Don’t surrender!

In the pursuit of talent attraction and retention many companies seem to have taken and are been expected to take more and more charge of the happiness and well-being of their employees, and employees themselves seem to expect it. Great Place to Work, people engagement programs are driving this strange notion that employers are now responsible for people’s happiness.

Many philosophers pondered over the concept of happiness, what makes people happy? is happiness the ultimate goal of our life, the pursuit of it driving consciously or unconsciously the majority of our actions and decisions, and how to reach happiness? For the Greek Stoics happiness came from wisdom, from giving up wishes and aspirations, from virtue and leading a healthy life. On the contrary Epicureans thought that happiness came from the satisfaction of our desires and wishes. I guess there are many routes and journeys to get closer to happiness but none of them seem to relate to engagement.

In fact, I am pretty sure that happiness is not the correct lever to drive engagement. I am in bliss when I sit by the fire in winter reading a good book or when I listen to music but I cannot say that this boost my engagement and performance. I would even argue that it is a certain level of dissatisfaction with the way things are, the conviction that they could be better and the belief that I can have an impact that boosts my motivation and energy to work hard, achieve more and ultimately the enjoyment I get from my work. I have to doubt that people are motivated by different things but somehow, I think that people’s engagement and contribution, and thus the enjoyment of their work, is maximized through autonomy and accountability, by treating them as adult and engaging their intelligence.

So is our employer responsible for our happiness, well-being, and career? I would rather say that we are.

While it is true that employers can offer more or less enjoyable work environment, encourage people to lead a healthy life, offer development opportunities and support people in their career choices, we are all responsible for our lives and what we make of it.

Having said all this, there are definitely some things for which we, as employers are responsible; treating our employees with dignity and respect, acting in a responsible way internally, in the communities in which we do business and as a world corporate citizen. We are also responsible for ensuring the safety of the people who work for us, for making equitable people decision and ethical business decisions, but is my employer responsible for my happiness?

After thousands of years in our history of humankind of dependency on various institutions and many struggles and even some revolutions and civil wars to gain our freedom of will and action, we should not surrender the responsibility for ourselves to our employer or anybody else.