Are You Happy at Work?

<...a person's happiness with work, the work environment, and coworkers can contribute significantly to overall job satisfaction...>

That's a truism (a short way of saying the "bleedin' obvious").

This is a huge issue that goes way beyond the workplace and management problems.

I was trained in a non-psychological approach to this problem where I used to work. It centered around a concept called "tone level."

Raise the average tone level of any group and its ability to survive, flourish and prosper improves. While there is a technology for this that goes beyond the scope of business management, most people tend to be fairly happy in most social and work situations (at least that's been my experience) so what the manager is often confronted with is one person who's got a problem that is dragging the rest down. If this person IS the manager, that's a whole problem in itself. But usually this is not the case.

I've worked in many relaxed and happy groups. I think that is the most natural condition for a working group. In such a group, there's plenty of communication, people get to know each other as people, and they help each other to get things done. These were confident, productive groups.

I have worked in other groups that had problems. In one group in particular, I felt the need to be shut off from the others in order to get my work done. It was the only group I ever worked in where I felt I had to listen to music on headphones while I worked in order to stay sane. This was before I learned about tone levels.

After I learned the tone level technology it became obvious to me that there had been one chronically low-toned person in this group. This person didn't even work with me directly; we just shared an office. But his effect on the group's tone level was profound. That group was having problems with the design of its product that did not seem to resolve. After working there a while, I found some excuse to change jobs.

There are a lot of pop-psychology sort of things that a manager can do to help a group "get happy." But if the group is "infected" with a chronically low-toned individual, the manager will have a continuously hard time with that group, and the group will suffer. It is a huge management skill to be able to spot and handle low-toned individuals. In a "healthy" business such a person would usually just be fired. In a troubled business, employees might be forced to live with such people, or even be managed by them. Not a good scene.

Where I used to work, such people, when spotted, were usually first given a chance to improve their behavior. If that didn't work and it was clear they were actually doing destructive things in the group, they would be routed off staff with a personal program for becoming more employable. Extreme cases might involve legal actions. This particular organization had a third option that is not available to most businesses. Say the spotted person had problems, but on the other hand seemed to have desirable skills. Because our organization taught a counseling method for raising tone level, that person could be assigned to get counseling from one of our students. This was done all the time by this organization, and was part of what made it successful. Where it was not done, or the counseling was refused or failed to do the trick, some very able people were lost. But when we found out what such people had been up to, we usually understood why they were let go.

When a group is working under a lot of external pressure (like soldiers on a battle field or farm workers during an insect infestation) work itself can get pretty grim. But in those cases group tone level becomes even more important. Modern business environments increasingly tend to look like battlefields instead of calm and happy places. If so, just make sure that the group is fighting a real external enemy and not simply contending with low-toned persons in its own ranks.