Workplace Happiness

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Which Happiness Model and Framework Do You Use?

The Happy Worker Hypothesis has been around for a while now and has been heavily studied and researched. It is generally accepted today that the happy worker is an engaged worker and engaged workers benefit the organization and the organization’s bottom line.

While there is a lot of chatter about the need for employers to have happy workers, I don’t generally see a lot of literature around a framework or model discussing how to actually develop happy workers. The concept of happy workers is great, but concepts are essentially useless if they are not implemented.

In their January 2020 article, “Workplace Happiness: A Conceptual Framework,” Roy and Konwar shared a framework on employee workplace happiness they’ve created. Their framework is based on their review of the published happiness literature.

In their article, Roy and Konwar note that workplace happiness consists of two categories: individual factors and organizational factors. The fact that happiness consists of both individual and organizational factors is consistent with other areas of employee focused research such as employee health, wellbeing and employee mental health.

Roy and Konwar reported the individual factors as being:

· Employment status

· Meaningfulness of work

· Job security

· Relationship with co-workers

· Recognition

· Autonomy

According to Roy and Konwar the individual factors impact job satisfaction, job improvement and organizational commitment

For the organizational factors, Roy and Konwar listed:

· Training and development

· Management and leadership

· Compensation/reward

· Skill recognition

· Superior/subordinate relationship

· Career advancement opportunities

According to Roy and Konwar, these organizational factors can be further broken down into the following sub-factors:

· Job flexibility

· Working hours

· Work-life balance

· Work environment

· Organization culture

The organizational factors are said by Roy and Konwar to impact:

· Employee retention

· Employee engagement

The Roy/Konwar framework is no doubt but one framework or model related to employee happiness in the workplace.

If you are currently seeking to address employee happiness in the workplace, how do your efforts align with the Roy/Konwar framework?

If you are seeking to address employee happiness in the workplace, how many of the individual and organizational factors from the framework are you addressing and measuring?

Reference:

Roy, Rituparna. Konwar, Juthika. 2020. Workplace Happiness: A Conceptual Framework. International Journal of Scientific and Technology Research. January2020. Volume 9, Issue 1, pp. 4452–4459.

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