Imagine an environment where staff exudes happiness and a constant flow of high productivity, and success drives the workplace. Today’s business communication commonly shows workplace happiness campaigns as a tool for accelerating productivity, involvement, and company success. The campaign’s initiative is depicted as the preventive steps taken to create an encouraging work culture that offers positive reinforcement and values people. Even though such programs deliver significant benefits, scrutiny reveals that these benefits are limited. On the other hand, they may initially fuel enthusiasm and engagement, but the long-lasting effect is under debate. On the other hand, the link between happiness and productivity may be more intricate than what has been shown, and many factors may affect productivity in the workplace. While happiness campaigns are depicted in a positive manner, on further examination, it is revealed that there is a need to take a holistic view of employee wellness and organizational development. Based on the consequences of the search for happiness, the interaction between joy and achievements, and the usefulness of happiness studies, this essay determines that the desired ROI from happiness campaigns may not always be realized for many reasons that are inherent to happiness campaigns.
Firstly, getting the ideal work happiness cannot always be guaranteed, regardless of the high complexity and multifaceted attributes of human feelings. However, although joy is undoubtedly welcome, the search for it may be a disaster, resulting in such disadvantages as becoming self-satisfied, intolerant of criticism, and so on. Seppälä & Cameron’s (2015) research highlights the role of compassion in the workplace and mentions the dangers of focusing only on happiness, thus stunting personal development and growth. Organizations that only concentrate on facilitating happiness can still find themselves in a disadvantaged situation due to their inability to handle difficulties and adjust to environmental changes, which reduces ROI. The underlying assumption of happiness campaigns is that they boost the moods and engagement of team members, thus increasing organizational performance and eventually resulting in a return on investment. Even though happy employees usually tend to be more productive and engaged, the simple correlation between happiness and performance is not always clear. Elements including job satisfaction, internal motivation, and organizational culture highly weigh in determining employee performance, where profitability alone may not be sufficient as a driver for tangible business outcomes.
In addition, the connection between happiness and performance or success does not exist to the extent described by the proponents of happiness at work. The results from the studies done by Mauss et al. (2011) and Gruber et al. (2013) imply a positive correlation between employee satisfaction and productivity; nevertheless, one must be cautious in interpreting the findings. Happiness determination as the only factor leading to constant high performance needs to be more accurate since other factors like skills, resources, and organizational culture also play important roles. First, what is considered success or performance in one industry may have little to do with the same concept in another sector. This can make it hard to use the findings from the happiness research in a general way. This may lead organizations to perceive happiness programs distortedly, as it often involves simplistic judgment that directly relates happiness to performance. Advocators allege that the injection of money into a happiness program can lead to lower turnover rates and, therefore, help organizations by cutting a great deal of recruitment and training costs. Provided that leadership inadequacy, career development deficiencies, and unhealthy work environments are not considered and taken care of, the happiness campaigns would fail to prevent staff turnover and returns on investment achievement.
There is also the possibility of an exaggerated view of the value of happiness to achieve an unrealistically positive ROI for happiness campaign strategies at the workplace. At the same time as the studies undertaken by Achor (2012) show that carrying this message helps show the probable benefits of a more positive environment at work, they could, however, tend to over-simplify the complexities of the internal dynamics of an organization. Happiness is naturally subjective and person-dependent; therefore, there cannot be a single simple blueprint that would guarantee the effectiveness of happiness interventions in all organizations. Furthermore, implementing happiness programs often faces operational and cultural limitations that impede their success. Organizations carrying on their business without addressing these factors will never be able to gain a commensurate return on investment (ROI). Critics may argue that campaigns on happiness contribute to the essence of a positive organizational culture, which leads to employer branding, the attractiveness of the best talent, and, ultimately, success in the long term (Achor, 2012). No doubt this turnover is an additional cost, but the programs leading to happiness may not be a solution to the natural causes of workers’ moral demotion and turnover. Being strategic in the happiness campaign will help dismiss the view that this solution method is irrelevant and unfeasible in addressing the core concerns of apathy and attrition.
In conclusion, workplace happiness initiatives do have a propensity to be the mediums facilitating employee wellness and organizational thrive, but they are not simply causes for them. Happiness, by many ends, may lead to unforeseen consequences; the relationship between being happy and how successful one may be is complex, and the value of doing happiness research may be underestimated. ROI is thus the biggest challenge in any campaign trying to make people happier, and this calls for an equally complex approach that considers all the factors behind the rise and fall of individual emotions, the situation in work and study, and the weaknesses of current research. Through that, the organizations will forge ways of connecting their happiness initiatives with their strategic actions and, hence, accomplish more by effect.
Achor, S. (2012, February). The happy secret to better work [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work
Cederström, C., & Spicer, A. (2015). The wellness syndrome. John Wiley & Sons. https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=JWGRBgAAQBAJ&printsec=copyright&source=gbs_pub_info_r
Gruber, J., Kogan, A., Quoidbach, J., & Mauss, I. B. (2013). Happiness is best kept stable: Positive emotion variability is associated with poorer psychological health. Emotion, 13(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030262
Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., & Savino, N. S. (2011). Can seeking happiness make people happy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, 11(4), 807–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010