Arbejdsglaede is a mouthful but it’s a word and a concept worth exploring. We’ve learned it from Alexander Kjerulf – aka The Chief Happiness Officer. Alex spearheads an organization called Woohoo Inc., which is dedicated to fostering happiness at work. We have a link to his blog in the sidebar and we previously talked about him in Words of advice from “the chief happiness officer.”
Alex explains a little more about the concept of happiness at work – or arbejdsglaede – in this short video. He talks about the difference between happiness and satisfaction and the link between happiness and personal and business success. He also says that is everyone’s responsibility – we shouldn’t just wait for it to happen to us.
See his related post: The 5 most important findings from the science of happiness that apply at work
He says:
“Traditional psychology looks at everything that can go wrong with our minds – psychosis, neurosis, phobias, depression etc – and asks how it can be treated/cured. It’s an incredibly important field but positive psychology asks the opposite question: When are we happy? What does it take for people to live good lives and thrive psychologically? The field has been especially active for the last 30 years and we are learning some really interesting and surprising things about happiness.”
He offers the five findings from positive psychology relevant to the workplace and discusses each:
1: Positive emotions have many beneficial effect on us and on our job performance
2: Emotions are contagious
3: Small actions can have a large effect on our happiness
4: Unexpected things make us happy
5: Making others happy, makes us happy
Alex has a website devoted to arbejdsglaede that includes videos of people who enjoy their work. What the heck is arbejdsglaede!?
We’ve also posted quite a few videos that relate to the concept of happiness at work under our Inspiration category. Here are a few examples of people who enjoy their jobs:
Inspiration of the Week: Elton Simmons, Traffic Cop
Tim’s hugs, Karen’s Challenges
And a few other related posts:
“The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance” – Shawn Achor
In his entertaining and though provoking TEDxBloomington presentation, Shawn Achor says that most modern research focuses on the average, but that “if we focus on the average, we will remain merely average.” He wants to study the positive outliers, and learn how not only to bring people up to the average, but to move the entire average up.
The Happiness Model
Can you base a business model on happiness? Yes, according to successful CEO Chip Conley. Conley has written three books, including his most recent, PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, and is at work on two new ones, Emotional Equations and PEAK Leadership.