy-person-who-gets-angry and an unhappy-angry-person. So yes, we get angry. Happiness is not our only emotion, it is simply the outlook we have chosen to cultivate because it is usually the most effective, thoughtful, healthy, and productive.

Research has found that "letting it rip" with anger actually escalates anger and aggression and does nothing to help you (or the person you're angry with) resolve the situation.

There is no doubt - Being happy has a positive effect on our work performance and our effectiveness. It has also been proved that happy people are healthier, too.

In a recent study of British civil servants, the happiest participants had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Their hearts kept a mellower pace than those of less happy participants, and they didn't flip out as much during a mental stress test.

Happiness might even hedge against heart disease, suggests the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Under stress, the happiest participants had lower increases of plasma fibrinogen, a sign of inflammation that can predict heart disease.

Translation: Being happy may be good for your physical health.

So, being happy will not only make you more rational and productive, it spurs you to do a better job in less time – and you’ll be healthier, too!

And, research has discovered that happy people are HAPPY on or off the job – not just at weekends!