Dear Selvet,

I got an answer from a manager of one subsidiary of Solvay five years ago. He complained that the turnover rate of the personnel is too low -- not a single person wished to leave the company for 15 years. Just look at the voluntary turnover rate and you receive a rough estimate of happiness.

Success!

Igor Gurkov

One way is to look at the Work-Life balance among employees in the organization.

I have no idea, sorry

Work satisfaction

Healthy and up building relationships at the workplace

Hello Selvet,

I guess the better way to go down the road would be to pay attention to the employee satisfaction levels in the company and among peers. Happiness sounds to vague. Bear in mind that I am not really into this area.

Maybe the attached graph will help you a bit.

Rgds,

Dusan

Another way to measure happiness is from the point of view of governance. To what extent there is transparency in policies, involvement of employees, engagement of employees in decision making and other critical areas...

Happiness measurement in an organization directly is complex. The standard practice is to measure the Employee satisfaction and/or Customer satisfaction. If Employees are satisfied, one can generally conclude that it is a Happy work culture and environment!!

This may help

Chapter Measures of Happiness: Which to Choose?

I would suggest that you would measure happiness on different segments. For example:

Happiness with the culture of a workplace

Happiness with the environment'

Happiness with the salary

Happiness around "how things are done"

Happiness with the level of social activity

Happiness with the level of support received

Happiness with communication

A survey using a scale is probably an ideal start

One can be very happy about two or three of these and absolutely miserable about the others. I hope this is helpful

Wow, this is a pool of very interesting subtopics. Definitely a lot of studies could be carried out. Thumbs up.

I think it is very difficult to measure happiness simply because the notion of happiness varies between individuals and they would invariably vary over time. What then would be an average value of any measure of happiness, however defined?

I could be happy yesterday and be sad today and be more sad day after tomorrow? How will one then be able to talk of happiness? What would be a measure of happiness? Perhaps there may be a range of indicators. Are there any biological indicators of happiness? Perhaps when we laugh we may be happy for a fleeting moment and if so some measure of dopamines or of endorphin could be used.

Mrs May became British Prime Minister and undoubtedly was happy at her achievement at the time. But I do not think she is happy or in a happy place today.

I can see some merits in the response of Ms C Dunlop above but the recurring question is: How do you measure each of them? How would one place them in a ranking of their contributions to the notion of happiness?

I am not sure that satisfaction can be equated to happiness as argued by Mr Aditya above because one can be satisfied with something that one has bought or the service that one has experienced, but that may not raise one's 'happiness level, however measured.

Interesting - it begs another question - is happiness at work referred to either; an emotion that fluctuates or is it a consistent state of reflection of one's feelings in regard to a particular segment of work or ...................? Maybe the researcher should be exploring satisfaction levels at work which probably correlate to happiness?

It may be necessary for the researcher to define "happiness" before the research begins. Either that or change the terms of reference in order to specify the research and define the research question. Will the research involve quantitative or qualitative research methods or a mix?

When an individual thinks of his/her job as fun, then happiness is there to be felt so.

Dear Selvet,

I got an answer from a manager of one subsidiary of Solvay five years ago. He complained that the turnover rate of the personnel is too low -- not a single person wished to leave the company for 15 years. Just look at the voluntary turnover rate and you receive a rough estimate of happiness.

Success!

Igor Gurkov

I refer to Mr Gurkov's response and I quote "He complained that the turnover rate of the personnel is too low -- not a single person wished to leave the company for 15 years. Just look at the voluntary turnover rate and you receive a rough estimate of happiness. "

The above response is baffling to say the least. Assuming the premise is right and I am not sure that it is, how will anyone estimate even roughly happiness? What measures would be used and what would be the unit used in the estimation?

There are many reasons why people do nor leave and here I shall give a few. Here in The Netherlands, many companies have their own pension funds. When one retires, once pension is related to the last drawn salary. At Philips it is 2% of the last drawn salary. One need not be a rocket scientist to see that if one works for the same company from age 25 to 65, and if one's last annual salary at retirement is, say Euro 80K, the pension, comes out to be 40x2%x80000 = 64,000 . If one leaves at say the age of 35, just 10 years after joining, the pension will be 10x2% of last salary of 30 years previously assuming the person does reach retirement age in 30 years time. Inflation will mean that the amount will be small compared to what one could get as pension at retirement age of 65. Thus, it is easy to see that here in The Netherland people continue to work for the same employer.

Other reasons could be that the person might have bought a house, and is happy living where he is, and his children might not relish the prospect of leaving friends and school to go to another.

There are many more reasons that I can advance but I shall not at this time. So, in my view, staying put in a job may not be an indicator of happiness. That said, not wanting to change jobs could be that the person has been climbing the career ladder and may not wish to move to another employer. In Japan, people do NOT switch to other employers -- they work with the same firm until retirement.

Thus, I have to sadly conclude that Mr Gurkov is on shaky ground with his view that staying put can be used as an estimate of happiness.

PS Solvay is a Belgian company and much the same happens in Belgium as happens in the neighbour The Netherlands.

Dear Phil,

I referred to a Russian subsidiary of Solvay with no pension funds available to employees based on the period of employment at the same employers. Even in the Netherlands university professor's pension does not depend on the period of stay in the same university, the habit of life-long employment in Japan ended in 1990s etc. Even taking your arguments, the expectation of a good pension, satisfaction with your house and the school for your children, good neighborhood and tolerable colleagues are the part of the happiness.

Mr Gurkov,

Perhaps in Russia these things like pension are not properly planned, organized and executed. In most of the countries around the world, including in Asia, pensions are regulated and enforced.

Your view about a university professor's pension in The Netherlands is not correct, I am afraid. I happened to have belonged to one, the ABP. All academics belong to a common pension fund, irrespective of university. One can move from one institution to another without losing benefits that one is entitled to... that encourages mobility, which ensures the newer employer benefits from the knowledge, experience built up in a previous job.

Yesterday, 20th March 2018, was the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness. The 10 happiest countries in March 2018 were reported to be Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia, in that order from 1 to 10.

Respondents in the various countries were required to respond to questions related to some variables. Six variables were used viz., 1) GDP per capita, 2) Social Support, 3) Healthy life expectancy, 4) freedom to make life choices, 5)generosity, and 6) freedom from corruption. R-squared was a high 0.735, which is far, far higher than many of the papers that get published in many journals. Sample size in most countries was at least 4000 with it exceeding 7000 in all 10 countries mentioned above. In The Netherlands, N=7441. The lowest sample size was in Burundi, N= 2905.

If one thinks of happiness in a business (organization), some of the above variables may not easily translate. We can, if we try hard enough, still attempt to see if there could be some kind of relationship. So in my view,

Variable 1); Variable 2) in terms of fellow colleagues; Variable 5) in terms of generosity of salary and perhaps Variable 6) wherein everyone is judged solely on performance, not on gender, not on belonging to a certain class or group or religion, not on country of origin or not on cultural antecedents etc., could possibly be applicable. I have to say I am not a sociologist but I do have an interest in these matters, as they have much to do with economics as some of the variables might suggest

Having said all of the above, I wonder if the notion of happiness (i.e. the feeling of being happy) is valid or persists over time (even on a personal or work-based view) and throughout a short or longer period. I do not have the answer but I hope I have provided some food for thought. Perhaps some of you may care to respond?