Are you happy? Your boss wants to know

Garry Ridge, who runs the chemical company WD-40, has a leadership style guided by two sources — Aristotle and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

“Pleasure in work puts perfection in work,” Ridge said first, quoting the Greek philosopher.

Then he picked up a recent memo from BlackRock. “Companies that built strong bonds with their employees had lower levels of turnover and higher returns during the pandemic,” Ridge read aloud.

This he punctuated with his own comment: “Well, duh!”

WD-40, which comes in a blue and yellow tin familiar to many homes that had squeaky doors, is a secret formula cleaner that can loosen a rusty screw, remove crayons from the wall, get rid of bugs stuck to the car, and remove rust from bicycle chains.

Ridge likes to remind the nearly 600 employees at his 17 offices how useful their work is. But he also believes some are inspired by the company’s unorthodox culture. WD-40 has no managers, only trainers. Workers can receive “Mother Teresa” awards for donating their “time, talents and treasures” to the community. They can remind their colleagues during meetings to create “lasting positive memories” together.

Long before the pandemic, many of them were wary of companies that advertised themselves as dedicated to keeping employees happy. There were the tech companies whose campus-style offices had ball pits and slides. There were offices with lunch buffets and chilled rosé wine. A growing number of employers measured employee happiness with surveys, often hiring consultants to create fun in the workplace.

To some people, the pursuit of happiness at work — and the associated price tag, like an $18,000 program for managers on how to lead happy teams — might seem like a corporate alchemy that tries to turn feelings into productivity. It may seem like an incentive to smile and put aside less convenient demands for bosses, like remote work or pay raises.

Those criticisms have taken on new urgency as workers and employers discuss plans to return to the office in what economists continue to characterize as a tight labor market. Some workers say they prefer flexibility, or inflation-adjusted raises, to corporate gimmicks like a Lizzo gig for Google employees and beer tasting at Microsoft.

“It’s the ‘I’m not going to help you set your time in advance in a way that will help you, but here’s a discount code,'” said Jessica Martinez, 46, program director at a global foundation that has long maintained Wednesdays. -Wine Fairs and is now handing out gifts back to the office, like bottled water.

“People are trying to get everything back to ‘normal,’ but the truth is, normal was terrible for some people,” she said. “Why not give them what they really want?”

In some workplaces, “happiness” can mean letting employees choose their own supervisors. It can mean getting rid of performance reviews. It also usually means measuring levels of happiness – although not everyone agrees on what “happiness” means. Take those by the Dalai Lama, Dale Carnegie, and Barbara Ehrenreich, for example.

In recent years, economists and behavioral psychologists have shown employers that there is a commercial thesis to their fixation on positivity. A study published in the Journal of Labor Economics found that people who received chocolates and comedy videos — common happiness-generating items — were 12% more productive than a group that didn’t receive gifts. Another study by the Journal of Financial Economics showed that companies that appear on the list of the top 100 workplaces have higher shareholder returns than their peers.

“There’s evidence that we’ve misunderstood the causal arrow of happiness,” said Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist who teaches a popular course on happiness at Yale University. “You think, ‘I’m feeling productive at work and things are going well at work, so I’m happy.’ But the evidence seems to suggest that the other arrow is there too, that happiness can actually affect your job performance.”

The idea that companies should care about happiness came with the rise of non-manual jobs, said Alex Edmans, a professor of finance at the London Business School. As the productivity of some jobs became more difficult to measure — switching to the quality and quantity of ideas, not the number of pins made or caps screwed onto toothpaste tubes — managers decided they should make their employees feel motivated. Compensation was important, but so was how people felt on the job.

But many see a risk for workers in believing their employers are cultivating an emotional relationship with them, when in reality the relationship is about money.

“Your boss isn’t there to make you happy,” said Sarah Jaffe, author of “Work Won’t Love You Back.” “No matter how much they say they’re focused on happiness, they’re focused on profits.”

“Someone is getting paid to bring this exciting new culture of happiness into the workplace,” added Jaffe. “I’d like to know how much my boss is spending.”

British consultancy Happy Ltd. calls the program he administers for senior leaders the Happy MBA. The cost is approximately US$18,000 (R$90,000), and participants receive a certificate, not an actual degree, through the Institute of Leadership and Management. At a recent session, managers from companies and nonprofits exchanged tips that included letting employees choose their supervisors.

Woohoo, a Danish company that helps create happiness surveys, and its software partner Heartcount typically charge companies about $4 per employee per month, plus consulting fees that Woohoo founder Alexander Kjerulf does not. I wanted to inform you because they vary a lot.

Woohoo and Heartcount consult with psychologists and statisticians to ensure that their assessments focus on people’s emotional rather than logical responses to their work. Weekly surveys, sent via email on Fridays, include questions such as: Are you proud of the work you do? Have you been praised lately for the excellent work you’ve done? Then Woohoo helps employers interpret the data.

This data, however, raises its own set of more tricky questions than those typically covered by an online survey. What does it really mean to be happy?

Kjerulf defines it as the extent to which people experience positive emotions at work, or while thinking about work during their personal time. WD-40 leaders understand that this includes combining meaningful work with a sense of belonging.

Another workplace assessment company, Culture Amp, which serves around 4,500 companies, doesn’t believe in measuring happiness, preferring metrics like engagement and well-being. Its leaders see happiness as something unstable that differs from person to person and is far beyond the employer’s control.

“I admire the sentiment behind it, but measuring it gets tricky,” said Myra Cannon, director of people science at Culture Amp. “Happiness is fleeting.”

One of the companies Woohoo has supported is Vega, a software developer in Serbia. It publishes a monthly newsletter called Happiness Central, part of its intention to “over-communicate our achievements”. In the “meme wars” that take place twice a year, employees are rewarded for creating memes that “mock people in C-level positions” at the company. The CEO sometimes surprises everyone who comes through the door with fruit salad.

“If people have better relationships with each other, especially within teams, we can expect better performance,” said Vega CEO and co-founder Sasa Popovic. “We can expect people to be more engaged and, in the end, our customers receive better service and are happier with our work.”

But these office relationships don’t pay workers’ bills, a criticism that has grown as happiness becomes a common topic in boardrooms.

“In the beginning, a lot of startups gave people great benefits and overworked their employees, and they tried to cover that up by eating snacks in the kitchen,” said Martinez, the foundation’s director. But she noted that labor shortages are giving more workers the opportunity to say they will not tolerate what they used to do.

“The vacancies are not being filled because you treated people badly,” she said.

The flexibility of working from home has made some workers more comfortable telling employers what really makes them happy — the freedom to spend more time with family, not free lunches at the office.

“Eating cereal in the break room doesn’t make up for not being able to pick up your kids from school,” said Anna King, 60, a mother who works at an energy company in Portland, Oregon. “The real concerns are, do your employees feel part of the team — not because they’re playing ping pong together, but because they’re meeting real goals and have decent work hours?”

While millions of employees make bold demands of their bosses, especially around permanent flexibility, some say the focus on happiness is distracting. After all, the “Mother Teresa” awards don’t improve conditions for workers — and, in fact, may encourage them to devote more hours to the corporate community, at the expense of their personal lives.

“I don’t think things like meditation or whatever else employers are doing to increase well-being are bad initiatives,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a group of progressive thinkers. “But they are no substitute for decent wages, decent benefits, healthy hours.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves