Can well-being be measured? About happiness management

Shortly after the great crisis of 2008, it seemed that the world was finally beginning to draw some conclusions. Happiness, including the happiness of workers, began to emerge as an important topic, worth bringing to light and key to rebuilding what was destroyed as a result of the shock of bursting artificially inflated bubbles.

The hope was increased by the fact that neuroscience was developing more and more vigorously and quickly, and we were gaining more and more knowledge about how our brain works and how we can influence it. It seemed that this was an excellent, moreover based on the scientific method, chance to launch the "happiness and well-being" project in full.

So how did it happen that fifteen years later, in 2023, much more is said about a new wave of addictions and something called the "loneliness epidemic", and not about linearly increasing indicators of individual and social happiness? To try to look at this more closely, we need to look a little behind the curtain of this turn towards "managing good mood".

Why should everyone be happy?

This seemingly obvious question is actually an opportunity for us to critically examine the mechanisms and stories that have been triggered in connection with the "happiness project". Business-oriented practices of so-called well-being are, as we will see in a moment, a rather specific response to a problem that companies and large corporations are increasingly facing.

People get sick, burn out professionally, fall into depression and miss a large number of working days, and the current motivational methods work in a very limited way and do not solve the problem of employee absence. At least outside of Poland. There are also various laws that to some extent protect working people from pressure, coercion and overwork. Again, at least outside of Poland.

There is also a growing awareness that there is no long-term benefit from an unsatisfied and exhausted employee, and constant retraining of new people associated with rotation in positions increases costs on many levels of the company's operation. Therefore, there was a burning need to create tools that would make working people feel better. Heck, they might even need to be happy. Research confirmed that satisfied people who feel well-being function better and perform their duties well.

In this way, a new tool for accumulating efforts at work appeared: happiness management.

Has the best time in the history of human work approach begun? 

It seems that, in principle, yes. Companies either offer their employees mindfulness, meditation, stress reduction, etc. activities, or they finance such courses and workshops if the employee finds them outside the professional space. A healthy lifestyle is promoted and people are encouraged to take care of their own relaxation and rest. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that good work is a place where people feel happy and satisfied. A recipe for success? In principle, yes, the question is: for whom?

I do not intend to prove here that there was some conspiracy, and employees did not gain and do not gain anything from it. It would be disastrous to proverbially throw the baby out with the bathwater. People really started to pay more attention to how they feel at work, which may bring very interesting and potentially equally positive effects in the future.

The question worth pondering, however, is: what is the purpose of this happy employee for companies and how is this happiness defined and by whom.

As for the first part of the question, the answer is quite simple and completely understandable from the perspective of the philosophy of the company's operation: employees are supposed to be happy to be more useful at work, to be more effective, to be less sick, and thus - to fulfill their duties in full time. And here we move on to the second part of the question. If we try to answer it, I will risk the thesis that the definition of happiness is perhaps jointly established by the company and the employee, but its boundaries are strictly controlled by the employer.

This means that the employee is supposed to be happy as long as it allows him to be effective and accumulating. So it may mean, for example, that if a given person decides that they are happier when they work much less, or when they can solve problems together with others or, for example, with the help of trade unions, then their sense of well-being does not correlate with the expectations that the company has towards them.

Is this supposed to be the problem?

Yes. There are several long-term problems here that are significant and extensively written about by William Davies, a cultural theorist in his recently published book in Poland, "The Happiness Industry".

Firstly: the trend to standardize the sense of happiness through numbers, learned formulas and charts, announced as a great victory of science (I don't know if you know, but a happiness scale and a formula for happiness have been created) leads to a situation that is quite controversial for many scientists. It is suggested in it that the concept of "well-being" can be objectified, and therefore, it is enough to perform appropriate actions on one's own mind and body to achieve this state.

It sounds great, but there are concerns that this kind of approach will lead to what has happened before: seemingly objectifying some area of discussion, incidentally making it more difficult to discuss it. So instead of real science, there emerged a scientism clearly supported by the powerful - because it is in their best interest. This is the belief that with numbers and scientific jargon, you can once and for all end the discussion about whether something is true or not. Don't get me wrong. There are many areas of science where such precision is extremely important and necessary, but there is an open question whether we really need a medicalized definition of what happiness is for us.

Secondly: this objectification still focuses heavily on the individual perception of people and does not place them well enough in the system in which they live and function. Well-being probably increases the desire to take care of oneself and one's well-being, but often does so at the expense of caring for the dimension beyond the personal.

I'll try to explain this even better. Our well-being and the work of our brain are not only influenced by relaxation, meditation, etc. It is also influenced by the work atmosphere, the communication culture of a given place, ways of solving or avoiding difficult and conflict situations, the possibility of joining communities that really protect us from abuse and, for example, mobbing, and can fight for our salaries and other rights. In short, "happiness" is a very specific state and it doesn't seem to me (and not only to me) that it's a good idea for someone to determine in an apparently objective way whether my subjective feelings, which I have a right to, are justified or not.

Thirdly: the well-being industry has dangerous and somewhat inherent (because it is a business) tendencies to become another painkiller, which admittedly brings temporary relief, but in this way also disrupts signals indicating the need for a systemic approach to why and how we work and (as pointed out by, among others, the Internacja Collective) may be the cause of the emergence of further potentially addictive mechanisms. Other such means are what I allow myself to call a business variation on Buddhism (tempting, among other things, with a very simplified concept of the world as an illusion) and so-called corporate stoicism, which attracts many with an equally simplified vision of "detachment from everything", which gives a rather illusory hope of coping with the state of terror resulting from functioning in a deregulated and uncertain professional and personal world.

So you're saying it's trash?

No. In my work, I pay a lot of attention not to present unnecessarily simplified conclusions. Our minds, tired from the daily rush, often crave this, but it can be a trap. Therefore, I believe that all efforts that lead to making our workplaces more friendly, open to dialogue and not leading us to burnout through constant hard work, rather than meaningful work, are very much needed and should be welcomed with hope. However, hope is most useful when we do not lose the necessary vigilance to watch whether behind beautiful concepts and strategies there is sometimes an attempt to consolidate the status quo, or changes that may ultimately worsen, rather than improve our overall condition.

Therefore, it is worth using various relaxation, loosening or other mindfulness tools that are proposed to us. The only thing worth remembering is not to let them become another way of accumulating our productivity and not to try to suggest to us that they definitely know better (because they have data and charts behind them) how to OBJECTIVELY AND SCIENTIFICALLY make us happy. I hope, however, that this will still be our personal and communal choice based on discussions, disputes, cooperation and testing of various tools to improve well-being.