Happiness at Work in Colombian Companies: A Perspective Under the Rise Model

Introduction

The current business environment is changing at a rapid pace. Markets and workers’ priorities change over time. Companies usually study their needs and external trends but eventually, forget or put in second place the way their workers feel at their workplace.

In Colombia, only 32% of workers are pleased with their jobs, 62% state that they feel a certain level of physical exhaustion, and 56% feel some level of emotional or mental exhaustion, according to research performed by HubSpot, a CRM platform (Portafolio, 2022). In Latin America, according to Microsoft (2022) in its Work Trend Index, 48% of workers and 53% of managers inform that they have a certain level of exhaustion at work, and 43% of employees say that their companies ask for their opinions at least once a year, meaning that over 57% of companies rarely knows about the experiences of their workers at the workplace; the same Index states that 55% of workers consider that working in a different company, different to the one they currently work at, is the best way to develop their skills. These numbers provide an overview of how workers feel about their jobs in Colombia and Latin America, showing that there is room for improvement.

Thus, in this chapter, the authors will present the results obtained through organizational diagnoses that took place in several Colombian organizations, both public and private, using utilizing the RISE Model (Route for Innovative and Sustainable Enterprises), a model designed to help organisations in their endeavours and efforts to enhance their managerial practices, thus allowing them to become World-Class Organizations (Pérez-Uribe et al., 2021; Ramírez-Salazar et al., 2019). This chapter will concentrate specifically on the study results focusing on finding the aspects that strongly influence happiness in the workplace. Until the first half of 2022, the RISE Model has been applied in 126 organisations and companies of all types and sizes. However, for this chapter’s purposes, the database of 106 of those 126 organisations was used.

Hence, the author’s purpose with this chapter is to analyze the results obtained using assessing those 106 institutions by dint of the RISE Model and thereby get a more crystal-clear idea of what organisational factors, descriptors and/or variables can contribute or hamper a company’s corporate climate, factors that can affect happiness at work. This element has a tremendous influence on competitiveness and organizational sustainability.

Therefore, the authors will provide several theoretical pillars sustaining the concept of “happiness at work”, the methodology that entails the RISE Model and present the results of the statistical method used for the validation of the data concerns, using multivariate multiple regression analysis. This will undoubtedly help the authors provide recommendations to the academic and entrepreneurial communities based on this study’s conclusions, aiming to improve a company’s organisational climate and happiness at work.

The authors expect that the conclusions and recommendations provided in this chapter will prove helpful in improving the organisational climate and culture in organizations.