Positive mindsets for professionals are essential and will help improve your mindset and create a more positive work environment. Given that the average employee is unproductive for around 25% of their working day (and often stressed for the other 75%) there’s a lot of room for improvement in the average business and much of it is to do with their mindset!

Positive Psychology is a science! It’s not a management fad, or part of the self help movement, it’s the study of what’s right with human beings and applies that knowledge to our lives, communities and organisations. In business we aim to increase personal productivity and efficiency while building resilience to stress and burnout, oh…. and we have a whole lot of fun doing it!

Here are some things you need to know about Positive Psychology in business.

• Positive workers are over 37% more productive than their negative co-workers, they do better in management roles and are more resilient to stress. – Shawn Achor
• Positive managers have teams that are 30% more productive than their negative co-workers. – Shawn Achor
• Thriving teams; those who have high success rates, better cohesion and stay focused on the project, have a positivity ratio of 6:1, meaning they interact with 6 x the positivity than negativity. – Michael Lossada

So the key is ‘how can we apply positive mindsets to create a positive business?’ Here are four simple things you can do;

1. Acknowledge people – Negativity is contagious, fortunately for your workplace culture, so is positivity. By acknowledging co-workers, you’re saying “You’re an important part of this business” and that’s what truly motivates. Set up a white board and encourage graffiti to praise employees and their work.

2. Develop a growth mindset – People with a growth mindset know that they can always learn, they are open to challenges and see effort as the path to success. Encourage all learning; support your team to try new things and most of all nurture learning with new courses, challenging projects and interesting books.

3. Create down time – The best organisations in the world recognise that a stressed employee is an unproductive employee and have developed strategies for down time on the job. Patagonia has surfboards lining the halls, with their philosophy being “Let my people go surfing”. Get creative in giving your people time to recharge.

4. Bring back the fun – We know how great dopamine is for our brain and we know having fun floods our brain with dopamine, so put the two together and create a fun environment to work in. Google (Fortune Magazines 2014’s ‘Best Company to work for!’) has slippery dips, meditation pods, put put golf and their team are certainly more creative, productive and dedicated than most.

When looking at Positive Psychology strategies to implement into your workplace, don’t go for the one big party at Christmas, rather find strategies that you can use and implement every day to gently shift the culture in a positive direction. Start with these four and let me know about the positivity that builds in your team!