Institute For The Future

Do Your Best Job Ever!?

Job satisfaction is at a two-decade low, so I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise that employers have begun enlisting the help happiness coaches as part of their workplace wellness programs. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the new efforts, being undertaken by major employers such as UBS and American Express are leveraging growing interest in happiness psychology research and aim to offer a legitimate way to reduce stress and improve mental well-being, though they also raise questions about whether too much happiness doesn't have its own set of costs.

 

As the Journal notes, these programs are "draw[ing] on psychological research, ancient religious traditions or both" to emphasize:

 

[I]nner happiness, and controlling your own mood in the face of turbulence or misfortune.

 

Indeed, the happiness coaches go beyond traditional positive-thinking approaches, taking new tacks that tend to ring true with workers. Some examples: Write e-mails to your co-workers every day thanking them for something they have done. Meditate daily to clear your mind. Do something for somebody without expecting anything in return. Write in a journal about things you are thankful for; look for traits you admire in people and compliment them. Focus on the process of your work, which you can control, rather than outcomes, which you can't. And don't immediately label events good or bad, but remain open to potentially positive outcomes of even the most seemingly negative events.

 

 

The Journal doesn't really quote any opponents of workplace happiness coaching, though the comments section on their blog the Juggle about work-life balance, some commenters, not surprisingly, express some skepticism. For example, one reader named Martin suggests that "to attempt to smile and pretend that we’re happy creates more workplace stress, rather than less."

 

And that point--how much happiness is good for us--is something of an open question that will gain more attention in the coming decade. At a basic level, it's fairly obvious that some hardship is necessary and useful. This evening, for example, I opted to go out for frozen yogurt instead of doing chores around the house--which offered an immediate short-term gain but left my apartment cluttered and dusty--a noticeable cost.

 

Fortunately, happiness research is much more sophisticated than that simple example of frozen yogurt. But the same sort of issue remains. Take a couple examples from health. In this week's Newsweek, Sharon Begley looks at recent research into the efficacy of antidepressants and argues (somewhat controversially) that:

 

[T]he drugs are effective, in that they lift depression in most patients. But that benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill—a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.

 

Hence the moral dilemma. The placebo effect—that is, a medical benefit you get from an inert pill or other sham treatment—rests on the holy trinity of belief, expectation, and hope. But telling someone with depression who is being helped by antidepressants, or who (like my friend) hopes to be helped, threatens to topple the whole house of cards. Explain that it's all in their heads, that the reason they're benefiting is the same reason why Disney's Dumbo could initially fly only with a feather clutched in his trunk—believing makes it so—and the magic dissipates like fairy dust in a windstorm. So rather than tell my friend all this, I chickened out. Sure, I said, there's lots of research showing that a new kind of antidepressant might help you. Come, let me show you the studies on PubMed.

 

 

In contrast, in her new book "Bright-Sided," Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that the failure of that placebo effect--not just in mental health, but with illnesses such as cancer, which she has recently battled--can leave people feeling guilty and frustrated over circumstances beyond their control. The flip side of having the power to make things better is that we are to blame if everything remains the same. Instead, she suggests that most people would be better off operating with a more pessimistic and skeptical point of view.

 

Some psychologists have taken her line of thinking further and gone as far to suggest that depression itself, at appropriate times, can serve an important purpose by forcing us to focus more sharply and concretely on important problems.

 

For employers looking at workplace wellness, I think the lesson is relatively straightforward: Some help with mental well-being and happiness can be useful, but the more coercive those efforts feel, the greater the backlash--and the less successful--workplace happiness programs would likely be. But what the balance between coercion and help, and between useful and unrealistic optimism looks like--in the workplace and beyond--remains a very open, but very important question for the coming decade.