By Jessica Pryce-Jones
June 10, 2010

Is your organization facing people, productivity or performance issues? Is managing engagement, retaining talent or presenteeism a key area of focus for you? If any of these topics are on your radar, then perhaps you should start to think about the Science of Happiness at Work and how you could use it to fix problems which seem intractable – but aren’t. 

As CEO and founder of iOpener, a human asset management consultancy that helps organizations with the people end of work, I’ve been steering a five-year research program into happiness at work. Our aim was to see if there was a link between being happy in your job and productivity. And it’s clearly a very strong one. When you compare and contrast the happiest employees against their unhappiest colleagues, we can see that they:

• Are 47 percent more productive
• Intend to stay 115 percent longer in their jobs (regardless of recession)
• Take 300 percent less sick leave.

And that’s just for organizations. Employees in turn benefit in the following ways from being happy at work. They:

• Are 180 percent more energized
• Experience 155 percent more happiness in their jobs
• Perceive they are 150 percent happier with life
• Find 108 percent more engagement
• Feel 50 percent more motivated
• Find 50 percent more belief in their potential
• Are 40 percent more confident
• Think they have 35 percent more control over what they do.
 
Some pretty staggering findings. So you can see that there’s a lot to recommend being happy at work from both an employer and an employee perspective. 

So what is happiness at work? Our data, and the 5,000 people who’ve helped us collect it, tell us that happiness at work is made up of five important components -- what we call the 5Cs:
- Contribution, which is the effort you make and your perception of it
- Conviction, which is your motivation in good times or bad
- Culture, which is about how well you feel you fit
- Commitment, which is about your level of engagement
- Confidence, which is about your ability to take a risk

At the heart of all these lie Achieving Your Potential, while surrounding them lie Pride, Trust and Recognition. They frame the context in which you work and will have a big impact on your overall feelings about your job. And we can see that these critical three have plummeted since the recession began, severely affecting how people feel about their work.

For example, I was recently coaching a senior executive working in healthcare, who was low across all the 5Cs, but just about hanging in there in terms of what he was delivering. He was the kind of person who never gives up, who does what it takes to get a job done. But recession or not, he was clearly at risk of quitting. Pride in his organization was very low, Trust in his leader was at rock bottom and he didn’t feel any sense of Recognition. Digging into his working life, it quickly became clear what he needed to do: schedule an urgent meeting with his CEO to talk about his deep concerns.

What, if like this exec, you’re feeling unhappy at work and don’t know where to start? You’ll find a host of stories, tools and tactics in my book, ‘Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital For Success’ published by Wiley Blackwell. Or you can go to www.iopener.com/report, fill out a questionnaire and get back a personalized six page report into how happy and productive you are, what affects you and most importantly, lots of self-help for you to think about.

Taking control of your situation and managing it is of course one of the most important things you can do -- especially for building your happiness at work.

Jessica Pryce-Jones is author of “Happiness at Work: Maximizing your Psychological Capital for Success,” published by Wiley Blackwell.  Contact her at  jessica.prycejones@iopener.com.