Should You Really Hire A Chief Happiness Officer?

A wellbeing strategy isn’t a quick win

Put your hand up if you employ a ‘Chief Happiness Officer’. Anybody? Don’t worry, I’m not going to make fun of you if you do, because it’s not a bad thing.

However, I do think that you should be asking yourself why. And this is the exact question Dr. Kai Haas asked the room at Mad World 2018, with his engaging speech titled: Do you really need a Chief Happiness Officer?
 

His conclusion? Hiring a Chief Happiness Officer is a nice thing to do. However, doing this alone will not provide happiness. Instead, you must create an employee experience that spreads across the entire organization – otherwise, you’re just hiring a person who is launching initiatives that nobody will buy into.

Dr. Haas works as Managerial Occupational Physician at Airbus. He says that there is no formally accepted definition of a Chief Happiness Officer. However, he says that a definition can be worked out, by comparing it to that of a Chief Financial Officer.
 
“The task of the CFO is to coordinate effective financial, accounting and tax strategies,” he tells me. “So if I translate that for a Chief Happiness Officer, I would say that the role is someone who coordinates effective strategies of wellbeing and employee experience.”

However, Dr. Haas does not believe that it matters what you call it.

If Google can hire an official ‘Jolly Good Fellow’… well, what’s wrong with calling a person your Chief Happiness Officer?

“I use the phrase ‘Chief Happiness Officer’ because it’s a little bit provocative,” Dr. Haas tells me. “It probably makes you think of somebody designing offices that look like leisure centers, or like kindergarten classes with colorful plastic toys. But there is much more to it than what you call it.”

According to Dr. Haas, you can call it what you like, and launch as many health and wellbeing initiatives as you like. However, if you don’t connect the role to the entire employee experience, then you won’t get very far.

“If you just create a title, obviously that brings attention to the topic of employee happiness. Which is a good thing! But if you just leave it at that… you know, if you establish a Chief Happiness Officer, but you don’t really connect your health and wellbeing programs to your culture, communications, and leadership, then it will not be sustainable.”
 

“It’s about the whole experience” insists Dr. Haas. “What matters, is how well you connect the role to other areas of your organization.”

He says that your health and wellbeing initiatives should be fully connected and integrated with the context of your whole business, including:
 

Dr. Kai Haas addresses delegates at Mad World Forum, 2018:

“Don’t get me wrong,” he adds, “I think this kind of role is a good thing. But it’s not enough to simply distribute apples, or build a fitness suite on-site. If your management is toxic, or if your employees are being handed ridiculous workloads, then they are not going to care about happiness initiatives.”

Before Dr. Haas returned to Germany with his family and took his current role with Airbus, he worked for another large corporation – Novartis, in Switzerland.

However, he says that just because your organization is big and well-funded, doesn’t mean it’s easy to roll out a good health and wellbeing strategy.

“I helped develop strategies in both organizations,” he explains, “but it is not a case of thinking up a brilliant strategy, then having one single meeting where you make a business case and everybody says ‘HOORAY!’. It can take years to develop these things.”

I asked Dr. Haas what advice he would give for an organization looking to take action and make things better at work. He said that first, you must identify a problem. Then, it’s simply a case of starting small and having patience.

“First, you must understand what your pressing issue is,” he says. “Do you have a high long-term absence rate, for example? Then, start small. For example, provide training for supervisors to help them deal with mental health issues. Start in a small department, so that you can learn from it. You’ll also have a better business case going forward, once other people see that it was a success.”

Dr. Haas adds that starting small is also helpful because it’s faster to execute than a more holistic, company-wide approach – because if you try to do this, then you might never start anything at all.

Don’t be intimidated by the fact that Dr. Haas represents a big brand. He says that many of the principles of a good wellbeing strategy can translate from a big business to a smaller business.

“You probably don’t have an occupational health specialist,” he admits, “and you certainly won’t have a Chief Happiness Officer. But as a smaller company, you can still identify what is important in terms of culture and leadership, and then apply it on a smaller scale.”
 
When I asked him to provide examples, he told me not to underestimate the value of positive psychology.

“Positive psychology achieves a lot,” he says. “Really small interventions can change a lot. For example, you start meetings by looking for success, or things that went well, instead of what went wrong.”
 
And Dr. Haas says you can do this in any company, regardless of size. All it takes is human interaction and communication.
 
This article originally appeared here.

Sat Sindhar is currently serving People HR as a Managing Director. His expertise honed over the last 25 years has been firmly grounded in the fields of Business Operations and Human Resources. Visit www.peoplehr.com Connect Sat Sindhar