CONCLUSION
Implementing the Seven Strategies
The last seven chapters provided a broad action buffet of options for creating more happiness and engagement within your teams. I hope you are as enthusiastic about putting happiness to work as I was to pull your action buffet together. I recognize, though, that it can feel overwhelming to face so many choices against the backdrop of all the deadlines and deliverables that come as part of our daily work. The key now is to begin.
As long as you have the best interests of your team top of mind, you can’t really go too wrong. However, here is some final advice to boost your chance of successful implementation and the benefits that come with it.
FIND COCONSPIRATORS
Who on your team is likely to get excited about implementing the ideas in this book and creating a happier workplace? Start talking up the ideas with some of those folks, and see who wants to help. Maybe it’s some of your happier members who would love to help create a more positive team. Or maybe you want to focus first on a team member or two who are well connected and respected on the team already.
Start by sharing this book and highlighting the strategies you are most excited about. Lay out your ideas of how you would like to potentially implement some tools and get their feedback and thoughts. Having a couple other people on board as you start to bring these ideas to the broader team will make it a lot easier to implement changes, start the virtuous cycle, and get the rest of the team to go along.
Having coconspirators will also keep your motivation up. Changing social scripts is hard, even when you are committed to the change. You are going to get tired, discouraged, and/or distracted by other priorities from time to time. Your coconspirators can pick up the slack or keep you accountable when that happens.
FOCUS ON ONE STRATEGY AT A TIME
Commit that you are going to do this. But commit in a focused way. As much enthusiasm as you may have to jump into several strategies simultaneously, changing too much at once can easily overwhelm people and reduce effectiveness. The good news is that you don’t have to implement every strategy in this book to be successful in creating a more positive culture and more engagement with your team.
To choose where to start, consider which strategies prompt your own energy and excitement. Which strategies intrigue you, pull your attention, or get you fired up? These strategies will likely keep you motivated and on task. You might also consider starting with any strategies that your team is already doing reasonably well. These strategies will give you an implementation head start by taking advantage of any natural strengths or tendencies already within your team. (Remember the power of building on strengths from Strategy 4, Activate Employee Superpowers?)
Once you’ve identified the top two to three strategies that you are most interested in implementing, get input from your coconspirators, and decide together which to work on first. What makes people happy varies; giving them choices will get more buy-in and willingness to dive into these tools and strategies. This sense of team autonomy will get things moving in a positive direction.
If collectively you know which strategy to kick off with, go for it. If you aren’t sure yet, there are some advantages to implementing certain strategies together:
• Strategies 1, Hardwire Authentic Appreciation, and 2, Cultivate Connection, are the two most straightforward strategies that generally have more bang for the buck in the short term. They generate energizing activated positive emotions quickly with easy- to-implement individual and group habits.
• Strategies 4, Activate Employee Superpowers, and 5, Mine for Meaning, take more effort up front. They both have significant self-reflective exercises before you see much of the benefit.
• Strategy 7, Approach as a Coach, takes more time from you to kick off, but it also has the most powerful long-term payoff. This strategy can help with implementing and customizing any of the other strategies in a personal way for each of your team members.
• Strategies 3, Put Stress to Work, and 6, Embrace the Negative, have emotionally challenging content and are better implemented after you’ve established at least one of the more positive emotion–oriented strategies first, especially Strategies 1 and 2.
PLANT MANY SEEDS AND TEND THEM CAREFULLY
While each tool is designed to be easy to start, long-term change takes time and focus. Go deep on your first strategy because it will set the tone for all your efforts in creating a more positive culture. It’s worth taking the time—at least a month of focused effort—to do it right and lock it into habits and your regular work flow before moving on to the next one. If you integrate the first strategy well, virtuous cycles will make implementing additional strategies much easier.
Once you’ve got buy-in from your coconspirators, there are several prongs to a successful implementation strategy:
• Prep your full team with the why. Talk about how you want them to be happier, to create a happier workplace, and how engagement and happiness overlap. If they are open to reading and learning more, share the book. Talk about the specific strategy you and your coconspirators have chosen and why.
• Work on a 21-day personal habit challenge together. The goal is to integrate and hardwire these ideas through habits. Choose a couple of the personal habits within your first strategy. Encourage everyone on the team to pick one, and have everyone start the 21 days at the same time. Check in on it during team meetings along the way. Have everyone choose an accountability partner to support along the way via email, text, and conversation. A full list of these personal habits and the strategies they connect with can be found in the Appendix at the back of book (on page 235).
• Choose at least one interpersonal habit for your one-on-one meetings and one for your group meetings. Keep up those habits for at least 7 to 10 meetings so they become a normal part of your interactions. All the interpersonal habits can be found in the Appendix on page 235.
Remember to be your own laboratory—experiment and adapt the various tools to keep things moving forward and with your team.
PUT YOUR OXYGEN MASK ON FIRST
Simple self-care practices are important precursors to happiness—not the fun, day-spa-and-treats type of self-care but the unsexy, disciplined work of ensuring that you get sufficient sleep, eat healthy food, exercise, and get social support. If we aren’t rested, if we are riding a blood-sugar roller coaster, if we don’t find time to move our bodies and give our minds a rest, or if we don’t have the social support we need, it will be difficult to tap into the personal happiness, activated positive emotions, and engagement that we are hoping to create for our teams.
As you begin to roll out the strategies in this book, make sure that your team also has the time and structural support to take care of the basics. If they are sleep deprived because your culture lauds people who answer emails at 2 a.m., implementing these tools will be challenging. Make an effort to change your team’s culture to one where work isn’t the reason people can’t sleep, exercise, and eat healthily. You can’t control their lives outside of work, but you can avoid being a barrier to self-care.
ROLE MODEL, REINFORCE, RECOGNIZE
While rolling out the strategies in this book, it is essential to recognize the power of the 3Rs: role model, reinforce, and recognize:
• Role model. As a team leader, you are the most visible member of the team. Everyone will look to you as they judge how seriously to take these changes. Be visible applying and sharing stories of these tools in your own life and work. Role model being vulnerable, learning, and talking about emotions. Be out front practicing personal, one-on-one, and group habits. Share the value you find in these activities. If they don’t see you consistently utilizing these tools, it is going to be very hard to induce them to maintain momentum.
• Reinforce. To maintain motivation and avoid becoming an organizational “flavor of the month,” regularly revisit the purpose behind the changes. Remind the team that this is about creating a happier and more positive workplace culture. Keep the why of these efforts front and center, regularly reminding them how these efforts benefit them as individuals and the team as a whole. Make sure these ideas are visible in team communications: in team emails, in posters up around the office space, and in your meetings. Roll out different strategy tools over time so there are new things to talk about while still getting the previous ones fully hardwired.
• Recognize and appreciate. Remember to recognize not just your team members’ regular work but also their efforts to implement and practice the tools in this book. The entire first strategy, Hardwire Authentic Appreciation, is about this. Use those tools.
EXPAND DOWN, OUT, AND UP
This book is primarily focused on you and your immediate direct-report team. This is the most effective way to make positive change because you have the most direct influence. But what if you want to put happiness to work deeper in your organization, out among your peers or up to your own boss and more senior leaders?
If You Are a Senior Leader
Most engagement-oriented consulting firms who are hired by senior executives bring programs that force engagement from the top by fiat. This tactic is not very effective because (a) it doesn’t tap into the positive emotions that are essential to engagement, and (b) people at all levels of the organization want a say in how change is brought in. These are some more effective ways:
• Start some pilots. As you get your immediate team started on at least one of the strategies, keep an eye out for any of the managers on your team who are enthusiastic about the happiness path to engagement. Which ones are jumping in with excitement and ready to push ahead? Ask who is willing to pilot this program with their own teams. Start with two or three pilots, and make sure they have resources to be successful.
• Share this book. Make sure whichever of your people lead these pilots with their teams have a copy of this book to fully understand the context, to decide which strategies they are most excited about, and to support their rollout strategy.
• Be visible with your support. Talk about your support of happiness strategies in group communications. Position them as an exciting initiative that you are rolling out slowly. Make an appearance at a kickoff meeting to show how enthusiastic you are about the program (having their supervisor’s supervisor weigh in can be a powerful motivation).
• Get the data they need to evaluate success. Make sure pilot teams can evaluate both their engagement and whatever performance metrics (both quantitative and qualitative) they hope to improve by implementing the program. By tracking these outcomes, you can test the value, which can build incentives to expand the program further within the group (and beyond). Check in on the data on a quarterly basis the first year. Monitor how it’s going, and adapt as necessary.
• Give them freedom to choose strategies that fit best for their team. If you’ve had success with a couple of strategies in your own team, you might want others to follow your footsteps. But your managers know their teams best. Let them choose their strategies and customize the program to the specific personalities and interests of their people.
• Gather an implementation team. Connect leaders who are implementing strategies on a regular basis to check in and make sure they have the support they need. Brainstorm what broader structural changes you could make to support implementation. For example, what kinds of procedures and processes may be getting in the way of implementing the strategies? Where might there be written or unwritten rules in place that undermine happiness and engagement?
• Let other groups jump in too. As these pilot programs get going, it’s likely that other folks will start requesting the program in their group. Encourage this. Just make sure you can provide the same level of support for these follow-on groups as you did for the initial pilot. When over a third of your group gets moving, have your implementation team think about how you might encourage everyone to participate in some way. Just remember, this has to be based on choice, not directive.
LEAD LATERALLY AND UP
Want to expand the benefits of this book beyond your teams? Start talking it up with your peers and your direct supervisor. Share the book with them, and see what they say.
If they are skeptical, continue to implement within your team, and keep track of your data and results. Once you show improvements in engagement and the performance outcomes that come with it, you can go back to those folks and make a more powerful argument. Your argument will be strengthened by qualitative stories of success and progress.
If there is interest, see if you can implement one of the strategies with your peer group and supervisor. In your meetings together, suggest they start implementing the relevant habits into their lives. Again, everyone doesn’t have to be enthusiastic about trying it out, but if you can get a small group interested, go for it. And if specific peers are interested, share this book with them, and let them run on their own.
NOW IT’S YOUR TURN
The power to significantly improve your team, to create a more positive environment for your people and higher levels of engagement, is now in your hands. You can find a suite of helpful tools to support your efforts at PutHappinessToWork.com.
Now, go put happiness to work!