13 Experts Provide Tips on Fostering Happiness at Work

These days, many of us are working from a mix of in-office and home environments. Digital interactions are now commonplace, with workers occasionally meeting in person under certain circumstances.

While this new, hybrid approach enables greater flexibility and autonomy for workers, there’s not exactly a rulebook for how to manage a team in this new environment, leaving leaders with more questions than answers:

While there may not be just one right answer to these questions, there is a guiding principle: understand what makes your employees tick. At least, that’s what the experts say.

In this guide, we’ve gathered essential tips and insights from thought leaders, who all employ different methodologies around business culture, management, and communication in the workplace. By understanding who we are as humans and how to tap into our inner workings, these experts say, we can help enable effective collaboration, create positive habits, foster trust, and more. Here are their pointers:

Broader connection isn’t as easily nurtured in this new hybrid environment, tasking leaders with finding new ways to bind us all together and build trust.

According to Jay Van Bavel, there’s a new mandate for leaders of a flexible workforce: create a sense of “us.” If we want to future-proof flexible work, we need to help workers transcend the individual identity that comes with working from home and plug into a group identity. This fosters collaboration and innovation.

According to Tessa West, there are several ways to use video meetings to help everyone gain the contextual information that accompanies physical interaction, bridging the gap between at-home workers and in-office workers.

These days, disruption is the norm. Learning how to survive — and even thrive — in the face of disruption is essential. To support both employees and customers during this time, Charlene Li claims today’s leaders must shift their organization’s culture to embrace disruption.

Your employees aren’t in one place anymore, which means it’s more important than ever to understand what motivates them. According to Gretchen Rubin, you can better understand yourself and others around you with a personality framework known as the “Four Tendencies.” Rubin’s framework is based on one question: how do you respond to expectations? How you react reflects one of four tendencies:

• The Upholder: Upholders readily fulfill both outer and inner expectations — they meet deadlines, are eager to know what people want from them, and expect a lot from themselves. They’re focused on execution and self-direction, which means they’re often perceived by others as rigid.
• The Questioner: Questioners will do something if it makes sense to them — they make everything an inner expectation. They resist arbitrary items and any perceived injustice, requiring reasons and rationale for doing anything.
• The Obliger: Obligers meet outer expectations but struggle to meet inner ones. They never fail to help others, but struggle to help themselves — which makes them great team members, friends, and family members. If they want to keep a form of inner expectation, they have to have a tangible form of outer reliability.
• The Rebel: Rebels resist both types of expectations and do things their way, on their time. They don’t even listen to themselves most of the time. Rebels place a high value on identity — they make decisions based on what feeds into their existing self-perception.

According to David Horsager, trust is the linchpin for a successful business strategy — leaders need to foster it before they can expect workers to embrace new processes and changes. In fact, research from The 2021 Trust Outlook reveals that the No. 1 reason people want to work somewhere is because they trust leadership. So how do you actually become trustworthy?

According to Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, the secret to success isn’t talent or skill — it’s grit. Eskreis-Winkler has studied grit over the years, determining its connection to success and what people can do to cultivate it. She outlined three key ways you can become — or help others become — a grittier person:

Motivation is a tricky topic, one that has leaders scratching their heads on how to master. According to Lindsay McGregor, motivation can be boiled down to a framework that leaders can apply to effectively inspire employees’ best work. Called “The Motive Spectrum,” this framework can be organized into two categories of motives: direct and indirect.

Work happens everywhere: home, the office, airports, coffee shops — you name it. To stay connected with colleagues and customers, regardless of location, you need to master the art of hybrid collaboration. Mark Bowden provided 12 tips and tricks on how you can make the most of your hybrid meetings:

According to Dan Roam, using visuals to tell stories is one of the most powerful ways to get a message across. By infusing your presentations with drawings and images, you can clarify what’s in your own mind and confirm if someone sees it the same way, fostering mutual understanding and better connections.

Think of your presentation as a story you’re trying to tell — one that visuals bring to life. As Roam displayed via a mechanism he calls the “visual decoder,” simpler is usually better. A visual decoder is a four-part structure for presenting visual information that’s designed to easily display a story. These are the four components:

Our brains don’t create new material from scratch. An idea comes from stitching together pieces of existing knowledge in an unexpected way, from building new bonds.

According to Jonathan Fader, routines are our own personal masterpieces — we just need the right tools in place to create them.

A positive habit needs structure in order to become sustainable, which is why Fader developed an approach organized by “what,” “why,” and “how,” which leaders can apply when they want to encourage the development of positive behaviors.

• The what
  The “what” is all about identifying your goal and finding ways to keep it top of mind. Fader, for instance, built an acronym for his goals called GEMS, which stands for guitar, exercise, meditate, and stretch.
• The why
  To form a habit, you have to identify an internal motivation that inspires consistency. Start with something connected with your values — your role as a parent, commitment to your passions, or long-term vision for your life.
• The how
  How long does it take for a behavior to become a habit? Studies have proven it takes 66 days — a two-month plan — to canonize something and make it automatic. But how do we become consistent? We need to find ways to inspire the behavior we want to see, which can often be done through gamifying, connecting, and protecting our habits.

Good habits lead to growth, while bad ones result in frustration. A good habit doesn’t have to mean an entire overhaul of our existing routines, but rather small, achievable, consistent wins that help improve our perspective and change our mindset. Consistency is what matters most for positivity, and, according to Lewis Howes, leaders can focus on these five areas to drive growth — both within their team and themselves:

According to studies by Google, empathy fosters effective collaboration, more inclusive attitudes, and happier employees. Workers who view their organizations as empathetic often have increased morale and less stress, reducing turnover as a result.

Empathy also helps create better leaders. With an empathetic mindset informing their management style, leaders can provide constructive feedback while addressing employees’ needs in a way that helps people grow.

While a common concept, empathy still faces quite a few misunderstandings. Some feel like the skill is unattainable or difficult to hone — which has sparked a few myths around empathy.

Here are three myths Jamil Zaki debunked:

Myth #1: Empathy is a trait

Fact: Empathy is a mindset, not a personality trait. And empathy is something we can continue to hone — similar to working out and growing a muscle, you can grow your capacity for caring and understanding.

Myth #2: We can tell what our colleagues are going through

Fact: In the workplace in particular, our empathy muscles can atrophy when people rise to power. Leaders often attain the positions they have because they can understand and connect with people, yet by being in that position they can also lose a sense of empathy. To solve this paradox, leaders need to not only imagine someone else’s reality, they also need to learn about someone else’s reality.

Myth #3: Empathy is a solo sport

Fact: People tend to copy the positive behaviors of those around them. Empathy is no exception, which means it lives on through an organization’s culture rather than a single person. When empathy becomes a social norm, people are that much more motivated to be empathetic, generating noticeable, widespread kind behavior.

Whether they’re advising on meeting best practices or motivation, there’s a throughline from all these experts’ insights: make work more human.

This all starts with putting your employees first — let workers’ needs inform decision-making, especially when the answer doesn’t always seem clear. An employee-first approach will be the key success factor in making a working environment sustainable.

It’s also important to support this approach with solutions optimized for employee experience, like those included in the Zoom platform. At Zoom, we build experience-first solutions optimized for this new flexible future. Just take Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery for example, which is designed to create an inclusive experience that promotes equality for both in-person and remote workers through the strategic application of AI technology. Couple this with our real-time language transcription to truly bring people together, enabling employees to work globally while feeling heard, connected, included, and equal.

Meaningful work starts with thoughtful leadership — bring in the right processes and products that make you the best leader you can be.