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Now days in my return to work in February the schedule of the year means turning my attention to the Business Course and information materials that are relevant to that.

Sometimes it’s essential for me to look as specific areas of information or to seek out answers to questions that I want to pose on the course, but other times the information comes from the most unusual of sources or from unexpected areas.

One thing that I am particularly interested in is happiness and happiness at work, while I was listening to Stephen Westerby’s book Fragile Lives I bailed out half way through because it was a little bit too much like Henry Marsh’s book Do No Harm. In the void that this created I started to listen to a book on the causes of depression and anxiety in the western world (more about that later, it’s an area of particular interest of mine). I was pointed in the direction of the Gallup survey in 2012 on work place engagement, you can see that here. I’ve since sort this out, I’ve pulled out the details and it’s a pretty impressive piece of work. They looked at over 225,000 individuals over 141 countries and the headline news is staggering.

Based on the survey results 14% of the worldwide work force are engaged at work with 24% ‘actively disengaged’.

Actively disengaged individuals are indicated as being unhappy and unproductive at work, they’re liable to send negativity to co-workers. There are almost twice as many of these as there are engaged workers.

The rest of the work force exist in the ‘grey zone’, where they don’t like there work but they don’t hate it enough to do something else.

The material that I’ve been looking at suggests this is one of the main causes of depression in the western world but it’s more than that. It seems that most of the 63% survive their work and see happiness as getting home to sit in front of the TV (a large percent of the British public spends up to 5 hours a night doing this).

The watching of television in the evening dulls the sensors even more and makes the work less engaging the next day and so the cycle continues.

It’s bad enough that we subject this to ourselves but those of us that are in positions of responsibility with our organisations then go on to subject it to the teams that work for us; excepting staff turnover, low training, low engagement and paying as little as possible to obtain as much of the slice of the pie as we can.

Imagine an organisation that was the other way around.

Imagine an organisation that understood that promoting engagement in staff will increase the value overall without doing anything else.

If more engaged staff are invested in the business they will provide a better service, better ideas and better productivity. They are much more likely to ‘invest discretionary effort in organisational outcomes’.

Corner shop businesses (and many dental practices are classified as that) are unable to breakout from this situation.

Imagine you went to work and one of your main goals was to make sure your team were happy and engaged. Imagine that doing that meant that your business worked better, increased productivity, profit and allowed you to further increase the engagement of your staff.

This is directly at odds with the man trap of increased turn over at reduced costs, but it works. Not just at improving the financial viability of a small business but much more importantly improving the enjoyment, satisfaction and fulfilment of the people who go to work.

Blog post number: 1549