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How to find happiness in and out of work

Work Joy

Arbejdsglaede

Arbejde means work and glaede means joy. Combine the two words and hey presto, you like what you do and you feel happy about going to work. Similarly, the Danish world arbejdslyst means a desire to work or to feel like working.

58 per cent of Danes say they would continue to work even if they no longer needed to for financial reasons.

We define being happy at work as looking forward to work tomorrow, having enjoyed work yesterday, and thinking that your workplace is a great place to work.

The Complexity of Work

If work and happiness had to select their relationship status of Facebook, they would probably go for ‘it’s complicated’.

In short, you would need the emotional boost of two weddings to counter the negative impact of one year of unemployment. Unemployed people consistently score lower than their employed counterparts. On average, people who are employed experience a satisfaction that is 0.6 points higher (on a scale from 0 to 10) than those who are unemployed.

Mappiness Project led by the British economics lecturer George McKerron in 2010 found out that paid work was ranked lower than any of the other thirty-nine activities people engage in except for ‘being sick in bed’. Working had one of the worst impact on happiness.

Some results:

Positive:

1. Intimacy 14,2.

3. Sport 9,12.

19. Drinking tea/coffee 1,83.

20. Reading 1,42.

Negative:

27. In a meeting, seminar, class – 1,50.

29. Waiting, queueing -3,51.

31. Working, studying – 5,53.

Happiness at work is a shared responsibility. It is not just up to you, or your boss or the organization you work for – we all have the responsibility to increase happiness at work.

Happywork

  • Think like an archeologist looking back through time and assess previous jobs according to happiness scale.
  • Start mapping which moments and days provide you with arbejdsglaede.
  • Embrace the complexity of happiness at work.
  • Consider which elements of your job and happiness at work you have control over and which you don’t.
  • Try to get to know what drives happiness at work for your co-workers and managers.
  • Embrace that you are also responsible for your happiness at work.

Finding purpose

So, what do you do?

Lot of us find identity in and through work. Perhaps more interesting questions to pose when you meet someone new could be not what do you do but why you do it.

Norwegians are very much like Danes but with a nicer-sounding language and a more beautiful landscape.

What we found was that people working in a smaller organizations were more likely to feel meaningful within their company.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”[1]

Happiness is ‘a good-quality lawnmower and a big law to mow’. It is easy to see what part of the lawn you have mowed and where you have not been yet. We like to see our progress.

Hey, Boss, Where Are All These Springs Going?

Where to Find Meaning?

A study by PayScale. Of the more than 500 different titles with sufficient data, the most meaningful role is the clergy, where 98 per cent of people report a high level of sense of meaning. Teacher’s and surgeons came in second and third.

If you want to play odds in finding meaningful work, the best bet seems to be one where you help people in some way.

Voluntary Meaning

Around 40 per cent of Danes are involved in volunteering or charity work.

Job Crafting

A growing number of studies suggest that by looking at your job differently you can hack your way to a higher level of job satisfaction. The exercise of changing your view of work has been coined as ‘job crafting’ by Amy Wrzesniewski.

The idea of the Smile File is that you hand every new employee a notebook called a Smile File with the encouragement to write down compliments they received from co-workers, clients and managers.

Meaning Goes Beyond Happiness at Work

Purpose is central to our wellbeing. Aristotle wrote that happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. This dimension in happiness research is often referred to as the ‘eudaimonic dimension’ or ‘eudaimonia’, which is the ancient Greek word for happiness that Aristotle used. It is typically seen as a contrast to the more traditional understating of happiness as pleasure or hedonism.

We need both elements in our life. The good life involves both a sense of purpose and a healthy dose of pleasure.

Specialisterne

Thorkild Sonne created a company called Specialisterne. A company whose aim is to help neurodivergent people to thrive in the workplace by matching them with great jobs.

He said that they took time to establish comfort zone of the person, get to know their motivation, workability, professional and personal skills. Taking this knowledge to hiring managers help set up the right working environment.

Social responsibility makes a good business better accordint to Lars Jannich Johansen, founder of The Social Capital Fund (Den Sociale Kapitalfond).

The Progress Principle

The feeling of progress is important to us all. There is a sense of satisfaction that comes from moving forward and overcoming obstacles.

Teresa Amabile is talking about the progress principle. She said that of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perception during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Happywork

  • Consider whether your current job is lacking either a bigger purpose (ask yourself, am I helping to make a world a better place) or smaller purpose (is the function I have within my organization meaningful).
  • Explore volunteering or a work side hustle.
  • Create a Smile File.
  • Practice job crafting.
  • Record every bit of progress, no matter how small.

Flat, trusting and connected

Trust is what defines not just Denmark, but the Nordic quintet: Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland all enjoy high level of trust.

Control is expensive, really expensive. Control is good, trust is cheaper.

The biggest study dropped 17.000 wallets around the world, and an average 50 per cent of the wallets were returned with money in it.

The Return on Investment on Trust

Control may mean that a couple of slackers work harder, but it may also mean that the majority of people, who resent the control and the mistrust, decide to work less.

Comparing people in high-trust companies with people in low-trust companies, researchers have noted:

  • 74 % less stress.
  • 50 % higher productivity.
  • 106 % more energy at work.
  • 76 % more engagement.
  • 13 % fewer sick days.
  • 40 % less burnout.
  • 60 % more enjoyment at work.

Okay, so trust is great – but how do we get it? How do we build trust?

Five ways to build trust in the workplace:

  • Be honest.
  • Listen with empathy,
  • Value your long-term relationship.
  • Honour your commitments.
  • Give it time.

The Flat Pyramid

It is much easier to cultivate trust in flat organizations. According to the Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum Denmark has some of the flattest work hierarchies in the world. This means that no matter what your position or your job title is, you are encouraged to and entitled to speak your mind and express your views. The thought behind this being: if your opinions are not heard when decisions are being made, then why should you care about those decisions.

Power distance

Power distance is defined as the extent to which less powerful members of the organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed.

This is a metric used to measure the degree of inequality that exists – and is accepted – between people with and without power. Hofstede Insight did a survey that showed that Denmark is the best and Russia is the worst.

I Get High (Job Satisfaction) with a Little Help from My Friends

Okay, so flat hierarchies with a high level of trust contribute to your happiness at work. But we need one more ingredient to populate those hierarchies: good people.

We often don’t put that much importance on the social aspect of our jobs and tend to think of making friends at work as an added bonus, whereas the research shows it is fundamental to how well you can do your job, as well as how much you enjoy it, which is equally important.

Are You Likely to Leave Your Company Soon?

  • I know what is expected of me.
  • I have materials and equipment to do my job.
  • I can be the best every day.
  • I have received recognition.
  • My supervisor cares for me as a person.
  • There is someone at work that encourages me.
  • My opinion counts.
  • The mission of the company makes me feel that my job is important.
  • My co-workers also do quality work.
  • I have a best friend at work.
  • Somebody talks to me about my progress at work.
  • I have opportunities to learn and grow.

The Order of the Elephant

Danes are essentially a nation of introverts.

Peer to peer recognition is important.

The best programs have the following shared characteristics:

  • Specific.
  • Immediate.
  • Fun.
  • Inclusive.
  • Public.

The Order of Elephant is Denmark’s highest-ranking honor.

How to Build for Connection – the Lego Way

Lego means play well.

Job Index is the biggest job-search site in Denmark.

According to Anne Sofie Fedders, who is LEGO’s Head of Ways of Working, you need to understand how your employees actually work and what their different routines are like.

Ride into the Friendship Zone

Prosocial Bonuses Increase Employee Satisfaction and Team Performance. Some researchers use randomized teams in a research where they offer teams a chance to spend 15 Euro on themselves or others. People who spend money on themselves sold for 3 Euro more, teams who spend money on others sold for 10 Euro more.

Avoiding toxic bosses is also important for happiness at work.

Avoiding Toxic Bosses

31 March is the International Quit Your Crappy Job Day. If your boss is a jerk, you should quit.

Happywork

  • Make your co-worker feel appreciated.
  • Find a work buddy.
  • Consider what you can do to level hierarchy in your organization.
  • 31 March – International Quit Your Crappy Job Day.
  • Consider a project outside work.
  • Get to know your local shop owner. The first step in building trust in your neighborhood is getting to know people and letting people get to know you.

The Pursuit of Freedom

Autonomy is the ability to make your own decisions about what to do, rather than being influenced by someone else or told what to do.

Denmark ranks highest amongst twenty-seven European countries in terms of employee autonomy.

The 3-Metre Rule Rules

Tivoli Gardens have the 3-metre rule. The rule means that you are the CEO of everything within a radius of 3 metres.

For every single employee, their focus is on four concrete elements:

  • Being a host for the quests.
  • Solving the quests’ problems.
  • Keeping the gardens clean.
  • Being the best colleague.

How these elements are fulfilled is up to the individual.

Flexibility Is More Than Working from Home

Look for Flexibility

If you are looking for a new job, make sure to ask what flexibility looks like in practice, and consider whether that suits you.

Gotta Have Some Faith in the People

Spotify. No more going back to the office, unless that is something what you want.

Freedom from Interruptions

The Tuesday Morning Quiet Time. On Tuesday morning between 8 and 12 AM, the company sent phone calls to voicemail, email servers were shut down and no meetings were scheduled.

Thinking Outside the Boss

The ultimate level of freedom is perhaps being your own boss. If you have to beg for a seat at the table, maybe you should build your own.

Why You Should Have a Freedom Fund

Whether you call it F… ..U money or Freedom Fund, it gives you the option to quit your job if you are not happy with it.

Danes switch jobs quite frequently – and this might be a source of happiness at work. The average Danes spends 7.2 year with one employer, Italians 12.2, the French 10.8, Germans 10.2.

The flexicurity model is the Danish labor market model. Flexibility means that employers can hire and fire at will, without high costs for layoffs, the security part is the fact that you receive quite good benefits if you are unemployed.

40 per cent of people in the UK do not have enough money to support themselves for a month in the absence of their usual income.

The average UK family with kids throws out food worth 700 pounds each year.

Thirteen ways to boost your freedom fund:

  • Get rid of your car.
  • Cook your own food.
  • Buy secondhand.
  • Cancel subscription.
  • Shop for groceries strategically.
  • Reduce your energy usage.
  • Sell stuff you don’t need.
  • Do your own home repairs.
  • Invest in quality, not quantity.
  • Use public amenities.
  • DIY entertainment.
  • Take care of your belongings.
  • Use round-up services.

Retire on FIRE

FIRE is the idea of living really frugally, saving and investing at least 50 per cent of your income. One of the leaders is Jacob Lund Fisker.

The common idea is the 4 per cent rule. If people took 4 per cent out of their investments each year they should have a very high probability of not outliving their money during a thirty-year retirement.

Work is an incredibly powerful source of happiness. The key is that it must be creative, social and engaging work that brings you towards a purpose you believe in. Wealthy people decide what to do and how to do it for 93 per cent of the hours that they spend working, compared to 76 per cent of general population.

Freedom Has Two Wheels

Daniel Kahneman researched the worst and the best daily activities. The worst was morning commute, the evening commute was third worst. 62 per cent of people cycle to work in Copenhagen.

43 per cent of working Danes live 10 kilometres or less from their place of employment.

Happywork

  • Start tracking your expenses.
  • Start building your Freedom Fund.
  • Consider what side hustle you would find enjoyable.
  • Explore is you can do 3 metre rule or quite time.
  • Bring the flexibility questions in new job search.
  • Use your bike, or find a new job if you are too far away.

The Work-Life Balance Myth

Karoshi is the word that describes deaths caused by work-related stress.

In 2021 the global average for hours worked per worker each year was 1.716.

Work-Life Balance, Scandinavian-Style

There seems to be a greater respect for people’s personal life and for their time in Scandinavia. You don’t work less here, but your work more condensed. There is much more that ‘it is your own responsibility and you do it on your own time’ sense here.

Lessons from the Four-Day Work Week

Less stress (39%), less burnout (71%), lower staff turnover (57%), fewer sick days (65%), slightly higher revenue (1.4 %).

How to Get Five Days’ Work Done in Four Days

Increase productivity. Sending fewer emails and cutting meetings.

  • Change the meeting culture.
  • Implement focus time.
  • Prepare to-do lists for the following day.
  • Think before adding people to an email.
  • Automate.
  • Involve as few people as possible in any given task.

Five ways companies can help with a better work-life balance:

  • Make use of leftovers.
  • Provide flexible working arrangements.
  • Offer childcare assistance.
  • Create communication guidelines.
  • Implement a manager-led culture shift.

Regulation regarding rights to disconnect is not the right way. What we should aim for is the right not to feel obliged to answer every email as fast as possible.

Beyond the Nine-to-Five; Shared Housework

A common Nordic belief is that mothers and fathers should take equal responsibility for their children and that children have the right to be with both parents.

Dugnadsand – Raising the Bar(n) for Happiness

Building a huge structure like a barn is a big project and requires more hands. A work community matters. Voluntary work counts.

In Norwegian, there are the words ‘dugnad’, meaning voluntary work done together with other people, and ‘dugnadsand’, meaning the spirit of dugnad.

From Work-Life Balance to Work-Life Blend

Why not to aim for ‘work-life’ blend.

There is work that is good for you and work that is bad, but it’s wrong to label all work ‘bad’ and all life ‘good’.

Embrace the Seasons

Maybe you can have it all – just not at the same time. Perhaps the key to a happy life is to embrace the seasons, the ebb and flow of work and life over a lifetime. And maybe it is time to abolish the idea of work-life balance and embrace the work-life blend instead.

Happywork

  • Consider working abroad.
  • Consider how you can get more work done in a shorter time by applying the lessons from the four-day work week experiment.
  • Form a dugnad or whatever you want to call it.
  • Is work from home shared fairly? Have the talk about choreplay.

Reframing Success

So many people assume that work won’t make them happy and settle for an unrewarding job in order to pay for a bigger house and a nice car.

The Poul Principle is about instead of thinking that to be rich means having a lot of money, but to be wealthy means having a lot of time to live and enjoy your life.

The One-More-Million Syndrome

Money is important for happiness, but mainly because being without it is a cause of stress, worry and unhappiness. But we see diminishing marginal returns when it comes to happiness.

People often care more about their relative income than their absolute income.

How do we decouple wellbeing from wealth?

Change the Narrative

Being successful should mean feeling good about what you do – and doing good work feels great. Happiness is the ultimate success.

The Real Imposter

In 1978, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes published a paper in the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice and introduced a phenomenon ‘the imposter syndrome’.

Capitalism needs us all to feel like impostors. Seek progress, work harder, make more money.

The Importance of Self-Esteem

Feeling that you’re good at what you do is particularly important. Mastery is all about feeling you can handle the tasks and situations your encounter in life.

We overestimate what we can do in a day and overestimate what we can do in a year.

The Pomodoro Technique: write a to-do list, work on a task for 25 minutes, record what you did (maybe cross it if you finished), take a 5-minute break, do 4 session, take a 15-30 minutes break.

‘We’ over ‘Me’

The Law of Jante (Janteloven) emphasizes collective accomplishments and looks down on focusing on individual achievements. You’re no better than us.

Carlsberg – probably the best beer in the world. Janteloven promotes a culture where successful people can be criticized if they pretend to be better than their peers.

The Chicken and the Egg

 Happiness is perhaps the most overlooked reason for success.

Rather than seeking happiness from success and money, happiness should come first.

Karl Marx believed that work, at its best, is what makes us human. He hated how capitalism alienated workers from each other and from the product of their labor.

Happywork

  • It’s time to write your own obituary.
  • Mitigate the one-more-million syndrome.
  • Consider which jobs, tasks, hobbies, and activities give you flow.
  • Try applying the Pomodoro Technique.
  • Go for value instead of success. Success comes with an external view; value starts with you.

The Future of Wellbeing at Work

Wellbeing at work is growing in importance because we recognize that we need to redesign the way we work to add to our wellbeing, instead of undermining it.

Universal Basic Income

In 2017 Finland began a two-year experiment. Increase in happiness from 6.8 to 7.3 in 0 to 10 scale.

People were asked what law they would pass if they were the Minister of Happiness in their country. The three most frequently proposed ideas for laws are universal health care, a four-day working week and universal income.

The F-Word in Business

Talking about emotions at work has become more common – and tracking them as well.

Loneliness, self-esteem, stress and joy spill over from one domain to the other, which is why the idea of work-life balance is a myth.

What Do You Offer in Terms of Happiness?

Galilei once said: “Measure the measurable – and make the unmeasurable measurable.”[2]

Take on the Role of Chief Happiness Officer

Companies have a responsibility for your wellbeing at work, but so do you.

Beyond Paid Work

Work is not just about paycheck. With every job, we pick up things that bring value to our lives: skills, friends, anecdotes.

No job is perfect, and we all have bad days at work and tasks that are less fulfilling and fun. Not even Danes experience work Valhala – where we fight (the old Norse idea of fun) all day and feast all night.

As humans we are wired to work. We enjoy achieving things.

Bessie Anderson Stanley: “He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; (…) who has left the world better than he found it whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of Earth’s beauty or failed to express it …”[3]

Happywork

  • Start tracking your wellbeing at work.
  • If you are unhappy with your current role, explore job sites.
  • Adopt wider definition of work than just paid work.
  • Have a plan for what to do after you quit job or retire.

[1] In the book on page 30

[2] In the book on page 214

[3] In the book on page 222

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