I picked up a reference on Twitter (thanks Saliha Bava!) to a great article on the connection between happiness and good health. It seems there really is a physical reason why happier people seem to be generally more healthy. Stephen Cole, an immunologist, has found out that happiness ‘seems to alter the function of immune cells’. Here’s a link to the article:
m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/what-a-happy-cell-looks-like/385000?utm_source=SFTwitter
According to Cole, negative experiences may damage the immune system’s ability to ward off infections. But being happy strengthens it, heloing people to stay healthier.
This is great news! A few years ago I used to supervise students studying to be qualified HR practitioners. They had to do a management project and a surprising number chose to write about abseentism. To my mind this must be one of the most boring topics imaginable, but no, it was very popular. Depressingly, most of the students approached it from a very punitive angle, The whole thrust of their projects was to see how people could be forced to come to work even if they were ill. The underlying assumption seemed to be that they probably weren’t really ill but just skiving off. (That’s a topic in itself….)
But now we have the answer! If employers want to reduce absenteeism all they have to do is make sure people are happy at work.
Well actually, according to Cole, there’s a little more too it than that. He cites the Aristotelian distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic forms of happiness (or, pleasure versus purpose, in Paul Dolan’s terms) – it seems that a sense of purpose and meaning has a more significant impact on health than ‘just’ pleasure (although pleasure is still pretty important!). So actually, employee well being is less about access to gyms and healthy living advice – it is about making sure people are engaged in meaningful, important work. Burkhard Sievers, a writer on management, suggested a few years back that the increase of interest in motivation stems from the loss of meaning in work – motivation as a surrogate for meaning. Let’s go for meaning instead!
Humansinwork 