Everyone speaks about the Happiness Index and how some countries have it to a higher degree over others. Bhutan, in our neighborhood has consistently scored high followed by some of the Scandinavian countries and life coaches and human behavior experts say the degree of acceptance of our lives is directly proportional to our happiness.
In other words, the more we accept our realities and stay away from fantasy, the happier we become. Incidentally, this is also a basic tenet of Buddhism as coach Marshall Goldsmith often reminds us. We live to feel good, though our quest of happiness is eventually what makes us unhappy, given the mismatch between our desires and reality.
For many years now, behavior experts, psychologists and life coaches have been hammering one idea as the cornerstone of getting our mojo at work. The positive attitude at work and the collaborative nature of our interactions thereon has often been described as the real driver to better work performance and an overall good life.
Microsoft finds the odd one out
However, now Microsoft has come up with some research that could throw a can of ice cold water on some of these theories. Dawn Klinghoffer and Elizabeth McCune wrote about it in the Harvard Business Review and did so with sufficient data, for the former heads people analytics and the latter is in charge of employee listening systems and culture measurement.
No! They’re not the head psychologist or the surveillance officer at Microsoft. Far from it actually. These two leaders are tasked with discovering how Microsoft’s employees feel about their lives at the workplace and even outside of it. And if you thought they were analyzing employee engagement, which has become a bit of a buzzword now, the answer is a NO.
In fact, these two individuals made the startling discovery that employees aren’t really looking for more engagement within the company. Quite the contract in fact. The research revealed that most employees seemed to use these engagement metrics to mask the fact that they weren’t actually having a great time.
The duo claimed that this was in fact a reflection that Microsoft hadn’t actually set a bar high enough for employee experience. And they went about actually measuring what mattered to the employees and not what the companies felt employees should have.
And the solution was simple
The duo says in their article that the solution actually lay in making the survey shorter with the motive being to assess whether an employee was actually thriving. From Microsoft’s perspective, to thrive meant to be “energized and empowered to do meaningful work” and the discovery that the new survey brought with it was game changing.
They found that employees who weren’t thriving talked about experiencing siloes, bureaucracy and a lack of collaboration. However, the two researchers didn’t stop there and proceeded to quiz some of those who were positive about thriving at work and maintaining the work-life balance too. And another startling discovery awaited them.
“By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size,” the researchers said.
Which actually translates into something quite different from what we believed. That teamwork wasn’t really the mantra for a happy workplace. And collaboration often resulted in bureaucracy than in a truly productive environment. The researchers say collaboration in itself isn’t bad. It’s just that leaders and teams need to be mindful of how much is too much.
