Happy Office Manager or Chief Happiness Officer (CHO) are occupations found in many foreign businesses. The first company which promoted these concepts in Poland was Future Processing from Silesia, and this task was actually assigned to you. Can you tell us something more about working as CHO?
Chief Happiness Officer is a relatively new concept, thus it is difficult to talk about the universal and generally accepted scope of duties. As for our company, the role of CHO was directly related to activities which enhance the unique organizational culture of company, in which the human factor is especially important. From the very beginning of our existence, we have been trying to build relations with our clients and employees basing on mutual trust; the role of CHO consisted in planning and coordinating activities aimed at this particular purpose as well as constant monitoring and reporting of the level of happiness measured among team members. It was frequently related to consultancy during implementation of smaller and bigger changes in order to help answering such questions as ‘how a given action is to influence our culture and happiness of employees' and 'how to implement it correctly’.
The company resigned from calling your post CHO and currently you are Culture Team Leader. What does your group specialize in? Is one Happy Office Manager in the company enough?
I used to perform a role of Culture Team Leader when we called this post CHO and actually the whole team was engaged in the issues that I discussed in the previous question. By extension, the main areas of our activity are internal communication management, recruitment of new people to our company, support of team integration, focusing on implementation of changes in the company as well as conducting differentiated opinion research. As you can see, these are quite standard processes, however, the core activity is providing their coherence with values of a given company. Single Happy Office Manager is not enough in order to provide happiness to all employees, since many various factors in the whole organization and our individual approach have an impact on the fact whether we feel comfortable in a given place. We cannot make somebody happy at a push. Due to the same reasons, such post can be simply considered as unnecessary in many companies. As a result, we decided to resign from this name, however, the scope of my duties has not changed much. On the other hand, the vocation of a person responsible for happiness can help us to send a message to the world that happiness of our employees is the most important value for us although it only makes sense when the philosophy of company is exactly the same. Otherwise, it can have an opposite effect.
We already know what is your role of Happy Office Manager or Culture Team Leader. And now it is worth asking the question: "What is the purpose of establishing such a post?". In other words: "Why should we take care about atmosphere in the office?".
The simplest answer is: to make work more pleasurable. If we have good conditions to work, we have more enthusiasm and thus we achieve better results. It makes clients happy and it certainly contributes to business success.
What are the profits of happy employees?
Happiness is the goal in itself for us; we want to build a company in which the human factor is important and time spent at work is the source of satisfaction, not frustration. Moreover, happy people more often achieve success. If they are respected and appreciated, they are more engaged in their work and thus – more efficient. It has a direct influence on both the clients' happiness and the willingness to further cooperation, which contributes to business success. Happy employee becomes an ambassador of their company and helps to build a good opinion about it. Happy employee is also less prone to change of work, which has a crucial meaning in times of constant struggle for talents.
What are the components of happiness in the office?
There is no universal recipe, of course. According to our experience, people can create good atmosphere in their closest surrounding on their own, and all we have to do is not disturb them. It is important to talk with them openly and engage them in issues that concern them, support cooperation and mutual help as well as give them some space for realization of their ideas.
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