International Day of Happiness is coming and I have been pondering over the question on, 'what brings happiness?'. A highly subjective question considering that, getting the password right at the last attempt of losing a forgotten email account also brings a spontaneous smile and a sense of achievement. Not to mention, words of appreciation at home or work and recognition of efforts are key factors that bring happiness and result in an automatic boost in efforts. Have you experienced that?
We have all heard of the Carrot and Stick Approach to motivating employees. The right expression being, Carrot for Reward and Stick for Non-Compliance implying that, 'Stick' is not an approach by itself but a set of consequences you make employees aware of. However, a lot of times it gets misunderstood whereby Stick is used as an approach to extract delivery and this often results in retaliating employees, labor problems and ultimate drop in productivity. Basically, employees are not happy and they show it at work.
That concludes, productivity implies more Carrots or in other words keeping people happy. While awards, appreciations and promotions are direct recognition of efforts, to have consistent productivity, organisations should keep their employees Happy. Hence, the importance of this goes beyond a robust appraisal system and fridge benefits under employee welfare initiates.
How many organisation measure their 'Employee Happiness Index'? as first step to ensuring a happy work place. Its time they see because, the world sees Happiness Measure to be critical.
Bhutan measure its country progress not by Gross Domestic Product but by Gross National Happiness and the country today stands out to be a Climate Change Agent when Paris still tries to keep the collaborative efforts of all participating countries to the Change Initiative. OECD had their first meeting in 2012 to measure World Happiness Index by country and since then there has been five World Happiness Reports rating 155 countries. The importance of this measure is more and more understood by countries as evident from, UAE taking the Happiness Initiative over an entire year in 2017.
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| An Instance on how the World Measures |
There are some interesting takeaways on how the subject has evolved since 2012 to date in measuring world happiness and that they can/should be extended to organisational level.
The OECD (2013, p.10) Guidelines on Measuring of Subjective Well-being says,
Well-being is "Good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that people make of their lives and the affective reactions of people to their experiences." and identifies this by three major elements:
1.Life evaluation —a reflective assessment on a person’s life or some specific aspect of it.
2.Affect —a person’s feelings or emotional states, typically measured with reference to a particular point in time.
3.Eudaimonia —a sense of meaning and purpose in life, or good psychological functioning.”
They have attempted to measure this by adopting 'Well Being Survey' where questions are posted to the population and data are collected even at daily tracking level to summarise happiness. The methodology applied being survey questions rated over a 0-10 rating scale to measure aspects like, life evaluation covering, happiness, anger and depression, health aspects, aspirations, how people see themselves today and 5 years from thereon.
When countries economic progress depends on productivity which has to come from contribution by people, it is the organisations where 'Happiness' has to first emerge. Food for thought: I conclude this blog asking, How many organisations are going to measure the Happiness Index on the coming International Day of Happiness 20 March 2018.
