Smile more?

Photo by Anni Roenkae.

It's hard to start a conversation about happiness at work. Particularly a contrarian one. What kind of person is anti-happiness? So many people are having such a dreadful time at work, you'd have to be a monster to take the opposing side in any discussion about workplace happiness.

It's not that we're monsters, per se. It's just that we're deeply skeptical of the conventional wisdom around work. Especially when, if that wisdom were working, you'd see it in the data.

Nowhere does this show up more than in the workplace happiness myth. It goes like this: happy workers are engaged workers are effective workers are productive workers. Therefore, happiness = productivity.

If you futz with the data long enough, it will confess to anything

Over the weekend, we found a twitter thread pointing to some of the findings in Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report. We also got outside and enjoyed the sunshine. Lest you worry it's all digging through workplace surveys and no fun around here. It's workplace surveys and fun, tyvm.

Anyway, there were two big things that stuck out in the thread. The first is that Gallup looked into burnout at work and summarized several contributing factors. All of them bottom out at poor management. So far, we're nodding vigorously.

At the very end of the thread, there's one last Gallup stat. "95% of people who are thriving at work report being treated with respect all day and 87% report smiling and laughing a lot."

Having worked with data nerds for a very long time, we did the thing you do. We squint. What is this information trying to tell us? The first part of the report says that the vast majority of people don't like their jobs. So this stat is talking about a majority of a very small minority (the people who do enjoy their jobs). Within that minority, almost everyone reports being treated with respect. And – wait for it – demonstrating external indicators of happiness. Smiling. And laughing a lot.

The correlation of smiling and thriving is pernicious. Because for many, many bosses, the idea of these things being tightly tied holds a lot of appeal. It offers a data-supported lever you can pull to be a good boss. You need to build a happy team. A smiling team. A laughing team.

From that spot, bosses start to optimize for positivity. They make an assumption about which way the causation flows. "A smiling team is a thriving team," becomes, "If I get my team to smile more, they will thrive."

That's not how it works.

You can't take custody for someone else's happiness

Oh, you can try. As a manager you have all kinds of knobs and levers at your disposal, and some of them might sort of work. You can lighten workloads, and take their work onto your shoulders. You can withhold negative feedback, send them to a lot of professional development. You can shut down anything that sounds like criticism. And, to a point, it works. The team's Employee NPS scores go up for a bit. Until people start to leave.

They don't leave angry, they leave bored. Because one by one they realize that they're stuck on a plateau. Their team is happy in a benign, inwardly-focused way, but also less and less in the critical path. They write, "it's not you it's me" goodbye notes that say they were just ready for a new challenge. Which, if they were more honest, means any challenge whatsoever.

If you start from the assumption that you need to make your team happy – that happiness is an input to work that you need to maximize – you reach for one set of tools. Tools that reduce stress, remove discomfort, avoid conflict. And maybe at a birthday party, or a summer camp, those would be appropriate. Maybe. But at work, those tools often create deeply ineffective teams. Teams whose internal rep becomes a disaster. Teams we stop counting on. And it's hard to stay happy on one of those teams.

You can't take custody for someone else's happiness. And even when you try, it doesn't do what you want it to.

Happiness is an output

You know what you totally can take custody for, though? The structure and effectiveness of your team's work. A cool thing about re-orienting your focus in this way is that it unlocks several new tools. Another cool thing is that it is literally what you get paid for.

When you orient around questions of whether your team's work is healthy, clear, and effective, some of the old tricks become obviously wrong. It's not healthy, effective, or clear to insulate your team from negative feedback, or to avoid discussing hard topics. Like, that's obviously not what you would do. Letting something fester is the opposite of health. Concealing feedback is the opposite of clear.

The more you focus on your team's effectiveness, the better your radar gets for the things that trip them up. Often the first of these is that they don't all have the same idea of what effective means. Getting clear on that means getting clear on goals, priorities, ownership, and accountability.

Once we have those, other things start to bubble to the top – broken process, unanswered strategic questions, resource gaps. As you address each of those, you see the results in terms of your team being able to get more done without running too hot. You end up with a rep as a reliable team that gets shit done and is clear-eyed about what they need to succeed.

And then something entirely unsurprising happens. Your people start to smile more. Which is what this Gallup data was actually trying to tell you. And what managers have been rediscovering for generations. It's not that happiness makes teams healthier or more effective. It's that being part of a healthy, effective team makes people happy.

We get it. By the time you're down to this, the 1,004th word on the subject, it feels obvious. Maybe it is for you. Maybe you also get loud about correlation vs causation. But we talk to a lot of bosses, and many of them are trying to carry their team's happiness on their back. Have been trying to carry that happiness for two plus years. Are still trying to hold this massive and heavy thing. To those bosses we'd say: put that down. It's not yours to carry. Your job is to build a workplace with dignity, and clarity. One where your people know what's expected of them, and what success looks like. Let them decide how they feel about it.

- Melissa and Johnathan