Happiness that is good for business: employee well-being at the heart of the company
The relationship between employee happiness, company performance and the challenges for managers
by Kevin Giorgis*
Job satisfaction and the wellbeing in the company are the two key elements on which the future of the labour market is being played out and have now become a critical success and return-on-investment factor that we cannot afford to ignore. Workers today are no longer willing to sacrifice their happiness in the name of career advancement, and companies, for their part, must implement new strategies to improve the internal climate of their organisations and not lose their best talents.
For this reason, as EFI Ecosistema Formazione Italia, together with Great Place to Work - a global company specialising in the analysis and improvement of organisational performance through corporate culture - and in collaboration with OMM Business, a training company, we have carried out a survey in the field to understand where we really stand when we talk about happiness in the company.
Happiness at work. Keywords: collaboration, trust and respect
Happiness in the company comes through the level of trust and appreciation among colleagues, which seems to be higher in teams than in managers and leaders. And the figures from our survey confirm this: on a scale of 1 to 5, employees feel, on average, appreciated by their colleagues (average rating: 3.5). A slightly lower perception (3.3), however, when it comes to support from managers in critical or difficult moments and even lower when it comes to trust in management (3.1). Even in the office, people want to express themselves freely, they need their declared values and actions to coincide and, above all, they want their work to have a positive impact. It should come as no surprise, then, that the most frequently cited expressions to describe happiness at work are collaboration, respect, listening, growth, gratitude and well-being.
There are, we cannot deny it, many areas in which managers still need to improve a lot: the management of problems and conflicts, the clarity of feedback or the sharing of objectives, but also the lack of dialogue and continuous and constructive confrontation.
By now it is clear: talking about happiness at work is not just a fad or a trend to be ridden, it is a strategic talent attraction and talent retention lever that companies must take into account if they do not want to have repercussions in terms of business. It is no longer a surprise, in fact, that people's well-being and happiness are closely linked to the performance of organisations.
