Would you rather be happy at work or enjoy fair pay, reasonable hours and be valued by those you work with and for? Or can you have both? Is workplace happiness achieveable?
I read with great interest the article “The Cult of Compulsory Happiness is Ruining our Workplaces” in the Guardian by Andre Spicer where he argues that forcing “workplace happiness” could be counter productive. He details how different organisations introduce the ‘fun factor’ through a range of initiatives and that Chief Happiness Officer is now a bona fide occupation as they strive to connect employees satisfaction with increased productivity. He suggests that happiness for happiness sake may mask reality to the detriment of the organisation and individual employees.
The thousand plus comments on the article were equally illuminating as readers suggest that the happiness gimmicks to achieve workplace happiness can’t mask the absence of the important basic principles of being engaged and valued and working fair hours for fair pay. I echo many of these comments. I think happiness is transitory anyway, both at work and outside work. There is more to the concept of wellbeing, which embraces a broader deeper sense of security, satisfaction and contentment, that should be the goal for both individuals and organisations.
The Cult of Compulsory Happiness is Ruining our Workplaces
Some companies strive to make the office fun, so we’ll work harder. But forced positivity has a negative side
In their quest to make employees happier, companies around the world have been busy installing play equipment in the workplace. Google has set up slides in its Zurich office so engineers can whizz between floors. The online shoe retailer Zappos encourages employees to dress as their favourite animal on certain days. There are US companies that give staff an opportunity to be ninjas for the day. Fussball tables, computer games, action figures and scooters have become fixtures in some workplaces. And if you walked into the offices of Inventionland, you could be mistaken for assuming you were in a children’s playground: workspaces there include a fake pirate ship, a tree house, and a giant shoe.
The lengths companies go to in order to make employees happy to spend increasingly long hours at work do not stop there: Tony Hsieh, chief executive of Zappos, has been known to down vodka shots with employees in interviews. And Expedia, ranked this year as the happiest workplace in the UK, has modelled its London office on a night club with free bars, chill-out zones and Formula One simulators.
In The Wellness Syndrome, the book I wrote with Carl Cederström, we took a look at the increasing fascination with happiness at work. We found a growing industry of “funsultants” offering advice on how to make workforces more positive. Firms such as Zappos have started to employ chief happiness officers. There is also a booming field of management research on positivity at work.
But despite all this effort, work still sucks. According to a recent study by the London School of Economics, the place where we feel most miserable is work. There is only one place and circumstance that makes us feel worse – being sick in bed.
The clamour to make employees happy at work is driven by one of the oldest cliches in the human resource management playbook: that a happy worker is a good worker. As William Davies shows in his book The Happiness Industry, this idea has been part of management theory since at least the 1930s. The problem is that there have been decades of research on the link between employee satisfaction and productivity, and the results are pretty inconclusive.
There are studies that find if you show students a standup comedy routine and then get them to spot errors in a piece of writing, they will do better than students who have not seen the comedy routine. However, another study, of a major UK supermarket chain, found that the stores with the least satisfied employees were the most productive and profitable.
But giving space for a range of emotions at work can also be important for the health of the entire organisation. This is wonderfully illustrated by a recent study considering why the mobile phone maker Nokia failed. In 2007, the year the iPhone launched, Nokia was the world’s leading mobile-phone maker. It had ample information about Apple’s venture, so should have been able to successfully challenge it.
However, the Finnish company had invested heavily in a smartphone operating system called Symbian, which wasn’t working well. Middle managers in the company knew it, but they feared communicating the bad news up the hierarchy because they didn’t want to appear to be negative. They had got the message: if you wanted to keep your division open, it was imperative to be only upbeat and pass on positive news. Because senior managers only got positive news, it took them too long to ditch Symbian, switch operating systems and launch a decent smartphone. By that point, Apple and Samsung had overtaken Nokia. Now Nokia no longer makes mobile phones.
The sad truth is that being constantly on the lookout for happiness may actually mean happiness eludes us. This point was illustrated by a study in which psychologists got two groups of people to do something that usually makes people happy – watching a film of someone winning an ice-skating competition. They then tested how happy the experience made them. Before watching the video, one group read out a statement about how important it was to be happy and have an upbeat attitude; the other group did not.
The psychologists found that the group that didn’t read out the statement actually tended to be more happy after watching the video. This suggests that when we talk about how important happiness is, we become less likely to find it, even when we have experiences that usually make us happy.
Wanting workplace happiness is fair enough. But being forced to be happy at work can be troubling. If organisations were genuinely interested in making their employees happy at work, then they would probably give up on the corporate clowning and look at some much more downbeat interventions. A simple step would be allowing employees to work from home at least some of the time. One experimental study found employee satisfaction and productivity shot up when people were allowed to work from home.
A second simple step would be to stop interrupting workers with all sorts of pointless demands such as long emails, bureaucratic forms and compulsory happiness initiatives. A study by researchers at Harvard Business School found workers felt most satisfied on days at work when they were just able to consistently focus on an important piece of work and make some meaningful progress on it.
Finally, removing some of the endemic uncertainty that is built into many workplaces would be an excellent step towards making employees more happy at work. In my own work with Mats Alvesson we found that many organisational restructuring and change initiatives achieve very little apart from making employees miserable, building the reputations of a few managers, and fattening the coffers of consultants.
One way organisations really could make their employees happier, aside from slides and vodka shots? Think long and hard before pointless restructuring.
To learn more on workplace happiness and wellbeing contact Mental Toughness Partners.
View Andre Spicer’s article and comments https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/12/cult-compulsory-happiness-ruining-workplaces-office-fun