There’s a good reason why we find it hard to establish the causal links between our working lives and our personal happiness. It’s because it’s all very complicated. So complicated in fact that you can sidetrack any discussion on the subject by asking elementary questions such as: ‘what do you mean by happy?’ or ‘should it be the role of work to make us happy?’ A lot of commercial interests in the workplace sector would like us to think that there is a correlation between what they do and how happy people are at work, but the research shows that things are never that straightforward.
It all depends not just on a stimulus but how we choose to respond to it. One thing that seems evident is that the design of the workplace would be characterised as a ‘hygiene factor’ according to the work of Frederick Herzberg dating from the 1950s, which explained why the things that motivate us are not the mere opposites of those which make us unhappy.
We must be careful when we attempt to correlate factors in such complex systems
In practical terms, this means that we are more likely to be happy in a job we love with poor surroundings than a job we hate in the most salubrious of offices. Similarly, if people are stressed because they have an unhappy home life, designing their office differently won’t do much to help. That is why we can reject many of the simplistic attempts to equate specific environmental factors with our personal happiness. We must be careful when we attempt to correlate factors in such complex systems.
The source of happiness
A proper understanding of just how complex the relationship between work and happiness is can be gauged by looking at research such as that published in a report by Alex Bryson and George McKerron for the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.
The report is based on millions of pieces of data from tens of thousands of people in the UK. The data acquisition method was unique. Respondents were asked to use an app called ‘mappiness’ to record how satisfied, anxious or relaxed they are at a particular moment in response to messages sent to them at random times of the day. Crucially they were also asked what they are (or were) doing at the time the message was sent so that the researchers could relate 40 chosen situations with specific feelings.