values and vision: creating happiness at work

Blue sky thinking

We've written about happiness at work a few times: when we wrote about flexible working increases employee satisfaction and about counting the right thingssuch as employee satisfaction. It is a subject dear to our hearts as we are convinced from the countless studies and personal observation, that employees who are satisfied with their work are better contributors and colleagues at work and that they are happier in general.

We are also quite excited about how thinking sustainably helps both the environment and ultimately the bottom line of business. What can we say, we like things that have dual benefits! It seems to make sense to us.

So, we were quite pleased to read a recent study by Cassandra Walsh and Adam Sulkowski published in Interdisciplinary Environmental Review. Using regression analysis and other statistical methods, they found in their survey of 113 companies, that, "there is a significant positive relationship between perceived environmental performance and employee satisfaction." Or, in more concrete terms: "having a reputation for being a relatively more environmentally-friendly company can result in having happier employees." This is great news of course!

Further reading of the article reveals some more interesting finds. First, the study was focused on 113 companies that already participate and release annual corporate responsibility reports. So, these are companies that are already thinking about the social aspects of their businesses: environment, ethics, and concern for stakeholder engagement among other things. KPMG has repeatedly found in their large scale world surveys that companies participate in corporate social responsibility to attract and keep employee talent, because their employees want them to, because they perceive that it helps the working environment, innovation and learning. And of course that job satisfaction seems to be higher among businesses that have corporate social responsibility than those that don't.

Second, Walsh and Sulkowski also observe in their discussion, that corporate responsibility is a form of employee engagement. It communicates to employees what the company is up to and also allows them to see if their own values are aligned with the company's. And, as they stress, "engaging employees helps
to create a mutual understanding between businesses and the people that work for them, further increasing employee satisfaction." It's nice to see companies have a growing awareness that employee engagement goes both ways.

Another one of those win-win situations! J2 Research excels at engaging employees and would be happy to help you get more satisfied people: people who really are happy at work!

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