The Happiness Factor

By Lori-Ann Duguay

Are you tired of losing your best employees? Struggling to fill positions in your organization? Brace yourself: 1 in 4 of your existing employees are eyeing the exit door! Here's the shocking truth: it's not all about the money. In this game-changing book, you'll uncover the secrets to what truly drives employee satisfaction and retention. Say goodbye to the financial drain of disengaged employees who are typically costing you 34% of their annual salary in company losses. This book reveals exactly what your employees want and how you can provide it, ensuring their happiness, commitment, and peak performance. Through the powerful 3M approach - Measure, Map, Mobilize - you'll gain a practical roadmap to transform your workplace culture immediately. Take charge, ignite motivation, and keep your organization thriving amidst the shifting tides of the new world of work. The time for action is now, and this book is your key to success. Don't waste another moment watching your top talent slip away. With this book as your guide, you can create an irresistible employee journey, magnetizing and retaining high-performing individuals.


After a successful career of 20+ years with the same organization, Lori-Ann had come to understand the opportunities and limitations that came with bearing the 'golden handcuffs' of a good pension and benefits. This experience inspired her to work with organizations and help them create highly motivating workplaces laced with and engaging employee experiences. People-Powered Solutions helps companies with a growth mindset ignite organizational transformation by creating magnetic workplace cultures that attract and keep top talent. Their expertise lies in building the complete employee experience and leadership capabilities necessary to attract and retain top talent in today's ever-changing work landscape. Drawing from her background as an HR Strategist, Talent Development Expert, Professional Coach, and Dispute Resolution Practitioner, Lori-Ann brings a deep understanding of talent management and employee engagement to guide organizations and leaders in embracing a people-powered approach to leadership, talent development, and conflict resolution. Join forces with Lori-Ann and People-Powered Solutions to unlock the potential of your workforce, drive growth, and create an environment where employees thrive!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lori-Ann Duguay
• Release date: Oct 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738157716

Book preview

Foreword

Every once in a great while, the Universe shows up and puts you exactly where you need to be.

I spend my life in inflection points. Those places in life where everything begins to fall apart and the strategies you had and the tools you used to rely on somehow no longer work. It’s the place of the transition and most of the time, it’s hard. It requires you to constantly evaluate your toolkit and oftentimes asks you to think well outside of any box you’ve ever considered. However, it is here, in those places, that you tend to see people and places like they are outside of you and they oftentimes show you what a microcosm of the world looks like under the influence of change. When you first start working in this place, every situation, behavior or crumbling structure looks like a forest fire. However, when you step back and view the microcosm, you will quickly see that on some level they all have the same elements. What you will inevitably find is that within that viewpoint you are able to break down those elements and create more healthy structures that will provide long and lasting change.

It is within this context that I first met Lori Ann. It was through conversations on some of the most challenging structures of my own personal struggles in my new organization that we both began to realize that we were seeing the same patterns showing up in many of the organizations that we had worked in. It was there that we began to have many of the conversations about creating a simple model that would enable the transformations that many businesses need to make. It was also in this discussion that we began to understand that it isn’t transformation and change that makes people lose their happiness and engagement, but it is their loss of happiness that makes the transformation somehow so much more difficult!

The questions then began to arise as to how to maintain happiness when a company needed to change and the answers really came as we began to deep dive into the needs that my organization had. It was here, that Lori-Ann began to shape her model that became the basis of The Happiness Factor. While I sat in the series of forest fires shouting to her for solutions to make the noise go away, she threw in not only the practical solutions but the context of ways to create engagement through the process. In doing so, she not only formulated a simple model that all organizations can use, but created a group of engaged leaders who became part of the solution so that the responsibility didn’t just fall on me.

As I said in the beginning, the universe shows up and puts you where you need to be. I also believe that the universe always puts the help you need in your way. If you have found your way to this book, then you can rest assured, it is exactly what you need at the exact right time. I will always be personally and professionally grateful to Lori-Ann for crossing my path, as I know that my organization has become better for her influence in it. It is my fondest hope that this book provides the wisdom you need as you begin your own transformation and that it provides the solid grounding that will help you to see the forest fire from the trees.

Michelle Sangster CHRO

Eclipse Automation

Introduction

Success is no accident.

Pele

What motivates people to show up for work? Wait a minute . . . When I say, show up, I don’t mean show up and occupy space or be a tenant of the workplace. I mean show up and perform to their full potential.

Considering that most people spend between 8 to 14 hours a day at work, do you think they will continue to come to work and give it their all if they aren’t happy? Once employees start losing interest, everything starts to decline. It’s like when you were a teen and realized that you wanted to break up with someone and suddenly all you could see were their faults! Once employees are no longer happy at work, they will inevitably begin to mentally check out and start shopping around for their next jobs. Remember that an organization is nothing without its people. Also remember that even the most competent, high-performing employees will shift into shopping gear when their motivational needs are not being met! In fact, research shows that 1 in 4 of your current employees is shopping around right now.

What can you do about it? What if you don’t have the budget to increase salaries across the board? Or to bring in consultants to overhaul your people-management strategy? Organizations often claim they don’t have the budget to make these types of ongoing investments. Yet those same organizations fail to recognize how quickly the costs of employees leaving them—or even worse, staying and being completely unhappy—can add up. Unhappy employees cost you even more in the long run. Companies frequently assume that their employees are leaving because they want more money. They don’t understand that more often than not, it isn’t really about the money! In fact, it’s usually about things that are lacking in the employee’s day-to-day work environment that would not even cost a lot to provide.

You can find a ton of information out there about the costs of unhappy employees. You will also find a lot about what drives employee engagement in the workplace. What is missing from all this information is a step-by-step guide showing you how to bring more motivation to the workplace. Let’s be clear, no one can motivate a person directly. More to the point, happiness is an inside job. Regardless, one thing you can do is create workplace experiences that are highly motivating!

Ten specific employee motivational needs will make or break your efforts to ensure your employees feel fulfilled in the workplace.

Specifically, to be happy at work, employees need:

Clarity

Communication

Purpose and Impact

Growth Opportunities

Training and Development

Work-Life Balance

Recognition and Appreciation

Autonomy and Empowerment

Relationships

Leadership

Creating workplaces that fuel these ten motivational needs is the key to happier, more productive employees. You started reading this book for a reason. Maybe you’ve already started to notice those individuals in your organization who have already checked out. Maybe you had not realized that many of the performance issues you are contending with are actually red flags that should have alerted you to which of your team members may have been shifting into shopping gear. Regardless of the reason you picked up this book, rest assured that by the time you are done reading it, you will have a roadmap and a concrete plan to create a highly motivating workplace experience that will make your employees want to stay and thrive!

My Journey

When I started writing this book, I wanted to help organizations create healthy workplace cultures. I quickly realized that my book also serves as a self-help guide for unhappy employees that helps them determine what is missing in their day-to-day work lives and how to take ownership of their career happiness. Understanding and identifying the basic needs I outlined above allows employees to point to the specific motivational needs their workplaces do not supply. Armed with this knowledge, employees and employers can plan together how to improve their workplace experience. After all, happiness is an inside job.

I offer this book as a tool to pinpoint the current gaps in your workplace and a methodology for creating the experiences employees need to be happy at work. To be honest, I wish I had had this book all those years ago when I faced similar struggles, so I could have identified what was missing! To that end, here’s my story:

My journey must begin with a caveat. For 21 years, I worked for the same well-established large-scale organization. As a result, many of the examples throughout this book hail from my experiences at that company. The caveat is that throughout my work with organizations in the private, public, and non-profit sectors, I have heard stories and helped solve challenges that paralleled my experiences. My intent is not to cast a dark light on my former employer, but rather to help people recognize that dysfunctional employee experiences, regardless of the type of company, can lead to employees completely checking out. Now in the large-scale organization I worked for, although programs and services changed, I will say that over my 21-year career, the dysfunctional culture and employee experiences remained exactly the same. For 15 of those 21 years, I was stuck in the same position. I knew my position inside and out after two years, and although the programs changed, the role I played in their administration remained pretty much static. New programs were different versions of what we already knew, with variations coming in waves. After five years in the same position, things began to feel stagnant. Nevertheless, I stayed put.

Why? Because I worked in a satellite office in a rural location in Northern Ontario, Canada. To provide services in this location, I needed to be a Jill-of-all trades and know how to administer all programs. The commitment of time, training, and experience required to get someone to acquire that level of subject matter expertise was considerable. Since I had already attained a high level of expertise, the main office leadership preferred to keep me in the same position for as long as they could to save them the work of finding a replacement and training someone new.

Now, the manager was also allowed to invoke a recruitment policy restricting job postings to within a 125-kilometer radius. This meant to apply on the posting, applicants had to live within 125 kilometers (78 miles) of the work location or be willing to relocate if they were hired. Lo and behold, all the potential job postings that would have allowed me to grow and evolve in my career were limited by the 125-kilometer restriction. Since as far as I was concerned, relocation was not an option, I could never apply for any other positions.

Feeling stuck in my career didn’t bother me as much when I was focused on building a family. Eventually, however, when my kids grew and became more independent, the stagnation at work became more bothersome. I would look for mentally challenging side projects or side hustles (yes, I even sold Mary Kay at one point) but they never seemed to be enough to satisfy my need to feel that I was tapping into my full potential of skills and capabilities. People told me to suck it up. After all, I had a great job with an excellent pension and benefits. They told me it was golden, to which I always replied that it was in fact more like golden shackles. I couldn’t bear being in that same spot until retirement.

At about the five-year mark, I knew that this job would never be enough for me. By the time I was into my 13th year, I started planning my exit strategy. I decided to go back to school to complete postgraduate studies in Human Resources Management and Labor Relations while also working my full-time gig.

After four years of feeling 100% challenged, I graduated and began consulting on the side. Now that I had this additional credential under my belt, my side projects allowed me to realize that my dead-end position did not have to be it for me career-wise. Something shifted in me. For the first time in my career, I felt like I could finally take control of the next chapter of my professional life. Until then, I had been waiting for opportunities to serendipitously show up rather than actively seeking them out. You know what they say right? Don’t wish for it. Work for it. I am not sure who they are, but I decided to take their advice.

Doing so transformed my perspective. I began networking with managers and leaders from different levels of the organization. I applied for jobs outside the company. I was so unhappy at that point—and so checked out—that I was willing to accept less money(more on this later in the book) to move to a company that would see my worth and help me grow.

As often happens once employers get wind that one of their top performers is shopping around, my employer suddenly decided to offer me some growth opportunities. But 17 years into my career in the same position, it was too little, too late. Years of resentment had festered. I accepted the opportunities but always knew deep down they were transitional positions to keep me busy while I solidified my exit plan. I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there was nothing my employer could offer me to make me stay.

I must admit that for the longest time, the source of my unhappiness wasn’t clear. I couldn't understand what I was chasing. The side consulting projects continued. I would use vacation days to work on projects. Within two years, I was using up all of my allotted time off to work on projects and still couldn’t keep up with the demand.

It occurred to me that I could probably do this side-gig full-time. I decided to take a year off and experiment. I was grateful that my employer offered job security for the first year, so I could try this thing out and go back whenever I wanted if things didn’t pan out. However, three months into my full-time business, I knew I would never return to my old life. I took the accumulated resentment and frustration and allowed it to fuel my passion for creating happier, more productive workplaces for other companies.

Over the years, I have invested considerable time in researching what makes people unhappy at work. I also had my own first-hand experience to draw on. Soon, I started to understand what drives motivation at work and what employees need to