I’m working away on my pet project & keen interest-area, Organization 2.0 — how organizations are evolving their structures, approaches, roles and responsibilities (plus governance, accountabilities, etc.) to truly leverage collaborative 2.0 tools and technologies. By the way, some of you should be prepared since I’m about to embark on a series of interviews to see how organizations are coming along with this evolvement or if, in fact, you’re experiencing more “stalledment”…. And I come across a link to the “Chief Happiness Officer” , Alexander Kjerulf, who writes and speaks on the 
importance of happiness in the workplace. This isn’t a new concept by any means, but it is one that most organizations try for a bit, particularly around the time of off-site meetings, team building and 360 appraisals, and then “get back to work!” The first time I heard this concept was in the mid 1980′s when the VP I reported to at Imperial Oil Ltd. started to actually DO something about building and maintaining a “happy” work environment.
A “happy” work environment? The guffaws were loud and long. An “effective” work environment was the goal — maybe even a “motivating” work environment. But “happy?” Good heavens — if you were aiming for happy you might get sleepy, and we already had enough dopey and grumpy. But he was not deterred and those of us who worked there benefited from the incredible learnings of what it really takes to create and manage a happy work environment. 
Read the first post about the interview with Pret A Manger, one of the companies that hire happy people and train them, rather than highly-skilled people who aren’t happy and hope that they’ll be ‘motivated’. Yes, we need highly-skilled employees – no question. But if those highly-skilled people aren’t feeling good about what they are doing and why they are doing it, then the workplace becomes toxic, dysfunctional and collaboration and change are just a dream that won’t be a reality.
Speaking of change, Alexander’s next post looks at why those people who are happy with their work are more willing to engage in changes at work:
“1: Happy people get more ideas
In times of change, companies cannot rely on the old ways of doing business and thus need new ideas. Preferably lots of them. And a fascinating study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School shows that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. In other words, happy employees generate more ideas.
2: Happy people buy into new ideas.
It’s not enough to generate lots of ideas, you also need people to believe enough in them to actually want to implement them. Many managers work from a belief that change comes from dissatisfaction, pain and unhappiness, but psychological research proves them wrong. It turns out that what a business needs is optimists. Optimistic employees believe that change projects will pay off and are thus much more likely to commit. Unhappy, pessimistic employees only see all the ways a project can fail and often only go along on the surface – offering compliance rather than commitment.
3: Happy people implement new ideas.
And finally, once you have the ideas and people buy into them, you need to have the motivation to actually do something about it. And once again research shows that happy, satisfied employees are much more motivated. In fact, while managers must constantly work help dissatisfied employees find their motivation, happy employees motivate themselves. If you like the company you work for, you want the company to succeed – if you hate your workplace, you don’t give a damn.
In short, happy companies change willingly and effectively, while their unhappy competitors cling to business as usual and throw up massive resistance to all things new and uncertain.”
This isn’t just a feel-good blog; positivesharing.com shares some excellent insights and research regarding positive, productive, “happy” workplaces. And it is those qualities, much more than the networking and collaborative technologies, that will underpin the evolution to Org 2.0, 3.0, the future.