To Have Joy in the Workplace, There Must Be Justice for All

We all want to create spaces full of joy, fulfillment, and happiness. But how do we do that in a world that feels divided, uncertain, and at times far from joyful?

For several years, our firm has been researching the best practices for building joy at work. We have learned about the importance of harmony, acknowledgment, impact, and purpose. But the COVID-19 pandemic and the persistent social injustice it exposed spurred us to think about joy at work around a new fulcrum: justice. Social movements like Black Lives Matter have put justice — and injustice — at the front of people’s minds. You can’t have joy without justice. That’s true at work, at home, and in the community.

Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or your neighbors, joy and justice are two intertwined priorities we should all advance. When leaders don’t speak up and take a stand on urgent issues, they sow distrust and unease — and they certainly don’t lay the groundwork for joy.

The Joy Gap

In our original 2018 Joy@Work study, we found a stark gap between the levels of joy people expected to feel and the joy they actually experienced: Fifty-three percent of survey respondents who said they expected to feel joy at work reported that they did not actually experience it. Because most people spend a majority of their waking hours working, this joy gap has a pernicious effect on our overall joy, happiness, outlook, and well-being.

In 2021, we conducted our survey again. In just three years, the joy gap had widened substantially — from 53% to 61%. The pandemic has highlighted what’s important, at work and in life: taking care of one another, finding joy even in hardship, and looking for moments of meaning. The new mantra for leaders: Create spaces where people feel safe, seen, supported, and inspired.

The joy gap is concerning, but it offers us all unique opportunities for positive intervention. What can leaders do to improve outcomes while creating a baseline of justice, and to build the foundations for joy?

Common Barriers to Joy

Before leaders can start talking about positive change, they must address the toxic, joy-killing norms we should all leave behind. In our research, people cited excessive workloads and unrealistic expectations as their most pressing challenges and barriers at work. Our new research shows that many employees feel that managers are “militant” and unrelenting in pushing to get more done in a shorter time period.

The pandemic has introduced a new set of personal responsibilities for many, if not most, employees. As leaders plan what work will look like for their teams over the (still pandemic) months to come, they need to consider how to ward off overwork. Planning for the new work reality must include having honest, open conversations about fair expectations.

It’s worth noting that companies are increasingly being called on to take a societal role in their employees’ lives. Work is no longer a transaction of time and effort exchanged for money. And in fact, the best workplaces were never transactional. Again, leaders have the opportunity to provide human care and make sure people feel safe, seen, supported, and inspired.

Start With Safety

In pre-pandemic times, you might have assumed that most people felt reasonably safe at work. But that assumption went out the window with COVID-19’s arrival. In our 2021 survey, less than half of respondents strongly agreed that their physical health and safety were reasonably protected at work. Less than half: That data point alone was alarming to us. It became clear that people also didn’t feel emotionally safe at work, regardless of physical protection. Less than 50% of respondents said they can be themselves at work.

There’s a real opportunity for leaders to address these basic human needs as a required precursor to joy. Even if you had a strategy in place for safety, well-being, and mental health pre-COVID-19, that strategy probably needs an update. Most people are feeling new physical and emotional stressors now, after becoming caregivers, teachers, and social workers overnight.

Changing the atmosphere and making people feel safe and protected is all about listening. Some senior leaders have abandoned their armor, are showing up authentically and vulnerably, and are expressing their full, complex emotional truth in courageous conversations. And teams have started to acknowledge and unpack the challenges, trauma, and loss we’ve all experienced during this difficult period.

Dan Cable, professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, has seen a shift in the support people expect from leaders. “Leaders have to be really in tune with where each of their people is, mentally, emotionally, even psychologically, in a way that we weren’t as comfortable with before the pandemic,” he said on Kearney’s Joy@Work podcast in 2020. “Instead of it being the dominant leader that has all the answers and makes the command-and-control decisions, it’s more about the leader that tries to empathize with where each person is and then tries to help them get what they need to be effective at work. And that is more of almost a servant role than a commander role.”

President and CEO Stephen Tang led medical testing company OraSure Technologies as his team rallied together to rapidly create COVID-19 testing kits. He quickly felt the pull to have more vulnerable, honest conversations with his coworkers. “In the normal course of business, I don’t think I would have been so eager to share my own personal journey,” he noted. “But under the circumstances, I’ve learned to make myself more vulnerable.” The result of that new openness? New emotional depth and connection at work.

Tang described a vulnerable, connected culture among teams at OraSure: Employees were trying to educate their kids from home and generally spending more time at home with their families. “The typical boundaries between work and home life just aren’t there anymore. And that requires a particular sensitivity,” he said. Team members have learned how to more carefully communicate with each other and hold space for the emotional, sometimes messy reality they’re each living through — lessons Tang believes should be upheld even as employees return to a more normal work environment. Even after the worst of the pandemic has receded, he said, that focus on overall wellness and connection shouldn’t change.

To feel safe, people need to believe that they can show up as themselves and receive unmerited grace — a basic respect for their raw humanity. And when you extend that grace and create a safe, supportive space for people, their outlook, potential, and joy start to truly blossom in a deeper and longer-lasting way.

Justice Leads to Joy

Our research shows that beyond creating a safe physical and emotional atmosphere within your organization, there’s a real need for leaders to acknowledge and engage in the broader conversations about justice that are multiplying around us. How an organization responds to pressing social issues like Black Lives Matter, the gender pay gap, and LGBTQI+ equality has a direct impact on employees’ ability to access joy. To move the needle on joy, we need to have hard conversations about justice. That involves acknowledging our own and our organizational blind spots. By recognizing injustices and standing up as allies for one another, we can create reckoning, reconciliation, hope, and positive change.

The first step is to acknowledge the social issues that are affecting your people and your community. In her role as interim president and CEO of the Executive Leadership Council, Crystal Ashby has this advice for leaders: Commit to the journey of real, raw conversations about social issues. “We’re going to have to admit when we were wrong. We’re going to have to admit when the mistake was made. We’re going to have to ask how we change it and fix it. But we’re all going to do it together. And it starts at the top of the house. Every CEO has to own this for it to be believed,” she said.

Next, reflect on your organization’s values and consider how they intersect with the issues in your community. If justice is a priority for your organization, how will you integrate the push toward justice into your processes and systems? If diversity, equity, and inclusion are priorities, you have to measure progress toward them and tie success to compensation, just as for any other performance metric. Otherwise, employees will see your initiatives and goals as hollow talk. And as we shift into new ways of interacting with our teams and communities (whether in person, hybrid, flexible, or remote), ask yourself whether your model is fair and equitable: Are your decisions driving justice, or holding it back?

And finally, if your organization still has a long way to go to reach true diversity or equity, it’s OK to acknowledge that. Talk about your goals and be honest about the work you’ll need to do to get there. All of these conversations matter, no matter your organization’s starting point.

HPE chief sustainability officer Brian Tippens finds optimism in the simple fact that today, hard conversations about diversity, inclusion, and social justice are occurring in the workplace in a way that they weren’t a mere two years ago. “Dealing with adversity is causing us, as corporations and as individuals, to think about how we can be a force for good,” he said.

Build Your Joy Toolkit

Previous research has shown that harmony, acknowledgment, and impact are three ways to create a more joyful group of people. Our new research identified three focus areas for leaders who want to infuse more joy: purpose, people, and praise. Lasting cultural change requires ongoing effort, but there are specific actions that you can take to get started on each of these fronts to bring more justice and joy to your organization.

Link every person’s work to the organization’s purpose. When you’re crafting a corporate purpose, think simple; everyone in the organization needs to understand it. But the real magic comes from personalizing that purpose by helping your team members recognize whom their efforts personally impact every day. How are they helping customers? Or, if they’re internally focused — in accounting, for example — how does their work empower and boost the people around them to carry out the organization’s purpose?

Foster a sense of social connection and fun on teams. Given the stress, worry, and fear that emerged during the pandemic, people need social connection more than ever. One quick way to do this: Rethink meetings. Working from home, without casual chats or eye contact with colleagues, has turned many meetings into passive events. Try adding an interactive element: Break into small groups, work on tasks as teams, and come back to the larger group to discuss the results. Exploit small opportunities to add one-to-one connection, even briefly.

Offer frequent, focused praise to recognize people for their efforts. Directing praise to a broad group isn’t enough to create moments of joy for individuals. Think about how you’ll praise groups and how you’ll create moments for discrete praise to individuals and small teams, and share specific, sincere praise with your peers and the people you manage on a weekly basis.

Ultimately, all leaders should keep a steady focus on justice and joy. When we listen to one another, take care of one another, find joy even in times of hardship, and look for the moments of meaning, together we can close the joy gap and build a more just and joyful world.