💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 6200.gmi captured on 2021-12-05 at 23:47:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Companies that try to turn happiness into a management tool are overstepping
the mark
Sep 24th 2016
LORD Percy of Newcastle, Britain s minister of education in 1924-29, was no fan
of the fad for happy-clappy progressive education that spread among the
country s schools on his watch. He declared that it was all nonsense: a child
ought to be brought up to expect unhappiness. This columnist feels the same
suspicion of the fashion for happy-clappy progressive management theory that is
rushing through the world s companies and even some governments.
The leading miscreant is Zappos, an online shoe shop. The firm expects its
staff to be in a state of barely controlled delirium when they sell shoes. Pret
A Manger, a British food chain, specialises in bubbly good humour as well as
sandwiches. Air stewards are trained to sound mellifluous but those at Virgin
Atlantic seem on the verge of breaking out into a song-and-dance routine.
Google until recently had an in-house jolly good fellow to spread mindfulness
and empathy.
A weird assortment of gurus and consultancies is pushing the cult of happiness.
Shawn Achor, who has taught at Harvard University, now makes a living teaching
big companies around the world how to turn contentment into a source of
competitive advantage. One of his rules is to create happiness hygiene . Just
as we brush our teeth every day, goes his theory, we should think positive
thoughts and write positive e-mails.
Zappos is so happy with its work on joy that it has spun off a consultancy
called Delivering Happiness. It has a chief happiness officer (CHO), a global
happiness navigator, a happiness hustler, a happiness alchemist and, for
philosophically minded customers, a happiness owl. Plasticity Labs, a
technology firm which grew out of an earlier startup called the Smile Epidemic,
says it is committed to supporting a billion people on their path to happiness
in both their personal and professional lives.
The trend is not confined to the private sector. Several governments, including
those of America, Britain, France and Australia, now publish for the benefit of
their citizens regular reports on levels of national well-being. Bhutan has
long measured its gross national happiness, and the United Arab Emirates boasts
a brand-new Ministry of Happiness.
Businesspeople have long known there is money to be made in the field. Dale
Carnegie, a leadership guru, said the best way to win friends and influence
people was to seem upbeat. Disneyland is still the happiest place on Earth .
American firms regularly bid their customers to have a nice day . One of the
sharpest books published on the phenomenon is The Managed Heart from 1983, in
which Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California,
Berkeley, noted that many employers demanded emotional labour from workers in
the form of smiles and other expressions of positive emotion . Firms are keen
to extract still more happiness from their employees as the service sector
plays an ever greater role in the economy. Run-of-the-mill service firms are
fighting for their lives against discounters. As customers, most people prefer
their service with a smile rather than a snarl.
Some firms are trying to create some wellbeing, too, showering their employees
with mindfulness courses, yoga lessons and anything else that proves that
managers are interested in the whole person . Only happy fools would take that
at face value. Management theorists note that a big threat to corporate
performance is widespread disengagement among workers. Happy people are more
engaged and productive, say psychologists. Gallup claimed in 2013 that the
unhappiness of employees costs the American economy $500 billion a year in
lost productivity.
One problem with tracking happiness is that it is such a vague metric: it is
difficult to prove or disprove Gallup s numbers since it is not entirely clear
what is being measured. Companies would be much better off forgetting
wishy-washy goals like encouraging contentment. They should concentrate on
eliminating specific annoyances, such as time-wasting meetings and pointless
memos. Instead, they are likely to develop ever more sophisticated ways of
measuring the emotional state of their employees. Academics are already busy
creating smartphone apps that help people keep track of their moods, such as
Track Your Happiness and Moodscope. It may not be long before human-resource
departments start measuring workplace euphoria via apps, cameras and voice
recorders.
Be miserable. It ll make you feel better
The idea of companies employing jolly good fellows and happiness alchemists
may be cringe-making, but is there anything else really wrong with it? Various
academic studies suggest that emotional labour can bring significant costs.
The more employees are obliged to fix their faces with a rictus smile or
express joy at a customer s choice of shoes, the more likely they are to suffer
problems of burnout. And the contradiction between companies demanding more
displays of contentment from workers, even as they put them on miserably
short-term contracts and turn them into self-employed partners , is becoming
more stark.
But the biggest problem with the cult of happiness is that it is an
unacceptable invasion of individual liberty. Many companies are already
overstepping the mark. A large American health-care provider, Ochsner Health
System, introduced a rule that workers must make eye contact and smile whenever
they walk within ten feet of another person in the hospital. Pret A Manger
sends in mystery shoppers to visit every outlet regularly to see if they are
greeted with the requisite degree of joy. Pass the test and the entire staff
gets a bonus a powerful incentive for workers to turn themselves into happiness
police. Companies have a right to ask their employees to be polite when they
deal with members of the public. They do not have a right to try to regulate
their workers psychological states and turn happiness into an instrument of
corporate control.