Bringing FLOW into your organisation

According to Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, being in flow is the key to real human happiness.

The pre-requisites for personal flow are:

• Inner clarity of mission and vision
• Clear goals
• Balance between challenge and skill
• Feedback about your performance
• Fully in-sync with work
• Intrinsic motivation
• Enjoyment and contribution

If we consider the Yerkes-Dodson performance law, being optimally stimulated (in flow) will yield the best performance, innovation and motivation.

So: If you want to create happiness and high performance/motivation and innovation in your people, you need to get them in flow!

The following is a list of ideas on how to get and keep people in flow at work, generated by PhD students during a leadership training session today:

• Make sure that people understand goals correctly
• Create a nice working environment, ergonomic, green …
• Be sure that people are aligned to the company environment, culture and attitude
• Give people space to work quietly on high-concentration work
• Give people the relevant technical and administrative support in order that they can concentrate on their core tasks
• Give people time and space to be creative and take initiatives
• Ensure communication is good and clear
• Have team building moments
• Give regular feedback to people
• Coach people
• Give people the opportunity to express themselves, for example: A questionnaire
• Sports facilities, power-nap, coffee, massage and zen-rooms
• Regularly check people’s workload
• Divide tasks to ensure that people are not over-stressed
• Get people together, so that they can get feedback from their colleagues
• Don’t leave “crisis situations” too long – ensure there is balance between challenge and skill level
• Get to know your people better, work on really understanding their needs and motivation
• Flexible working hours and home-working possibilities
• Give more training and development initiatives
• Job-rotation
• Give people responsibilities so that they can grow
• Relevant reward systems

For more ideas on flow at work, look at this short film: http://bit.ly/i6ioEd

Hope this was interesting! See you on www.infinitelearning.be or follow me on twitter…

(Feel free to comment…)