A couple of years ago one of our students, Natasha, conducted a study into what makes a good day at work. It was this that piqued my interest in the topic, and this year the whole cohort of students helped me to collect some qualitative data exploring this topic. The students interviewed 40 adults, currently working in the UK about their jobs, and asked each of them to describe two different good days at work and reflect on what made them so good.
The analysis of the data revealed three key findings. Good days involve i) making positive contributions,ii) having positive relationships, and iii) a boost to self-esteem.
Positive Contribution: what I do
A positive contribution is focused on the content of the participants' work, and at its best, involved people working hard and achieving a lot of useful stuff. This was the most dominant of all the themes and could be seen in every single narrative.
Central to a positive contribution usually was a tangible achievement, as people really enjoyed seeing the fruits of their labour or making clear progress towards a goal. These achievements tended to be particularly satisfying if the project was hard, beset with challenges, daunting or if the success was unexpected. It's interesting to see that (almost) the worse the project is, the more people gain from finishing it.
People also found their work more rewarding if they could see its value - either working on projects that they believe are important, or through seeing that their work had a positive impact on others. The last feature of 'a positive contribution was feeling productive. The good days identified by the participants were often described as long, tiring or busy days, and people said that feeling worn out at the end of a day made them feel they had been productive. This was also seen in the number of people who spoke about the satisfaction they got from being able to cross things off their to-do lists.
Positive Relationships: who I am with
It will come as no surprise to hear that other people featured prominently in people's good days.
Participants enjoyed the opportunity to connect with others, both catching up with colleagues and making connections with new people. As well as social relationships, people reported enjoying collaborating with colleagues, working together on projects, or just being with others who shared the same values, mindset or goals. Finally, the idea of support came up frequently in the narratives: people's good days often included either feeling supported by others, or having the opportunity to support others.
Positive Self-Evaluations: how I feel about myself
Two thirds of the participants' good days involved an incident that boosted their self-esteem. This theme never appeared on its own in the narratives - it seems that on its own, a boost to self-esteem isn't enough to make a good day, but it is much appreciated alongside another positive incident. Sometimes, these were moments when they realised that they were learning things, were actually pretty good at the job, or had achieved something quite tricky. More often, these moments were linked to feedback from others. Feedback was appreciated from every quarter, with participants quoting positive feedback from co-workers, clients, patients, pupils and their parents. But most impact came from being praised (particularly publicly) by their managers. In fact, even just being noticed by managers seemed to give participants a positive boost.
So what can we take from this?
- Managers should feel ok keeping staff busy. People enjoy working hard, so giving people extra work (within reason!) is not necessarily a bad thing. Taking on difficult or daunting tasks reap particular rewards, so should not be avoided.
- A detailed to-do list, and an opportunity at the end of the day to tick things off and reflect on everything we have achieved might well help us to feel more productive.
- In terms of relationships, there are good things to be gained from social connections, so we should all be making time to talk to our colleagues (or clients, or students, or stakeholders) about non-work things. Managers should encourage this kind of informal interaction and support workers developing personal relationships with each other.
- Finding ways to boost our own or others' self-esteem is important. Obviously giving workers the training and support they need will make sure that they are more likely to learn, develop their skills and expertise, and succeed in their projects. But on top of this, a culture of praise and specifically public praise can be a great way to offer extra ego-boosts to staff. Senior managers can help substantially here, as praise from them carries particular weight, and managers should remember that even just attention and engagement with their staff can make a huge difference. But it's everyone's job to help with this - giving positive feedback to anyone, whenever we can is going to help.
And what's next?
There are lots of theories which try to account for well-being more broadly, although they haven't generally been used to help us understand episodic happiness. One of the most well-known is Seligman's PERMA model (2011) which suggests that well-being is made up of:
Positive emotions - that's probably most similar to self-esteem in this study
Engagement - this wasn't really explicit in this study, although perhaps is linked to productivity
Relationships - as above
Meaning - that emerged as part of 'making a contribution'
Accomplishment - closely linked to the 'positive contributions' from this study.
So, this study does a good job of showing that Seligman's model might apply to one-off episodes at work as well as broader life experiences, but as a qualitative study, we can't be sure that we can generalise this to a wider range of people. Perhaps that should be my next study?
