Joy at Work(er) Blog

Written by Roxanne Brown

Some quotes from recent Joy Research interviews…

“Talent is the whole game.”

“The definition of a great place to work has evolved over the last year.”

“We spend so much of our lives at work, the standards for who you work for ought to be very high.”

“People are evaluating their lives and where work fits in it. What is its proper place?”

“The silly and small things we do for people here matter because they are super personal. It’s hard to show the results of that in a formal way and it’s hard to describe, but it matters so we do it anyway.”

“People are messy and that’s beautiful.”

Written by Roxanne Brown

Are you an early adopter at work? Changing to something new while the folks around you haven’t changed yet takes courage.

Are you an influencer at work? Changing influences people around you to change too.

Are you slow to adopt changes at work? If you’ve been burned in the past, that’s understandable.

No matter who you are, you have an impact on your colleagues. You’re important. You matter. Your impact definitely matters to how well any change goes and how you and others experience it. What kind of impact do you want to have? How can you contribute Joy at Work through your impact?

Written by Roxanne Brown

Spreading joy can help you feel joy yourself.

You may feel frustrated by your work.
You may feel frustrated by your colleagues.
You can also let that go temporarily and just imagine you love your work and enjoy working with your colleagues.
With that in mind, what could you do that would bring your colleagues joy? Something as simple as keeping your commitments to them may be all it takes!

You have an impact on others. You can choose the impact you want to have. You can choose joy.

Written by Roxanne Brown

It’s not usually WHAT you want to change that upsets people, it’s HOW they feel they (and others) are treated in the process that is most upsetting. The best you can do is be intentional about how you want it to feel and decide what must be true for that to happen. Then doing what’s reasonable. A structure to act and learn your way forward gets you there. This is empathy in action and can increase Joy at Work in the process.

Written by Roxanne Brown

As a leader, you do things all the time that no one will ever know you did. No one will ever know how you struggled over the decisions, the work, the sacrifice you made or the arrows you took. It’s impossible for others to know. They aren’t you and they don’t sit where you do. Plus, it would be nearly impossible for you to describe it to someone else.

It’s helpful to widen your perspective when you feel the weight of this. Remember your intention. Why did you decide to be leader? What impact did you intend to have? What did you want to contribute through your work? Leadership is personal.

When you get back to your intention, the rest gets smaller.

Written by Roxanne Brown

When you're surprised to learn that your colleague thinks very differently than you, that’s a good time to get curious.

“I wonder why they feel that way? I wonder what life experiences brought them to that point of view?”

You won’t know the answer because you’re not them but it’s the right mindset for exploring and expanding your perspective.

Differences in opinion stemming from a wide set of life experiences among you can be a good thing at work. Often, what appears to be an impasse, upon deeper discussion can reveal that in some ways you’re not that far apart. You may use different words and place emphasis on different points but the essence of what you value is likely very similar, if not the same.

Debate can be enriching, energizing and lead to unexpected innovations if people are kept safe in the process, meaning, they don’t hurt themselves, each other or those that are not present in the debate. You...

Written by Roxanne Brown

Inside the first few weeks of the year, we’ve noticed a theme: People having trouble getting back into their work.

If this is you, here are a few thought experiments to try!

1…
What if you imagined your workday as a story? How would you like your story to start? What would it be like in the middle and how would you end your story for the day? Who would be in the story with you and what kind of relationship would you have with them? It’s your story. Write it for you!

2…
What if you reimagined your work as art? After you create a beautiful spreadsheet, proposal, brief, agenda, report summary, etc., step back and marvel at it as if it’s framed and up on the wall. You made that! (You are quite talented.)

3…
For those parts of your work you dislike, here’s a really useful question to ask: How can I make the thing I don’t like to do, fun for me? Just asking the question can jolt you out of your work...

Written by Roxanne Brown

We (The Change Decision) often talk about trust at work in terms of risk. How risky is it for me to trust my boss? My colleagues? My company? My team?

Joy at Work is present when I don’t have to think about that and just focus on the work. When my attention doesn’t have to weigh all of that. Just enjoy working with my boss, with my team, for my company.

Some people grant a lot of trust right from the start and tolerate a lot of breaches, but once trust is broken, it’s hard to get it back with them.

Others are slow to trust. They want to see consistency in words and actions for a while before they’ll grant trust.

Some will be hard to read because they feel they need to have a façade of trust while being cautious in their trusting actions.

It depends on their life’s experience and how much they believe they have at risk.

How do you nurture trust at work?

Written by Roxanne Brown

When we do work we enjoy that contributes toward a shared goal, we feel joy at work.

When we give selflessly to colleagues, when we work hard with others that are seeking the same goal, when we believe the goal is worth going after, when we trust each other, we feel joy at work.

When we overcome a setback, when we forget blame and focus all attention on the solution, when we try something with the confidence we’ll recover if it doesn’t work, we feel joy at work.

When we sometimes pause and celebrate, when we recognize our colleagues, when we see our progress, we feel joy at work.

Written by Roxanne Brown

In January 2020, I chose a word for the year: Freedom. That choice was about freedom from self-doubt, freedom from the noise in my head and the freedom to choose from more options resulting from the first two. When I think back on that now, I can hear the wish to go back in time. I also think, “how quaint.”

About ten years ago, I experienced freedom from the constant, internal dialogue. I had some life-changing experiences that caused me to question everything I thought I knew about myself and the world. My reaction was to just sit with what was happening and try to learn from it. I adopted a “follow-your-nose” philosophy, which translated meant I was letting the universe speak to me and then responding with what seemed to make sense at the time. I was certainly intentional about the life I wanted to live, but my previous “force-of-will” approach to make my carefully chosen goals happen was no longer my mode of...