Building Your Practice - Beyond Happiness

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Great to have you with us and thanks for your genuine attention and reading this edition. And for those of you who joined our community in the last month and subscribed to this newsletter. Welcome!

This is another special edition of my newsletter in which we deal with the wish of every professional service firm - creating a happy work environment.

This edition features advice on how to create a happy environment in your practice from a true expert on #happiness and bestselling author - jenn lim on Beyond Happiness. Jenn was one of my guests in an episode of SWITCH ON!, my weekly interview show with THE SWITCH (see here the link to this respective interview).

And if you’ve missed them from more than two weeks ago, we always archive the shows to my YouTube page. If you’d like to be notified when the newest episode is available, subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive a notification.

For each professional and professional firm - the idea of leading a happy, upbeat team sounds great, right? But is it really necessary?

As long as employees are doing their job and ideally not hating it. it’s fine – right?…

Well, NO actually. In a professional firm, especially nowadays, employee happiness counts for a lot.

The rising importance of “client experience” – with its focus on individuality, meaning and choice – has awakened a new phenomenon that professional firms must look internally to satisfy: the age of “employee experience”.

The link between happiness and productivity isn’t new, but many professional firms still underestimate just how important it is in the workplace.

Many researches prove that:

Happy employees stay in their job four times longer than unhappy employees;

Happy employees are 12% more productive;

Happy employees commit twice as much time to their tasks;

Happy employees have 65% more energy than unhappy employees.

Clearly, having happy employees isn’t a bonus; it’s a necessity for every successful workplace. Productivity, motivation, dedication and retention all depend on it.

To understand more about the tangible effect happiness has on us, our workplace and much more, and how shall we build workplace strategies that spread happiness and, as a result, benefit all employees and the bottom line of your firm, here is Jenn’s advice:

I would want to break down is the preconceived notion that happiness is just about the highs. It's just about those rainbows and unicorns, or just when people feel like, oh, yeah, I'm having a happy day, happy moment. But the reality is, what I wanted to show is by going beyond, it's not just the highs, it's also our lows. It's also knowing not only our strengths but also our weaknesses, our blind spots. And by being able to be real with that, authentically and not sweeping things under the rug… that we feel whole and we feel real.”

So by going beyond happiness, it's not the need to be from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep to be happy every moment. I mean, that's just not possible. But it does mean to go from the full gamut of the day to feel like you're living fully and meaningfully.

Being able to articulate your own purpose and values for everyone in the organization is really the key to the how. So that people, when they show up, you can tell it's not for their paycheck, you can tell it's because they're aligned with their own personal purpose and their own set of values.

And so as leaders these days, the more we can actually open up that conversation and do these exercises, then you're actually getting everyone included in this process of not just what your organization is doing, that's beyond happiness or beyond making profits. Everyone that's stepping into your team or your company is feeling that way and super aligned to that greater goal. And that's when you see the how turn into the positive results and the outcomes that we're talking about.

The big thing about instilling, and fulfilling happiness is these four levers. And it clues purpose. But these levers, like, no matter what you do. Number one, check on the status of your, like, take a snapshot, have a very attentive listening tour of your people, and ask them what's going well, and what's not going well. And that's the snapshot. And use data points, too, like whatever you're collecting from a survey perspective or your retention rates, use those data points as stats and stories. When you take that snapshot, then you get a sense of, oh, these are the things we can celebrate, and these are the challenges that we're facing as a group. Take those top to two to three challenges and use these happiness levers for them:

Number one, the lever of control. How can you increase the ability for them to feel they have a sense of control.

The second is progress. Make sure everyone is feeling that they're moving, growing, and developing in some way. Even if it's like a long project, make sure you're celebrating milestones along the way.

The third one and this is a huge one right now, is a sense of connectedness…It's actually talking more meaningfully. And this is where the magic of having purpose and values, when you have those kinds of conversations, then you can actually speak to them in a way of, oh, I know its purpose. I know its most important values. And so we can have these more deeper exchanges and more connected interactions that really creates a more bonding sense of family or just really stronger connections.

And then last one, of course, is purpose. If you have the umbrella purpose on top, all these levers to address your problems and issues will inevitably make things better. I am committed to this and we're going to do it together.

The greenhouse model: The belief is that leaders who we are and what we're here for is to grow others, to grow people in our organization, to help prioritize people in that way. So at the same time, though, as a leader, we don't have to be the tallest plant or biggest tree. We want to provide the conditions for others to grow. So then we can all actually grow the organization and profits together.

But the biggest caveat and the biggest add and build to that is that we have to remember as we're growing other greenhouses to nurture our own.

It seems counterintuitive, but it really is true. And sometimes we get so focused on revenue, sales, profits, and all these external factors that are important to the business, but we forget about how we can nurture our own greenhouse first or together.

It's like embracing uncertainty really, and getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. And that brings a sense of maybe people aren't thinking happiness, but at least groundedness. And then you have more senses of being able to actually live fuller and more meaningfully.

💡 ***SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT ***

➜ My free, three-part video series, "Switch & Grow Your Practice", will help you create momentum for your practice growth—whether you’re just getting started or you already have established practice but want to grow it further to make it future-proof practice. Register via this link to find out more and get instant access to the video series as soon as we launch them.

Until the next edition…

SWITCH ON and keep HAPPY!

Warmly,

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If you have any specific questions about building authentic relationships with clients, client retention, or referrals, please send us an e-mail and I will be happy to help.

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Itzik is considered the global leading authority on business development, business networking, client relationships, and personal branding. He is a highly sought-after international speaker, trainer, business mentor, & attorney-at-law. He is also the bestselling author of “The Attention Switch” & Founder of THE SWITCH™️ , the leading online training, education and done-for-you platform for professionals globally. Itzik teaches, trains, and mentors lawyers, other professionals, and professional firms to attract and win their ideal clients by becoming seen as authorities in their field, creating and maintaining successful and strategic relationships, and learning to SWITCH their relationships to referrals+revenue+results.

See more information: itzikamiel.com | THE SWITCH™️ or connect with Itzik via: info@itzikamiel.com

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