How is happiness different from engagement?

When you look at the questions we use to measure happiness at work, there is a lot of overlap with the sorts of topics traditional staff engagement and satisfaction surveys cover. This is not too surprising given the ingredients of engaged work and happy work are much the same.

So… clients quite rightly ask, “What sets happiness apart?”, "Why is happiness at work a better people metric than engagement at work?"

Happiness is easy

Happiness is an emotion we feel and communicate from birth. We don’t have to work hard to understand what it means or imagine what it looks like. This instantly makes happiness an initiative everyone can be a part of. It is an inclusive concept that employees outside of people operations, HR and senior management teams can easily understand.

Happiness is honest

Questions on happiness seek people's pure experience of the work they do and the colleagues they spend time with. We have used the best from the social sciences to word our questions carefully so they unearth how people really feel without leading or exposing them. This helps employees answer honestly. Consider how differently you might answer a question like “Do you feel you have made good progress with your work?” vs “When at work, I am completely focussed on my job duties”.

Happiness is something we share

Happiness is important to everyone - across cultures, professions, gender and age - and it is contagious, spreading from one person to another. A good engagement score is something the business or a manager benefits from. A good happiness score is something we all benefit from.

Happiness drives us

Data about happiness is difficult to ignore. We are hard-wired to learn from what makes us happy so we can go on creating rewarding situations. For individuals, it tells us that more of the same would be a good thing, so it directs our attention and loyalty towards people, brands and activities that make us feel this way. For organizations, it acts as a forward-looking metric to anticipate risk and improve people problems before they become too messy or ugly to fix.

Engagement is not such a carrot as happiness is. But it is not a stick either. It occupies a space in between which falls short of being inspiring, socially relevant or personally motivating. It is not that engagement initiatives are bad. They just lack the human energy to change things for the better. And this makes improvement an uphill struggle, because you can’t move whole organizations without moving people. With happiness, employees are more easily excited and eager to help. So whether our clients take a ‘minimum workplace standards’ perspective to lessen business risk or an ‘optimum performance’ perspective to model industry excellence, we always tell them the trick to having engaged employees is to get off to a happy start.