Experiencing happiness at work isn’t a matter of stumbling upon the profession that is ‘perfect’ for us and then riding that wave of joy into retirement.
Rather, like wellbeing, happiness is made up of a bunch of different components that can be experienced in many different jobs and workplaces.
So what are the key factors that we can apply to different jobs to have a better chance at finding happiness at work?
Workplaces can be the drivers of positive mental health outcomes.
We live in a world where a huge number of people suffer from mental ill health and access to help is poor. As employers, why not go a step further from just ‘not making things worse’ to actually making things better?
Creating social-connectedness at work is one opportunity for leaders to impact their people positively. Loneliness experienced at home can seep into the workplace and leaders have the power to not only prevent work-based loneliness, but combat loneliness overall.
Workplaces can be the engines that drive a socially connected world.
How can leaders create an environment that fosters social connection?
Whether it’s a restructure, a new senior hire, cost-cutting measures or a change in direction, organisations know change is a normal part of maintaining a successful business.
And yet organisations mess it up, creating disgruntled employees who fight them every step of the way - even when the new ideas are good and have the potential to help everyone.
Why is organisational change so hard?
And how can leaders do it well?
What is one thing a bunch of workplace psychologists all have in common?
We don’t do New Year’s Resolutions.
There’s a few reasons for that.
Some of us find they just don’t stick.
It’s not because we lack willpower.
We’re workplace psychologists. We know the theory behind making changes stick.
We’re workplace psychologists, and we don’t do New Year’s Resolutions.
So what do we do to set our intentions for the year ahead?
Circuit breakers are a simple solution to a potentially deadly and costly problem. When a circuit trips, we simply open the fuse box, flick a switch, and providing there is no deeper fault going on, we reset the system.
Now, imagine if we could do this with our brains. How much potential damage to our mental and physical health could we prevent if we had an automated switch that simply cut off the power to our unhelpful thought patterns before they escalated to breaking point?
Most people are familiar with the terms burnout and stress, and have an understanding of what poor workplace mental health looks like. But what is it that we are aiming for? What does a psychologically ‘well’ workplace look like?
Mental Health - we all have it, and yet it can be difficult to talk about, especially at work.
October 10th 2023 is World Mental Health day and the theme this year is ‘Mental Health is a universal human right.’
How do you actually bring up the topic? Or, if someone else lets you know they’re struggling, how should you reply?
In our last blog we covered how to identify burnout risks, and how to protect yourself at the recruitment stage by spotting which organisations or job roles might pose a high risk to individuals.
In this blog, we will cover some of the steps that individuals can take to lower their burnout risk and protect their mental health at work when they find themselves in a job role or organisation that may present a higher risk.
Perhaps the best thing an individual can do to avoid burn-out is to work for an organisation that has a robust Psychosocial Risk Management plan in place to support positive workplace mental health outcomes and protect their workers from chronic stress.
But how can you choose the right job? And what other practical steps can individuals take to protect themselves from burnout and feel good at work?
Mental health advice around change often centres on how to start or how to stop doing something: New Year’s Resolutions, Change Management, addiction cessation or the addition of new, positive habits.
We are frequently encouraged to step out of our comfort zones and embrace a growth mindset.
Proactively seeking change can help us to grow, learn, and develop.
Learning about how neuroscience impacts behavioural change is not only fascinating but gives us tools to make habit creation and habit cessation less painful and more efficient and rewarding. We covered some main points on this topic in part 1 and part 2 of our Change blog series.
But proactive change is not the full picture. At times, change is simply thrust upon us, and it isn’t always good.
In part one of our guide to change we looked at the ‘stages of change’ model. In part two, we will consider five practical strategies to successfully facing change and how we can apply those change strategies in ways that benefit both our performance and our mental health.
Here are five keys to change that we can keep in mind the next time we are either faced with change, or we decide to strive for change.
This is the first in a three-part blog series about change in which we will cover: The Psychology of Change, a Practical Guide to Change, and How to Manage Change (in both yourself and others) while minimising negative mental health outcomes and optimising positive ones.
Change is a constant throughout our lives, and change can impact our mental, physical and emotional health in a myriad of ways.
it can be helpful to separate all of the cultural and mental clutter that surrounds goal-setting and behaviour change and figuring out how best to do it, when and how you want to and are able to, and not because an internet personality who exudes the scent of bran flakes while they do burpees at 5am makes you feel like you would somehow be a better person if you could force yourself into the same habits.
The school holiday / work juggle struggle is real.
Whether you are a working parent managing stress, or you wish you had more time to spend with your kids, this blog covers mental health tips to help you stay grounded and anxiety-free at work and home during the school holidays.
Worrying can impact our mental health at work significantly, and has been the subject of sage advice for centuries.
Inspirational quotes about improving your mental health by simply ‘not worrying’ are easy to find, but much more difficult to put into practise.
Can you control worrying by simply choosing not to worry? And if so, how?
In this blog we will explain in simple terms what worry is, how you can control worrying, and how you can work and live your life despite having things to worry about.
Burnout: a state of mental and physical exhaustion, characterised by feelings of cynicism, depletion and distance from our work.
AI: the simulation of human intelligence by machines, and used for everything from data analysis to customer service and even creating art and writing romance novels.
Can Artificial Intelligence help us to beat burnout, and regain our sense of humanity at work?
Developing strategies to increase opportunities for social connection is a major research concern that is impacting public health policy globally at multiple levels; from the design of community living spaces to employment regulations, public health campaigns and how we harness technology.
What can individuals do to ensure they are getting the social connection they need for mental and physical wellbeing?
Firstly, establish how much social connection you need.
Canada - that bastion of forward thinking - is currently working on developing public health guidelines for social connection to improve population mental health, and control mental and physical health risks. Bit like your five a day, but in chit-chats rather than fruit and veg.
Does that mean Friday night pizza parties are back on the work perks list, or should even form part of your Psychosocial Risk Management plan?. (TLDR: no. For more nuance, read on).
Stress: so ubiquitous, the idea of preventing it altogether might seem a bit like trying to hold back an incoming tide.
But stress doesn’t need to be an inevitable part of life, and it definitely doesn’t need to be an inevitable part of work.
How can employers control work-related stress?
Burnout: the imagery in that word is evocative, and perhaps one reason why the term has become popular. Why? Because the picture that burnout conjures is so very much like the experience of it.
Burned out individuals keep going, like flames across a landscape, until they run out of fuel entirely and have absolutely nothing left to give. Not one spark remains. They are quite literally ‘burned out.’
How can we tell the difference, why does it matter, and what can we do about it?
During a panel discussion of women leaders that I recently attended, the panelists were asked ‘what do you consider to be your biggest achievement?’
Without exception, every panelist responded ‘just surviving.’ One added ‘just managing to get to where she was.’ They gave the sense of having managed to move forward and reach their goals, but of having to perpetually push through a current, whilst dragging a parachute, to do so.
What was holding them back and how can we recognise gender discrimination in the modern workplace?
International Women’s Day 2023 has been and gone but the challenges that women face to experiencing equity in the workplace remain.
What are those challenges, and what would an environment that successfully controls for psychosocial hazards at work that particularly impact women look like?
When Psychosocial Hazards are outside your control, but are impacting your people, what can you do?
What if everyone at work is dealing with the same trauma simultaneously? How can leaders equip themselves to support their people through traumatic events that are impacting entire communities?
Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have come about entirely by accident.
Penicillin was born when Sir Alexander Fleming took a two week holiday and returned to his lab to find that a mould had grown over elements of his research, and that the unexpected mould deterred the growth of bacteria.
It took another 12 years and the work of two chemists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain to isolate, test and turn the compound that Fleming had discovered into a useable product, and the urgency of the World War 2 effort to stimulate mass production. Penicillin saved many lives and changed the course of medicine globally.
Fleming, Florey and Chain were each awarded the Nobel prize in 1945 in Physiology or Medicine. From their efforts, we have antibiotics, and also a recipe for turning data into a useable, scaleable positive intervention.
How can we apply this to mental health in the workplace by way of Psychosocial Risk Management?
The weather is bitter, the poorhouses and the prisons are full, and a money-hungry employer is keeping a shrewd eye on the company’s heating bill while his overworked and shivering clerk tries to remain optimistic in the face of inflation.
The year is 1843, but it could as easily be 2022.
Psychosocial Risk Management and the Cane Toads of Australia are both what we call ‘Wicked Problems'.’ That is, a problem which is difficult to solve because of complex and changing requirements that interact with each other, to the point that there is no single solution.
Think about your Psychosocial Risk Management process (or any other process that has been implemented by your organisation as a way to solve a problem). Did it solve the problem? Or did it create other problems?
What does a shared hatred of bad parking have to do with Psychosocial Risk Management within a world-renowned aeronautical engineering company?
Recently, a friend told me about the staff communications channel within their new job role. The channel includes a multitude of totally non-work related employee group chats, on topics ranging from a love of cats to photos and commentary of terrible parking in their neighbourhoods.
Why would an organisation - especially one with a very serious image - encourage what some might consider frivolous oversharing of personal trivia during company time?
The answer - (in part, at least): Psychosocial Risk Management.
A couple of years ago, I tried out for the fire service.
Facing down the entry to a confined-space maze designed to test my response to claustrophobic conditions, I realised that I had spent far too much time focusing on my running speed and pull-up ability and nowhere near enough time practising the mental skills I would need to control my fear response and manage anxiety under stress.
I failed.
The good news is that you don’t need to be prepping to face down burning buildings to benefit from facing your fears or managing anxiety.
Mental Health Awareness Week 2022 has just come to an end. The theme this year was ‘Reconnect - with the people and places that lift you up, hei pikinga waiora.’
The positive mental health benefits of connection are clear.
Research has found that:
Happier people tend to have strong social relationships
Social networks promote a sense of belonging and wellbeing
People with a higher number of close connections (three or more) were found to have a lower incidence of mental health conditions.
You can explore some of the research on this via the MHAW website here
But how can this help people who struggle to stay social?
I love survival stories. Whilst often harrowing, they demonstrate the incredible power of the human mind and spirit in the most inhospitable conditions.
Laura Dekker, New-Zealand born Dutch sailor, pursuing her dream to be the youngest person to sail single-handedly around the world in the face of repeated opposition from Dutch authorities - grit.
Getting up and continuing to sail after being whacked on the head by a flying fish - resilience.
Yet, resilience and grit are perhaps now more readily associated with corporate wellness schemes, positive psychology, and psychometric testing in recruitment.
And yet, I began to wonder, is developing the ability to withstand trauma really what we want at work?
Wouldn’t it be preferable to create an environment where the capacity to avoid PTSD wasn’t a necessary quality?
Every good leader has been a bad boss at some point.
The truth is, we’re all a mixture of good and bad qualities and leadership often falls upon us by accident.
Managers - be they good leaders, or bad bosses - have a profound impact on their teams.
So what makes a bad boss, and what makes a good leader?
How can bad bosses become good leaders?