March 2006 – Is happiness a job for life?

Maintaining my hypochondria at an unhealthy level is not easy. I suffer too many anxious days when, even with the help of a well-thumbed family medical book, I am unable to diagnose anything that can undermine a nagging sense of well-being.

January was a particularly difficult month, endured without so much as a hint of a cough. My hopes of finding something wrong were raised briefly at the weekend after spending time with medical friends who did their best to diagnose seasonal affective disorder.

Even this was ruined however, when one of them, a GP, asked me to rate my general happiness. I said I was probably about 75 per cent happy with my lot. “You should think yourself lucky,” she said. “There are a lot of people out there who are a lot less happy than that. I’m seeing them every day in my surgery.”

To some extent this eased things since it suggested that my relative happiness was abnormal and hypochondriacs thrive on abnormality. I had already been struggling with the concept of happiness for most of the previous week after a brief discussion at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

Among various discussions looking at ideas for future RSA projects was one led by Lord Best, director of the Rowntree Trust who was trying to build something around the theme of fostering greater levels of happiness in society. The idea has been explored by Lord Leyard, former director of the centre for economic performance at the London School of Economics and author of happiness.

One idea was a happiness index or metric. A happiness measure might be a welcome addition to the workplace since work, or overwork, seems to be one of the chief causes of unhappiness today. But what would constitute a happiness measure?

How should we define happiness in the first place? Is it something to do with contentment or satisfaction? Most recruiters I know are looking for restless, ambitious people. A classic interview response is to say that you see yourself in the interviewer’s shoes in a few years’ time. People who seem content or happy with their lot tend to be regarded as safe but dull. These are the people who, traditionally, have formed the backbone of any organisation - rarely mentioned in dispatches, but always dependable.

Their collective sense of contentment has been so neglected, so disturbed, that many have become deeply unhappy at the way more agile, vocal, pushier and, sometimes, less talented colleagues have manoeuvred themselves in to high places.

Once the thrusters are installed behind the top desk it is tempting for them to adopt the same quick and easy approaches that brought them thus far: talk the talk, follow the latest fashions and prune away at the so-called “dead wood”, including once-upon-a-time motivated and capable people who were trampled underfoot in the Darwinian scramble for corporate ascendancy.

The trade unions have chosen to fight back by insisting that employers recognise the terms and conditions of contracts. Only last week the Trades Union Congress announced a “work your proper hours day” where people were urged to stick to their contracted hours. The TUC had calculated that people in the UK were giving their employers £23bn of “free” work a year.

This contrasted with the report I mentioned last week suggesting that companies were losing billions of pounds in productivity a year because of poor performance among some employees. Companies face constant competitive pressure to increase their productivity and efficiency. Often this feeds through in to broader expectations of the workforce, either in extra workloads or more flexible working practices.

Decreasing levels of unhappiness appear to be an unfortunate by-product of unbridled competition. There is evidence too that short term bottom line gains through efficiency savings can backfire in the long term.

Making a case for retaining skilled workforces in a forthcoming book, 21st Century Japanese Management, New Systems, Lasting Values, James Abegglen compares the respective fortunes of Airbus and Boeing.

Boeing, once the largest single source of exports from the US, cut its workforce by more than a third and production by more than 40 per cent in 1993 in response to a cyclical downturn in the aircraft industry with corresponding order cancellations. A strike at the company in protest at the cuts only increased costs and losses.

Three years later when orders began to increase again Boeing found that it had too few experienced managers and trained assembly workers to cope with the extra work. It recruited 32,000 workers in just 18 months but was still forced to call a temporary halt to production of 747 and 737 aircraft. Airbus, meanwhile, working in a more regulated employment environment, retained its skilled workforce and began to win more orders from its chief rival, grabbing the lead in market share of commercial aircraft by early 2004.

Mr Abegglen uses the comparison to stress the merits of Japan’s unfashionable attachment to lifetime employment, which, he says, has persisted throughout Japan’s economic downturn. The result, he believes, is that restructured Japanese industries are well poised to compete once more.

The resilience of Japanese employment is a timely reminder, if any were needed, that the globalisation of employment markets is unlikely to lead to a single dominant system of work and management. The point was emphasised in an inaugural lecture last week by Chris Brewster, professor of International Human Resource Management at Henley Management College.

Prof Brewster has drawn on the Cranet surveys, a series of extensive HR surveys, repeated every three years across 42 countries since the late 1980s to make the case that the US management belief in a “one best way” approach to work and management simply won’t wash in most European countries.

Successive surveys, he said, suggested that changes in HR management approaches across Europe within the past 15 years had been nuanced, sometimes appearing to converge, then diverging. He said: “There is very little evidence of countries becoming more alike in the way that they manage their human resources. Countries remain stubbornly different in how they deal with HRM.”

Prof Brewster is scathing of some of the newer management approaches. “I know how I like to be treated by others so it follows that I should treat people in the same way. It’s pretty obvious stuff. Management is really about implementing processes and getting things done.”

Looking at these arguments collectively, laissez fair capitalism does not appear to have yet delivered a society that, in the words of John Major is “at ease with itself”. A happiness measure could well be one solution but it must be the right kind of happiness, not the smug, self-preening kind or that which takes pleasure from bullying and mockery. Nor should it be the “tinned happiness” of red nose days and forced jolliness.

Sadly some of our happier times seem to hark back to a world we left behind, when communities were tight-knit, relationships were lasting, food seasonal, and work continuous. Somewhere happiness fell out of fashion, replaced by a trendier cynicism. It is time to bring it back.

21st-Century Japanese Management, by James C Abegglen, is published by Palgrave Macmillan, price £55.