Seeding Happiness to Enhance Productivity and Harvest Profits

An Undefined Emotion

Hysterical crowds at a rock concert and the ones swaying to the chants at a guru’s discourse have one thing in common. They all are in search of happiness. In fact, human beings, even with minimal aspirations, are all perpetually in pursuit of some sort of happiness. Happiness is amongst the most extensively researched subjects related to human well-being. Scholars have delved into innumerable aspects of happiness to declare what they think were convincing proofs, means and methods of securing happiness. Proven or not, we know beyond doubt that happiness is one of the most important ingredients of well-being and consequently influences everything an individual does. A universally accepted definition still eludes happiness despite extensive research in everything connected to it. However, universally people believe that happiness comes from within.  Happiness remains as subjective and vague an entity as it was, ever since it was first humanly experienced. Aware, awakened or not, everyone persists in their efforts to achieve happiness and pursue what they perceive would provide happiness.

Quantifiable Triggers and Subjective Experience

Happiness is generally associated with satiation of material needs or change in condition towards a desired state. This assumption, partly explains the fleeting and comparative nature of happiness. Purchase of a new car could trigger happiness, but it ebbs away over time. It could also plummet instantaneously seeing a colleague with a better car, newly purchased.  One’s own car, a source of happiness till then ceases to be so. Similarly, happiness experienced getting a jump in career could vanish when one realises that a colleague, considered less worthy, has secured an equal or better raise. While, even a basic meal could flood the poverty stricken with happiness, connoisseurs could remain stubbornly immune to happiness even at the most elaborately laid out fare. Happiness, though visibly associated with material possession or matching one’s expectations in each of these illustrations, is something intrinsically beyond mere physical possessions, change in conditions or relative success.

Behavioural scientists have linked happiness to various aspects like career, health, family, society, etc also. It has been seen that the intensity and longevity of happiness experienced by an individual varied depending upon the perceived level, achieved in relation to his expectations and aspirations. It is also widely accepted that, given the same inputs, intensity of happiness experienced and expressed varies from person to person. This is dictated by one’s choice of how happy one should be. Even those culturally conditioned to believe that being happy could invite unhappiness, do experience and express happiness in various forms.

Irrespective of the source of happiness, clinical studies have convincingly proved that happiness is associated with presence of biochemicals like serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin in the body. While presence of these can be ensured by chemical intervention, such drug induced stimuli have devastating effects and produce euphoria that is momentary and drug dependent.

Despite being associated with and triggered by quantifiable, measurable and comparable aspects like material possessions, career, health, family and society, happiness essentially remains subjective, ambiguous and personal.

Path to Sustainable Happiness

Happiness associated with material acquisitions and changing conditions are proven to be afflicted with short shelf life. As one gets accustomed to the changed conditions or has flaunted enough the acquisitions of creature comforts, happiness ebbs away. But happiness triggered by recognition, relevance and respect (Triple R) are seen to be durably useful. Since this source of happiness ends up in a reinforcing, reassuring positive cycle, individuals naturally tend to commit themselves to perform better and contribute more where needs of ‘Triple R’ are continually met.  Though inherent to an individual’s personal and social life, these are predominantly at play at his work place. Interestingly ‘Triple R’, enjoyed by an individual at his workplace easily spreads over to other spheres of his personal life.

Monetising Happiness

An organisational culture, where ‘Triple R’ is in abundance, can be crafted by human resource experts with vision. Managements mistakenly equate ‘Triple R’ with remunerations, designations and authority. Though these are essential to organisational existence and individuals acquiring more of it derive happiness from it, there are limits beyond which these can’t be granted and sustained. An organisation can have only one CEO. It can create innumerable verticals and can have one head for each. It can pay absurdly large compensation packages. It can assign tremendous authority to various individuals. But going beyond a certain limit will be detrimental to the very existence of the organisation.

Recognition relevance and respect exist on a different plane from everything else. It touches the very heart of dignified human existence. It doesn’t need heavy fiscal outlays. It just needs understanding and deft handling that visibly manifests itself in equality and objectivity.

The challenge for those entrusted with creating and maintaining such an OC would be to find ways to continually provide conditions where individuals experience incrementally increasing relevance, periodically receive inputs of recognition and believe that respect has been earned.

Way Forward

The fact that happiness comes along with a clutch of by-products, should excite human resource experts, interested in organisational success and growth. Happiness besides providing a sense of physical well-being, enhances self-worth, creates a sense of purpose, encourages optimism and strengthens commitment to the cause resulting in higher individual productivity. This can easily be channelised to further organisational aims and harvest operational profits. Disengaged from remunerations, designations and authority, organisations need to innovative to provide ‘Triple R’

Since it is natural for an individual to pursue happiness, it is easier to motivate him to pursue such activities than drive him for remunerations.  If an individual’s pursuit of happiness and organisational goals are coterminous or made even seemingly so, he would naturally be aligned with the organisational path.

The resultant is a win-win situation both for the individual and organisation.

LES INDISPENSABLES , THE LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS AND ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

Healthy balance between work and personal life is a challenge most professionals have willingly given up on, happily or otherwise. Distinction between the two, has all but vanished, as work-related activities have pervasively invaded personal and family time. For many, home has become nothing more than a place for ‘homemade food’, wash, change and a nap on one’s own bed. Spending most of the twenty-four hours at workplace or at work, even though physically present at home, is now considered an indispensable ingredient for upward mobility on the coveted corporate ladder. Being expected to stay in office beyond working hours or regularly required to carry work home, is considered synonymous with one’s arrival amongst the ‘reckonable’ and ‘indispensables. It signals one’s proximity to the fountainhead of power. After all, for the coveted ‘Ferrari’ one needs to embrace monkhood of work.

Reckonable Performance Indicator

Being present mostly at work place or seen engaged in work associated activities is now a well-established manifestation of organisational fidelity. Though it has, nothing remotely connected to performance, utility and productivity, mere presence at work can be considered as organisational fidelity and amply rewarded. This trending manifestation of managerial selflessness, at well-publicised personal costs, can trigger corporate emotions like the outpouring reserved for military martyrdom. Spending time beyond the call of office schedules, seemingly showers venerability. Though, factually of worthless relevance to the organisation, it is now counted amongst visible and reckonable parameters of performance. With nobody complaining and none objectively linking presence to profitability or productivity, there is a race raging amongst many employees to be known for staying longer at work or to be seen perpetually at work.

Demanded or otherwise, the propensity of employees, seeking to be at work endlessly is attaining epidemic proportions. It is now a visible manifestation of the subcontinental work culture. Managerial hierarchies expect and overtly or subtly enforce presence well beyond work-hours and office boundaries. Many at the top expect unquestioned compliance as, at least a few amongst them could have walked the sublime sacrificial path to their current positions.

A Subcontinental Phenomenon?

Companies in Europe and USA, it is generally believed, do not encourage or expect over stays. Business mails over the weekends lie cocooned awaiting the next working day for deliverance. Even an Indian corporate within the geographical boundaries of Europe and USA do not expect or openly encourage overstays. Many corporate entities, indigenous and thriving in the subcontinent as well as multinationals offshoring business to India seem to encourage employees voluntarily staying back after prescribed work-hours to finish assigned tasks.  

Elusive Rationale

Exploitation or incompetence are just superficial explanations.

Organisations driven by greed for quick gains, could exploit employees by cruelly burdening them with targets, humanly impossible with efforts made in stipulated working time. In that case employees have no alternative but slave beyond the clock and deliver what is expected by the repressive regime. Ever since the economy was liberalised two decades back, employment opportunities have grown. Despite the current slowdown, competence does have adequate opportunities to choose from. In an environment, where strong labour laws are in place, vociferous trade unions which can easily be driven to violence keep vigil, activists are on the prowl looking for issues to be taken up and an active independent judiciary is visibly sympathetic to the oppressed individual, exploitation in its typical sense can almost be ruled out.

Are organisations besieged by disloyal incompetent individuals, incapable of delivering results expected of the hierarchical position assigned? If poor recruitment policies inundate organisations with incompetence, then the number of successful enterprises in the country should progressively be dwindling. Though incompetence plays significant role in extinction of enterprises that once thrived, it can’t be the causa mortis of all failures, because a talent pool is the prerequisite for any organisation to come into existence. Moreover, incompetence, produces nothing spectacular, despite hard and long flogging. Hordes of incompetent managers however long they stay would achieve nothing worthwhile.

If exploitation and incompetence individually do not force long work hours, what else could be enticing employees to stay back at work? Would an organisational culture that expects its members, as a matter of traditions or practice, to regularly work beyond office hours, really help organisational goals? Does such an environment really help the individual? 

The Quagmire

Most individuals in the corporate sector live and thrive by targets and bottom lines assigned. Upward mobility is driven by performance ratings and targets achieved. Amidst complaints of unrealistic expectations, there is unanimity in accepting that most, if not all, achieve assigned targets, successfully push up bottom lines and competitively increase the bar for the next fiscal. If it is a practice to enhance targets each fiscal, it is natural to assume that the previous target was deliberately soft. It is also known that targets sans fundamentals end up a cropper.

But targets alone do not justify the need for employees to regularly stay back beyond scheduled times. One doesn't have to be necessarily be in office physically to clock working hours. Continuing to answer emails or monitoring progress remotely and being subject to conditions that necessitate thoughts about work is also working.  In effect individuals, mainly those in positions of managerial hierarchy are perpetually at work or want to be seen so. While there are a few who sacrificially toil for the organisation, many spend time beyond scheduled hours, not because longer presence helps them achieve elusive targets and lift bottom lines but for the visibility associated with long office hours.

Looking a bit closer at the situation, one can make out that in most cases, it is the result of an organisational culture that has evolved due to a management matrix debilitated by incoherent definition of roles, inadequate delegation, poor decision making, lack of accountability and weak lines of communication. It results in a mutually parasitic existence, where the individual strives to elicit the most out of an organisation and the organisation in turn, embodied by other individuals, tends to wring out the most from the individual. Detrimental to competent professionalism, such an environment fosters one-upmanship, encourages personal loyalties, promotes pretence, nurtures fraudulence, and pardons purloining of efforts. It effectively and perpetually bleeds the organisation, vilifies it, inflicts losses and stunts growth.

Dumping Diminishing Returns

Law of diminishing returns is a cardinal rule that applies to everything known.  The number of hours clocked by an individual over the course of the day, over a period of time, can be objectively evaluated against productivity to prove that individual performance is also governed by law of diminishing returns. This factum, notwithstanding, to understand the issue in the right perspective, there is a need to consider the problems related to long working hours, both for the employer and the employee.

Fatigue and disturbed sleep are the initial products of long working hours.

Fatigue is known to reduce mental and physical prowess, impair judgement and concentration, degrade motivation, slow down reaction time and increase risk-taking behaviour. It reduces decision-making ability, communication skills, attention and vigilance. Sleep deprivation invites, high stress and related medical conditions.  Each of these, has a tendency to be cumulative in nature and aggressively adds on to ill effects of each other.  Sleep deprivation and fatigue is a deadly combination that can significantly erode productivity of an individual.

If one thought, these self-inflicted damages were limited to the organisation alone, there couldn’t be a bigger error of judgement. Besides the adverse effects of regular long absence in marital relationships, the impact on a nuclear family, the basic unit of modern society, due to absence of parents is unfathomable. Children groomed merely by play schools, maids and makeshift arrangements devoid of parental attention tend to acquire serious emotional problems. Hard-working parents tend to make up for the lost time through over indulging acts of pampering. Robbed of early-life role models and value systems associated with healthy nuclear families, children suffer the most. The terrible impact on the societal health is best left unsaid.

By nurturing a work culture which expects or encourages individuals to stay longer than schedules, an organisation is effectively incurring expenditure not only on eroding its own employee’s productivity and inflicting grievous physical and psychological injuries on its staff but even actively colluding to undermine the very fundamentals of a healthy happy society.

Dispensing Les Indispensables

It is not without sufficient and logical reasons that many European and forward-looking economies have introduced shorter working days and enforce adherence to work schedules. Societies hosting such enterprises claim that the result is a happier, healthier and productive workforce. Despite enforcing scheduled work-hours, these business entities continue to grow making profits. There is a scope for indigenous organisations to evaluate their management policies that allows individuals to work beyond scheduled work times.  In order to enforce work schedules on its employees, organisations may require to redraw hiring policies and reorient existing organisational culture.  This could eventually lead to finding the ‘best fit’ for the role, resulting in higher savings and better productivity. No one is indispensable. However, in each organisation there would be few who assume indispensability. All of them develop, flaunt and exercise indispensability at the cost of the organisation.

Dispensing with those attempting to be Les Indispensable may not be a bad idea for an organisation to emerge leaner, stronger and more productive.

What I Really Meant was…

“What I really meant was …”, or “I didn’t mean it that way …” are sentences, frequently heard at work places amongst professionals and between individuals trying to clear the air. This happens normally during discussions defending an utterance or gesture that was not appreciated.  For each such confessional or explanatory declaration and occasion that led to it, there could be innumerable occasions where possibility of such a declaration never arose and the parties concerned continue to hold positions that eventually turn detrimental to interpersonal and intra-organisational relationships, creating a working environment unnecessarily vitiated. While ‘communication’, is one of the most discussed and focussed aspects of management, miscommunication remains rampant. Despite innumerable seminars or workshops on effective communication and countless books, on the subject, available to managers and managed alike, miscommunication and communication gaps continue to persist across all types and levels of management.

Do explanations help?

Seldom does the explanation, ‘what I really meant ...’, or “I didn’t mean it that way …” do much good.  It invariably sows seeds of suspicion about the intent of the person involved and over time steadily builds up unbridgeable trust deficit. For both the afflicted and the one who inflicted, it is important to understand the genuineness of the ‘confession’ lest relations sour over time. Reaching common grounds and bridging genuine communication gaps is not a major issue if the parties are sincere about it.  Such occasions are easily identifiable, best ignored and naturally forgotten and forgiven.

The Genuine Ones

Cultural differences, language barriers and unfamiliar surroundings can result in genuine and benign miscommunication. It is very likely for a person, new to an organisation, not having acquainted himself well enough to its ways, to initiate a communication that would finally end up in a "but what I actually meant was…". There could genuinely be an issue of language and the manner in which an idea had been put across. It is also possible for a ‘linguistically challenged’ individual not aware of the true and implied meaning of the words or sentences used, saying something that he actually did not mean.  Such conditions are genuine and should be accepted in the right spirit.  A bit of understanding and patience can create and nurture working environments that can reap dividends both for the organisation and individuals.

Be Cautioned

Unfortunately, the percentage of people who genuinely say " what I really meant ...’, or “I didn’t mean it that way …” is considerably negligible compared to those who make this statement often. Quick organisational scan could reveal individuals who frequently apply this tool. Irrespective of the position in the hierarchy, it is imperative to exercise utmost caution when dealing with a person who habitually makes this statement.  It is clear that the individual does not actually mean what he says, even when he makes the statement "what I really meant ...’, or “I didn’t mean it that way …”.  Such people are habitual mis-communicators and do so for vested interests.  It is only when confronted with inescapable situations, they come up with this statement, mostly as an excuse.  

Organisational Remedy

Interestingly, every organisation has a fair share of such people.  They are normally grapevine catalysts who either willingly or unwittingly initiate interpersonal and intra-organisational discomfiture. While they may be good at spinning the rumour mills in an organisation, in the long run they can be detrimental to organisational health. It is therefore important to identify such people and put them in place, well before they bring reckonable harm to the organisation.  Organisations could help themselves by providing appropriate forums and conducive environment for employees to air their views.  While almost all organisations claim to have such forums, in most cases these exist only on records.  Organisations where communication is attended to and miscommunications systemically handled tend to do better and grow better than those which considers communication as a trivial issue.  It pays to remember the  lines of a famous poem, “for the want of a nail…the kingdom was lost…”