WORKPLACE SPECIAL....................Should we aspire to be happy at work?

Should we aspire to be happy  at work?   It still hasn't been shown that happy workers are necessarily more productive For a number of years now, I have dedicated my final class in the Human Capital Management course to the topic of happiness in the workplace. It is always  interesting to see how my students, who are all experienced managers, discuss the issue, with some highly skeptical, and others curious. Happy at work? Since when? Why? My attention is particularly called to the contrast between  the reluctancy of Catholic societies and the view of Protestant cultures, which  tend to see work as something that can make a positive contribution to our lives,  while providing us with the means to improve them. Overall, most people  believe that we aspire to be happy in other areas of our lives, but not at work;  at best, it is a necessary means to improve our wellbeing, but hardly a source of happiness in itself. Scientific insight into the nature of our spiritual wellbeing comes in the form  of the recently published UN Happiness World Report 2015, based on solid interdisciplinary work led by a team of prestigious economists. The report  provides a well-rounded approach to the topic, from economic, educational,  psychological, and even neuroscience perspectives. The report shows that  perceptions of happiness depend on six main factors. Three are purely macroeconomic: financial wellbeing, healthy life expectancy, and the level of corruption in the country under study. At the individual level, social factors such  as the number of friends, family support or social groups, play a key role in measuring how happy we are, along with free dom of choice and solidarity with  the rest of society. Can we transfer any of these factors to the world of work? At least two of them  can, based on the results of previous studies. Freedom to make decisions about  how best to carry out one's job, along with the relationship with our workmates are  once again at the top of the list, and so should be the mission of managers and the job of human resources. Give your team some room to maneuver  (in other words, trust them), and make sure that the atmosphere at work is  pleasant. At first glance they may not seem like difficult objectives, but they most definitely are. In the first place, giving employees greater autonomy is a radical shift away From traditional management practices, which are based on control and hierarchies. Since the 1960s, organisations have learned to obey their superiors, with only labor unions prepared  to challenge authority.As we move up the management ladder, we exercise control over others with varying degrees of elegance or good manners. Many companies have their own urban myths about the time such and such  took the initiative, with disastrous results, all of which are designed to reinforce  the idea that “we don't come here to think“. At the same time, contemplated as social systems, organisations are quite artificial. Rarely are we able to pick  and choose our colleagues (let alone our bosses), as would be the case with  other organisations or groups. Equally, what companies do is not necessarily  of interest to all concerned, and competition doesn't help matters. Finally, despite a long tradition of research into the subject, it still hasn't been shown that happy workers are necessar ily more productive, which has been used by companies as a reason for not investing in ways to cheer up their employees. In conclusion, there is no reason to assume that work is going to make us any happier than we are already, although, given the amount of time and energy  we spend in the activity, it's a shame it doesn't. By Cristina Simon The Author is a faculty of IE Business School, Spain.

CDET 4SEP15