Back in my day, when I first started in ”the business”… blah, blah, blah. I can’t believe I actually wrote those words. Hahaha.
My point here is that when I first joined the workforce post college, my happiness was not a consideration by my employer. It was 1981. Ada, Oklahoma. They handed me a camera… told me to go shoot and edit a story on parking meters… then, anchor the 10pm news that night. I was dumb enough to think I could do it. I did it. Badly.
Back to that happiness thing. When I got started, my well being was not a consideration. It is now.
The Wall Street Journal has a story about how the hot course at Harvard Business School is called “Leadership and Happiness.” It is full. You can’t get in.
The course teaches how to cultivate a team’s happiness. The professor, Arthur Brooks, says that happiness is not a product of chance, genes or life circumstances. The Journal reports that Brooks teaches that happiness comes when you tend to four key areas: family, friends, meaningful work, and faith or life philosophy.
The course is treated like an actual Harvard Business course. Happiness is treated like portfolio. ”Are you over-indexing” in any of the four key areas?
The course came to be in the early days of the pandemic. While Covid changed how we look at things, the cake was already in the oven.
Work/life balance has been a thing for sometime now. I’m sure it has a lot to do with why so many businesses are hurting for workers. The Great Resignation continues.
I get it too. While I come from a time and place where you worked hard to make a good living, I sometimes wonder what if I hadn’t pushed so hard? Would it have mattered?
The workplace is changing. The worker has more power than ever before. Managers and owners are having to adapt. A course in Happiness 101 may be the way to bring the worker back into the fold.