More good days
In their first meeting, we ask them to remember a good day they had at work. The kind of day you’re eager to talk about when you get home. The kind of day where you feel alive at work.
Maybe your version of a good day is when you’re proud of the work you did or you learned something new. Or maybe it’s when you helped a colleague tackle a challenge or got recognized for your contribution.
“Your goal in this program,” we tell them, “is to have more days like that.”
A method for more good days
“More good days” is the name of a program we’re about to pilot in two factories in Germany. Small groups will meet for thirty minutes a week for eight weeks. A lightweight curriculum, tailored specifically for the company, will help them build skills—communication, knowledge sharing, cooperation—while they cultivate trust and strengthen relationships with colleagues.
The program is rooted in research by Dan Cable, author of Alive at Work, on “channeling your best self.” In one study, for example, Cable’s team set up a simple intervention during employee onboarding at a call center. New hires were instructed to reflect on when they were at there best, and then shared that within small peer groups. Six months later, participants in the intervention performed better—and stayed at the company longer—than those who didn’t.
The actual steps in the curriculum are based on the principles of job crafting research by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton. They found that employees who made small changes to how they performed their tasks, how they related to colleagues or customers, and how they chose to perceive their job, all led to improvements in performance and employee wellness.
As predicted by self-determination theory (SDT), these small steps enabled employees to fulfill the basic needs we all share for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When you feel a sense of control, master, and connection your motivation, confidence, and engagement increase. You feel more alive.
“We need to convince the managers”
For most people we talk to, it’s obvious that employees who have more good days will perform better for longer, will be healthier, and will show a greater willingness to cooperate with others. They know this from their own personal experience walking into any store or office, where they can immediately tell if the person across from them is “having a good day” or not, is pleasant and helpful or irritated and bored (or worse).
Yet, “time away from work is money,” they’ll say. This is deemed especially true for operational workers because, unlike high-paid executives, their work is counted. “We need to convince managers that it’s worth it.”
As a result, without clear measures of ROI, the training for employees in operational roles is almost universally limited to the minimum technical skills they need to perform a task. There’s no time or money for more good days.
Have a good day
And yet, though ROI is hard to calculate, there are plenty of statistics supporting the need for such a program. For example:
Forbes reports that 69% of employees are unsatisfied with their social connections at work.
The Society for Human Resource Managers reports that 82% of employees have felt lonely at work.
Gallup reports the percentage of U.S. employees who strongly agree that they are treated with respect at work has returned to the record low of 37%.
Workplace incivility (“defined as low-intensity deviant behavior that is rude, discourteous, and disrespectful”) is not only on the rise, but has been shown to be contagious, leading to a spiral of negative behaviors.
Work can be better than this. The author Studs Terkel wrote about work as a kind of search, where employees look “for a sort of life than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” No one should be denied that.
The next time you walk into a shop, think about the people who work there. The next time you use a product, think about the many human hands that touched it.
What kind of day are they having? What kind of life?
Everyone deserves a chance for more good days at work.