As a result of ‘Health Work Wellbeing’, a government led initiative to improve the health and well-being of working age people, there has been a burgeoning interest amongst employers around improving wellbeing at work.

Boots, the Ministry of Defence, HM Prison Service and E.ON are just a selection of the organisations who have been demonstrating their commitment to improving the health and wellbeing of their employees.

Aside from the intrinsic benefits for employees, high well-being at work has been demonstrated to greatly improve productivity, employee engagement and loyalty, as well reducing absenteeism.

Some of the Evidence….

The first evidence comes from David Maister in his book ‘Practice What You Preach’. He says ‘This is the first attempt to use hard data to prove the link between employee satisfaction and performance. I set out to test what I’ve been advocating for years. The bad news is I still believe it. The good news is that now I’ve got proof.’

In a study involving 139 professional service firms covering 5,500 people in 15 countries, he studied the correlation between employee attitudes and financial performance.

He found that financial performance – evaluated by margins, profit per employee and profit growth over a two year period – is directly linked to employee satisfaction.

’Generalised Investments’
Interestingly Charles Galunic and John Weeks at INSEAD (Financial Times Mastering People Management Series) have found similar results. Their evidence suggests that when companies undertake what they call ’generalised investments’ in developing people, for example leadership and personal development, then employee commitment and loyalty can be increased.

In a study with insurance agents they found that ‘generalised investments’ including management development and technology training produced greater satisfaction and profitability.

However, they also noted that ‘generalised investments’ are something of a two edged sword – they increase loyalty and commitment but also increase mobility.

This link between ‘generalised investment’ and commitment is strengthened by Linda Bilmes at Harvard and her book ‘The People Factor’. She identifies ‘people factor’ criteria and the ones most likely to increase satisfaction are: allowing people to influence decisions that affect their working lives; training; and performance linked pay.

She quotes a study of 2,000 US and German companies, the overall levels of satisfaction were 34% of US workers and 35% of German workers. However, among workers in companies that offered people-factor benefits, job satisfaction was much higher – 58% of US and 63% of German workers.

However, she found a huge gap between what companies thought they provided and what workers believed they received. For example, 71% of respondents listed ‘I am able to influence decisions that affect me’ as ‘very important’ but only 34% of employees agreed they could do it.

Empowered Employees
Dinah Daniels from The CEO Refresher says: ‘The key to creating this type of stable, productive workplace is to put employees in charge of their own success. Employees who are empowered to manage their own growth and achievement on the job tend to be more self-satisfied, more cooperative, and more pro-active in trouble-shooting and solving problems. Ultimately, they are more invested in contributing to the organization’s efficiency and bottom line because they know they have the power to affect change within the organization and to promote and control their own career growth.’

According to further research, “experts” and news reports, production is directly related to how happy employees are. How do you measure happiness? How do you link happy people and profit? Several companies have attempted to do this.

Sears has proven that for every 5% increase in “employee motivation,” the company profits pushed up by half a percentage point. Unfortunately, the article from the Customer Service Advantage newsletter did not explain how Sears defined “employee motivation.” A study by Towers Perrin, a global management consulting firm, showed that a lower employee turnover rate helps a company keep customers. The study showed that increasing employee retention by 2% could increase business by as much as 6%.

So if employee happiness directly affects production and performance. How can you increase employee happiness, keep employees and increase productivity?

What is Happiness?
First lets explore what we mean by happiness as it plays such a large part in our lives and work and is often misunderstood.

We use words like happiness, pleasure, fun, laughter, enjoyment, satisfaction, and excitement as if they are interchangeable. We use each or any of them to create a general image of people having a good time; implying they all mean about the same.

However, happiness is quite different. Fun, pleasure, satisfaction and excitement all turn on and off but happiness does not, it stays with us regardless of the emotion being experienced. Happiness is a condition of my being – it stays with me while I am experiencing emotions.

The Benefits of Happiness
When you have greater control of your happiness:

• You feel good. You feel joy, cheer, peace and contentment
• You are pleased with who you are and what you do
• People enjoy being around you
• You have higher self esteem
• Your life is improved physically
• You can more easily solve any problems that may arise
• You have additional energy
• Your life is improved in every way
• You will have the best life imaginable – a happy one!

On the other hand, despair or unhappiness:

• Makes you feel anger, loneliness and resentment
• Stops you from solving your problems
• Often creates new problems
• Limits friendships with other people
• Has no positive benefits
• Will eventually destroy your life

For organisations, it appears that staff are more productive when they feel they are in greater control of their lives and when the company is investing in their development. The happiness that results leads to greater self leadership, self confidence, self responsibility which in turn result in:

• less blaming,
• less stress,
• better internal relationships,
• increased creativity,
• greater trust,
• greater confidence and maturity in dealing with customers.

The Conspiracies of Happiness
Often we collude to maintain many conspiracies about happiness that have us believe that happiness comes from outside of us. We are promised instant happiness for simply buying the right toothpaste or drinking the right beer. We know from our own experience that more material things do not bring us happiness. We remember how quickly the ‘happiness’ of a new job, pay rise, new house or car, international holiday etc wears off. Often leaving us feeling empty and needing something ‘bigger and better’.

Here are some common happiness conspiracies:

• If only I had more money I’d be happy
• If only I was more famous I’d be happy
• If only I could find the right person to marry I’d be happy
• If only I had more friends I’d be happy
• If only I wasn’t physically disabled I’d be happy
• If only someone close to me hadn’t died I’d be happy
• If only the world was a better place, then I’d be happy

Definitions of Happiness
We would say we are in a state of happiness when our mind is at peace. Importantly, happiness comes from the inside out and not the outside in.

The modern world needs to measure everything and a mind at peace is a difficult challenge for researchers to deal with.

The closest they have come in measuring it is Life Satisfaction or the extent to which I am satisfied with my life. A great deal of interest and research is going into this area. For example the Strategy Unit of the Cabinet Office has produced a report titled “Life Satisfaction: the state of knowledge and implications for government”

However, as the underlying belief is that happiness comes from outside of us, research into Life Satisfaction looks into issues such as health, employment, income etc as measures of satisfaction. While this might be valid, it is not happiness in the sense that we understand it because life satisfaction comes from outside of us, not inside.

Taking Control of Happiness
If we accept that happiness comes from the inside out, then it is possible for us to take control of our happiness. Learning to take control of our happiness is an immensely valuable capability for a person and at the same time, as we have seen, can result in great benefits for the organisation.

Imagine how the performance of you organisation would improve if more of your staff were taking control of their happiness; were more self-confident, self-leading and self-responsible.

The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back

Behavior grows worse before it grows better

The easy way out usually leads back in

The cure can be worse than the disease

Faster is slower

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space

Small changes can produce big results–but the areas of highest leverage are the least obvious

from The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

Now, any vision worthy of the name springs from deep and complex places, where the cognitive, the emotional and the spiritual merge into the intuitive to create something inspirational and potentially transformative.

Such visions are often shared and become zeitgeist, which is not to say they are universally welcomed or understood.

The implementation of the vision must pay attention to the complexity and keep the big idea as the guiding star. Then we can see whether the vision was realistic in the time and place it landed, or merely plausible, but ultimately deluded.

When visions are implemented through reductionist processes, they generally fail, but it is not always clear whether the vision was deluded or the process mangled it.

To illustrate the point: back in the days when New Labour had lots of New Ideas and some Very Clever People, making policy and influencing the lives of public servants all over the land…………………………………

……..the core ideas were that too much public money was being spent on treating the symptoms of societal problems and that programmes were working in silos, whilst  Society was creaking at the seams, despite growing economic wealth.

Note the capital S in Society, because in 1997 we had more or less realised that there was such a thing as Society, after two decades of social policy built on the notion that there was not and that it was all about individuals and their families.

So, out of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit and the Social Exclusion Unit, flooded a plethora of great ideas about Partnerships and joined up thinking.

So far, so plausible.

Now, the implications of all this visionary activity, for those charged with its implementation, were a menacing mixture of opportunity and threat. Whilst such a cocktail is attractive to entrepreneurs, both private and social, the public sector is not the natural habitat of risk takers.

Meanwhile, at community level, where the realities of societal failure are most keenly felt, social activists were coming up with radical and commonsense projects to address the problems in a joined up way. These found funding from the Lottery or various Trusts, but rarely from reconfigured mainstream budgets, which might be expected from the rhetoric…….

As the various big ideas get translated into strategies and passed down the chain to government offices, Regional Development Agencies, Local Authorities, Primary Care Trusts and so on, each level gets to work to create some meaning from its point of view, some extra work for its agency, along with as many of the extra resources it can capture and plays the game of Partnership that is one of the requirements of Government. I once heard public sector partnerships described as “ Different agencies, getting together in a spirit of mutual loathing in pursuit of external funding” and lots of people will recognise some truth in that cruel observation.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned community activists may be rash enough to turn up to a Partnership meeting, having heard warm words about 3^rd Sector involvement. Now, since there is implied power shifting in all this stuff, the management of the Partnership is key. The norm was/is for major partners to take control and make sure nothing much happens by controlling agendas and minutes, talking interminably, albeit plausibly and producing “Action Plans”, which produce little action but do manage to leave the power and the money in the usual places. After a while the activists get on with the action on the ground, with whatever resources they can muster, hitting many of the outcomes the Partnership claim to want to achieve, yet still without commensurate reconfigured mainstream budgets.

How can this be?

Well, the fatal flaw is the reliance on reductionist processes and the deluded belief that a thing is nothing more than the sum of its parts – which may hold for a machine but certainly does not for human beings. The power nexus is such that the vision is subsumed by the process and as long as change is driven by process, then nothing much changes……………..not least because process folks hold a lot of power without much accountability and, as Machiavelli said a while back : “When a new system of government is introduced, those who make their living from the old system, will oppose it.” We all know some great exceptions to this rule, but that does not change the rule………….

What can we do?

The problem for folks who think they can hold back change is that change happens anyway, so standing still means going backwards. Eventually all that becomes so clear that the change and realignment just becomes the new commonsense and on we go. ……. Though not always smoothly and incrementally…………………………

New Tories anyone?

………………which is at the same time extremely complex and very simple.

And this is an example of one of the foundations of happiness: despite what you might have been told by parents or teachers, it is indeed possible to hold contradictory things true, simultaneously.

This insight is very liberating. After all, in a world full of contradictions, it is much healthier for our minds to embrace their possibilities and find a balance.

There seem to be certain fundamental foundations for Happiness.

Getting good genes and having good nurture in infancy are not in our control, so if we got a poor deal from the start, we will have to do some work to repair the damage.

Next, a pervasive belief in our culture, that life should be fair is the basis for a lot of unhappiness and mental illness, since, at some time in our lives, we will come upon an event which is so “Not Fair”, that our world is in turmoil. One of our cultural responses to “Not Fair” is to seek someone to blame, even if it is not really anyone’s fault. So, blame others and move towards paranoia or blame self and get depressed! All this causes pain, we try to dull the pain with alcohol, drugs and such like and so it goes on………..

Once we accept that life is not fair, it’s just life, then we are freed from the need to blame.

Extreme poverty causes unhappiness, though research shows that “enough” is the key and “more” does not significantly add to Happiness.

Learning to live simply, decreases the need for more and more money and is a great strategy for feeling rich, whilst avoiding undue stress……………………..

Simple living includes eating simple food, taking plenty of walks in Nature and fostering friendship by being kind to others (whilst not forgetting to be kind to oneself!)

So, there’s my starter for a simple approach to Happiness.

And don’t expect to find Happiness by looking for it – it is elusive and just appears as you get on with living your authentic life.