How can you use job crafting to help increase your work happiness? To mark the International Day of Happiness, Mark van Vuuren (Associate Professor of Organisational Communication at Twente University) and Oriana Tickell (Director of the Science of Happiness at Work at iOpener) put together this useful guide, with the aim of discovering the subtle ways in which crafting your ideal job can help create a better workplace.
New academic partnership between iOpener and Dr. Mark van Vuuren, Associate Professor of Organisational Communication.
We are delighted to announce that we have started a new research collaboration with Dr. Mark van Vuuren, Associate Professor of Organisational Communication at Twente University. The aim of this collaboration is to maintain the academic rigor of our Happiness at Work dataset and to further scrutinise the data to generate reliable insights around the topics that we know are relevant to our clients and beyond.
Together, we aim to develop new insights into what makes people happy at work and how this matters in terms of performance. We will be combining our data insights and observations from our interactions as consultants with our academic experience and our hands-on experience in identifying and innovating the tools and solutions we offer for the challenges our clients face.
Oriana Tickell
Oriana is iOpener's Director of Coaching Programs and Happiness at Work
To quote Leonard Cohen in Anthem , “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. Positive Psychology helps to find the crack where the tiniest ray of light can come through on the darkest days. As she discovered for herself, the serious study of happiness is not for the faint of heart. Positive Psychology has little to do with rose colored glasses and rainbows, it is more about finding ways to find the light and come through the hard challenges and obstacles that most human beings face at some point in their lives.
H@W is important to Oriana because her 12 years of being involved with this project have shown her time after time that being happy at work brings many collateral benefits for individuals, which then translates into impact on teams, organizations and their results. It would be hard to find the perfect job that is perfect every day, so identifying what could be different and working at making the necessary tweaks can make a big difference.
Dr Mark van Vuuren
Dr. Mark van Vuuren is a hybrid academic, combining roles as Associate Professor organizational communication at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and partner of consultancy firm WhereWeMeet.
He is convinced that the dynamics of happiness at work deserve the rigor of science with relevance for practice. Particularly, Mark explores the everydayness of thriving, since the experience of happiness and meaningfulness is more impactful if found in normal life than in those few exceptional peak experiences one may have.
Lately, he was inspired by a traffic controller near a school where also road works were sometimes obstructing the flow of biking youngster (yes, this was in the Netherlands). Instead of shouting or pointing, he greeted every passing kid. They were literally queuing up for a high-five with him, making it much easier for him to stop traffic in case a heavy lorry needed to pass. I am looking for opportunities for such high-fives in my working life, and the collaboration with iOpener is one of them
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