Happiness at work.......your quality of life and sometimes your life depends on it. Work is an important part of the life of the modern man, as it always has been, but work has become more complicated that before. Today what we do is often done as a part of a large organisation. The work is often abstract manipulation of matter or information, and the value created by the single member of the organisation has become increasingly difficult to measure. Organisations have become increasingly responsible for not only the physical work environment, but also for the mental working environment, and factors like stress and sexual harassment are becoming more and more regulated by company rules and culture. The health of the employees has become a major financial interest of the company as only healthy employees and leaders can perform optimally. Often the companies have health insurance for their people. Today employees and leaders also expect work to provide their life with meaning and stimulating experiences and developing challenges. Scholarly knowledge is substituted with experiential learning in a developing and dynamic environment. Society is developing fast and only companies with modern, well-oriented and culturally integrated employees can win the competition by offering costumers, clients or patients the best products and services. A strong association between quality of life, development of personal character, self-realisation, development of talents and skills, physical and mental health, meaning of life, sense of coherence and similar core concepts of modern medical and psychosocial sciences have in many studies now been strongly associated with work satisfaction, joy on the job and similar concepts. The scientific challenge we have taken upon our shoulders is to put the whole messy and chaotic area in order, and create a formula according to which the actual integrated status of worker can be calculated. We have decided to call the integrated concept of all above mentioned dimensions for working life quality, similar to the well-known global quality of life concept in medicine and social sciences. We are proud to present, in the present book, a mathematical formula from which the created value of an employee or leader can be known, if only the working life quality is known. We also provide a questionnaire for measuring the quality of working life, based on a theory of quality of working life. We have in a study on a random sample of the Danish population found a strong statistical association between the measured quality of working life and health. We started the research in quality of working life in 1994, and the first version of the QWL-theory was ready in 1996. In 1997 it was empirically tested in a study involving 1,500 persons and 30 companies. After adjusting the questionnaire and analysis of the data we further improved our understanding to the level that we are happy to present in this book, based on a number of published scientific papers.

Life's too short to be unhappy at work "I'm working harder than I ever have, and I don't know if it's worth it anymore." If you're a manager or leader, these words have probably run through your mind. So many of us are feeling fed up, burned out, and unhappy at work: the constant pressure and stress, the unending changes, the politics--people feel as though they can't give much more, and performance is suffering. But it's work, after all, right? Should we even expect to be fulfilled and happy at work? Yes, we should, says Annie McKee, coauthor of the bestselling Primal Leadership. In her new transformative book, she makes the most compelling case yet that happiness--and the full engagement that comes with it--is more important than ever in today's workplace, and she sheds new light on the powerful relationship of happiness to individual, team, and organizational success. Based on extensive research and decades of experience with leaders, this book reveals that people must have three essential elements in order to be happy at work: A sense of purpose and the chance to contribute to something bigger than themselves A vision that is powerful and personal, creating a real sense of hope Resonant, friendly relationships With vivid and moving real-life stories, the book shows how leaders can use these powerful pillars to create and sustain happiness even when they're under pressure. By emphasizing purpose, hope, and friendships they can also ensure a healthy, positive climate for their teams and throughout the organization. How to Be Happy at Work deepens our understanding of what it means to be truly fulfilled and effective at work and provides clear, practical advice and instruction for how to get there--no matter what job you have.

This book examines the importance of work in human well-being, addressing several related philosophical questions about work and arguing on the whole that meaningful work is central in human flourishing. Work impacts flourishing not only in developing and exercising human capabilities but also in instilling and reflecting virtues such as honor, pride, dignity, self-discipline and self-respect. Work also attaches to a sense of purposefulness and personal identity, and meaningful work can promote both personal autonomy and a sense of personal satisfaction that issues from making oneself useful. Further still, work bears a formative influence on character and intelligence and provides a primary avenue for exercising complex skills and garnering esteem and recognition from others. The author defends a pluralistic account of meaningful work, arguing that work can be meaningful in virtue of developing capabilities, supporting virtues, providing a purpose, or integrating elements of a worker's life. In light of the impact of meaningful work on living well, the author argues that well-ordered societies provide opportunities for meaningful work, that individuals would be well advised to pursue these opportunities, and that the philosophical view of value pluralism, which casts work as having no special significance in an individual's life, is false. The book also addresses oppressive work that undermines human flourishing, examining potential solutions to mitigate the impact of bad work on those who perform it. Finally, a guiding argument of the book is that promoting meaningful work is a matter of ethics, more so than a matter of politics. Prioritizing people over profit, treating workers with respect, respecting the intelligence of working people, and creating opportunities for people to contribute developed skills are basic ethical principles for employing organizations and for communities at large.

It is very easy for organizations to ignore or overlook the impact of social and commercial change-of increased pressure to deliver profit (above all else) and of transformation in the ways in which we are now working-on the mental health and, consequently, the performance of their employees. And yet there is plenty of evidence that in many workplaces, performance is down, stress is up and professional employees are struggling to balance their home and work lives. This collection, while looking at individuals, places the spotlight on organizational initiatives to support the development of attitudes, values, character and behaviors in employees. The aim of these initiatives is to increase our resilience to those experiences and events which impact on performance. There is a particular focus on managerial and professional jobs where employee discretion and commitment are critical. The Fulfilling Workplace extends the themes developed in early titles in the Psychological and Behavioral Aspects of Risk Series deeper into organizations; to explore the organization's role in coming to grips both with human frailties and toxic workplaces-both destructive to individual and organizational health.

A state-of-the-art psychological perspective on positivity and strengths-based approaches at work This handbook makes a unique contribution to organizational psychology and HRM by providing comprehensive international coverage of the contemporary field of positivity and strengths-based approaches at work. It provides critical reviews of key topics such as resilience, wellbeing, hope, motivation, flow, authenticity, positive leadership and engagement, drawing on the work of leading thinkers including Kim Cameron, Shane Lopez, Peter Clough and Robert Biswas-Diener.

Named the Best Management Book of 2021 by strategy+business Named one of "this month's top titles" in the Financial Times in September 2021 Named to the longlist for the 2021 Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award in the Management & Culture category A plan for conquering collaborative overload to drive performance and innovation, reduce burnout, and enhance well-being. Most organizations have created always-on work contexts that are burning people out and hurting performance rather than delivering productivity, innovation and engagement. Collaborative work consumes 85% of employees' time and is drifting earlier into the morning, later into the night, and deeper into the weekend. The dilemma is that we all need to collaborate more to create effective organizations and vibrant careers for ourselves. But conventional wisdom on teamwork and collaboration has created too much of the wrong kind of collaboration, which hurts our performance, health and overall well-being. In Beyond Collaboration Overload, Babson professor Rob Cross solves this paradox by showing how top performers who thrive at work collaborate in a more purposeful way that makes them 18-24% more efficient than their peers. Good collaborators are distinguished by the efficiency and intentionality of their collaboration—not the size of their network or the length of their workday. Through landmark research with more than 300 organizations, in-depth stories, and tools, Beyond Collaboration Overload will coach you to reclaim close to a day a week when you: Identify and challenge beliefs that lead you to collaborate too quickly Impose structure in your work to prevent unproductive collaboration Alter behaviors to create more efficient collaboration It then outlines how successful people invest this reclaimed time to: Cultivate a broad network—not a big one—for innovation and scale Energize others—a strong predictor of high performance Connect with others to reduce micro-stressors and enhance physical and mental well-being Cross' framework provides relief from the definitive problem of our age—dysfunctional collaboration at the expense of our performance, health and overall well-being.

This book brings together two bodies of knowledge - wellbeing and recovery. Wellbeing and 'positive' approaches are increasingly influencing many areas of society. Recovery in mental illness has a growing empirical evidence base. For the first time, overlaps and cross-fertilisation opportunities between the two bodies of knowledge are identified. International experts present innovations taking place within the mental health system, which include wellbeing-informed new therapies, e-health approaches and peer-led recovery communities. State-of-the-art applications of wellbeing to the wider community are also described, across education, employment, parenting and city planning. This book will be of interest to anyone connected with the mental health system, especially people using and working in services, and clinical and administrators leaders, and those interested in using research from the mental health system in the wider community.