Except for a couple of brief stints in the for-profit world (more on this later) I have lived nearly my entire adult life in the non-profit world. The work I was doing within the non-profit world always made me happy—from directing social-justice-themed theatre productions to organizing communities around local economy issues. What wasn’t making me happy was how I was working. I was becoming an unproductive, burned-out-from-exhaustion, surly, snarky, stressed-out mess of a human being. Sure, I was making a decent living and doing work I was deeply passionate about, but so what? If I could barely make time to hike or have dinner with good friends, what good was my work, really? The why of my work all made sense to me. The how and the when? Not so much.
On a recent trip to Newark, NJ, I met a business owner named Medina whose office is the entire loft space he’s rented in a sustainable neighborhood called Lincoln Park. Medina chose to move his life and business to Newark from Brooklyn because it was a slower pace and he was ready to slow his life down. The offices for the design company are on the ground floor of his live/work loft, and upstairs he greets clients with wine, cheese and even some pop-culture TV in his living room. He’s designed his entire loft to be his business and his home. “It’s not hard to separate work from life because I love my work, and it’s who I am and I am it,” he explained. How Zen is that?
It makes sense for a design firm, actually. You walk through his studio and learn a lot about Medina’s style and esthetics. He invites his clients to sit down for a chat so he can learn about them too. Downstairs, his employees roll in whenever they feel like it, work through the night, if they are so inclined, or work all day. There are no rules in this office. If you need a nap, take one on the couch upstairs while your tea is brewing. This started to sound to me like all those Silicon Valley tech start-ups you read about or Google’s HQ. It even reminded me of the brief five months I spent at a dot.com in 2001 that, with millions of dollars in capital funding, provided organic and local lunches for employees every Friday, paid for extravagant gym memberships and yoga instruction, bought healthy snacks from what was then a little-known company called Odwalla, encouraged employees to bring their dogs to work, and to come to work sweaty from mountain climbing before dawn or a bike ride at lunch because “look, we have showers with organic soap!” This dot.com was once a locally owned bookstore, bought by a large corporation that owned several online magazines and travel sites. The little bookstore blossomed into a large online outdoor/adventure travel bookstore. Within those five months I witnessed millions of dollars of burned capital and an office that resembled an echo chamber after half of the 45 employees were let go. I promptly quit and went back to the non-profit world where I felt safe from corporate-imposed happiness-inducing culture.
But the thing about Medina is that he is not a corporation. He’s a small business owner with a few employees who love him, and he treats them like family. I asked one of the young graphic artists how it worked for him, working like this. “I love it. I can come and go whenever I please and go to the gym in the middle of the day, and I have my volunteer hours I can go do, then come back at 8pm if I want.” This was the embodiment of the why, the how, the when of work.
I was inspired. But I was concerned. What about those in the retail world, or those with storefronts or service-based businesses where it’s simply not possible to let your employees come and go as they please? How do you create a culture that focuses on your employees’ happiness and health? Is it possible that the simple act of opening your own business and the very being of being a locally owned business could create a culture of happiness economics?
Consider this: In 1972, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck used the phrase “Gross National Happiness” to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve his country’s Buddhist-influenced culture. The Centre for Bhutan Studies, under the leadership of Karma Ura, set out to develop a survey instrument to measure the Bhutanese people’s general sense of well-being. Ura collaborated with Canadian health epidemiologist Michael Pennock to develop Gross National Happiness (GNH) measures across nine domains: time use, living standards, good governance, psychological well-being, community vitality, culture, health, education, ecology. Since then, dozens of communities have employed the indicator in their own communities. The UK and Thailand are both measuring their country’s well-being through surveys and tracking mechanisms. The documentary film “The Economics of Happiness” maintains that Gross National Happiness is achieved through the localization of economy, politics and culture. That’s right. Localized economies lead to a higher Gross National Happiness.
And now consider this: A recent study by LSU and Baylor University concluded that US counties and parishes with a greater concentration of small, locally owned businesses have healthier populations— with lower rates of mortality, obesity and diabetes—than do those that rely on large companies with “absentee” owners. Many sociologists agree that locally owned businesses— unlike chain retail “big box” stores and large manufacturing plants—have a greater investment in the community. They have more at stake when it comes to the well-being of employees, customers and other local citizens. The LSU and Baylor researchers, who analyzed national population, health, business and housing data, found that the greater the proportion of small businesses, the healthier the population.
What this means is that locally owned businesses contribute to their employees’ happiness and health by being good employers: paying good wages, providing meaningful work, providing time for volunteerism, doing whatever it takes to retain employees because turn-over in employees is costly. Locally-owned businesses are contributors to our social capital, providing more time for volunteerism, contributing more donated dollars to nonprofits, and of course contributing more to our local tax base through the multiplier effect because they spend more money within the community, which gets recycled into the community over and over again.
My point here is that we don’t require millions of dollars in capital from a corporate parent business to buy our happiness at work. We are emerging in this new economy as a culture of employees and employers who care about the why, the how and the when of work, and it’s time our own GDP include the happiness factor because it is our locally owned businesses that are re-building our economy, one happy healthy employee at a time.
Check out The Economics of Happiness online for more information about the upcoming conference March 23-25 in Berkeley, Calif. Check out MedinaCiti for their philosophy on work.
This article appeared in the March 2012 edition of Green Fire Times.
