It’s important for leaders to lend primacy to the people dimension, says Dr NS Rajan
Happiness is to employees what profit is to enterprise. Organisations have learnt to go beyond employee satisfaction to measuring employee engagement. I believe that the time has come to explore hitherto unexplored domains, and to go beyond employee engagement. Engagement at work is measured. Happiness at work is felt. Great leaders and progressive enterprises, in their own interest, would now seek to unravel the contours of what makes people happy at work. Perhaps, as Immanuel Kant suggested, “Happiness is an ideal not of reason but of imagination’. Are we happy at workIJ
Man’s quest for the ever elusive happiness has ranged from the simple to the sublime over time. The brilliant satire Brave New World penned by Aldous Huxley in 1931 depicts a make-believe England from which unhappiness has been completely eliminated. The conditioned citizens of this make-believe world, set in contemporary 20th century, are subject to chilling attempts to engineer an artificial paradise. They declare that each citizen must imbibe the utopian wonder drug Soma for a chemically induced state of wellness and claim that “one cubic centimetre cures 10 gloomy sentiments”.
Thankfully leaders in today’s world need not resort to social engineering. love, happiness and leadership of course continue to defy all definitions and yet you can, perhaps, discover that the real life-transforming elixir of happiness is well within your grasp.
The pursuit of happiness has been an eternal quest of mankind; scriptures and sciences, poets and philosophers have long extolled humanity’s endeavour in this direction. Aristotle had observed a long time ago that happiness consists of pursuing wisdom guided by moral value. The Upanishads dwelt on the state of an innermost bliss or anandmaya, a pursuit that had to transcend beyond the physical layer to arrive at the final destination. Social philosopher Jeremy Bentham had an alternative path in his theory of utilitarianism where the maximum good of the maximum number is endeavoured towards, where happiness was defined as enabling more pleasure than pain in an individual’s lifetime.
Jefferson even enshrined it in the American constitution: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” You would have now noticed that life and liberty are absolutes and happiness has been qualified as a pursuit!
Psychologist Maslow wrote of a now familiar and contemporary hierarchy of needs with basic needs at the bottom and self-actualisation at the top. These needs, we may note, tend to coexist. Social scientists developed a new science called positive psychology to examine well-being and happiness. In our daily lives, we do recognise the fact that pleasant experiences and pleasurable moments such as eating chocolate or watching a nice film yields joy. These shortlived yet enjoyable moments are termed hedonic.
On the other hand, the human mind has a deeper quest for long term fulfillment of aspirations and contentment. We clearly need to desire and hope for both short term and long term elements to make us happy. On the whole, our overall happiness is reflected in the extent to which we judge the overall quality of our life as a whole favorably, ie how much one likes the life one leads.
If happiness bears such importance in the lives of individuals, can the society they belong to or organisations they work for be unmindful of their responsibilityIJ Can a leader build a truly great institution when self-interest prevails to the extent of excluding the subjective and psychological well-being of its employeesIJ People are the greatest asset and harnessing human capital is both an art and a science.
Transactional quid pro quo relationships between the organisation and employees severely limit possibilities to unlocking human potential. leaders, after all, are responsible for people who spend a large and significant portion of their wakeful day at work. When you light the candle of happiness for others around you, it brightens your own path with its warm glow. It is imminent that leaders lend primacy to the people dimension, unravel individual needs and personal aspirations of employees to co-create the future.
Work you enjoy is one of the chief sources of happiness. Social scientists provide empirical evidence that some of the key facets of a workplace, including the quality of environment, sense of purpose, feeling of ownership, social embeddedness, empowerment and autonomy, could be real sources of happiness. For an individual employee, much as the cerebral needs like curiosity to learn and development are critical, interpersonal dimensions such as bonding, capacity for love, connectedness, sense of gratitude and selflessness are indeed vital. Our ability to deal with the futility of fruitless hopes, corrosive envies, and unrequited desires is also essential for our happiness. One of the chief sources of happiness is learning to live within your income!
When employees are happy at work, you can see the transformation of compliance to commitment, contract to trust, control to empowerment, a vision to a shared destiny, of performing one’s duty to going beyond, and from good to great teams.
When our employees are happy, even hard work can be effortless, and in turn they would gladly commit themselves to making their leaders happy delivering desired outcomes.
Happy people make happy organisations leading to happy customers. Reciprocally much as success is being able to achieve what we want, desiring what we get could lead to happiness. Nobel laureate and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer had observed: “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”
Pay = Employee satisfaction
Passion = Employee engagement
Purpose = Happiness at work
Compliance arises from our disinclination for punishment. Commitment emanates from our happiness at work.
The writer is the Group Chief Human Resource Manager at Tata Sons and the author of Quote Me If You Can, Penguin Random House