The Great Gloom, or Why Employees Today Seem to be Unhappier Than Ever

IF YOU HAVE TO GO to a conference, there are few places better to do it than Las Vegas.

Not only does the city have a giant Convention Center, but many large hotels — Caesars Palace, the Aria, the Venetian and Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, Wynn and Encore, MGM Grand, and the Red Rock Resort, just to name some I have been at — have good conference facilities of their own.

Last week, I attended the Transform 2024 conference (formerly called HR Transform) at the Wynn & Encore. It’s an event that’s growing rapidly, and as Steve Smith wrote on the the Starr Conspiracy’s Work Tech Weekly blog, “Transform is the HR tech conference buzz-event of the moment.”

One of the more interesting sessions I attended had the provocative title The Great Gloom: Employees are Unhappier Than Ever. Why?

This was a panel discussion with four speakers:

• Robleh Kirce — Session moderator and Managing Partner at NextArrow;
• Melissa Doman, MA — Organizational Psychologist, Former Clinical Mental Health Therapist, & Author;
• Anita Grantham — Head of Human Resources at BambooHR;
• Rebecca Port, PhD — Chief People Officer at 10x Genomics

Last fall, I recorded two speakers — Josh Bersin and Geena Davis — at the annual HR Technology conference held at the Mandalay Bay Conference Center, and I published an edited version of their transcribed comments here on The Skeptical Guy.

The feedback I got from Skeptical Guy readers was such that I’m publishing an edited version of the Q&A from The Great Gloom session here. It has been edited for length and readability.

By the way, I have two other sessions that I recorded and have had transcribed, and I hope you will let me know if you would like me to post them here as well.

Why are Employees Today Unhappier Than Ever?

Robleh Kirce: Okay, so I’ll start here. What is happiness from your perspective?

Melissa Doman: I think happiness, for some people, is whatever they need it to be. It is very individual, it’s very subjective, and it’s based on a lot of things that influence every day in our life. So it’s whenever we’re bringing that sense of joy, contentment or feeling like things are as they should be.

Anita Grantham: Happiness is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t know that it’s our job to define happiness for other people.

Rebecca Port: To me it’s a combination of pleasure and purpose, and it’s a balance of the two. And too much pleasure isn’t going to make you happy, and too much purpose isn’t going to make you happy. So it’s a combination of both.

Robleh: I love that. So for my academic understanding of this (which is really academic), there is a subjective moment of happiness and there’s also sometimes this push for, not necessarily an objective measure of happiness, but eudemonia. This idea is that it’s almost the goal of life to have some purpose that’s driven at, and that’s what you’re talking about. Also, there are these moments of pleasure and pain …

So we have an understanding of some type of balance between the subjective, momentary pleasure, momentary pain, and some sum total of those things. There’s also purpose and meaning that everyone’s pursuing. What is employee happiness?

Melissa: Employee happiness — oh, that is not a linear answer. There are so many things that can make employees happy. It could range from being able to put food on the table for their family, to be able to have flexibility in their work, to feeling a sense of connection and purpose about what they do and why. But I think that there are so many things that go into the experiences that go into being able to feel that happiness at work.

As you were both saying, it’s not telling people what happiness is, but rather, encouraging them to find what that is for them. And it’s about what that means and what that looks like, especially after the pandemic, because I don’t know about all of you, but how happiness felt pre-2020 is very different to how it feels now.

Helping people to find purpose in their work

Rebecca: I think it’s important that happiness isn’t a stable concept. I think it’s about looking at it over time and having that sense of pleasure and purpose over time. Employee happiness is really helping people find purpose in the work that they’re doing, and a connection with the people that they’re doing it with, and pleasure and fun around what they do. And as Mel said, I think one of the gifts that the pandemic gave us was that it opened up everybody’s lives.

That’s because we were all at home, and finally people are living and (feeling) “oh, you have a life.” Or, it’s okay to have children, or it’s okay to have elderly parents who you are looking after, or whatever the other challenges are. Employee happiness is so complex. It’s not just about what we do at work; it’s also about all of those other parts of life which we may or may not know about.

Robleh: There are a lot of factors that go into it, but when you’re describing some of these components at work, it reminds me that self-determination theory highlights these and there’s this autonomy component to it — our own competence that we get a chance to display in the work context. There’s a big difference for how people understand that before and after the pandemic.

Anita: I want to make it actionable. What can we do to connect our people to our purpose at work? I believe that’s part of our mission and values. We want to attract people that understand what their values are, and do they 75% align with the values of the organization? Can they wake up and be motivated to go to work because of a purpose that gets them motivated to work? I think what’s happening right now is that people have lost track. What’s my value? What do I identify with? And, what organization would do that for me?

I think as people, as practitioners, we need to be explicit on attracting people around a mission and values so that people clearly understand what they’re getting when they get inside of our organization. It also repels people that don’t want to be a part of that. And that’s okay. There’s lots of other places they can go.

Robleh: Here’s a follow-up question — So there’s a selection component to this, right? But you also mentioned that for some reason it seems more difficult for people to do this well … and to attract and demonstrate what are the values that we care about. What’s leading to that difficulty?

Rebecca: I think some of it is transparency and being open on what the deal is. I think as people, as practitioners, we need to be really clear on, “hey, this is what we do, this is what we don’t do.” And then you can opt in and that’s not for everybody. Admit that you can’t make every employee or every person happy and we say, “Look, this is a really intense place to work. If that’s got you down, don’t come here.” And that’s okay if it’s got you down because it’s like you said, there are lots of other places. So I think being really clear on what’s the deal is important.

Melissa: I’d love to add to that. I think that there is a missing conversation in the workplace about the co-creation of what happiness is and how this is about how we feel and hope that happiness could be created. What does that actually look like? How do we impact that with each other and what do we bring into the workplace that could impact that? What can we control ourselves and need to take responsibility for, whenever and wherever possible, to influence our own happiness? We can’t make others responsible for that.

It’s “a meet-in-the-middle sort of thing”

Robleh: Anyone know Chris Rock? Yeah, no? Well he’s a guy, occasionally funny, and he talks about being in a marriage. Relationships are hard. And he says, “well actually not that hard. Moving a couch is hard by yourself, but if both parties are working on it, it’s actually not so hard.” So I’d argue that there’s a component of self responsibility, but perhaps also organizational responsibility.

Melissa: (I agree with) that 1000%. I don’t think that happiness in the workplace is just a top-down thing. I think that it’s a meet-in-the-middle sort of thing, because you have a tremendous responsibility if you are in a position of leadership. People look to their leaders for examples, for role modeling, for permission to do things no matter how much of a rebel that you might be. And I think that there’s not only that opportunity, but it’s very much a “it takes a village” sort of thing. Each person has to do their own piece. It is co-creative in some ways.

Robleh: So there’s this individual lens. There’s also this broader, big data lens to look at this as well. So what are the reasons employee happiness continues to drop?

Anita: If you can access this report, it’s free. It’s the Employee Happiness Index at Bamboo HR. We had 1.4 billion data points coming out of the EMTS survey and it boils down to four things, none of which are going to be surprising to any of us. One is team members want more feedback. They want to know what’s working and what’s not working. Number two is they want organizational transparency. We’ve mentioned all of these, but it’s evident in this big data set as well.

And guess what? This will shock you. They also want more money. And then the fourth one is they want team and career support. So they want to know that they can be able to grow. And I think we’ve been, for those of us that have been in tech, we’ve been in this world of growth. Instead of growing our people, we’re hiring our people because that’s been easier. They want to grow their careers so they can stay longer.

Robleh: I love that. There’s a study in 2020 looking at employee happiness, meaningfulness, work-life balance and connection. Some of the three biggest drivers for that are employee happiness. And again, that may be a little bit different post pandemic.

The Journal of Business Ethics also put out an article about organizational virtuousness and this does have an impact on employee happiness, and, what we mean by this virtuousness. Do we look at our organization and say, yeah, we trust them? Do they forgive us? Do we forgive them? Are we able to move on from things quickly? Do we act with integrity? Do we say the things that we mean and then follow through on all of these things? It’s all talking about transparency

Leaders are NOT flawless

Anita: You need to be open and say when we mess it up. We don’t do this enough. We’ve got to be truthful. I think it’s one of the most impactful things we can do. Look, I’m not perfect. Those of you that have worked with me on my teams know that maybe I hit it 70% of the time, and it’s not consistently awesome all the time. We aren’t perfect and I’m learning just like everybody else. And I think we’ve got to share that organizationally. We sometimes put leaders on a pedestal and think that we’re all flawless  — and we are not flawless.

Rebecca: I think being transparent and being open is really important. I think there’s a real power in owning that you messed up — not only because it makes you more human, but also because it then gives everybody else permission to mess up. And I think it’s about making sure that people can continually learn from their mistakes and look for other ways to learn.

Robleh: In addition to looking at some of the academic research on this, I also went to another source. Some of you may know Reddit and the Bamboo article posted on Reddit. One of the things that they were getting at here is the deal that employees have with employers  If you feel like you’re getting a fair deal with your employers, it’s much easier to be happy. When you don’t, not so much, right?

And what about AI and the impact of AI in the workplace? There’s some serious conversations about “Am I replaceable?” that I have to entertain as an employee that drives the value that my employer, or the perceived value, that the employer has to me. How do we let employees know we value them and we want them to have a great deal?

Melissa: I think this is really, really tough because there’s something called the SCARF model. And the F doesn’t stand for one of our favorite collective four letter words, but for fairness. So if you think about fairness, how many of you here believe that fairness is a top value for you, whether it’s at work or whether it’s in your romantic relationship? When you feel like something is unfair, it just makes you want to flip the table, doesn’t it?

The thing is, we’re all adults here and the crappy thing is that sometimes there are going to be decisions that are made that are going to be unfair and painful and we’re not going to recover from that. I think that it is a delicate balance that could crack at any moment. If you have even a quarter of a heart, you would hope that leaders in the business want people to feel that they are valued, that their role is valued and that they are recognized for that in the workplace and are not just a number who is replaceable.

AI will have an impact in almost every industry. And so I feel in 2024 that my mantra is that multiple things can be true at the same time … We want people to have this feeling of fairness, that they are valued and don’t feel replaceable. And at the same time, businesses can’t always guarantee and give employees that comfort of the safety and security and longevity in their jobs that everyone will be looking for. So I think that the answer is that people are still figuring it out and we’re going to have to make some really tough non-binary decisions when it comes to how AI is going to impact employee happiness.

Creating a great sense of belonging

Robleh: I’m going to ask a personal question here. When have you felt most valued, personally, in the workplace?

Rebecca: I think as we talk about this, it’s really about looking at a sense of belonging, right? I think that even the AI question around “I’m not replaceable,” what that’s really saying is, “make me feel valued right now.” When I look at a time when I found this value, it’s not just from my boss, but it’s from my peers, my team, my co-workers, and that we’re all really connected, we’re all driving towards a clear goal, and we all really care about each other.

I think if you can create these environments where people are connected and truly care and approach each other with respect, and I want you to do well, and you want me to do well by removing scarcity in our ecosystems, I think you end up with this great sense of belonging For me, that’s when I felt most valued, that I’m part of this thing, and that I’m part of this team.

Anita: I feel like I can share anything with my team. Feedback for me is when I feel valued and somebody can tell me the ugly, dirty things … And when you said this, it made me feel like this and it didn’t feel good. That’s when I know I’m doing my job, when I can hear it all and it’s okay. And when it comes back to AI, what we can do about it.

I don’t want my team — four people, four days, 10 hour days — to put together data points. That’s not their highest and best use. I want to use AI for that. I want our people to be focused on things that only humans can do, and humans can do more for people. Connection is really important. Let’s put our people on the biggest people problems to connect with our humans to drive value to our customers. Let’s not be afraid of AI; let’s embrace it to do the work that we don’t want our team doing anyway.

Robleh: One of the questions that came from the audience is what’s a manager’s role in this? I’d love to hear some perspective on it.

Rebecca: I know that managers have a significant impact on employee happiness. I think that as a manager, it comes with a space of being. It’s an honor and a privilege to manage someone and have a significant impact on someone’s life. And so I think as people professionals, we need to make sure that we’re hiring those people that want to do that, right?

Hiring people is not the only way to get ahead and make sure we structure our organizations like that. We’ve used the SCARF model and we partnered to train our managers so that they can give really good feedback, but we do it in a way that protects somebody’s dignity and respect, and in a way that leaves people with their psychological safety intact. I think when managers can do that, they can help foster employee happiness.

Robleh: Thank you. So let’s make sure we’re hiring and promoting the right people. Then also make sure that they’re trained and skilled to allow happiness to be fostered.

Caring enough to give difficult feedback

Melissa: Let me make this really brief. I specialize in teaching businesses and leaders and individuals how to talk about mental health as a form of conversational literacy in the workplace. That is a skill, like any other skill, and the language that we all need to learn no matter what walk of life we come from. So if you think about the manager role, how many of you in here have teams that report to you? Do you ever feel like their Mom or Dad?

And you didn’t volunteer for that, did you? No. But your team members will look to you to shield them, to protect them, to maybe be responsible for some of their happiness. That’s natural. It’s normal. It’s a lot of pressure on you, but there is such an opportunity to have … radical candor? We’re all familiar with radical candor. I care enough about you to give you this difficult feedback. And that means feedback if you’re also self-sabotaging your own happiness.

I’m all about that radical candor. And so I think that there is an opportunity for managers to not only look out for their teams — how they work, what their output is, and their general well being — but also bringing up opportunities through radical candor for blind spots. But you are not responsible for the adults that you manage. At the end of the day, they have to take that responsibility even when they make you feel like you have to do it entirely because of your job title.

Robleh: I’m getting close to a closing question, but here’s a quick one that was on the screen. There are a lot of key decision-makers that say happiness isn’t measurable. What do you say to this?

Anita: One thing that the data tells us is that time-off makes people happy. And in our applicant tracking system right now, our teams are asking for more time-off than we are granting. Isn’t that interesting? We don’t want to give them time-off. I think that’s fascinating.

So if time-off makes people happy, and you’re a key decision-maker, and you’re managing the outcomes and results, there’s no reason people can’t take the time-off they need. So that’s what I would say to it. I don’t think we need to be in charge of happiness. That’s a big wave. But there are things that we can do that drive that. So let’s grant some time off.

Rebecca: And on the point that people don’t think that happiness is important … I think there is data that you can shed. Happiness is basically the predictor of success, regardless of the measure of success. Happy doctors make three times better, or more accurate, diagnosis. Happy salespeople outsell unhappy salespeople by 56%. Happy people — happy employees — take 10 times fewer sick days than unhappy employees. Happy employees are 12 times more productive than unhappy ones.

The list is endless. There is a whole series of academic data that’s published on that. So if you are faced with decision-making saying happiness isn’t important, it absolutely is. It drives engagement, it drives productivity, and therefore it is really important to organizations.

“Insight doesn’t always equal healing”

Robleh: All right, closing question here for you all is — what’s the time that you were so happy you recommended something?

Melissa: I am actually going to give a very personal example if that’s okay. Obviously, I’m biased. I have the best therapist on the planet, and something made me so happy because it was just phenomenally transformative. Yes, because I’ve learned and listened, and despite degree titles, we are all human beings and we still carry our stuff. And even for all the work I’ve had in clinical psych, I have learned very recently, that insight doesn’t always equal healing.

I’ve looking at this and I’m thinking, “look at the infrastructure that gets the guy to the top of this hundred foot tightrope.” The thing I would recommend is to surround yourself with people that care about you and you care about.

When I look at things that I would recommend, that’s my team right now, I don’t know if I’m allowed to use the word love, but there is a lot of love shared and it feels remarkable. I don’t take that for granted. I think my recommendation is to look at who you sit with every day and make sure that they’re the right people.

Robleh: Here’s just a quick recap of what we talked about today. I think it’s the reality that there are some subjective and some objective performance of happiness. There are clearly benefits associated with employee happiness and there are things that are within both organizational control and managerial control to impact employee happiness.

Is it the goal? Sometimes. Sometimes not. But certainly it’s an outcome. An emerging priority. The conditions that produce happiness match with employees that have decided to opt into that and take some responsibility as well. The client, of course, is sad anytime you see something like this, I think parents’ most common answer for what they want for their children is happiness. …

What’s driving that, and what you can do about it, is a worthwhile endeavor. I want to acknowledge all of you for being here today. … People care about you a lot. That’s true for the audience as well. So thanks for your time.

 

• One-third of employers anticipate higher turnover in 2024 (From HRDive.com)
• How 2024 Will be AI’s ‘Leap Forward’ (From NYTimes.com)
• 10 Trends Behind Today’s Talent Scarcity as the Global Workforce Ages (From Franchising.com)
• Tech workers are dissatisfied with their six-figure salaries, worried about industry layoffs (From TechSpot.com/News)
• Mental Health-Related Absences Up 33% in 2023 (From SHRM.org)
• Not just extra PTO: How mini sabbaticals boost productivity (From BenefitsNews.com)
• What to watch as DOL’s independent contractor rule takes effect (From HRDive.com)
• Report: Workers are living further from employer, more are living 50 miles from the office (From USAToday.com)
• Sen. Bernie Sanders pushes bill to establish a four-day workweek (From NBCnews.com)