Workplace: Four ways to energise co-workers

How much energy do you have at work? Do you feel invigorated and engaged or down and disengaged?

Either way, the reason might be your co-workers: They are infecting you with their energy, positive or negative. What can you do to increase positive energy in your workplace?

Here are four actions you can take personally and as a leader.

1. Build high-quality connections: Focus on growing and improving high-quality connections. Try taking on a challenge at work with a group of like-minded people.

2. Create energising events: Organise and run events with an explicit focus of creating energy, not just delivering content, products or services. Be positive and enthusiastic, and show how much you love your work and the organisation. Aim to have people leave the event abuzz with energy because it’s so contagious.

3. Use tools that promote a “giver” culture: The act of helping someone at work creates energy in the form of positive emotions – the “warm glow” of helping. Receiving help creates energy in the form of gratitude.

Gratitude for help received encourages paying it forward and helping others. Practise being a giver and a gracious receiver of help.

4. Try mapping relational energy: Think through which people in your networks energise you, de-energise you or have little effect on your energy. By visualising or even sketching out how these relationships interact with each other, you can create a type of “energy map”.

Energy maps help you figure out where to focus on building high-quality connections, creating energising events and using tools that create an energising culture. – (Copyright Harvard Business Review 2016)