Many words make small business owners unhappy: debt, inflation, bills, staff turnover, admin. But more problematic in the pursuit of workplace happiness is a seemingly innocuous word: when. When ‘when’ is attached to a goal, it introduces a timeframe and expectations that may be a long way off or impossible to meet.
“We call it in the research the Happiness Trap, or ‘I’ll be happy when…,’” explains Declan Edwards, a happiness researcher, TEDx speaker and founder of BU Happiness College. People tie their happiness to a destination, then can’t enjoy the journey. “I see so many small business owners get stuck in this,” he says.
Known online as That Happiness Guy, Edwards has written a book, How to Be Happy, that he hopes will flip the script for small and medium business owners and leave them better off mentally and financially.
“Rather than thinking happiness comes after success, I think I try to think of it the other way around,” he says. “Success is more likely after happiness.”
Unhappiness Grows In The Expectation Gap
Having completed his Master’s thesis on the role of happiness in organisations, Edwards has observed discontent among employees is common. “I would be shocked if, on a global standard, more than 10 to 15 per cent of people feel they’re truly happy and fulfilled in the work that they currently do,” he estimates.
A small business owner himself, he understands the motivation of people who set out to be their own boss. “At some level, everyone went into business saying, ‘I think I will be happier doing this than not doing it,’” he says.
But the longer hours, heavier responsibility and relentless problem-solving often deliver the opposite sensation, and owners find themselves looking desperately towards the horizon: “I’ll be happy when the business is this size,” they tell themselves. “I’ll be happy when I just get that new employee, I’ll be happy when we get rid of that troubling employee who’s causing all these headaches, I’ll be happy when we land the new contract.”
But once they’ve fallen into the Happiness Trap, Edwards says it can be hard to climb out. “It’s like we gamble our happiness on the next accomplishment, only to get there and then move the benchmark again,” he explains.
In that mindset, an SME owner’s great skill, problem-solving, becomes a hindrance. “If you are only ever looking for problems, I guarantee you will find them, and if you can’t find them, your brain does a pretty good job at creating them,” Edwards says.
Alongside the Happiness Trap is a Disappointment Gap, created when reality falls short of a mental image. “Life doesn’t play to our expectations, it doesn’t play to our plans,” he points out. “But I don’t think you should throw the baby out with the bathwater.” That means continuing to have hopes and high standards, but remaining flexible so they do not crystallise into rigid expectations.
“I like to think of happiness less as an outcome or an expectation, more of a skill,” he says.
When Teams Are Content, Happiness Buys Money
If happiness is a skill, it is also a measurable business input. Edwards points to research by Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, which found that salespeople who had been taught and practised the skills of happiness achieved 37 per cent higher sales than control groups who had not.
“Rather than asking, ‘Does money buy happiness?’ let’s start talking about how happiness buys money, because 37 per cent higher sales is something worth talking about,” Edwards suggests.
He points out that higher satisfaction at work can also lead to greater staff longevity, fewer mistakes and mental health leave absences, and reduced turnover expenses. More recent studies, Edwards adds, suggest a return of roughly $3 for every dollar intentionally invested in evidence-based happiness initiatives.
“If someone says there’s a stock on the market that’s going to give you a 300 per cent return on investment in a year, everyone is going to go buy that stock, and so my hope is more workplaces go, ‘Maybe we should be investing in happiness,’” he says.
He adds it’s not just staff who benefit. “If we work on happiness and wellbeing, we make better decisions, we think more clearly, we show up as a better leader, which makes it more likely that we achieve all the things that we want to achieve.”
Managing Happiness Requires A Delicate Balance
Edwards concedes that creating a happy workplace requires a balancing act. Small business owners can find it hard to determine where responsibilities to their employees lie.
“What I see a lot is one of two things: either they’re over-responsible for the happiness of their team, it is my job to make my team happy, and that is so exhausting and so stressful. Or they’re under-responsible and say, ‘Not my problem. Why do I have to think about this?’” he notes.
Edwards argues the latter camp misunderstand their influence, pointing to a study that found, due to the quantity of time they spend together, an employee’s manager has more impact on their health and wellbeing than their doctor.
There’s also the advent of psychosocial safety legislation to consider, he says. While the laws focus on protecting staff from mental health hazards rather than ensuring their happiness, they confirm the link between work and wellbeing.
He’d like to see the conversation broadened from preventing harm to promoting improvement. Just as the absence of disease does not always equal health, a lack of hazards does not guarantee contentment.
“What does it look like to not only create safe workplaces but thriving workplaces and flourishing workplaces for the benefit of everyone?” he ponders. “There’s so much research that shows when people are happy at work, they perform better. It has an impact on the bottom line. As a business owner, this is something that you benefit from.”
The Path To Happiness In 10 Minutes A Day
For busy business owners wondering where to begin, Edwards recommends three evidence-based daily practices, all free and done in less than 10 minutes. He gets annoyed when people say they don’t have time.
“Show me how many hours you have on your screentime this week, and then tell me you’re too busy to spend 10 minutes a day prioritising your happiness and well-being. I call bull**** on it,” he says.
1. Meditation or mindfulness
The first practice is meditation or mindfulness in any form: breath work, a guided app or a mindful walk. The aim is returning to the present rather than fixating on the future ‘when.’ Edwards cautions against giving up too early. “You want to pick up a guitar and play for three weeks, then give up because you aren’t Jimi Hendrix? You need to give yourself a few months to get good at these things,” he says.
2. Gratitude
The second is gratitude. Identifying three things that went well each day trains the brain to notice the good, not just problems, and it’s more effective when shared. “Gratitude shared is gratitude doubled,” he says. A practical application may be telling employees when they have done good work, not just flagging when they have not.
3. Emotional literacy
The third is emotional literacy. Edwards argues that many capable adults lack the vocabulary to describe what they are feeling beyond “good,” “bad” or “stressed.” Without that vocabulary, emotional intelligence remains out of reach.
“It’ll be like an artist trying to paint an amazing artwork with four little blotches of paint. It’s gonna be really hard to do, but if they have a bunch of different colours of paint, oh, now we’re working,” he explains.
Small daily practices can be the foundation for something bigger. “I do think we’ll make a much happier and better society as a whole if more people build the skills of happiness and they practice wellbeing science,” he says. “Not only to make better workplaces, but to have that ripple effect play out and create better communities and happier societies for all of us.”
