Workplace happiness has become big business. At companies ranging from arty startups like Etsy to corporate behemoths like Bank of America, bosses are using a host of tools, services and consultants to help improve their employees’ workplace satisfaction. On the surface, the trend is all upside: as businesses strive to reduce occupational stress and generally to make work more enjoyable, they are reaping rewards in terms of increased productivity, improved recruitment and retention rates, and lower healthcare costs.
What could possibly go wrong?
Plenty, as it turns out. As civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, and worker rights groups like the National Workrights Institute have noted for years, the emphasis on workplace happiness could lead to privacy concerns. After all, is it really management’s business whether their employees are happy? For that matter, if happiness is a metric for workplace effectiveness, what happens to workers who have a bad month or two? Could they be fired for being a downer at work?
These arguments have done little to dim corporate enthusiasm about the various surveys and devices that help bosses measure employee happiness. And, according to Ben Waber, CEO of Sociometric Solutions, these sorts of scenarios are unlikely to play out in the real world. Waber’s company provides sensor-equipped badges that track various indicators of employee happiness, such as face-to-face interactions and how often employees raise their voices. He claims that specific employee data, gathered either by surveys or by devices like his company’s “smart” employee badges, is kept confidential. Managers have access to aggregate data, which they can then use to design policies and programs that boost employee engagement.
Still, Waber acknowledges the potential for misconduct, and is advocating for tighter regulation of the emergent industry. “A lot of companies, even those that aren’t looking at employee satisfaction, do use digital data to identify individuals,” Waber says. “They’ll see features about an individual, and could technically look at an individual’s email.”
In some ways, Waber notes, the workplace happiness issue speaks to the larger concern of workplace privacy — and the need for legislation to protect employees. “Right now it’s a Wild West,” he says. “If there isn’t any regulation, eventually someone will screw up and do the wrong thing and at that point all the good that’s being done would go away. People doing this actually need to push for it to be regulated.”
A growing market for happiness
“We’ve been hearing much more from businesses and this is something we haven’t seen in the past,” says Peggy Kern, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center. “All of a sudden this idea that people who are happy tend to not take as many sick days, tend to be more productive, and so forth has more organizations beginning to pay attention.”
Kern says she has also been hearing more and more about app developers working on workplace-focused products that incorporate positive psychology research. For years, Gallup had a monopoly on the workplace happiness game, which they preferred to call “employee engagement.” Companies paid Gallup tens of thousands of dollars to use its Employee Engagement Survey and related consulting services.
As workplace happiness measurement has gained traction, more companies have entered the market. Now, apps such as Hppy promise to help companies measure and track employee happiness for a fraction of Gallup’s price. Even Gallup itself has rolled out a lower-cost version of its offering: to administer the 12-question, five-minute, Gallup Q12 Survey, the company charges roughly $15 per employee.
Balancing popularity and professionalism
One potential concern for the workplace happiness movement is professionalism. Kim Cameron, associate dean at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and co-founder of the university’s Center for Positive Organizations, says that, while the recent interest in his field is welcome, there is some concern that new and untrained consultants or apps could tarnish its reputation before it gets a real shot at transforming the way we work.
“I see scads of people who are now trumpeting themselves as an expert on this,” Cameron says. “That’s one of the scariest things for me about this becoming a trend. We hold several lecture series here and half the people there are consultants or practitioners trying to get the latest thing they can use to sell.”
That’s a double-edged sword for Cameron. While he wants to see more businesses embracing positive business strategies, he is concerned about what might happen if they integrate only a superficial understanding of the field. Having spent the last decade studying the correlation between positive business practices and quantifiable returns in industries ranging from healthcare to financial services to air travel, he is convinced that positive business is the way of the future – and he doesn’t want to see that future cut short by popularity.
Some shallow-end approaches, like bringing in a consultant for a one-day workshop or rolling out an app that measures and tracks employee happiness but doesn’t result in any sort of meaningful change from management, are fundamentally flawed, Cameron argues. When these approaches fail, as he anticipates they will, he worries that they may erode the credibility of the industry.
Another issue is a growing sentiment amongst employees that all of these initiatives aimed at improving their happiness amount to so much mind manipulation. “Some people feel like, ‘you’re trying to increase my happiness...because you want more out of me. It’s just a manipulation technique,’” says Cameron.
He notes that there is a continuum among companies adopting positive practices. “Some organizations are more virtuous and positive in their approach, others are less so,” he explains. Overall, however, he says, there is a clear connection between positivity and financial rewards. “When we measure financial return and positivity, across industries, we find a correlation of 0.86, which is almost perfect.”
In other words, Cameron explains, “Money follows positive, virtuous practices.”
Amy Westervelt is an Oakland, California-based freelance reporter who covers the environment, business and health.
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