For most of us, work is a fundamental part of life. When it’s good it can provide us with everything from fulfilment to friends. But when things aren’t working out, it’s something best not ignored.

Work occupies such a large proportion of our time that it’s hardly surprising how much of a powerful influence it exerts on our level of happiness. It’s possible, of course, to be happy at work and unhappy in other aspects of life – and vice versa. But the scientific data suggests that people who are happy at work are happier all round.

When you think about it, this isn’t surprising. Positive emotions have a nice habit of spilling over from one part of our life to another. If we find our work enjoyable, rewarding and satisfying, those feelings of contentment are likely to stay with us even when we’re not in the office.

Hold on, you might be thinking at this point: that’s a very big ‘if’. But you don’t have to possess your dream job to find happiness at work. Granted, if you’re really miserable at work it may well be time to explore other options (see p. 130), but if things haven’t reached that stage, there’s a lot you can do to increase your level of fun, interest and fulfilment.

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY AT WORK?

Before we get stuck into what you can do to boost your work feelgood factor, it’s worth having a look at what the evidence suggests contributes most to job satisfaction.

The following list was compiled by Peter Warr, a psychologist who specialises in employment issues. It’s the product of many years of research and countless surveys.

As you read it through, reflect on your own experiences at work. Which of the factors are most important to you? Which are you missing right now? And can you think of ideas to rectify the shortfall?

• Influence: Possessing at least some control over your work.
• Skills: Being able to utilise your existing skills and having the chance to develop new ones.
• Demands: Having challenging, but achievable, goals.
• Variety: Not being expected to perform the same task, in the same place and in the same way, every day.
• Requirements: Understanding what’s needed from you and how to go about delivering it.
• Positive relationships: Enjoying sufficient social contact (as with all these factors, exactly how much is enough will vary from person to person), and friendly, supportive, enjoyable relationships.
• Money: Being well rewarded for your efforts.
• Environment: A safe and comfortable workplace.
• Meaning: A role you believe is valuable and that is respected both by colleagues and society at large.
• Management: A boss you can rely upon for advice and support.
• Career: Being confident that your job is secure, and that you can progress to a different role when you’re ready.
• Fairness: Believing that the people you work for are honourable, honest and trustworthy.

THE BENEFITS OF HAPPINESS AT WORK

Feeling happier in your job brings an immediate and very obvious reward. You feel much better! But as if that weren’t sufficient, research indicates that people who are happy at work:

• Perform more effectively
• Are more motivated, energetic and enthusiastic
• Get on better with colleagues and customers
• Earn higher salaries
• Receive more promotions and bonuses
• Take less time off sick
• Stay with the organisation for longer

None of these is likely to be your main motivation as you set about increasing your happiness at work. But they’re a very pleasant fringe benefit. And when you’ve thought about the kind of changes that would improve your situation at work, they may also help secure your boss’s buy-in. After all, if you explain to your manager that the changes would make you more motivated and enthusiastic, and would help improve your productivity and performance, they’re more likely to sit up and take notice.

How to become happier at work

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Strengthen your relationships

As you’ll know from reading Chapter 8, nothing is more important for happiness than our relationships. That goes for work too. You may spend more time with your colleagues than you do with your friends, family, or even partner. So getting along well can make a huge difference to how you feel about work in general.

Compare and contrast how you’d feel in these two real-life workplaces.

In office A, most members of staff have their own small office. This might be regarded as a perk, but in reality it’s more of a curse. Individuals rarely emerge from their offices and consequently hardly know many of their colleagues. Moreover, since it’s a sandwich-at-the-desk culture, even lunch rarely provides an opportunity for social contact. Visits to the pub after work are almost unheard of. The hours can drag.

Now imagine doing the same job in a very different company. This time the office is open plan, the atmosphere open and gregarious. Lunch is eaten together, either in the company canteen or occasionally at a local pub. Social activities are regularly arranged for evenings – meals out, trips to concerts or comedy clubs, annual summer and Christmas parties. Colleagues develop into friends. Work becomes fun.

The second job is likely to be many, many times more enjoyable than the first, even though the day-to-day details of the role are more or less identical. When work is a place where we get to hang out with friends, it can suddenly seem like rather a nice way to spend the day.

But what if we find ourselves working with people with whom we don’t hit it off, or in an organisation that doesn’t place a priority on sociability? Well, as Mahatma Gandhi explained: ‘You must be the change you wish to see in the world.’ That means striving to display the kind of behaviour and attitude you hope for from your colleagues.

The psychologist Christopher Chris Peterson argues that positive team spirit is fostered by the following behaviours:

• Showing commitment to whichever task you’re engaged in.
• Resisting the temptation to moan or show frustration.
• Pulling your weight – and more.
• Volunteering to take on responsibility.
• Praising your team-mates.
• Helping other team members and the team leader achieve their goals.

More generally, ask yourself what you can do to make your workplace a more enjoyable place to be. If you’re friendly, open and helpful, there’s a very good chance that the people around you will begin to behave in that way too. Don’t neglect your communication skills (see p. 111). And if at first it doesn’t seem to be working, keep going. Sooner or later the ice will thaw!

For advice on how to go about building relationships, have a look back at Chapter 8.

COMMIT TO YOUR JOB

There is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task. BARACK OBAMA

Can you recall a time when you were overworked in your job, rushed off your feet for days on end? At the other end of the spectrum, have you ever found yourself with too little to do, struggling to fill the hours until you can finally head home? Which of the two situations did you find most stressful?

Clearly, having too much to do is no fun, at least over the long term. But research suggests that for most people it’s preferable to the opposite scenario. As employment guru Jessica Pryce-Jones puts it: ‘Hard work leads to happiness.’ We’re most content in our jobs – and indeed in other areas of our life – when we’re getting things done.

Frequently, of course, it’s not a lack of tasks that reduces our productivity but our attitude towards those tasks. Everyone experiences occasional days when they’re just not in the mood for work. But if you’re feeling like that on a regular basis, it’s time to do something about it.

Step one is a psychological shift. Recalling the great Bill Shankly, his former manager at Liverpool, the footballer Kevin Keegan commented: ‘I learned so much from Shanks. He used to say: “If I was a road-sweeper, my street would be the cleanest in the borough.” I took that to heart.’ So don’t fight work; give yourself up to it. Resolve to perform every task, no matter how trivial, to the best of your ability. The old adage is true: the more you put in, the more you’ll get out.

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Step two is a practical technique. If you can increase your productivity you’ll feel so much better about yourself and your job. Achievement feels wonderful. And the best way to boost your productivity is to set yourself realistic goals: for example, by the end of next week I will have dealt with x or done the research for y or investigated z. By November I will have put forward my proposal for re-organising the computing systems or changing how we handle complaints or …. You get the idea.

The best goals are:

• Challenging but feasible. The most highly motivated people set themselves relatively tricky (though still attainable) goals; they thrive when required to raise their game.
• Clear, specific and measurable. You need to understand exactly what’s required, how to achieve it and how you’ll know when it’s been completed.
• Attainable quickly. Any goal that requires many weeks or months to achieve is likely to require superhuman levels of motivation. It’s easy to feel discouraged if that end point still seems ages away after lots of effort. So if your goal requires sustained input, identify lots of smaller subgoals that will help you reach your overall objective – and give yourself a little reward as you achieve them.

Goals aren’t just a great way to help you get more done. You’ll find that simply defining your goals and tracking your progress gives you a sense of control – which, as we’ve just seen, is one of the key factors in determining job satisfaction (you’ll find more on boosting your level of control at work on p. 126). Just thinking up goals can be enormously empowering. Making progress with them will bring even more positive feelings.

FIND MEANING IN YOUR WORK

Steve Jobs was co-founder of Apple Inc, the largest technology company in the world, which he helped set up at the age of twenty-one. Here is Steve Jobs’ career advice:

You’ve got to find what you love and that is as true for work as it is for lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you’ve found it.

Jobs may have been overstating the case a bit, but there’s no doubt that if you love your work, if you believe it is worth doing, you’ll be happy in your role. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you won’t sometimes experience setbacks. But when you do you’ll know why it’s important to keep going regardless. And you’ll be better able to overcome those challenges.

Research has shown that people tend to view their work in one of three ways. A job is a chore we endure simply for the money. A career is work that we may or may not enjoy, but for which our primary motivation is advancement – for example, money, recognition and status. A calling, on the other hand, is a role we find rewarding in itself. A calling is what Steve Jobs was describing in the quote above. Katharine Graham, long-time publisher of the Washington Post, put it more succinctly: ‘To love what you do and feel that it matters – how could anything be more fun?’

The trick, then, is to turn your job into a calling. But is this really possible if we’re clinging onto whatever employment we can find in a fraught economic climate; if we’ve never found the work that is our passion; or if we know what we’d really love to be doing, but find ourselves stuck with something quite different?

Well, some roles, of course, suit us better than others. Some jobs we find relatively easy to love. But even for those of us not doing our dream job, there are steps we can take to make our role less like a job and more like a calling.

The first is to build on your strengths, values and skills. As we saw in Chapter 4, strengths are positive character traits and behaviours, such as creativity, teamwork, self-discipline, leadership, persistence and kindness. Values are what we believe is important in life. (See pp. 44–6 for more on strengths and values.) Skills, on the other hand, are techniques you learn and master through practice – for example, giving a successful presentation, writing a persuasive email, or dealing positively with a customer.

Take the time to understand your strengths, values and skills (you’ll find a questionnaire on strengths at www.viasurvey.org). If possible, choose a job that fits well with them. And if you’re already in a job, see what you can do to reshape your role accordingly. If you’re creative, for instance, is there any task you could take on that would allow you to use this strength? If you’re good with people, how could you increase this element of your work? If you value equality and justice, strive to promote these values in your dealings with your colleagues or customers.

Your work is to discover your work and then, with all your heart, to give yourself to it. BUDDHA

Crafting your role to suit you better may require the support of your manager. But you don’t need anyone else’s buy-in to reshape your attitude to work. With a change of perspective, you can find new meaning in your role, whatever it happens to be.

Committing to your job, as we described above, is a great start. To help you, think of five positive reasons for doing what you do.

Kirsty is a 34-year-old PA to a company director. It’s a role she fell into, largely because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. Having experienced periods of disliking her job, Kirsty expected it would be difficult to find five positives. However, here’s what she came up with:

• I’m able to provide for my son and daughter.
• I’m good at what I do.
• I enjoy the social contact.
• I’m lucky to have any job at all in the current economic downturn.
• I can fit my job around my other responsibilities and interests.

Write down your positives and keep them handy – maybe pin them up in the kitchen or carry them around with you on a card. If you’re feeling negative about work, you’ll be able to remind yourself what you’re in it for.

And don’t forget the techniques in Chapters 5 and 6 for reducing the impact of negative thoughts and increasing positive thoughts. They’re just as relevant to the world of work as they are to any other area of life.

The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one. OSCAR WILDE

INCREASE YOUR LEVEL OF CONTROL

Research has shown that there’s a very clear correlation between the amount of control a person has over their work and their happiness in that role. Broadly speaking, the more control you have, the happier you’ll be. That said, everyone has an upper limit. Some people would run the whole show if they could, while others are content simply to manage their own workload. What level of influence are you comfortable with? What level do you have now?

If you’re not happy with how things stand at the moment, ask yourself what changes you could make. Talk to your manager about taking on more responsibility, or suggest improvements to the way things currently get done. Increase your influence by upping your involvement in decision-making. It’s likely that your manager will welcome your contribution: after all, it’s a sign that you care about what you do. And as Jessica Pryce-Jones puts it: ‘actively seek out what you can do rather than ruminate on what you can’t’.

It’s much easier to exert control over our work (and other areas of life) if we’ve learned how to be assertive. Assertiveness means letting the people around us know how we feel and what we want, clearly, calmly and respectfully.

Assertiveness is especially useful when it comes to saying ‘no’ – something many of us find exceptionally difficult. Here are some techniques to help you with that tiny but ever so tricky word.

• If you’re not sure how you feel about a task, or you don’t feel able to say no there and then, buy yourself time. When you’re asked to do something, say you’ll think it over and get back to them. ‘I’d like to just review what else has to be done this week – I’ll come back to you later today’ is a perfectly reasonable response.
• Be sympathetic and constructive. Tell the person you understand their problem and help them think through alternative solutions – that don’t involve you!
• Explain why you can’t help, but don’t let your reasons sound like excuses. Remember: you are entitled to take control of your own workload.
• Sometimes you may want to meet the person halfway: ‘I can’t do x, but I may be able to help you with y.’
• With your boss, you can explain that ‘I can do this today, if that other task can wait until tomorrow: is that okay?’

Learning to be assertive can be hard, at least at first. It takes courage to speak up for yourself – and you should remember that when you do. Make sure you give yourself the praise you deserve.

DEVELOP YOUR SKILLS

Chapter 4 set out the five a day activities for happiness. One of the five, as you may remember, was learning new skills.

Well, learning is as important for happiness at work as it is in life generally. Most of us want to feel that we’re moving forward in our job, becoming better at what we do, developing new skills and adding to our range of experiences.

To help you do this:

• Aim to take on increasingly challenging (though not impossible) assignments. Stretch yourself: not only will you learn lots, the sense of achievement will be a huge morale-boost.
• Consider how you’d like your role to develop over the next year or so, and share your thoughts with your manager. What must happen to make that wish a reality? What training do you need? Which tasks could you take on right now?
• Draw up a plan for what you’d like to be doing in the medium to long term. Do as much research as you can; if you can talk to someone currently in that role so much the better. Find out what skills and experience are required and decide how to go about acquiring them. You may be able to develop aspects of your current job, or it may be a case of taking courses, or building work-related experience in your spare time.

LOOK AFTER YOURSELF

A major cultural shift has occurred in France in recent years. Instead of long, relaxing, restaurant lunches, the French worker is now more likely to wolf down a pre-packaged sandwich at their desk. Indeed, the average French lunch break is reported to have shrunk from 90 minutes in 1975 to 32 minutes in 2005.

News of this development was greeted with some amusement in the UK, where it was often seen as a sort of comeuppance for a society finally coming to terms with the real world.

But if there is a lesson to be learned here, it’s not that French lunch breaks were too long, but that for most of us they are too short. We’ll feel a lot happier at work – and get more done – if we eat a healthy meal and take a decent break from the daily grind.

Working flat out for hours on end is unlikely to increase your well-being, nor will it increase your productivity. All it will do is exhaust you – and no one works well when they’re tired. So make sure you take regular breaks during the day. If you can, leave your desk. Even better is to take a brief stroll outside in the fresh air. Enjoy a conversation with a colleague that isn’t about work.

Meditation can be a fantastic way to relax, even in the most stressful situations. So why not make the three-minute breathing space meditation (see p. 95) a regular part of your working day?

Remember the mini-activities for happiness we discussed on p. 54? Adding five positive activities to your day – no matter how small – will make a real difference to your mood.

Don’t let work dominate your life, no matter how rewarding you find it. As the Dalai Lama has written: ‘a happy life should have variety … One should not concentrate on job or money’. If we’re not careful, work can swallow up the time we should be spending with friends and family, or on hobbies and pastimes, or even sleeping. So make these your priority; work will take care of itself.

If at all possible, try to keep your working day within sensible limits. Bar a very few jobs, by law no one in the UK can be forced to work more than 48 hours a week. The average is around 35 hours, which is a much more sensible figure. Of course, there are probably times when the volume of work means that you have to work longer than you’d like. Or perhaps you work in an organisation where long hours are the norm. If you’re happy with the situation, that’s fine; but if not, it’s best to tackle the issue rather than letting it get you down. Start by having a chat with your manager. If that doesn’t bear fruit, it may be time to consider making a move.

When things are going badly at work, talking about the situation with family or friends is often the last thing we want to do. Instead, we try to build a wall between work and the other parts of our life. But of course problems at work don’t tend to stay there. Instead, they can dominate our thoughts and drag down our mood, no matter where we are. So don’t bottle up your concerns: talk them through with the people closest to you.

If you are too busy to spend time with your children, then you are busier than God intended you to be. RABBI MENDEL EPSTEIN

The techniques we’ve described here should provide a real boost to your level of contentment at work. But if you’ve given them a good try and are still unhappy, it may be time to consider changing jobs.

If you’re in that position, take the time to plan your next move properly. Investigate the possibilities as thoroughly as possible. Talk the issues through with your friends and loved ones; perhaps consult a careers adviser. Which roles would suit your strengths, values and skills? What do you need to add to your portfolio to maximise your chances of landing the right job? Are you confident you’ll feel happier in that role than in your current position?

Changing jobs presents a big opportunity to become happier at work. If it takes a while to come to a decision, that’s just as it ought to be. The prize is definitely worth the effort.