Complimentary coffee and massages, an on-site gym, and home-style workspaces. The world’s largest companies compete fiercely to make their employees as happy as possible. But how true is this approach?
The company you work for probably doesn’t have a «director of happiness» position. But some American companies already have a Chief Happiness Officer (CHO). The job of this top manager is to make employees happy—no more, no less. And such concern for the staff can be considered even touching, but common sense, you see, for some reason rebels against such a position in the staffing table.
The book The Happiness Industry has just been published in the UK.1 Its author, sociologist and economist William Davies, director of the Center for Political Economy Research at the University of London, said something that has long haunted many philosophers, psychologists and publicists. The craze for happiness and the pursuit of it is acquiring in modern society more and more strange, and sometimes even perverted features. Alas, positive psychology is partly to blame for this, the primitively understood ideas of which launched a kind of conveyor belt. He is now relentlessly churning out books that promise happiness to every reader, smartphone apps that measure happiness by heart rate, and other “happiness-generating” products. Being unhappy becomes almost bad manners. And the American Psychiatric Association has included in the latest version of the DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders) shyness and sadness as disorders to be treated.
- New Positive Psychology
William Davis sharply criticizes this obsession with happiness. And, as an economist, he pays special attention to the desire of large companies to make all their staff happy without fail. “The transition from the post-industrial age to the information age has changed the nature of work,” says Davis. “Psychological requirements are increasingly coming to the fore: such as intelligence and communication skills with customers or clients.” Accordingly, the heads of companies increasingly have to take on the functions of psychologists, taking care of maintaining the optimal state of mind of their subordinates.
However, this task is often understood too simplistic. Google Corporation was one of the first to set out to create an office from which employees would not want to leave. And the example was contagious. Today, large companies provide their employees with free meals, hiring the best chefs, massage therapists work in specially equipped rooms, gyms, swimming pools and tennis courts are being built in office areas. But William Davis sees these benefits as more of a manipulative technique that should tie the worker to the office more tightly — and thereby increase his productivity.. Top managers behave like short-sighted parents who believe that the only way to win the love of a child is to flood him with toys.
- Can you be happy?
According to Davis, you cannot make a person happy without asking about his desires. And these desires can hardly be reduced to spending your whole life without leaving the office. For most people, a clear boundary between work and the rest of life is very important. The same boundary that is actively blurred by the pursuit of big business for the happiness of its employees. Employees should be «more actively involved in the development of the company’s strategy, given more responsibility and asked about their aspirations,» writes Davies. The knowledge that you are trusted and can work autonomously is more valuable than any plush toys on your desks, massages at lunchtime and free beer on Fridays (some companies have such a practice). And no matter how beautiful your office is, the main advantage that it can provide you is the ability to be out of the office, William Davies is sure.
1 W. Davies «The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being» (Verso, 2015).