Deliver Value: Happy Contributing People

According to Aristotle - Happiness consists in achieving, through the course of a whole lifetime, all the goods — health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc. — that lead to the perfection of human nature and to the enrichment of human life.

Happiness is based on experiences that are metabolized in our mind, body, and spirit.  When people say, “think happy thoughts”, they are referring to past experiences that we can recall and dream about.  Oswald, Proto and Sgroi (2015) found happiness made people around 12% more productive while unhappy workers proved 10% less productive.  Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings. People are the center of delivering value to customers and provide innovations that allow the organization to thrive.  The more happiness people experience the better opportunity for the organization to have more satisfied customers and thrive.   Daniel Pink (2009) said if people were paid the right amount of money, given autonomy, purpose, and mastery they would be motivated to be their best selves at work.  Psychological safety is another popular topic that resonates with people.  In a Psychologically safe workplace people experience the freedom and courage to express ideas so the individuals and organization can thrive.  The same concept applies to enabling satisfied customers that volunteer personal time to show the world how amazing your organization's people are via social media or word of mouth.  If happiness is such a critical emotion and experience to invigorate people, why do organizations invest so little to create an environment where happiness can be experienced.

I spoke to four people who have an influential opinion in business and the agile community. My question was: What would you include in a working environment that would enable “Happy Contributing People”?  Please share one or more experiences.

 

Diana Larsen, author of Agile Retrospective and co-founder of Agile Fluency Model:

The Agile Fluency model has four zones, which 1) focusing on value (shift team culture), 2) delivering value (shift team skills), 3) optimizing value (shift organizational structure), and 4) optimizing for systems (shift organizational culture). The approach that you're going for is either the focusing zone or you're going for something that includes those skills of the focusing zone.  It's embedded in the whole model and those are the skills that allow for becoming effective as a team. When people have that sense of effectiveness of building good products, I mean, it's very tied to the project Aristotle ideas of psychological safety and dependability and having structure and clarity around what we're working on and you know those, those five keys that they talk about.

When we have the project Aristotle experiences for our teams, they tend to have much higher job satisfaction. I tend not to think so much about happiness because that has certain connotations for certain people, but I believe that people deserve job satisfaction. They need to be pleased with their work. They need to have that sense of accomplishment. They need to have that sense of control over their work lives as a team and the autonomy that they must think about.  That is true at the individual level, but it's also true of the team level. Does this team, and when we think about self-organizing teams, we begin to talk about autonomous teams.

Teams that can make decisions together to move forward together and that feel they have the mastery and the skills that they need. That's what fluency is about.  We've got the right skills that match the work that we need to do, or our company is willing to invest in us gaining those skills. When you've got all that together, you have high levels of job satisfaction.