In researching my book Happy Work, and working with some of the best brands to assist them in building incredibly Happy Cultures, I’ve identified a sequential framework. With this Happiness Ecosystem action plan, you can transform your organization from miserable (at worst) or merely average (better, but not good enough!) to truly extraordinary and super-competitive. Below is an abbreviated excerpt from my book Happy Work, the drills deep into each of these elements. Here are the steps:
1. Define Happiness. For our purposes, here’s how I define happiness on the job: “The engagement of purposeful work that serves our personal growth, in a way that positively impacts and serves others.”
2. Listen, Learn, and Collaborate. In order to know what you want to become you have to know your current condition. You need to cast aside your preconceptions and biases, and get a grip on the state of your organization. The energy flow is in all directions, and as CEO, your job is to manage this energy flow to produce the highest level of stakeholder happiness possible.
3. Validate. Data must be turned into actionable information. Aggregate and organize your insights into a presentation that you use to collaborate with a greater team to get buy-in and additional fine-tuning elements.
4. Organize. Your job is to direct the activities of your people to produce happiness for your customers, your stakeholders, and your investors. Assemble a happiness team to build out the formal happiness strategy. You might even appoint a chief happiness officer (CHO), head of employee experience, or vice president of global employee success.
5. Launch Your Happiness as a Strategy (HaaS) Plan. It needs to be real and written down and complete prior to launching it. It must activate the three key areas: “The engagement of purposeful work (1) that serves our personal growth (2), in a way that positively impacts and serves others (3).”
6. Monitor, Measure, and Fix. Happy cultures are dynamic and fluid, and you must continually eliminate the elements that aren’t working well and reinvest in those elements that do work.
7. Celebrate. It’s important that you celebrate the innovators while ensuring everyone in your company knows that it’s a team effort, and one employee’s victory is a win for everyone.