“Joy collected over time fuels resilience.” Brené Brown.
Most workplaces have rolled out resilience training. They have ticked that box . Certainly leadership is crying out for a more “resilient” workforce. People who can bounce back is what people are wanting. If this is what they are wanting what are they doing to collect joy? How does your workplace collect joy?
Is joy even on the agenda? Or is the goal of your workplace simply for people to come in keep their nose to the grindstone and just make it through the hours that they at work.
The first step is just to figure to what joy might mean to your team. Everyone is a little different aren’t they? A team I work with play soccer once week at lunch time. Another team has a trivia night. One of the teams I coach does double denim Friday. At our workplace we have a team member who likes to write poetry and we all wait for the next instalment eager to see how we each feature.
The days where the odd morning tea or birthday cake could fill the need for joy are gone. It just does not cut it, it is not enough. You need to know what joy means individually to the people in your team.
Our working world is now often described as VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. This is a term the military uses to describe the extreme conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan
If this is indeed our working world we are certainly going to need a lot of joy to overcome this because we will absolutely need to be resilient. As leaders it is your choice you can fill the joy void or you can put it in the too hard basket or the too warm and fuzzy basket. But if you are wanting that resilient workforce, those people that can go the extra mile , those people that can get back up after a setback, it might be worthwhile to put joy on the agenda.
So joy might mean a “wall of wins”, it might be two minutes at the beginning of the team meeting to talk about what brings them alive, it might be a commitment to journaling about joy, maybe it is an afternoon of lawn bowls or a corporate cooking class. I am not sure I don’t know what joy means for your team. Do you?
If joy like Brené Brown says fuels resilience it should absolutely be on the agenda in fact it probably should be the number one item.