Positive Psychology Archives - Trang 5 trên 8

Happy Workplaces Are Good For Business

Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness, Tâm Lý Tích Cực, Productivity / My Holland

In management circles, it’s generally believed and accepted that a positive environment in the workplace leads to higher productivity, minimal employee turnovers and over-all better healthy outcomes. On the other side of the coin, a workplace that is hostile and insensitive, reeking with anxiety and negativity usually produces poor job performance, low creativity and little innovation. A fairly recent Harvard research study has shown that when leaders and top honchos are humble, inclusive and frequently encourage their staff to voice out their feelings or seek help, employees are generally happier and become more engaged. An oppressive corporate culture over time, simply goes against achieving positive results. What You Can Do If you’re one of the team leaders or senior managers of your company, here are three tried and tested rules that will help bring out honest and constructive feedback, important to managing your people, and ultimately, your company better. When you want to correct your employees, do so in a positive context. You may even want to criticize or confront your subordinates. That’s okay, but give out as many as three or four positive statements for every negative one you make. This makes a lot of sense. Our brains tend to focus more on negative feedbacks than on the positive feedbacks. So, when you say a lot more that is encouraging, supportive and appreciative, these will sort of neutralize the brain’s partiality to negativity and will ergo, lead to a higher degree of employee engagement. Research studies say that where there is positive communication, you’re likely to see the best results; good engagement and high morale. Center your communication on the strengths of your colleagues and employees and their unique contributions. It has almost become a habit for us to harp on what’s wrong with our employees. However, by focusing on their weaknesses alone we may just inadvertently be creating competence. By centering on their strengths, we are creating excellence. Be as specific and detailed about your positive feedbacks as you are about the negative ones. Sometimes, we’re guilty of simply glossing on their strengths much like a ship that passes in the night and yet we delve on their weaknesses like the 4th of July fireworks. Put a lot of emphasis on teamwork and commonalities. When talking about the negative incident, be objective. Try to describe the problem in detail rather than evaluating it, and identify the specific consequences that resulted and your personal feelings that came with it without placing blame. Try to stay away from arguing who’s right or who’s at fault. Instead suggest acceptable, reasonable and fair alternatives in correcting the situation. Given an understanding of the foregoing, it won’t hurt to do an honest and candid self-critique to objectively find out where your corporate culture stands. If you feel it could do with some improvements, the guidelines above could pretty well serve as starting points for your top managers and team leaders.

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Create Positive Emotions At The Workplace. It Raises Productivity

Emotional Intelligence, Khả năng lãnh đạo, Mindfulness, Tâm Lý Tích Cực, Productivity, Workplace Culture / My Holland

A lot of men say that the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist, sees women as naughty and bad. An optimist HOPES women are naughty and bad! Seriously though, you know the big difference between these two points of view: Optimism being one that can have a great impact not only on your career or profession but also on your health and life, in general. What Research Studies Say In fact, research studies have shown that optimism helps to keep depression away, improve your social ties, boost job performance and raise the chances of success in any undertaking. And when you come face to face with setbacks, optimism can make you more resilient. Pessimism, on the other hand undermines work, friendships and health. It increases your stress when you dwell on the negative too much. It actually is the recipe for depression and failure. Given these, wouldn’t you rather work with the optimist who can lighten up the day and who you can count on for support? Of course you would!, unless you’re “The Voice of Doom” who loves to hang around people who do nothing but complain, point blame at co-workers and see the whole world as nearing its end. High Performance Emanates from Optimistic Employees If you look closely at your people in the workplace, you may notice (as studies in actual work setting reflect) that your high performing teams tend to have a 6-to-1 ratio of positive to negative viewpoints. The low performing groups have an under 1-to-1 ratio. This gap generally makes a tremendous difference in your business, organizational set-up and the people who comprise them. Your best performers typically produce the top scores on profits, customer service ratings and other value measurements. Have no doubt about it. Positive emotions play a key role in a company’s daily operations. It broadens. Negative emotions hold you back. What You Can Do So, on your one-on-ones with the negative guys help them out. Persuade them to distract themselves. Help them find healthy distractions like music, exercises, meditation, etc. Short of getting them to take up bullfighting lessons, get them to learn new things.These will help put their focus somewhere else. Get them to reappraise problems and see them in a different perspective. Is it half-full or half-empty? Is it really that complex or do they just see it as such? Teach them to regard a thought as simply that: a thought. No need for them to make any judgments. The only real thing is experience. With the foregoing, you should be able to lend a hand in raising the optimism levels in your company and shoo away all forms of negativism. This is key to productivity that leads to business success.

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The Importance Of Well-Being At The Workplace

Emotional Intelligence, Sự gắn kết, Khả năng lãnh đạo, Mindfulness, Tâm Lý Tích Cực, Wellbeing / My Holland

Well-being is about people feeling highly valued and supported in the job they do in their place of work. It’s also about their health, productivity and performance which can usually lead to good bottom line numbers for companies. Business organizations that are well-structured and well-managed generally play an essential role in the promotion of employees’ health and over-all well-being. The benefits they bring result in the reduction of absenteeism and malingering illnesses and facilitates ease and speed of recovery and return to work after either a serious injury or illness. At its simplest definition, well-being is about personal happiness, feeling good and doing one’s job in a safe and healthy environment. Why Is Well-Being Important To A Company? Experts in the corporate world say the cost of replacement of employees who resign can go as high as one hundred fifty percent (150%) of the departing employee’s salary, given the collateral costs of recruitment, hiring and training. On the other hand, business organizations which have a workforce that is highly engaged can reduce employee turnover by eighty seven percent (87%). You don’t have to be a rocket engineer to figure out its impact not only on a company’s net profits, but on the productivity, culture and over-all output of the business, as well. And so, if you haven’t as yet taken employees’ well-being seriously in your company, now’s a good time. Work out a wellness program with a system that’ll increase productivity and bring in good figures for your company profits. Even more importantly, develop a wellness package for your staff that will result in over-all happiness and health. Here are 5 easy-to-implement guides your company can adopt to create a well-designed wellness program to, not only raise your employees’ engagement level but as well, build a pervasive, positive culture in the workplace. Link your program to the company’s strategic direction. Get this running parallel with your company’s vision and values. This way everybody wins. Make sure you have a yardstick to measure your ROI. Launching a wellness program will naturally entail some investments. Put it all together with specific objectives and how success is to be measured. Check your rate of absenteeism, cost of employees’ wages and your company’s engagement scores. They’ll serve as an index against which you can compare performance after the program has been put in place. Get your top management to buy into the idea of a sound and well-grounded well-being program. It never hurts to have the support of everybody, especially the head honchos you might have to run too should problems crop up. Work out some quick wins. Provide initiatives that will help your staff to quickly jump in and level up. Don’t forget to have fun! The subject of wellness and health doesn’t have to be boring. Make sure your message is intriguing, trendy and to the point. It should inspire a change in behavior of your guys. Inject some lightheartedness into it or even some fun from time to time. With something like this in place in your company, don’t be surprised to see your people with smiles on their faces Monday to Friday!

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Empathy at Work Drive Your Business Forward

Compassion, Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness, Tâm Lý Tích Cực / My Holland

What Is Empathy? Empathy is the capacity to recognise and understand the emotions of other people. It’s about putting yourself in another person’s shoes, understanding his/her perspective and reality. You’ve heard about this often enough during call center and customer service trainings where the trainers tell you to “put yourself in the customer’s shoes to better understand what’s going on in the customer’s heart and mind.” You might think that empathy is spontaneous. It’s not. There’s a little science to it. What happens is …when you hear a compelling story or see a scene or a situation that hits your soft spot, our body releases Cortisol which helps us to concentrate on the subject matter. Simultaneously, the body also releases Oxytoxin. This is sometimes called the “Trust Hormone” or the “Bonding Hormone.”. It’s what makes us care about the subject matter and increases our empathy. Recent research which had men undergo an aerosol shot of Oxytoxin found that this group had exhibited emotional empathy in higher levels. All of us have these, but depending on genetics, our mood at the moment and how we relate to the other person, levels of our individual empathy varies. Why Empathy Is Important In Businesses The ability to connect with and relate to people, (in particular, prospects and regular customers of a business) is true empathy. It’s a force that can move the business forward because empathy makes you think beyond yourself and your own concerns. The minute you begin seeing and understanding that side of the business, you’ll realise there’s a lot to discover and appreciate. This inevitably leads tocreativity and innovation and happy customers. To start applying empathy at the workplace more effectively, especially among employees who interact with customers, you as a manager might want to have them consider the following guides: Get rid of your own perspective. Instead look at things from the other person’s viewpoint. As soon as you do this, you’ll get to realize these guys aren’t being wicked or unkind or difficult and unreasonable. They’re just responding to the situation with the information they’ve got. This happens all the time with customer complaints. Listen and listen well. Listen with your ears (what is the other person saying? what kind of tone is he using?) Listen with your instincts (Is he communicating all the important issues? Is there something he’s not telling you?). Listen with your heart (how do you think he/she feels?). Acknowledge the other person’s perspective. Once you recognize why the other person believes what she believes, then acknowledge it. This doesn’t equate to you agreeing but it’s an acceptance of other peoples opinions and they may have solid reasons to have those opinions. Be flexible. When interacting with your company’s customers, be prepared to change directions as the other person’s thoughts and feelings might also change. Getting yourself and your team to develop an empathy approach at the workplace may just be the most relevant decision you can make to improving your business. When you start understanding others, they’d want to understand you too and that’s how effective collaborative work goes.

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New Year…New Goals. Goal Setting Doesn’t Always Work. Why?

Tâm Lý Tích Cực / My Holland

It’s funny. We go through our lives chasing our careers with the common knowledge that goal-setting works. Our business management professors, company head honchos and peers in the same industry tell us that an ample amount of energy and self discipline go a long way too. We’d bring into the equation, large figures of determination and perseverance and most, if not all hurdles vanish like magic, right? Then, what gives? Why are so few of these goals get to be realised? Most people are likely to dismiss these questions with …”Maybe, you’re lazy, you don’t have any staying power or you easily get distracted” In other words, what this is telling you is that “You, dude, ain’t got no will power!” … which therefore creates an impression that the goals are in reality, a gigantic task needing a lot more hard work, sacrifice and effort that could be beyond human bounds. So, why be surprised many people raise their hands in surrender? In truth, the lack of will power or strong discipline may not be the issue at all. These guys have the ability to succeed. They may be wanting in focus, but that raises the big “WHY?” The Three Most Common Mistakes In Setting Goals Compromising a lot in your goals and choosing only what’s traditional. When you consider only what’s reasonable or what’s tried and tested, it undermines your chances of success. In lieu of going for what’s new and original … you opt instead for what’s been done before and already packed in neat little boxes, … the results you get are too predictable and too safe but not necessarily successful. When you stay too much in your comfort zone, you’re limiting your imagination and not letting your creative juices flow. What happens is that your enthusiasm, motivation and passion go down. Dare to think beyond what is traditional. Create something that’s never been there and go beyond your limits. Choosing the outside trimmings rather than the content. Don’t go choosing goals because the façade looks good and impresses your peers while there’s not much substance in it. That would be like attending a training program so you can have the certificate hung on your wall instead of learning and acquiring skills you never had before. Ask yourself “What do I get out of this? Is this something I really want? What do I achieve, learn or develop?” Selecting your goals by consensus. This is a case of you having the herd mentality and going with what everybody wants or needs. When you give in to others’ considerations, and not stand up for what’s true for you, you risk the goal being misaligned with your own purpose. You just might end up blaming others for holding back and resulting in an unrealized goal. Achieving your goals will require many steps. If you give yourself a pat on the back or a token reward for every little step you take, it’ll jack up your state of mind and boost your energy and motivation. As you properly set your goals, staying away from these errors enumerated above, keep this little piece of advice alive in your heart.

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Tâm Lý Tích Cực

Happy Workplaces Are Good For Business

Create Positive Emotions At The Workplace. It Raises Productivity

The Importance Of Well-Being At The Workplace

Empathy at Work Drive Your Business Forward

New Year…New Goals. Goal Setting Doesn’t Always Work. Why?

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