Happiness is creating jobs

Imagine a world in which companies valued creating jobs as much as they do goods and services at a price that makes them attractive to consumers. You don’t need to act like a politician who boasts about “creating jobs” that he or she had no role in doing. You do need to think about how job creation not only fosters human happiness but also enhances your bottom line.

A remarkable number of people, when you ask them what makes them happy, will say, “Having a job.” The reason why a job gives someone happiness is not just the regular paycheck and the benefits (though these things are more than nice to have.) A job gives a person purpose in life. When you ask someone what they are, nine times out of ten they’ll reply with what their occupation is. “I work in a factory” or “I’m a computer programmer at an oil company.” It follows that someone without a job, unless he or she owns a business, lacks the kind of purpose that makes them have self-esteem.

It therefore follows that when you give someone a job, you are also giving them a reason to be happy. The idea that giving people happiness by giving them gainful employment may seem strange. The purpose of making a new hire, we are assured, is to find someone whose skill set, and temperament will be an asset to the company. The statement is a true one, but not complete.

Henry Ford, the captain of industry who created the first family car, famously paid his workers far more than any other factory owner. He was not doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted to attract the most motivated, productive employees that he could. He also wanted his workers to make enough money to buy his Model T automobiles. As a side effect, Ford started to create the middle class, skilled enough to create goods and services and prosperous enough to partake of them.

Business can not only be a source of products that people can buy but also a creator of jobs that allow people the income to purchase those products. Not only can those jobs allow people to make money, they will also be a source of happiness that cannot fail to foster stability and prosperity that in turn are good for business. This state of affairs will in turn make you, as an upper-level manager, happy.

How do you create jobs? As you grow your business, making more goods and services, you find that you need more people to keep your business running. But how do you attract not only the most people but the best? Moreover, once you hire a workforce, how do you hold on to them long term?

Amazon.com provides an example of what to do and what not to do. On the one hand, people that the giant online retail firm hires for its fulfillment centers make a pretty good starting salary. They have great healthcare, parental leave, and educational benefits. Amazon.com employees have plenty of opportunities for advancement.

Unfortunately, Amazon works its fulfillment center employees like Roman galley slaves. The company actively discourages taking breaks, which can be a burden on workers’ backs and bladders. Amazon uses intrusive monitoring technology to measure its employees’ productivity. The company comes down hard on workers it feels are falling short. It encourages productivity through use of pressure and fear. The approach is much like the Communist Chinese social credit system, something that George Orwell could never have imagined.

If there is one principle you should take to heart in human resources, it is this: don’t be like Amazon. The online retail giant has bought itself high employee turnover, a great deal of worker stress, and a lot of bad media. Amazon has fended off the blandishments of Bernie Sanders and has stopped attempts to unionize its workforce — so far. But the cost has been grievous.

How do you avoid developing a toxic workplace culture like Amazon? The primary way is to hire enough people to keep your company running without being overworked and stressed. You will spend more on salaries and other compensation but will likely find you will come out ahead in the long run. Happy employees make productive employees. Happy and productive employees in turn make happy managers,

When a company seeks to hire more people, it usually advertises jobs on social media and hires a head-hunting company. However, one other way to find candidates would be to establish relationships with local high school and vocational school teachers and college professors. People who impart knowledge to the young will have firsthand knowledge about which potential employees have not only the job skills but the soft people skills that your company would find to be desirable. The approach will save a lot of time going through resumes and interviewing applicants. You will already be getting the cream of the crop from the start.

You also might take a suggestion from Elon Musk, the famous CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, to consider skills rather than academic degrees when considering job candidates. Some hiring managers always consider degrees, the more advanced and from the best universities the better. They think it saves time but, as a recent piece in Inc suggests, the approach costs more money. But such people miss candidates who have a lot of real-world experience and skills but lack those letters after their names.

What if you can’t find enough candidates with the skill sets you want? You should consider establishing a training program that will give new hires what they need to become valuable assets to your company. You should also offer, as part of your benefits package, further training or even payment for part-time college to enhance the value of your workforce. Employees appreciate a company putting in effort and resources to make them better employees with the ability to advance and earn more money.

If you want a happy workplace, you should strive to hire happy people. An employee who can joke around the water cooler and who sees the bright side of life, even through adversity, is someone worth hiring and keeping.

Having hired a workforce, you need to establish a corporate culture that not only encourages productivity but employee satisfaction and, dare we say it, happiness. Contrary to what some people might think, productivity and happiness are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they tend to reinforce each other.

Current business school wisdom maintains that employees should be made parts of teams with clearly defined responsibilities. Unlike a lot of such wisdom, there is much truth to the idea that teamwork fosters both productivity and employee satisfaction. Everyone has access to their teammates and their team leader to exchange information and offer suggestions about how to perform a given task.

The principle that managers should not micromanage has become common in the business world. It is a valid one. You should lay out the task that must be accomplished and then sit back and be surprised at the creative ways that your employees accomplish it. However, you should always be ready to provide support if needed.

The need for many employees to have a work/life balance has vexed managers for decades, Some managers’ attitudes can best be expressed as “You have a family that needs you? How is this my problem?” The attitude that an employee should live to work and not work to live should be discouraged.

One of the reasons you need to hire more people is to prevent obliging your employees to work eighty-hour weeks, run themselves into the ground, and either destroy their marriages or die an early death brought on by stress and overwork.

Instead, you want employees who know that most days they will be home for dinner. The knowledge that they can take some time off to deal with a sick child without getting hassled by the boss will make your employees happy and, in the long run, more productive.

People without families (say young folks just out of school) might be willing to put in longer hours if they have less of a social life. But even they need some downtime so that they can Netflix and chill. Your employees should be granted the choice to put in longer hours with no repercussions if they can’t.

Managers should always strive to praise in public and admonish in private. Everyone enjoys public recognition in front of his or her peers for going above and beyond. Such praise enhances self-esteem and motivates people to strive to do more. Indeed, you should institute a system of awarding customer service certificates for employees who have performed especially well. Pieces of paper are cheap but can provide a healthy incentive for the recipients to do more.

Nobody likes being chewed out, especially in public. It’s humiliating and embarrassing. Indeed, a good manager deals with an employee who has been falling short in a more helpful than punitive manner. The worker may have issues that are causing a lack of performance. Perhaps the company can help the erring employee work out those issues without having to threaten termination.

Working from home has become the new normal because of the coronavirus pandemic. Some employees thrive from the arrangement, liking the flexibility that it brings. Others can find the distractions of home life (children wandering into the home office for example) to be a little much when they are trying to engage in a Zoom meeting. Some managers hate working from home out of fear of not being able to manage their people from a great distance.

Even after the pandemic has become a bitter memory, you should give employees the option of working from home, at least for part of the workweek, That said, some tasks are best conducted at the workplace. The balance of working from home versus working at the office is should be experimented with. Likely the optimal balance is different for different people.

Team-building exercises involve taking a team and having them go through a fun but challenging task. The exercise can either take place at the office or offsite, say at one of those escape rooms you may have heard about.

A team-building exercise will expose the strengths and weaknesses of members of the team while fostering communication and teamwork. Such exercises are a great opportunity to improve one’s skills in a fun and safe venue. The activities will bring your team closer together and will vastly improve their workplace performance.

You should encourage workplace wellness, the idea being that healthy employees are productive and happy employees. Your healthcare plan should include free medical checkups. You should also consider conducting exercise or yoga classes on-site after hours. Indeed, you should have a workout room with equipment, with showers, on-site if possible. Else you should try to arrange memberships at a nearby gym at group rates for your people.

You should develop an individual development plan for each of your employees. Many people are anxious to not only hone their skills but to also move up the corporate ladder. If an employee has a clear path for advancement, he or she will be more fulfilled.

When the economy suffers a downturn, which it does with distressing regularity, the first thing some managers think of doing is to cut expenses by cutting the headcount. Avoid this decision if at all possible. Nothing hurts employee morale more than the thought that their jobs may not be around for much longer.

Instead, look for other expenses to cut. Poll your people for ideas. They will surprise you with the creative ways that will find to reduce costs, especially if they can avoid being the cost that gets cut.

You can try to encourage early retirements and buyouts to decrease employee expenses. At the last resort, you can negotiate a reduction in pay and benefits. You might think your people will resent having a reduced salary. You are likely to find that they prefer lower pay with an employer they like to no pay at all.

There’s a line in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai when Colonel Saito addresses a group of allied prisoners. He commands them to “Be happy in your work.” The line drips with unintended irony. Nothing is less likely to cause happiness than being used as slave labor to build a railroad bridge for an enemy in the middle of Burma during World War II.

Yet, as a general principle, the statement is valid. Indeed, the ranking allied prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, played with great panache by a pre-Obi-wan Kenobi Alec Guinness, took the idea to heart and persuaded his Japanese captors to allow the prisoners to take over the managing of the bridge-building project. His idea was to increase morale and discipline among the prisoners and to bargain with the Japanese for better rations and working conditions. The movie was about the ultimate team-building exercise.

The point of the story from the movies is that, beyond all of the tricks and techniques hitherto described, work in and of itself can provide happiness, whether it is in the middle of a Burmese jungle during World War II, or in an office or factory floor in the current era. The idea is that a shared task, whether it is building a railroad bridge, manufacturing a new model car for the first time, or bringing in a new software project on time and on budget can provide a great deal of satisfaction.

A happy workplace is a productive workplace. People who have jobs and work for a firm that encourages their happiness will be anxious to come to work and motivated to work hard and smart. And if the employees are happy, you, the manager will be happy. People who don’t work for your company will want to when they hear of how great a deal it is, making your task of adding employees as your company grows all the easier.

Indeed, if you one day open a copy of Forbes or the Wall Street Journal and find that your company has been named one of the best places to work for in the world, you will feel a sudden rush of satisfaction only felt after accomplishing something that many find to be difficult and some believe to be impossible.