WorkL founder - 'Why happiness should be a legitimate HR metric'

When Mark Price (now Baron Price), first joined John Lewis as a graduate trainee in 1982, he says he distinctly remembers his very first day on the job – being told by the then leadership that there was only one thing the partnership was really worried about: the happiness of its people.

In fact, long before academics were linking ‘happiness’ [what some regard as a rather imprecise metric – see later] to a 13% uplift in productivity (as well as better retention and cultivator of discretionary effort), Price says John Lewis instinctively knew that happy employees were better employees. And some 40+ years later – during which time he himself rose to MD of Waitrose, and Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership – his view has not only remained unchanged but he say he now has the evidence to prove it. Latterly founder of WorkL – the platform that allows employers to measure and track their employees happiness for free [some 1.5 million assessments have been taken], he says some of the correlations he’s found are stunning.

“All the legislation we see around work is around stuff like pay, and benefits, and rights, but they’re nothing to do with how we ‘feel’,” he says. “Happiness ‘is’ the way we feel, and we consistently find that how people get on with their managers is the most pivotal to this.” He adds: “People that answer ten out of ten in terms of their manager relationship correlate to an 80+ percent score in overall happiness.” He continues: “Lots of people think the concept of happiness is nebulous; I’m saying it can be defined, and it needs to recognised as a legitimate HR metric.”

The quest for happiness at work

The reason for HR Grapevine meeting Price is not a coincidence. Price is promoting his latest book – ‘Work Happier: How to be happy and successful at work’, the follow-up to last year’s ‘Happy Economics’. Happy Economics was squarely aimed for managers – to help them understand what drives happiness in their organisations (them!). But this new tome is for employees themselves, suggesting that in addition to whatever managers need to know, employees also need their own treatise too.

So is this book a recognition that managers are not doing a good enough job, and that employees also need to know how to push managers from below?

“The bigger picture is that managers need to do more to support employees,” he says. “But what this new book is doing is helping people address the reasons why they might not be happy at work – to give them the knowledge they need to address it. This may well be through pushing their managers to be better in their roles, and it contains my ‘Work Happiness Charter’ – the ten rights all employees should now expect from their workplace.”

Unhappiness can be found and fixed

By treating happiness (or the lack of it), as something that can be diagnosed, in the same way as, say a problem with a car, Price is doubling down on the notion that happiness is something definite – not ‘wooly’ – and demands a correct line of investigation about what’s going wrong to prevent unhappiness taking root.

But in doing so, it opens up a much more philosophical debate about whether employers should have ultimate responsibility for employees’ happiness – and whether staff should demand that their happiness is actively considered, especially when happiness can sometimes feel like it’s a changing thing that isn’t solely influenced by the workplace, but is dependent on myriad other things (such as what is going on in people’s own personal lives). In essence, is happiness too big a concept to chase (and pin down)?

Price though is more up for the intellectual challenge. “Employees do, absolutely, have to take responsibility for their own happiness,” he says weighing up the questions.

“What I’m asking employees to consider, is whether they should be content to let their happiness suffer, or whether they should do something about it?”