We are powerfully shaped by our experiences. Our experiences are not what happen to us but how we interact with what happens around us.
We are affected by the ups and downs of our day. Burnout researchers Bakker and de Vries (2021) suggest that daily experiences shape a trajectory of improving or declining health. When we experience day to day success, we collect and cultivate more confidence, energy, skills, and other important resources. When we experience loss in a day we are at risk of unintentional self-undermining behaviours such as creating conflict, procrastination, and withdrawal from sources of help. Left too long, a “loss spiral” occurs reinforcing daily negative experiences.
Many researchers use daily diary studies to try to understand how people experience their workday. The premise is that if we can understand in general what happens within people we can perhaps apply that to the larger population. Sonnentag et al (2024) looked at 382 different diary studies to try and determine what contributes to a “good day”. They started with the paradigm that people need:
- Balance: maintaining levels of energy and being replenished by the next day;
- Growth and learning;
- Contributing to others in their sphere of work.
What did they find contributed to a better day when they reviewed those 382 studies?
- Getting a good night’s sleep and a positive pre-work period are important. For people in a traditional morning to afternoon work period this means having a good sleep and then a psychologically nourishing morning routine – but it could also apply to any pre-shift time period. Engaging in mindful activities or other activities that generated positive emotion before work were generally related to a better day for that individual.
- At work, experiencing positive events such as balance, growth, and contribution to others was also important. But how did those come about? In their review they suggested that job control – the ability to influence when and how work is done – helped people manage their internal resources and response to work events and was a major contributor to a good day at work. Consistent with Conservation of Resources Theory (Hobfoll et al., 2018), job control amplified personal resources like proactivity and job crafting. Lastly, connecting with others in the workplace and improving on the status quo were connected to better days at work.
Is having a good day at work all up to the individual? Is it up to them to create lemonade from lemons? Or can we make lemonade with a little help from work-related job resources like flexible work policies, employee-centric job design, or social support?
We know that we are all humans responding to our circumstances and we can inadvertently create a one-size fits all workplace. So food for thought:
- How can you make work better today for you?
- How can you make work better for someone else in your workplace?
Lewis Health Management Consulting 