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> we suggest that leaders follow the science and take a structured approach to hiring for, promoting, and developing employee happiness > Measure happiness in

• hathym 5y ago
  even if they recruit only happe people, what guarantee they will stay happy? should they fire them once they are not?
  • VBprogrammer 5y ago
    "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
    • dsq 5y ago
      I had the same thought! There is an 'upbeat filter'.
  • strken 5y ago
    There's something to be said for a world where people don't have to stay in jobs they really hate.
  • allie1 5y ago
    This ties into the most consistent mistake EVERY manager makes - people don't change. I know of maybe 5% of people who do change, but that is so inconsistent and unpredictable that it can't be relied upon. Managers hire "almost great" candidates and think they can affect change and get a good deal, and this NEVER works out. Any red flags on the interviews/trial period will and do persist forever. In the end, it's always the reason the person gets fired, and the company loses the time they invested into the person. based on my experience of 10 years leading tech and marketing teams. Curious if anyone has conflicting experiences to share.
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      >Managers hire "almost great" candidates I would think an almost great candidate is someone who knows how to do most of what you need them to know how to do, people not changing is generally in referral to their innate personalities and not some idea that people can never learn anything.
    • goodpoint 5y ago
      Quite the opposite. People change slowly but people's *behavior* can change a lot depending on the environment. I've been in the industry for twice your years. I've seen a lot of people changing their behavior completely and in many ways. Mostly due to good or bad management or being in the right or wrong company or team.
    • brimble 5y ago
      People may not change much, but the same person can behave very differently under two different systems or leaders, or with a different workload.
    • logicchains 5y ago
      This is also one of the biggest dating mistakes people make, believing a partner will change. Odds are they won't, and if they do it may not be in the way you wanted them to change.
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Some jobs literslly ruin lives / your health, or make you miserable, so with this outlook these jobs should be paying massive fines or compensation?
• jevgeni 5y ago
  I feel this article is peak 2020s so far: super positive title with a utterly Orwellian conclusion.
• allisdust 5y ago
  Soon to be launched on leet code : Coaching sessions on how to convey (fake) happiness effectively. How do the authors separate out the causation part? May be the top performers are happy because they are performing well? Will they retain their happiness if lets say, they are thrown in something with stack ranking like Amazon. How about something like on calls? How happy are they going to be if their nights are continously ruined by production issues. What about personal stuff like divorces and family issues.
  • thelittleone 5y ago
    Followed by "how to fool the happiness detector built into your cubicle."
  • goodpoint 5y ago
    > Coaching sessions on how to convey (fake) happiness effectively. Most popular "positive psychology" is exactly that. Unsurprisingly, companies love the idea that employees should act happy in any circumstance.
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      Tale wagging and diving vigorously for scraps...or master gets "concerned."
  • kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    Work Units whose happiness is below 3.0 must attend mandatory 6:30 AM Joy Sessions.
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      GE...is that you?
      • mrtranscendence 5y ago
        Wait, GE has staff they haven't laid off?
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >Good luck getting a job, unhappy people… Since employment is one of the main sources of unhappiness I assume this will create an oscillating state of happy unemployed - unhappy employed people perpectually in and out of jobs as their happiness dips below a certain threshold.
  • Dudeman112 5y ago
    >happy unemployed - unhappy employed I see you've never been under any economic hardship ever in your life. Good on you, but that really, really doesn't apply for most people. Poverty sucks.
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      so what do I win if I disprove your 'I see'?
      • tapland 5y ago
        Employment is a common source of unhappiness. That to be a source at all requires a job. If you are unemployed you aren't just "less unhappy about your employment", you don't have any. I'd wager economic instability far outweighs the negatives of one's employment. After all, it's why many people still attend their jobs. I'd be absolutely amazed if you managed to disprove him, because nothing I've ever observed or experienced seems to fit into it.
        • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
          he said "I see you've never been under any economic hardship ever in your life." I said "so what do I win if I disprove your 'I see'?" you said: "I'd be absolutely amazed if you managed to disprove him, because nothing I've ever observed or experienced seems to fit into it. " So, you've spent your whole life tracking my levels of economic hardship? What organization do you work for? to say it another way, as I have lately noticed people not following what I say: I have had greater economic hardships than most Americans, the poster said they could tell I have not had any economic hardships, I made a response meant to cause them to think again by asking what I would win if I showed I had been under economic hardships, finally you seem to think that both you and the poster would absolutely 100% know that I have never been under any economic hardships - either that or you have grossly misunderstood what I wrote in response to them even though it was quite a short sentence and thus should be relatively clear.
• Joeri 5y ago
  Their entire argument for this also applying outside the military domain seems to be that the military is a very large employer… That seemed a bit shaky to me as well. You could just as well argue that people who are happy to go to war end up earning more medals. Happiness inside of the military is not the same as happiness in the workplace in general.
  • chillingeffect 5y ago
    Firm agree. Military unemployment and happiness assessment is absolutely different from other jobs. Look at the clear hierarchies, the enforced respect, the employment security, the healthcare, the indoctrination, the danger. It's greviously haughty and myopic to conclude this applies elsewhere without esupporting arguments, to which "it's a big employer" does not count. How did this pass muster? I conclude the authors are faking happiness to not get fired.
    • withinboredom 5y ago
      Military employment in the US is not that different from any other job I’ve ever had, including my current one as a SWE. Sure, there are jobs in the military that can be quite different (frontline assault units) but the vast majority of the military is support units. > enforced respect You are contractually obligated to do your job. They can’t fire you or send you home. Thus getting “smoked” (physical training as punishment) or an Article 15 (losing pay and/or rank) is the only option. I only once told a superior to go fuck themselves. It was worth every push up. Is it really so hard to be respectful in the workplace? > the indoctrination I’ve worked places that have heavier cool aid than the military. At least the military codifies it instead of “treating me like family” or “corporate values” enforced by some kind of cult-like culture. > the danger Yeah, getting rockets and bullets slung at you is pretty dangerous. But by the time that happens to you for real, you know exactly what to do. It’s survival, not war, in most cases (at least for support units). You do get hazard pay, so that’s something. Luckily I haven’t had to deal with this in any other job since then. However, it does give me a perspective that is quite useful. Whenever an “emergency” strikes at work, I’m calm when most people panic. No one is dying. The only thing wounded is the business’s bank account and maybe someone’s pride at screwing up. I can live with that.
• pjc50 5y ago
  This is literally just emotional labor: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5ea9f140-f722-4214-bb57-8b84f9418a7e https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5ea9f140-f722-4214-bb... > we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators So the job goes to the people who, in the eyes of the interviewer, can best fake happiness. The more desperate you are for the job for economic reasons, the more pressure on you to fake it convincingly. Big bright but not desperate smile. Right set of inspirational stories. No complaints or demands. From article: >> Here are three examples of simple exercises, each backed by rigorous evidence of effectiveness. In the first, the Gratitude Visit, participants prepare and present a 300-word testimony of gratitude to someone who changed their life for the better. In the second, Three Good Things, participants write down three things that went well each day and what caused those things to go well, for one week. The third, Using Signature Strengths in a New Way, calls on participants to complete an online strengths survey and then use one of their top strengths in a new way each day for at least a week I don't know whether it's because I'm not American or just really cynical, but I absolutely hate this kind of mandatory public performance of fake emotions. It's also more work for the employees to do; presumably this essay-writing is on the clock, in addition to other duties? I wonder if there will be an essay mill you can go to for the right set of inspirational stories to feed to your manager? Note that none of this stuff ever touches real concerns. Are the employees unhappy about the process? The breakroom snacks? The pay and pensions? Casualisation? Sexual harassment? (Obviously if someone gets groped at work, their happiness factor will go down, and that can be used against them in performance improvement) All of this has already been seen with the Bradford factor, a means of measuring employee sickness and targeting them for firing.
  • austincheney 5y ago
    > I don't know whether it's because I'm not American or just really cynical, but I absolutely hate this kind of mandatory public performance of fake emotions. It seems that you completely misunderstood the study, a longitudinal study conducted over 5 years and compared against a real world factor outside the study: military awards irrespective of any study.
    • pjc50 5y ago
• otikik 5y ago
  A lot of chronically unhappy people are adept at masking - faking they are happy and/or neurotypical. Especially so when they are aware that they are being tested for it. It's quite possible that a percentage of the top performers referenced on the original article are just doing that.
  • notahacker 5y ago
    I think that's an important point. I can believe that happiness is a component of workplace success, but the sort of stuff discussed in the article (self reporting happiness after writing Three Good Things narratives) sounds like it's far stronger evidence of compliance than actual genuine increase in hedonic well being.
  • frostwarrior 5y ago
    People tend to have an overly optimistic image of what it means to be neurotypical. Neurotypical people are not the extremely successful, always-happy, super charismatic elite. That's the 99% percentile. They are as outliers as the most unhappy and miserable of the people. Neurotypical is about the norm. If you have your set of problems but you don't need to take psychiatric drugs to deal with them, then you are neurotypical. And that's it.
• actually_a_dog 5y ago
  > Good luck getting a job, unhappy people… More like "have fun discriminating against people with psychiatric disabilities."
  • taneq 5y ago
    What happens when psychiatric symptoms are indistinguishable from 'normal' poor performance?
    • actually_a_dog 5y ago
      When the person cannot do the job with reasonable accommodations.
• austincheney 5y ago
  > Their entire argument for this also applying outside the military domain seems to be that the military is a very large employer… However, is not the military a vastly different environment from normal civilian workplaces? It’s not vastly different from other professions except software. Source: I have been in the U.S. Army for 25 years and I have been a corporate software developer for 16 years. The only valid question is not what makes the military unique but instead what makes software unique. The answer: a complete absence of professionalism. I wrote about this here: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Leadership_In_Software.md https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Leadership_... Edit: corrected the hyperlink.
• lupire 5y ago
  My old boss said he used to ask people in interviews if they were "lucky" people, until he decided it was too risky on a religious discrimination basis. "Lucky" is approximately the same as "happy" here.
• sanderjd 5y ago
  I also thought the analogy between the military and businesses by mere dint of workforce and asset sizes was incredibly weak.