Happiness, in general, has significant impacts on health, longevity, and relationships, and happier workers are shown to be more productive. While there are demonstrable benefits to cultivating a sense of happiness among workers, roles like chief executive optimist rarely appear on an organizational chart.
In practice, there is a gap between the concept of happier workers and actual strategic workforce agendas. Beyond elevating employee engagement via competitive benefits packages, where are the organizational supports to accomplish this in-house? On a more personal level, how can leaders enact the aspirational goal of enabling worker happiness? Through this lens, we see there’s a trust gap, too.
Trust is an essential element that contributes to happiness. Research shows that people are happier when they find those they interact with to be trustworthy. With trust, individual well-being improves and people lead more satisfying lives. Trust has even been credited as being a key driver of shared prosperity in cohesive societies. An organization should prioritize developing trust in and among the workforce to cultivate happiness.
Trust is perhaps the most vital form of capital leaders have today. Workers need to trust that leaders will follow through on commitments, maintain support of a designated agenda, and associate with individuals who align with stated values and strategic goals. Teams expect leaders to act with expertise and alignment with an organization’s values. This builds trust that leaders are acting with both competence and character. When there is mutual trust in organizations, there is a positive impact on the bottom line. However, without trust, there is no leadership.
It is alarming that overall trust in leadership is waning. In a recent survey, 61% of workers doubt that business leaders are telling the truth, indicating significant challenges for worker happiness and productivity. With this lack of trust, we have to question whether workers can put forth their best efforts, generate quality deliverables, or care about the bottom line. Can workers be happy and trust their leaders?
We recently spoke with business, academic, and government leaders in Finland and Denmark, the top two happiest countries in the world, about how enacted values impact workplace happiness.
Our takeaways were clear:
- Leaders are trusted to walk the talk to facilitate a sense of happiness.
- They do this through transparency, equity, and candor.
Transparency: Stand for what you say you do, all the time
Transparency removes personal agendas or filters from practices and behaviors. End-users can discern the motives and methodologies of leaders who do what they say they will do, for stated reasons, consistently.
Finland, for example, is often ranked as the happiest country in the world. There, transparency begins at the topmost levels of government. When a Finnish president is sworn in, they resign from their political party to represent the entire country. Without needing to satisfy a particular party, there is a higher likelihood of alternative agendas or subverted dealings.
This is consistent with Danish high-trust sentiment. Danes are thought to be among the most trusting people in the world, due, in part, to being among the countries with the lowest perception of corruption in the public sector. Both countries demonstrate the Nordic leadership model of a high trust/low corruption modus operandi.
Leaders, by definition, are tasked with being in charge of a group, not a subset or selected interest group separate from that larger organization. They guide the activities of the whole to realize a stated, desired outcome. While it may seem intuitive for leaders to accomplish their objectives using trust, history has shown that trust has been misguided. No organization can be honest with the public if it is not honest with itself.
This year, for the first time in the history of the World Happiness Report, the United States dropped below the happiest 20 countries. Among working Americans, trust is lower than it had been even last year. From the court system to banks, tech companies, and media, less than one-third of the U.S. feels they can trust the leading institutions in the country. Years of scandals, bail-outs, and contentious, divisive political campaigns are part of the problem. The lack of transparency in the operations of these entities has led to widespread mistrust, impacting the broader American public.
From school curriculums to wage legislation to U.S. military services, there is an increased emphasis on trust and transparency. And leaders are finding great value in transparency in other elements of business management, including reporting, information, and decision-making.
An appropriate level of transparency varies widely by culture, role, and the framework of legal and policy structures. However, leaders are watched, and those who have integrity to their stated goals merit trust which in turn makes employees happy.
Equitable efforts toward public welfare
The Global Competitive Report asserts that Nordic leadership places a high value on public welfare. Taxpayer money is trusted to support social programs that support healthcare, education, and job training. Liisa Hakala, director of Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health’s Work and Gender Equality program, identified functional capacity, ability to work, and employability for rising generations as a current objective for the Finnish government.
On the other side of the spectrum, Denmark recently overhauled its eldercare model insisting this population has the right to be treated with dignity and care. Together, all of these efforts work toward building trust between the population and government, recognizing past obligations, and preparing for a future of cooperation in building a prosperous country across the social spectrum.
Building trust across levels of an organization extends beyond government in these countries, with companies and organizations also committing to transparency, trust, and a commitment to support human resource management.
Finnish telecom company DNA’s SVP of human resources, Marko Rissanen, set his agenda to create a work culture based on freedom and trust. Instead of calculating working hours, he aspires to encourage workers whose minds are free from worrying about accounting for their time for their work to be “plentiful.”
At Aon, the emphasis is on the “someone before something.” The company places a high value on employees having the ability to be themselves and sharing what is important to them so that the company can identify the best benefits to offer to support them. In return, the company has found that employees bring their best selves to work.
At Lego, all employees enjoy a flex-security model for health and well-being management, which includes up to 30 weeks of paid time off in case of illness. All employees at Lego also enjoy the company’s global synchronous “play days” that reinforce the company’s commitment to core values of fun, imagination, and creativity.
Each of these companies is enacting their corporate core values, while also reflecting the emphasis the countries and cultures they are based in place on trust, transparency, and support of workers at all levels. Instead of micromanaging punch cards or reserving certain schedules or benefits for a limited class of employees, policies, and programs are distributed based on role-fit, and employees are trusted in how they use them.
Like Aon, many employers are finding that better awareness of the needs and concerns of employees enables more informed selections of benefits to equitably support healthcare needs.
Providing programs that serve the well-being of employees can generate a sense of trust between employee and employer through the simple recognition that everyone’s well-being matters.
Constructive candor
Communication in Nordic countries is not about making small talk. It is about being yourself, providing accurate representations of thought, and sharing the insights and ideas you are uniquely qualified to impart. Not only is this encouraged, it is the norm. So, if you ask a Finnish person how their day is going, be prepared to listen. For Danes, happiness is about atmosphere and experience and being allowed to let your guard down. Many workers find it hard to imagine this not being career-limiting.
One of the Finnish telecom company DNA’s core values is straightforwardness. As an organization, DNA has a foundational concept that it serves no one to withhold feedback that can improve a process or a relationship. When DNA’s executives routinely make the rounds to ask workers how things are going, it is more than a gesture.
Similarly, at Lego, psychological safety is a goal for all employees. Employees are encouraged to speak up if they observe any issues or if they can recommend any innovations to improve a product or process.
Candor is both founded on trust and strengthens it, while also being a core element of authentic leadership. Candor encourages innovation, fosters growth, and nurtures ethics and accountability. Furthermore, candor enables leaders to respond to changing stakeholder needs and navigate challenges because they have access to timely and relevant information.
Companies in Denmark and Finland have found that this type of candor facilitates more extensive communications across the levels of the organization. This communication, and the empathy it fosters, enables greater happiness for workers in these companies.
To foster this kind of candor, companies should formalize the establishment of systems, norms, and communication modalities that build psychological safety. Having company leaders share their stories either in formal fireside chats or unstructured forums and one-on-ones helps to show how constructive criticism was accepted and applied. Other companies start small, designating multiple devil’s advocates in meetings who can share their own or represent other’s ideas, building a process of providing honest feedback step by step.
When workers feel like they know what is going on, that their well-being is formally on the company’s agenda, and that their voices are valued, and will not be retaliated against, they feel comfortable coming to work and doing their best. They will feel happy. Happier employees can make our companies more competitive and more successful.