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Schumpeter - Against happiness

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.