I founded the startup Hapzly to research happiness and apply its principles to boosting workplace well-being and individual flourishing. I delivered many of these ideas on stage to over 10,000 people across 3 continents and through my work consulting a range of small and large companies. Check out some of this research below and get in touch to learn more about how this can benefit your company and team (and the world).
Research
In order to know how a business can generate happiness, we looked at policies and practices of many governments towards the well-being of their population and their environment. The study of the Gross National Happiness used by the Government of Bhutan and the studies of other countries like Denmark, typically one of the world’s happiest nations, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and the work on positivity by the UAE helped shape our understanding. As did work from different institutions like the Happiness Research Institution and Martin Seligman’s work on Wellbeing, in particular his PERMA model -- positive emotions, engagement, positive relationships, meaning, accomplishment. We also looked at leading businesses like Patagonia, Blackmores, and Koninklijke Philips (Number 19 on Corporate Knights world’s most sustainable companies) to name just a few.
We put an emphasis on clearly defining how businesses generate happiness. When defining happiness for a business it needs to be thought first from an individual perspective, and thereafter, from the business perspective. It means when you have set the outline of one’s happiness, you can look for how a business could influence this outline.
Individual perspective
An individual can split their daily life into three general parts: work, leisure, and time to fulfil his own needs as a human (sleep, eat, etc.).
The complexity in defining happiness is to derive it from these different timelines, and see within the three parts of a day (work, leisure, needs), where a business can influence one’s happiness.
The Happiness Research Institute defines happiness as three-dimensions of well-being:
• Cognitive dimension: overall life satisfaction (attention span, memory, reasoning, learning, thinking, patterns of thinking, acquiring knowledge).
• Affective dimension: positive / negative emotions experienced on a daily basis (relating to mood, feelings, attitudes)
• Eudemonic dimension: purpose and meaning in one’s life. (Aristotle: achieved through self-actualisation and having meaningful purpose).
There we distinguish the different timelines – a short-term hedonic happiness where people strive to get as many positive emotions as possible (enjoyment, pleasure, etc.), and avoid negative ones (pain, anger, jealousy, etc.), and a long-term eudaimonic happiness based on the search of purpose and meaning in one’s actions.
So what factors in our daily life are essential to our happiness?
In order to achieve happiness, an individual needs:
1. Decent work (working conditions, health at work, wage and benefits)
2. Command over material resources (economic power in their consumption)
3. Personal freedom of actions (ability to develop yourself personally and professionally)
4. A good governance (respect and security)
5. Social trust within the community (good relationships, belonging)
6. To cultivate mindfulness and virtue (improving mental health, behaviour showing moral standards i.e. ability to make right choice at the right time in the right way, ethics, honesty, trust, respect, responsibility, integrity)
7. Regular positive emotions in the day (love, pleasure, enjoyment, and stimulation)
8. Deep meaning and purpose (achievement, usefulness, recognition, impact, and fulfilment)Thus, hedonism and eudemonia can be found in each of the previous points, and be applied in each moment of the day.
Business Perspective
We need to look at how a business can affect each of these elements in a holistic view of happiness.
Pope Francis wrote "humans need to be considered in all contexts: as moral agents, members of society, agents in the economy, and parts of Nature itself." We apply this statement to businesses as well.
A business is an entity that has both an endogenous functioning (employees’ management) and an exogenous functioning (how/where they operate, and the relationship with customers).