The Key To Happiness At Work Is?

According to an article posted on The Huffington Post regarding Virgin Pulse’s Labor of Love Report, the key to happiness at work has nothing to do with your actual job. Who woulda thunk  it? The labor of love report explores what employees love most about their jobs. What they found is that our relationships with our co-workers rank high on that list!

We spend so much time at work and as we struggle to find a work/life balance, we end up spending a significant amount of time with those we work with and those relationships are very important and vital to our happiness.

We socialize within lunchtime, work on project together, and even spend time after work with each other. These are vital connections to our overall happiness ratio. These relationships, whether we know it or not have become our biggest mood booster all along.

This may not come to a surprise from those of us who have loved our job but hater our co-workers. These communities of people can make or break job satisfaction.

Nearly 40 percent of survey respondents named their co-workers as the top reason they love working for their company, with 66 percent saying those positive relationships increased their productivity and 55 percent saying they helped mitigate their on-the-job stress levels. And considering the average American worker spends 47.5 hours in the office each week, that is quite significant!

“The centrality of social connections to our health and well-being cannot be overstressed,” according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, the author of The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want.

Employers are beginning to recognize the importance of these connections in the office and are taking steps to reinvent the workplace to help nurture the positive aspects of employees’ work experiences, reducing burnout and turnover in the process. This is a great trend and can lead to better productivity for the employer and their employees.

The benefit to having camaraderie at work, and even just the opportunity for it, has been found to not just make for happier employees but is better for business and isn’t that the true bottom line. Here’s how it looks:  whether coworkers use their time to air grievances about their bosses, chat about weekend plans or head out to happy hour together, close bonds help dissolve dissatisfaction they may feel otherwise, making them more likely to work productively and remain in their current position for longer.

High turnover can be death to a striving business. The more satisfied we feel, the more hours we may log at our desks without gripe. This is an important study for employers and employees and can lead to great job satisfaction and great productivity if used appropriately. Our co-worker relationships are meaningful. That’s good to know!