The next intentional activity from The How of Happiness is savoring life’s joys.  Recall from my earlier blog that it’s these intentional activities and habits that can account for as much as 40% of our happiness.  The first intentional activity was expressing gratitude, the second was deliberate optimism, the third was to stop overthinking and comparing ourselves to others, the fourth was practicing acts of kindness, the fifth was social support, the sixth was coping with stress, the seventh was learning to forgive, and the eight was increasing flow.

Researchers define savoring as any thoughts or behaviors capable of “generating, intensifying, and prolonging enjoyment.” When you “stop and smell the roses” instead of walking by obliviously, you are savoring.  When you bask and take pride in your own or your friends’ accomplishments, you are savoring. When you suddenly emerge out of a frazzled or distracted state and become fully aware of how much there is to enjoy in life, you are savoring. This is the slight difference between savoring and flow: savoring requires a stepping outside of experience and reviewing it, whereas flow involves a complete immersion in the experience. Whether it involves a focus on the long ago, the present moment, or future times, the habit of savoring has been shown in empirical research to be related to intense and frequent happiness. (pp. 192-193).

Some of the best evidence-based writing on savoring can be found in the book Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience.  Savoring is a process of attending to, appreciating, or enhancing positive experience, not the outcome of enjoyment or pleasure.  Savoring, then, is a powerful positive capacity that we can all develop in ourselves.

Here are just a few suggestions on how to develop our capacity to savor at work:

•  Slow down enough to find the positive in your daily routine and activities.  Find a way to appreciate and enjoy the seemingly mundane part of your work.  Strive to bask in the feeling of accomplishment with the little things before you rush on to the next task.  Find the excellence in the things that you and others do daily.
• Celebrate good news.  If you are the leader, make sure you do this as often as possible for your folks.  If your leader is not doing this for you, do it for yourself.  I am constantly on the lookout for ways to reward myself with some dark chocolate or my favorite beer.
• Replay great days in your mind.  No need to analyze that day, just replay it.  What did you do, how did you feel?  Did your great day involve doing great things for others?  If so, can you remember the look on their faces or what they said to you?
• Reminisce with colleagues.  Remember that fantastic leader we used to work for?  How about that time we impressed the socks off a customer and won new business?  My first dean never missed an opportunity to tell me “You know, you were NOT our first choice for this job.”  That still cracks me up and I tell that story to a lot of my colleagues.   
• Transport yourself to the time when you will accomplish your goal.  How will you feel?  How will you celebrate?  How will you accomplishing this goal help those you have been given the privilege to lead?
• Focus daily on your larger purpose.  Maintain perspective.  Daily savor why you do what you do and why it matters so much. 

In my bathtub analogy of stress, savoring is the process of regulating the stock and flow of hot water in the tub, while coping focuses on the cold water.  The comfort of your bath is based on how well you learn to regulate both the positive and the negative.  Most of us are a lot better coping with the negative, but a focus on the positive merits more of our attention and effort.

Consider it a responsibility to develop these positive capacities in you.  Be a role model, and see what you can do to help others develop their own positive capacities.

I love the concept of employee engagement, so much so that I have included it in some of my own thinking on eustress.  Consultants are selling engagement like hotcakes, and we are lead to believe engagement “can have an almost magical effect on the bottom line” (Shellenbarger, 2007) and that fact is supported by “ground breaking global studies”

Should we be surprised that studies done by folks that want to sell us something support the value of what it is they want to sell us?

In the peer-reviewed, scientific literature the evidence to support these dramatic claims about employee engagement is very preliminary. One of the best studies I could find on engagement was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2005.  The study was conducted in Spain with 58 hotel front desks and 56 hotel restaurants.

My adapted diagram of the results of this very well done study is shown above.  Work engagement was evaluated with what I consider to be the best measures available, and employee performance was rated by customers.  The blue arrows show the statistically significant relationships and the numbers next to those lines give an indication of the direction and strength of the relationship.

The red dotted line between work engagement and employee performance indicates that the authors did NOT find a direct relationship between these two.  Work engagement is measured with three different sets of questions, and two of the three sets did NOT even show a statistically significant correlation with employee performance.  Wow!

This study suggests that work engagement creates a better service climate in the organization, which in turn leads to better employee performance.  I totally buy the logic behind that. But look at the 4 questions the authors asked employees to measure service climate:

1. Employees in our organization have knowledge of the job and the skills to deliver superior quality work and service

2. Employees receive recognition and rewards for the delivery of superior work and service

3. The overall quality of service provided by our organization to customers is excellent

4. Employees are provided with tools, technology, and other resources to support the delivery of quality work and service

Remember, we are being told that work engagement predicts these things.  Are we to believe, for example, that because employees are engaged, the organization provides them the tools, technology, and other resources to support the delivery of quality work (question 4)?  I think you see the problem here.

Philosophically, I am totally on board with the concept of employee engagement.  But in my opinion, the peer reviewed and publicly available empirical evidence behind this very popular concept does not support the claims being made about it.

The hype far exceeds the evidence, so proceed with caution if someone shows up at your door selling engagement.

The next intentional activity from The How of Happiness is increasing flow experiences.  Recall from my earlier blog that it’s these intentional activities and habits that can account for as much as 40% of our happiness.  The first intentional activity was expressing gratitude, the second was deliberate optimism, the third was to stop overthinking and comparing ourselves to others, the fourth was practicing acts of kindness, the fifth was social support, the sixth was coping with stress, and the seventh was learning to forgive.

Flow is the term Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi uses to describe being fully immersed or absorbed in what you are doing.  I’ve used this concept in my own published research to elaborate how I think engagement is one indicator of eustress – the positive response to stress.

One thing you can do at work to increase flow is to adopt new values.  Be open to new and different experiences, and constantly seek to learn new things (p. 184).  There is always something new we can learn at work, and always something about our jobs that can be improved if we will assume responsibility for initiating that behavior in ourselves. 

I also think clearly understanding the larger purpose of the work we do is absolutely critical.  Do you view work as your opportunity to do something, or is work just something that you do?  I know some of you may find this hard to swallow, but I personally believe that purpose can be present in any and all types of work.

For example, interviews with twenty-eight members of a hospital cleaning crew revealed that some of them disliked cleaning, felt that it entailed low-level skills, and did the minimum amount of work required; others, in contrast, transformed the job into something grander and more significant.  This second group of hospital cleaners described their work as bettering the daily lives of patients, visitors, and nurses….They set forth challenges for themselves – for example, how to get the job accomplished in a maximally efficient way or how to help patients heal faster by making them more comfortable.  They added tasks outside their formal duties, such as rearranging the paintings on the walls or fetching wildflowers. They saw themselves as part of a larger, integrated whole, not just mopping floors and emptying trash cans but serving as part of a system that improved people’s lives. (pp. 188-189).

Look around you – are the people you have been given the privilege to lead behaving purposefully and experiencing some degree of flow at work?  Are your employees kicking ass at work, or getting their asses kicked everyday they drag themselves to work?

Partner with your employees to fix your crappy systems and help them see the bigger picture in the work that they do.

I really like Rebecca Thorman’s most recent blog post “How to decide if you have a good job.” Her description of her team’s rush to launch their new website is an excellent example of my “bathtub analogy” of eustress and distress.  There is a LOT of workload and time pressure at her job, but Rebecca and others are simultaneously experiencing both positive and negative responses that are psychological (e.g. excitement, commitment, and anxiety), behavioral (lack of sleep), and physiological (e.g. adrenaline rush; cortisol).

It is also a great example of how Dr. Arnold Bakker envisions engagement:

Engagement is a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. Vigor is characterized by high levels of energy and mental resilience while working, the willingness to invest effort in one’s work, and persistence even in the face of difficulties. Dedication refers to being strongly involved in one’s work and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge. Absorption is characterized by being fully concentrated and happily engrossed in one’s work, whereby time passes quickly and one has difficulties with detaching oneself from work.

Here are examples from Rebecca’s blog post that illustrate these three aspects of engagement:

Absorption: “I work more than seventeen hours, my co-workers even more, and none of us really notice.”

Dedication: “I drive fast because I’m tired, and I want to sleep, and I want to get up and do it all over again.”

Vigor: “Fighting balance across the fence is blur. And that is where I live. A life that should preclude me from having any sort of relationship with anybody or anything other than work, but in reality, betters those relationships.  A place that makes me excited to be young and in love and working hard.”

Thanks, Rebecca, for this excellent example of engagement at work.

The next intentional activity from The How of Happiness is learning to forgive.  Recall from my earlier blog that it’s these intentional activities and habits that can account for as much as 40% of our happiness.  The first intentional activity was expressing gratitude, the second was deliberate optimism, the third was to stop overthinking and comparing ourselves to others, the fourth was practicing acts of kindness, the fifth was social support, and the sixth was coping with stress.

Forgiveness “involves suppressing or mitigating one’s motivations for avoidance and revenge (which often bring with them accompanying emotions of anger, disappointment, and hostility), and, ideally, replacing them with more positive or benevolent attitudes, feelings, and behaviors” (p. 170).  Forgiveness does not mean that we excuse or forget the transgression that violated our trust, it simply means we have accounted for it and are moving on with a renegotiated relationship. 

Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves, not for the folks that wrong us.  There is a lot of evidence to show forgiveness is associated with health, happiness, and other benefits.  In my own research, my colleagues and I found that revenge behavior was significantly and negatively related to the health of leaders we studied. In our study, taking revenge impacted leader health more than engagement, forgiveness, and burnout (Little, Simmons, & Nelson, 2007).

When people violate your trust at work, don’t ruminate and don’t take revenge.  Give yourself time to deal with the negative emotions and cognitive dissonance caused by the transgression, and then find a way to move on.  If the relationship with the individual is necessary or cannot be replaced, then you are going to have to find a way to talk with them to renegotiate “where we go from here”.  If the relationship can be replaced, then shake the dust off your feet and move on.

Don’t hold grudges.  Don’t get even.  Address it, incorporate what you learned about the individual into a revised relationship, and then press on.

If you are focused on excellence, you will have to become VERY good at forgiving all those folks that want to hold you back and force you to conform to their safe and comfortable mediocrity.