Workshop: Uppiness Up Your Game at Work

Session Leader: Dalia Feldheim

Summary by Marie-Claire McGreevy, ICC Belfast

Uppiness is an interactive online game that boosts happiness at work by enabling participants to learn tools and solutions from the sciences of happiness and positive psychology.

Co-founded by Dalia Feldheim, organisational psychologist Oren Appel and Dr Tal Ben-Shahar, the goal is to explore and unlock the potential of each team member by drawing on their inherent superpowers to offer a unique perspective to problem solving thus achieving contentment and fulfilment in the workplace.

The session opened with an invitation to the audience to select a strength card that resonated with them. This deck of flashcards featured a broad spectrum of strengths from intuition to loyalty to networking. Any reluctance or apprehension to share selected strengths and the reasons for choosing them with peers quickly dissipated, making way for celebrations and experiences being shared of how these natural attributes we often take for granted can have a transformative impact.

Six volunteers from the audience then stepped up to participate in a live game of Uppiness. Each gamer, equipped with five strength cards pitched their solutions to the taskmaster and posed positive psychology interventions to real-life challenges frequently encountered in the workplace. Following challenging scenarios centred around

procrastination and combative managerial relations, each gamer shared practical advice on how they felt it could be overcome, with a common thread of encouragement to take small steps at first and build on these foundations by implementing systems and processes wherever possible to negate the problem in the future.

In each round, the positive impacts of Uppiness were immediately apparent. In encouraging positive workplace language and affording gamers an opportunity to suspend the urge to provide a gut-instinct response and instead focus solely on offering advice derived from their natural strengths, collaborative communication and happiness levels were boosted.

Dalia closed the session with an invitation to the audience to pen a note of gratitude, either to themselves or to someone whose support or advice they had benefitted from. Although simple in theory, this was powerful in practice. It served as a reminder to make gratitude a daily habit – a little appreciation can go a long way to spreading happiness and productivity in the workplace!

A staggering 70% of people are not able to clearly identify their personal strengths. Of the 30% that can, only 17% feel empowered to exert themselves in a professional context.