Happiness for knowledge workers - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Happiness for knowledge workers - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Yesterday I spoke at a half-day conference about stress for knowledge workers. And I kicked ass, if I do say so myself :o) That new presentation format I designed back in November is really working well! Knowledge workers are architects, designers, writers, programmers, etc People whose input and output of work is immaterial, rather than physical. In recent years, these people have turned out to be very prone to stress and the mini-conference examined this phenomenon. Christine Ipsen presented the results of her phd study, which examines the source of this stress. Two friends of mine, Lene Thomsen and Nina Tange spoke about meaning at work and how this can reduce stress. The main point of my presentation was of course that we cant be focusing on fighting stress. That only makes people more stressed. We need to focus on promoting happiness at work when people are happy at work, theyre not stressed. I also talked about some myths about stress. Ive previously blogged about the fact that happiness at work is important to all kinds of employees. Its not limited to people in creative, high-paying or high-status jobs. But that being said, I think happiness at work is even more important for knowledge workers. Heres why: Happy knowledge workers are more motivated If youre a welder, you can probably weld even if youre not very motivated that day. If youre a trash man, you can still take out the trash. But what if youre an architect trying to come up with a new design, a programmer trying to solve a tricky problem or a journalist writing a tricky article? When most of the work you do goes on inside your head, motivation is critical! And of course happy people are waaay more motivated. Happy knowledge workers learn better For all knowledge workers, the knowledge you have is almost never enough. That stuff tends to go obsolete real fast. You need to constantly learn new things. And all studies show, that people learn much better when theyre happy. Happy knowledge workers form better relations at work Relationships and teamwork are crucial to most knowledge workers. And you form much better relationships at work and participate much more efficiently in teams when youre happy. Happy knowledge workers share knowledge Most companies that deal in knowledge also want employees to share that knowledge. As I wrote about previously, people only share knowledge, when theyre passionate about what they work with. People who dont care, dont share. Which is why so many corporate knowledge management systems fail miserably. The systems are fine theyre simply asking people to share information they couldnt care less about. As you probably know from reading this blog, I believe that everyone should be happy at work. Its just that happiness has an even bigger impact on the productivity of knowledge workers than it does on others. So if you work mainly with knowledge, increase your happiness at work. If you lead knowledge workers, do everything you can to make them love their jobs. So how do you make knowledge workers happy? Same way as everybody else. Read all about it. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related