Abstract
A systematic review of more than 200 published research studies found that happier people tend to be more successful in terms of the quality of their relationships, contributions to their community, higher performance, and achievement in their work. 1 It’s no wonder there have been thousands of scientific papers published on the topic and a recent online search of the phrase “happiness at work” yielded nearly 1 million results. When Dr Laurie Santos first offered her course, “Psychology and the Good Life” to students at Yale University, it became the most popular class in Yale’s history. Response to the material has been so positive that they’re now offering an online version of the class. 2 With burnout being declared by the World Health Organization to be a syndrome resulting from unsuccessfully managed workplace stress, 3 health promotion professionals are looking for new ways to bolster employee mental and emotional well-being offerings.
This issue of The Art of Health Promotion (TAHP) offers practitioners several examples of approaches being tested in real-world workplaces to elevate employee well-being overall and happiness in particular. Dr Viswanath and Dr Kubzansky from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness tee up the topic by sharing insights from their research and experience working with employers. They also shed light on the challenges of conducting happiness research, noting that some of the findings linking employee happiness to health and business outcomes are equivocal. I highly encourage readers wanting to learn more about their work to read their article in Time magazine’s special issue on “the science of happiness.” 4
As I considered the content for this issue, I was tempted to focus purely on what the research tells us about effective approaches to define, measure, and influence employee happiness. But I also wanted to deliver on TAHP’s focus on translating research into practice. To that end, I invited 3 organizations that provide happiness interventions as a service offering to employers to share how they have applied scientific evidence to their interventions and employer case studies that demonstrate the kinds of outcomes they are observing, including business performance results that senior executives are most interested in. I also asked them to incorporate lessons they are learning about what is most effective in the delivery of happiness initiatives or guidance they would offer to organizations that want to develop their own programs.
The team at BetterUp conducted an analysis on aggregated data from more than 2800 individuals across their book of business who have participated in their coaching programs rather than focusing on a single-employer experience. Dr Laurie Heap has devoted her work to improving student happiness but more recently has expanded her focus to employee populations and shared her experience working with Garmin to deploy an initiative for their employees. Experience Happiness rounds out the issue, sharing their collaborative work with R3 Continuum not just to deploy coaching for their employees but also to thoughtfully identify and measure the most meaningful key performance indicators to demonstrate the value of the initiative.
While the contributors packed as much into each article as length limits permitted, you might find yourself still wanting more. In that case, I’d like to recommend some of the books I added to my reading pile while researching this topic.
For an overview of the research linking happiness to improved performance for individuals, groups, and organizations as well as principles for underlying mechanisms contributing to those relationships, I recommend Shawn Achor’s 2010 book, The Happiness Advantage. 5 It’s chock full of entertaining anecdotes and stories from his own research at Harvard University and his adventures experienced as he aimed to teach employees how to apply his research findings to improve the quality of work and life.
For evidence-based practices on how to increase happiness levels and why they work, pick up Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book, The How of Happiness. 6 She addresses how we know it’s possible to improve happiness and what contributes to it before sharing 10 specific practices that research demonstrates improves happiness. What I found most compelling about her approach is the use of a self-assessment tool that readers can use to identify which of the practices are most likely to be effective for them. Her approach supports a theme you’ll see echoed often by the contributors to this issue of TAHP: That the contributors to individual happiness are unique to each person. What works for one person may not work for another, which is why experts in this area recommend offering populations a variety of approaches. This is why a challenge to practice journaling what you’re grateful for may not be as effective for you as it was for your best friend.
As I was discussing development of this issue with my coeditor of TAHP, Dr Sara Johnson, she recommended I add Scott Galloway’s The Algebra of Happiness 7 to my reading pile. I took it with me on vacation and it proved a delightful way to pass a cross-country flight. Although not steeped in scientific happiness research, this professor shares the content of the most popular lecture in his Brand Strategy course at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and I found several of his insights supported by the research you’ll read about in this issue.
For a truly global perspective, you’ll want to round out your reading with Dan Buettner’s book, The Blue Zones of Happiness. 8 It’s an essential read because it reinforces the fact that happiness cannot be cultivated in a vacuum of individual pursuits and practices. Context matters. The nature of the environments and circumstances we live and work in contribute significantly to happiness and may thwart an individual’s attempts to bolster their emotional well-being. And, yes, although it may be within your control to move to a home with less traffic noise or change to a job that provides a more supportive manager, these contexts are within the purview of a more systems approach to happiness that reminds us not to forget about the ways we can influence population-level happiness by addressing policies, processes, environments, and relationship dynamics within groups that elevates well-being for all.