Work & careers
The cult of compulsory happiness is ruining our workplaces
   Some companies strive to make the office fun, so we’ll work harder. But
   have been busy installing play equipment in the workplace. Google has
   some workplaces. And if you walked into the offices of Inventionland,
   workspaces there include a fake pirate ship, a tree house, and a giant
   increasingly long hours at work do not stop there: Tony Hsieh, chief
   in interviews. And Expedia, ranked this year as the happiest workplace
   took a look at the increasing fascination with happiness at work. We
   make workforces more positive. Firms such as Zappos have started to
   employ chief happiness officers. There is also a booming field of
   management research on positivity at work.
   But despite all this effort, work still sucks. According to a recent
   miserable is work. There is only one place and circumstance that makes
Workplace design: how office space is becoming fun again
   The clamour to make employees happy at work is driven by one of the
   worker is a good worker. As William Davies shows in his book The
   Happiness Industry, this idea has been part of management theory since
   Happiness at work may be good for some jobs – such as customer-facing
   work where you need to make members of the public feel upbeat too – but
   there is evidence to suggest happiness could be a liability in other
   While happiness at work is not always good for productivity, surely it
   contemporary workplace – become a no-no. This implicit ban on negative
   But giving space for a range of emotions at work can also be important
   operating system called Symbian, which wasn’t working well. Middle
   The sad truth is that being constantly on the lookout for happiness may
   actually mean happiness eludes us. This point was illustrated by a
   This suggests that when we talk about how important happiness is, we
   Wanting to be happy at work is fair enough. But being forced to be
   happy at work can be troubling. If organisations were genuinely
   interested in making their employees happy at work, then they would
   work from home at least some of the time. One experimental study found
   to work from home.
   A second simple step would be to stop interrupting workers with all
   compulsory happiness initiatives. A study by researchers at Harvard
   Business School found workers felt most satisfied on days at work when
   they were just able to consistently focus on an important piece of work
   many workplaces would be an excellent step towards making employees
   more happy at work. In my own work with Mats Alvesson we found that
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