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"Happiness isn\u2019t something you find, or work toward \u2014 it\u2019s something you buy and have delivered. Or at least that\u2019s the premise of one of the newest jobs over in the C-suite. Now, alongside the CEO, CFO and their ilk, we have the CHO, or chief happiness officer. As the name clearly suggests, the CHO is responsible for the contentment of individual employees, sort of like an HR manager, but on steroids; the theory goes that happy workers are productive workers, so happiness turns out to be in the company\u2019s best interest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many CHOs reside in Silicon Valley \u2014 both at startups and more blue chip tech companies. But it\u2019s starting to spread: Southern restaurant company Hopjacks created the position in 2012, and the Quality of Life Foundation, an education nonprofit, created one in 2010.\nOn a day-to-day basis, CHOs busy themselves with diagnosing the emotional well-being of their workers, as well as adjusting workplace policy and culture in order to create the conditions for happiness. This can involve distributing surveys that measure contentment, leading workshops on everything from communication skills to mindfulness meditation and generally diagnosing the office atmosphere. The job can also mean out-of-office activities \u2014 or, in the case of Hopjacks, a \u201CSerial Killer Secret-Santa Weapon-Exchange\u201D (an event, according to CHO Jarod Kelly, \u201Cwhere all of us blindly ordered each other [weapons] gifts from\u00A0www.budk.com\u201D).\nThe CHO\u2019s rise may have begun with Chade-Meng Tan. Meng is Google\u2019s chief happiness officer equivalent, officially known as the Jolly Good Fellow. According to his self-made job description, his goal is to \u201Cenlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace.\u201D He began at Google soon after the company was born, and spent eight years in the engineering department, before switching to the company\u2019s \u201CPeople Development Team\u201D in the mid-2000s. Meng was inspired to work happiness into Google after encountering studies on the 65-year-old brain of a Buddhist monk named Mathieu Ricard. Ricard, after earning a doctorate in molecular genetics, turned his back on science and became a Buddhist monk in 1972, with the aim of exploring happiness through meditation.\nIn a 2010\u00A0TED talk, Meng explains that Ricard \u201Cis the happiest man in the world,\u201D based on brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex. Whether or not measuring happiness in an MRI machine holds water is beside the point \u2014 Meng liked what he saw and aimed to spread Ricard\u2019s cognitive tendencies throughout the Google community.\nGoogle\u2019s involvement in worker happiness set off something of a trend, with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh releasing a book in 2010 called\u00A0Delivering Happiness. The book, which covers strategies to increase happiness in corporate culture, was a\u00A0New York Times\u00A0best-seller and spawned a consulting firm of the same name, devoted to, well, delivering happiness to companies around the world.\nDelivering Happiness, according to CEO and CHO Jenn Lim, devotes its time to measuring the contentment of clients and to laboring to improve their working conditions. So how exactly does one create joy? \u201CWe take a snapshot of all the employees and basically identify their happiness levels,\u201D Lim says. \u201CAnd using [the Happy Business Index], we can see, what are the key points of unhappiness?\u201D (The Happy Business Index is a survey based off of\u00A0\u201Cwell-being researcher\u201D\u00A0Nic Marks\u2019s Happy Planet Index, and scores how motivated and engaged employees feel in their workplace.) In an interview, Lim also explained that they look out for \u201Chow empowered employees feel, how much progress they feel they\u2019re making, how connected and aligned they feel with the company.\u201D\n\u201CBasically we\u2019re able to derive actionable things that we recommend companies work on. I think of us as kind of a heart monitor,\u201D Lim noted. CHOs not only monitor, but also calculate. Beyond the Happiness Business Index, the company uses a \u201Chappiness calculator,\u201D which is\u00A0featured\u00A0on its website and does little except tabulate how much money you stand to earn if you carry out a \u201Chappiness at work survey\u201D (created by Delivering Happiness, of course).\nSince 2010, with the publication of\u00A0Delivering Happiness, the job of CHO has been featured prominently in the\u00A0annals\u00A0of feel-good corporate advice. Much of the impetus for CHOs stems from\u00A0fears over declining productivity\u00A0and the desire to swipe away anything that could rob companies of extra profit. There are\u00A0studies\u00A0to\u00A0back\u00A0this up: One measured the productivity of workers who had just seen a clip of a comedy routine and found that productivity increased after watching the video. A longitudinal study was also performed, which showed that key events like bereavement and family illness cut into employee productivity. Companies bring CHOs on not so much out of some bizarro competition to become the happiest company on Earth, but to become as productive as possible.\nSo what\u2019s the problem with someone being professionally responsible for your happiness? Nothing on the surface. Good bosses, of course, should promote a positive work environment. Having an officer appointed to direct and proliferate the emotion, though, presents some issues. Besides the eerie similarity between \u201Cchief happiness officer\u201D and concepts like \u201Cministry of love\u201D and \u201Cwar on terror,\u201D it represents an intrusion into our emotional lives that should not be permitted to any kind of authority figure \u2014 be it corporate or governmental \u2014 regardless of intention.\nThis also comes amid a larger, well-documented trend of privacy being sucked out of our day-to-day lives.\u00A0The\u00A0New York Times\u00A0recently published\u00A0an article\u00A0on new forms of surveillance in the workplace, some of which are aimed at stoking employee happiness. For example, companies have begun to implement mandatory 15-minute coffee breaks after research showed that increased social interaction boosted productivity. The article also mentions a \u201Cdigital Big Brother\u201D whose omnipresence manifests itself in gadgets like ID badges that \u201Cmonitor the communications behavior of individuals \u2014 tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom for how long.\u201D Kelly, the restaurant chain CHO, even said he has access to \u201Cevery\u00A0email account\u201D in the company: \u201CKnowing that an error in handling even a small situation could snowball into an unhappy customer means, I am always on top of emails/notifications.\u201D\nThat brand of surveillance has a level of detail that might do more to increase panic attacks than worker contentment and output. At what level of behavioral analysis do research and monitoring of productivity begin to constitute a violation of privacy?\nFortunately, not all CHOs have access to \u201Cevery\u00A0company email address.\u201D Walter Chen, founder of tech startup iDoneThis, used to keep a CHO in his executive stable. He defines the position more as a human resources-customer support hybrid position, explaining, \u201CIf we called her head of customer support, it would sound really antiseptic. And so it\u2019s part of trying to better frame and articulate what it is that [our] company is about.\u201D Chen\u2019s CHO didn\u2019t have responsibility for company happiness; instead she was meant to \u201Cembod[y] the positive aspects of the company culture that you want to cultivate.\u201D\nSo in that version, the CHO becomes a kind of culture officer, devoted to upholding whatever values a company designates as its own. The problem here is whether or not it\u2019s possible to artificially impose such values, or whether adding them only in the interest of profit is a worthy endeavor. Deidre McCloskey, an economist and historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago (who wrote a\u00A0New Republic\u00A0cover story\u00A0in 2012 called \u201CHappyism: The creepy new economics of pleasure\u201D), told me that companies \"shouldn\u2019t call themselves value-driven if their only value is maximizing the bottom line.\u201D\nWhat\u2019s most problematic about CHOs, though, is that the intense focus on happiness may actually backfire. Upbeat workers might be more productive in certain situations, but it has been\u00A0noted\u00A0that people who constantly worry about being happy are in fact miserable. And while \u201Cvirtue increases the value of the stock,\u201D as McCloskey sardonically pointed out, in a larger sense, it might not be healthy to place happiness as the end-all be-all of our day-to-day lives. Chen\u2019s efforts seem benevolent enough, McCloskey notes: \u201CIt\u2019s a positive attempt to build an environment where people are excited about their jobs and making progress everyday toward something that\u2019s important.\u201D But the sincerity of the attempt doesn\u2019t necessarily make it correct: \u201CThere\u2019s more than the profit motive in human relations. \u2026 I think it\u2019s a fool's errand, to have a happiness officer.\u201D\nThe line between surveillance of our individual tics and that of our internal lives straddles the boundary into personal choice. And while chief happiness officers might honestly have employees\u2019 best interests in mind, the future of work should not be one in which walking into an office means giving up the right to a private life."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/24/chief-happiness-officer/>