Culture Workshop for Happiness

Learnings: “Happiness is Fleeting. Yet it is worth pursuing, thoughtfully.” “Two qualities that aren’t for compromise: kindness and geekiness.” Said Laura Snelmann-Junna in our Culture Workshop and I loved that she shared these learnings.

Happiness in an everyday work context isn’t the most common topic, we quite easily focus on results and effectiveness because of the pressure of timetables and business goals. That’s why it’s good to devote time to thinking about happiness at least in retros, but preferably every day with some small routine. For me, Culture Workshops have been a good way of dedicating joint time for improving ways of working, but also for pursuing happiness at work.

I’ve had big changes in my life in recent years, and they have made me appreciate happiness even more. I know some people prefer to talk about the good life instead of happiness, but I’m a person with big emotions so I like to talk about happiness. Luckily I’ve had people around me in a work context who share my passion for happiness or at least are willing to play along with me. 

Inspiration for Culture Workshops has come because I’ve been lucky enough to work with brilliant people like Sami Kallinen for over a decade already. He has made me think a lot about different personalities, ways of seeing things from many angles and practising empathic ear, meaning listening and hearing what the other person is saying. Sami has also facilitated Culture Workshops with my teams for several years already, and he facilitated this latest one with teams at Elisa in January. 

In previous Culture Workshops, we’ve had brilliant speakers to offer some food for thought like Camilla Tuominen and Henri Kinnunen, and this time we had Laura Snellman-Junna. We’ve also made prehand surveys, as we did this time, or tasks that get people in the mood even before the workshop. The idea of a prehand survey and with the speakers in the workshop is to allow people to stop for a while and think about feelings at work, better practises and what brings us joy and happiness. 

Laura Snellman-Junna gave a presentation about the Building blocks for a Good Life. Laura had a very personal approach to the topic and she analysed how different areas of happiness had occurred in her life when she was ten years younger and 20 years younger than today. She also divided happiness into three types: Pleasure, Passion and Purpose, which I found to be a very nice way of looking at happiness. These types occur in work life and outside work. It’s not easy to keep up happiness with all of these types all the time, since “life” happens. Laura summarised it very eloquently “Happiness is Fleeting. Yet it is worth pursuing, thoughtfully”. 

You may find yourself executing happiness at some points in your life, quite often when you are younger, but sometimes you only realise that afterwards. I found this to be true, sometimes the idea of happiness has come from the expectations of others or social norms, and you end up not listening to yourself patiently enough what happiness means to you. Laura also said that some people are of course wise enough at a very young age and do have a good sense of personal happiness, but I think for most of us it comes with life experiences. I’m much better at recognising true happiness now compared to even a few years ago.

Laura was also talking about recruiting people and how soft skills should guide us in that process as well as technical skills and other capabilities. At Wonna, a small consultancy company where Laura is a managing partner, they don’t compromise on two things when they recruit people, and these are kindness and geekiness. That had a profound effect on me, kindness is something I have learned to love in the people I work with or spend my time with in general for that matter. 

Laura’s presentation was a story about work-life happiness as part of happiness in your life in general. Identifying PERMA blocks at the workplace from positive psychology: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment, can help you to answer the question of what you want and need from work life. “Live and learn what is good life for you”, she said.

Laura’s presentation was brilliant in my eyes, and I think it also fitted nicely with our group of software developers and data wizards. Sami summarised it nicely by saying that the presentation was a “no-nonsense approach, dealing with topics that are important, but often get easily a superficial and toxic tone. It set a good foundation for the whole afternoon”.

During this time’s Culture Workshop, we had nice practises and exercises. Thankfulness post-its for others, personal takeaways from Laura’s presentation in pairs, and group work with your teammates on what should be changed in the current ways of working with practical Add, Improve and Drop -exercise. As a take away all of us could take a personal action post-it for implementation in the coming days and weeks. If most of us practice those post-its it can mean that two dozen small improvements will be experimented with. We have a visual reminder of the things we talked about on our board at the office and also as post-its in a Mattermost channel. Not to do those with pressure but with love for pursuing happiness in small bits.

In the Culture Workshop we of course had some fun also. Each person had been asked to make an AI portrait of one of the colleagues with text prompts using a Gen AI tool of their choice. In the workshop, it was very entertaining trying to guess who was who, and who had made the portrait for them. Thank you for the lovely idea Reetta Eskola from another workshop she had participated in. We also played three rounds of the Warewolf -game, with the guidance of Sami, and they worked nicely. 

Sparkling wine and giving personal candy bags were also part of the package, as was a nice dinner after the workshop in a nearby Asian restaurant. We were able to do the Culture Workshop at Reaktor’s office in the city centre, and it was nice to be at a different location than normal. Also, our facilitator from Reaktor’s side Mikael Nylund was a super nice person to meet. Thanks, Reaktor! Most of all thank you to the dear people from EID, ECC and EDS teams participating in this and that I’m able to share my work life with you. 

Last year I had a difficult time in my personal life but also very happy feeling after that, and I felt so lucky that I had my dear friends and family, and people close to me at work who helped me through the tough times. I couldn’t appreciate you more who offered a helping hand and also shared many laughs and celebrations of life with me*. Personal life affects work life, and it’s important that we can all be our whole selves. All this got me thinking about resilience and the ingredients of happiness. I haven’t made conclusive conclusions yet, but I have a good sense of what makes me happy and how can I keep that up. Feeling happy.

Thank you for reading. Please send me a message here or on LinkedIn, if you want to talk about resilience, coping with big changes or improving work-life happiness. 

*Reetta, Anssi, Tiitta, Sami, Leevi, Riikka, Riina, Susanna, Ritva, Cami, Sinikka, Katja, Viivi, Annika, Anu, Hequ, Kristofer, Ari, Kaisa, Kati, Iiris and many more ❤