In pursuit of happiness

A  recent Forbes article spoke about the distaste for the term ‘employee happiness’ among HR consultants. They typically prefer the term  ‘employee engagement’. The reason behind this preference is that  happiness is typically defined by its hedonistic nature, driven by an individual’s personal pleasures. Hence, even a lazy, underworked  employee could be happy, but would he be truly engaged? Does measuring  his sense of happiness tell the organisation anything about how  he would perform?

However,  there is a second definition of happiness that is termed as “eudaimonic” which focuses on meaning and self-realisation and defines  happiness in terms of the meaning that individuals derive out of their lives due to what they can achieve. A smaller minority in the consulting  world apply this definition of happiness and propound the philosophy that employee happiness, as Jeff DeWolf expressed, is the ‘oil in the gears of performance’. Given, these two differing views on employee  engagement, where does the answer lie? As always in situations such as this, it lies somewhere in the middle. While giving employees free food  or a gym at work could lead to satisfying their hedonistic needs, their  eudaimonic side of happiness can be satisfied only by providing them  with an environment for carrying out meaningful work. Research has shown  that when pursuing personal goals, feeling happy may be disconnected from finding meaning in their work. Thus, rather than focusing on the  commonalities between these two definitions, organisations must look to  identify employee happiness across both these dimensions.

What  can then organisations do to understand what their employees truly  want? Should they pursue the satisfaction of the hedonistic or  eudaimonic sides of happiness? If they need to satisfy both, how can  they do it? The answer to these lies in a couple of areas: a)  identifying employee experience on an ongoing basis and truly  understanding the issues employees face in their day-to-day working  environment. As I have argued earlier, the periodic, once in a blue-moon  engagement surveys, are passé in  this day and age and are postmortems that provide information about  what happened, but much after the fact. In contrast, feedback systems enable managers and organisations to have fingers on the pulse of their employees and  quickly identify hotspots of trouble or discontent as they arise. b) querying employees on not just their needs from a hedonistic  perspective, but also understanding what makes employees tick? What  enables them to be satisfied at work? The questions that organisations  pose to employees and the feedback that they try to elicit must take both these aspects of happiness into account.

In  summary, while employee engagement might be a term that is currently in  favor, organisations would do well to focus on both the aspects that  lead to the overall happiness as an employee.

The writer is founder and CEO of HR analytics start-up, Factorial Analytical Sciences