Joyful Museums Project: Boosting the Signal

Marieke Van Damme is a Boston-based museum professional who is both smart and thoughtful. She's putting together a fascinating panel for NEMA 2014 about workplace culture in museums.

To that end, she's launched the Joyful Museums project, and she's collecting responses to a general survey about museum workplace culture.

Here's what she writes:

I believe that keeping its workers happy, despite grim economic and other circumstances, should be the top priority of every museum. 

Engaged museum workers will have a deeper commitment to the mission of a museum than a disengaged one, and they will strive for a higher quality product (exhibition, program, publication, etc.) for the public. Building off of the growing academic field of positive psychology, I intend to explore what being happy at work means, why it is important for the museum community, and how it can be accomplished.

So please, take a few minutes to fill out her survey. I'm hoping to attend her panel at NEMA, and I'll report back on the results here.

You can also follow her on Twitter @joyfulmuseums.

(ps - Marieke and I have emailed a bit about our respective NEMA 2014 surveys, as they have some thematic crossover. If you haven't taken my grad school survey yet, please do!