The Pursuit Of Happiness In Business

My goal this year is to be happy.

That’s it – not much to ask but talk to those around you, how many of your friends, co-workers, or even family are really happy?

I’ve been practicing mindfulness in order to stop racing through life (and work) and make sure I make time to go for that walk in the morning, every morning.

And don’t work all weekend, every weekend!

So when I met with my business coach last week and we focused on personal and professional purpose, you’ll understand mine was centered around spreading happiness.

She started with two questions about Your Virtual Assistant as a business

Who are we?

Why do we exist?

Not easy questions to answer about your business but doing so helped draft our purpose:

Our PURPOSE is to spread happiness with those we work with; internally within our team and externally with our clients and partners.

EXTERNALLY we’ll achieve this by responding to our client problems with solutions, while filling in the gaps in their business using our resource of smart experienced thinkers and problem solvers with multi-faceted strengths.

INTERNALLY we’ll continue to improve our company culture and align what we do with our personal purpose. Each member of our team has the right to feel fulfilled, appreciated, and supported by both a management level and by our co-workers.

This article, “How happiness can help you in business” is well worth the read if you have a minute. The spotlight is on Moo.com and Zappos and how both company’s core values are all around promoting happiness both in their (lucky) staff and in going above and beyond to delight their customers.

[bctt tweet=”He (Moross) believed that employees that are happy make customers happy, and everything will fall into place after that.” username=”yourvaconz”]

I want this 🙂

The next step in my pursuit of happiness for this business was to identify what we are already doing to spread smiles. Only then could I find how to keep this purpose in front of mind (day in day out) and identify weaknesses in both our culture and processes.

A happiness audit for both our clients and within the team. Is what we do aligns with the personal goals and the purpose of those we work with? Questions need to be asked!

Does every email, message, skype or face to face convey happiness.?

Even a “NO” can be phased positively so do we keep any frustrations out of our communications?

And if we have frustrations are we looking at the source and finding ways to eliminate them?

Thank you gifts could be more frequent.

We are completely focused on business and professional processes.

This needs to change to ensure personal purpose is aligned with what our team and clients are doing on a day to day basis.

Looking at our onboarding process for both clients and contractors, is our culture and purpose reflected in each step?

Not yet (it will be though).

For me, the biggest challenge is incorporating happiness into our day to day life.

We get busy, we are met with challenges and we have bad days.

So creating a culture that incorporates happiness into everything we do isn’t easy – but it’s worth it.

I want everyone who engages with our people to be infected with our happiness and I’m 100% determined to achieve this.

So dear reader, what drives you?