Employee engagement doesn’t equal happiness and here’s why. Taken from the book, ENGAGEMENT MAGIC®: Five Keys to Unlock the Power of Employee Engagement.
Happiness isn’t the same as engagement. It’s an outcome of engagement. When you’re engaged at your workplace, you feel better about your life. You feel appreciated, recognized, and connected to the people with whom you spend the lion’s share of your day.
Thanks to the growing field of positive psychology, it’s become trendy to study what makes us happy. As a result, we’ve found out that happiness is important in the workplace: Research reported by the Wall Street Journal shows that happier workers help their colleagues 33 percent more often than unhappy employees, and are 36 percent more motivated in their work.
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However, happiness isn’t the same as engagement, and it’s important that we not confuse these two concepts. As mentioned above, it’s an outcome of engagement. Part of happiness is being engaged at work. We talk to a lot of people about work–life balance, and we’ve found that true engagement promotes happiness at home, not just at work. When you’re engaged at your workplace, you feel better about your life. You feel appreciated, recognized, and connected to the people with whom you spend the lion’s share of your day.
We often pursue what we think will make us happy––money, security, status––but find that those things actually make us unhappy. In fact, happiness may not be something that we can even aspire to. A study conducted at the University of Denver found that the more study participants valued happiness for its own sake, the more they felt disappointed and unhappy when confronted with even minor life stresses of setbacks. The researchers concluded, “Paradoxically, therefore, valuing happiness may lead people to be less happy just when happiness is within reach.”1
Happiness & Meaning
Researcher from Florida State University, the University of Minnesota, and Stanford University dug deeper into the importance of happiness in a study published in 2013 in the Journal of Positive Psychology. In surveys of 397 adults about happiness and meaning several eyebrow-raising results emerged:
- The factors that predicted a person would be happy were different from those that predicted the same person would find meaning.
- Satisfying one’s needs and want increased happiness but was irrelevant to meaningfulness.
- Happiness was based largely in the present, while meaningfulness was linked to thinking that integrated past, present, and future.
- Taking, not giving, increased happiness, while giving rather than taking increased meaningfulness.2
The clear conclusion is that happiness, while important, has little to do with meaning. Aid workers toiling in sub-Saharan Africa under harsh conditions may be temporarily unhappy with the heat, mosquitoes, and poor sanitation, but these same people inevitably find their work deeply meaningful and engaging.
1 I.B. Mauss, M. Tamir, C. L. Anderson, and N. S. Savino, “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness,” Emotion 11, no.4 (August 2011):807-15.
2 Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Jennifer L. Aaker, and Emily N. Garbinsky, “Some Key Differences Between Happy Life and a Meaningful Life,” Journal of Positive Psychology 8, no. 6 (2013): 505-16.
