Flourishing at Work

By the time she retires, a typical full-time worker will have spent about 90,000 hours — more than 10 years of 24-hour, round-the-clock days — actively working. How we spend that extraordinary investment of time greatly affects our flourishing, not merely because work provides the goods and services that we need to live full lives but also because it can offer meaning, rich relationships, and opportunities to build character.

Good work is an important pathway to flourishing, but employee flourishing is an equally important catalyst of good work. Recognizing this, most companies already invest in programs to promote health and wellness; many also offer subsidized health-insurance plans. This is all important, but people want not only to be healthy and wealthy, but to flourish in all areas of their lives. One survey of 2,285 American professionals, for instance, found that respondents on average “would be willing to forego 23 percent of their entire future lifetime earnings in order to have a job that was always meaningful.”

While some of our prior research has indicated that — while physical health does contribute to important work outcomes like job satisfaction, worker performance, and work engagement — happiness and character strongly contribute to job satisfaction as much as physical health. For work performance, happiness matters as much as physical health, and close relationships matter even more. Meta-analyses have suggested that employee well-being is related to reduced losses from turnover, health care costs, and distraction, the latter of which totaled $307 million per year at one major U.S. manufacturer, compared to a mere $16 million per year from sick days.

Promoting Well-Being in the Workplace

How might well-being be promoted in the workplace? To begin, organizations could start systematically measuring and tracking flourishing to understand what is and isn’t going well. In addition to providing helpful information on what needs the most attention, the simple act of measurement within organizations can often alter the conversation and change priorities so that well-being becomes central.

Organizations can also foster structures and practices that promote flourishing in all of life. Giving employees greater control over when and where they work has been shown to have important effects on employee well-being, including improved adequacy of sleep, more control over schedule, and better (and more) family time — all without reducing total work hours or increasing job demands. Similarly, creating a “caring organizational climate” leads to both better employee well-being and better work outcomes, including lowered distraction at work and increased job satisfaction.

Companies could also promote practices such as job crafting, in which employees, either individually or with managers, reflect on how they might restructure their work to better promote engagement, foster deeper relationships, and yield a greater sense of meaning. Such activities again contribute both to an individual’s sense of well-being and to work engagement. Executives can engage in job crafting, but so can janitors, as Barry Schwartz illustrates in his book, Practical Wisdom. Schwartz describes a group of hospital custodians who had “crafted their jobs with the central purpose of the hospital in mind. … They saw themselves as playing an important role in an institution whose aim was … the care and welfare of patients.”

Righteousness over Profit

The business case for promoting flourishing at work is strong, but this framing arguably gets things backward. When the great Confucian sage Mencius went to see King Hui of Liang, “the king said, ‘May I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?’ Mencius replied, ‘Why must your Majesty use that word “profit?”’ If you always say, ‘How can I profit my kingdom?’ your ministers will ask, ‘How can we profit our clans?’ The elites and the common people will ask, ‘How can we profit ourselves?’ … and the country will be in chaos. … There never has been a benevolent man who neglected his parents. There never has been a righteous man who made his sovereign an afterthought. Let your Majesty also say, ‘Benevolence and righteousness,’ and let these be your only themes.”

As Mencius saw, pursuing “profit” as one’s ultimate goal can become counter-productive, fostering selfish and shortsighted behavior, as when Enron’s notorious system of internal competition — “ranking and yanking” — encouraged the corrupt practices that ultimately destroyed the company. By contrast, leaders who pursue “benevolence and righteousness” for their own sake might well find that a reasonable “profit” follows naturally.

As Jesus pithily put the same point: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”