Importance of happiness in the workplace

Martin Seligman says although Kiwis are quick to have a moan, they are positively cheery compared with the dour Scots. Photo / Supplied

It's enough to make you want to overdose on Prozac. If I hear one more person, ever, refer to the glass being half bloody full, I swear I will empty the said vessel over their head.

For some reason, middle managers seem to be the worst offenders. Yet analogies about optimism endure and they endure for a reason. We all want to be happy. Well, most of us, anyway. And in business, happy workers are not only desirable, they are essential to future success. As we all know, a happy worker is a more productive worker - or in other words, a more profitable one.

But how on earth do you make people happy at work? Many businesses seem to think it has a lot to do with perks but, according to a renowned American psychologist, it could be a lot simpler - and cheaper - than that.

Professor Martin Seligman is no half-baked academic looking to flog a book. Although based at the University of Pennsylvania, the father of seven travels frequently - usually with his younger children, who are home schooled, in tow.

He is currently visiting Geelong Grammar School in Australia, where he is working with staff and pupils to develop qualities like resilience and, next week, he will visit New Zealand as a guest of the Government's Leadership Development Centre and the Foresight Institute.

In Auckland, he will hold a private seminar for Fletcher Building executives and will give a public lecture, called Positive Psychology and Happiness at Work, followed by a 45-minute question-and-answer session, at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. He will also give a public seminar in Wellington.

According to his Wikipedia entry, he is one of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century (yes, there is a notation to back up this claim), well known for his work on "learned helplessness" and, more recently, for his research into what is known as positive psychology.

That might sound like an oxymoron and, around a decade ago, Seligman would have agreed with you. As then-president of the American Psychological Association, he concluded that psychologists had done a pretty good job of cornering the market in suffering. What they hadn't done so well was figure out how to make life worth living.

"It became my mission then to complement psychology as usual - the psychology of the disabling conditions of life - with a new psychology of how to build the enabling conditions of life."

The recipe for happiness is simple, he believes, and involves three different ingredients: positive emotion, engagement and meaning. One way of achieving these is to carry out practical exercises which ensure they become part of your life.