The pursuit of happiness

Happiness is illusive. Everybody wants it but not everyone knows what it is. For some people happiness is time spent with family and friends, for others it is fame and money. Happiness to the hordes of refugees streaming across Europe from war-torn Syria is simply safety.

The pursuit of happiness has occupied man on a philosophical level for millennia. Greek philosopher Aristotle surmised that happiness comprised two elements; hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (a life well lived). Stoics believe happiness is achieved through living in agreement with nature.

While thinkers have been ruminating on the essence of happiness for centuries, in the past five years governments and businesses have started to muscle in on the act too. Because the more we have learnt about happiness and the effects it has on us, the more it has become apparent that happiness has distinct economic and societal advantages. Happy citizens are healthier, more productive and less prone to disorders. Happy children learn more and become more productive and satisfied adults. Happy marriages last.

In commerce happiness impacts on the bottom line. Research shows that employee happiness leads to increased output, increased generation of innovative ideas, fewer sick days, higher income, favourable evaluations from supervisors, and a more supportive working atmosphere. Customer happiness leads to loyalty, increased spending on company products and recommendation to other consumers. Which is why today forward-thinking companies are in a race to create happy workplaces, helped along by consultants and psychologists.

In the 2015 World Happiness Report, which ranks nations according to their happiness levels, Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Canada were the top five happiest countries of the 158 surveyed. The UAE ranked a very respectable 20, above the UK, Oman and Qatar. Togo was the unhappiest, just below Burundi and Syria.

The 2015 report gives a special mention to the UAE ‘for the extent to which happiness and well-being have been made central tenets of the design and delivery of the National Agenda to be the happiest of all nations’.

The strategy was developed after extensive consultation between the government and private sector organisations and was launched by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, who wrote an open letter to all Federal government employees reminding them of their core mission: providing world-class services to the people of the UAE with the goal of contributing to national happiness.

Already users of government services can register their happiness levels on Dubai’s Happiness Meter, which was launched by the Dubai Smart Government Department (DSG) in April this year. The meter, available at touchpoints throughout the city and on websites, measures happiness levels in real time.

‘We are confident that this new service will effectively contribute to promoting Dubai’s competitiveness globally, enabling Dubai government to become the smartest government regionally and globally,’ says Ahmad Bin Humaidan, director-general of DSG.

In business, workplace happiness was once viewed as a flaky sideshow. Instead of making workers happy, employers concentrated on getting the most effort from them, squeezing longer hours out with only monetary reward. Studies today show that model to be deeply flawed. It appears that longer hours do not equate with improved profits.

Stephanie Davies is an expert in positive psychology and advises many multinational firms on how to improve their productivity by creating happy workforces. She has led happiness enlightenment among businesses. Her book Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, has been translated into several languages and will be available in Arabic next year.

She says: ‘Happiness studies are a new phenomenon, although I began to study the links between happiness and humour 10 years ago. At the time it was seen as a fringe interest; just a few forward-thinking companies such as Google, Virgin and South West Airlines considered happiness and well-being as part of their overall, long-term business strategy, both for their staff and their customers.

‘Slowly though, over the last five years or so, businesses have begun to realise there is something amiss with the culture of long hours, increased demands on employees and the desire to earn higher wages. Working harder does not equate to increased productivity and people are not necessarily happier the more they earn. Financial reward is not the sole driver of well-being.’

Governments realise this and now add many more factors than GDP when they measure the well-being of their citizens. ‘Likewise, business is beginning to realise that the underlying factors that make workers happy are more complex than salary,’ she says. ‘Instead development, progression, a sense of purpose, workplace relationships and challenges are just as important in motivating people and making them happy.’

She says employees also need to feel valued and listened to, to feel part of the place they work in, want autonomy and need to feel that what they do has an impact. Businesses are changing and those changes come from the top down. ‘Successful business leaders understand how to make their workers happy,’ Stephanie says. ‘The rewards in terms of productivity, talent retention and loyalty are huge.”

Today happy workplaces are seen as the gold standard and at companies ranging from arty start-ups like Etsy to corporate behemoths like Bank of America, bosses are using a host of tools, services and consultants to help improve their employees’ workplace satisfaction.

Piloted in a UK school in an underprivileged area in 2012, the programme embeds happiness in school life. It uses a range of methods to help teachers boost pupil happiness, resilience and confidence. Studies show that happy children learn better and results from the first Happy-Centred school programme bear witness to this. Exam results at the school improved by an impressive 20 per cent after the programme was introduced.

Other schools are now adopting the scheme, which is good news in the UK as a recent global report into childhood found the nation ranked low internationally in terms of childhood happiness.

The Children’s Society Good Childhood Report 2015 found that children in England are among the unhappiest in the world, behind countries such as Ethiopia, Algeria and Romania.

The study, which looked at 15 diverse countries, ranked England 14 for the life satisfaction of its young people, only ahead of South Korea.

Levels of satisfaction with ‘life as a whole’ were highest in Romania, where the mean level of satisfaction among 12-year-olds was 9.5 out of 10, followed by Colombia with 9.3 out of 10.

Following the headline-grabbing introduction, Wellington rose from its ranking as 256th in the school league tables to 21.

‘There is much we can learn from positive psychology,’ says Sir Anthony. ‘Good teachers create happiness instinctively, much of it is intuitive. They don’t make their classrooms oppressive or allow them to run out of control. Good head teachers get the atmosphere of the school right so it is tolerant and secure and happy.

‘There is a natural innate happiness in children, as seen on the smiling faces of children in developing rural parts of India. Even though they don’t know where dinner is coming from they are still happy.

‘This Western standard of living that we all talk about and prize doesn’t necessarily translate to happiness. In our anxious suburbs and towns you see children arrive anxious and anxiety becomes the norm. Schools have a duty to bring out that natural happiness and make that the default position.’

He believes schools should be places where children can feel content, comfortable and secure. ‘Insecurity equals unhappiness,’ he says. ‘If you create schools that prioritise security, children will want to be there, they will learn much more, they will want to please teachers and do their homework.’

Like the first government officials who began looking seriously at happiness and the first businesses that began to prioritise workplace happiness, Stephanie and Sir Anthony both had their critics.

Happiness and the pursuit thereof is still viewed with scepticism by some. But the tide is definitely turning.