By Jessica Pryce-Jones | CEO, iOpener Institute for People & Performance

Let’s lay out our position right from the start. There’s no doubt about it that engagement and happiness at work are similar constructs and therefore belong in the same school of thought. And that well-being is a third leg to add to this important stool. And it’s also obvious that it’s better to have more rather than less of all of them, whether you’re an employer or an employee.

But before we go any further let me be clear about what we mean when we refer to happiness at work.

For us at the iOpener Institute for People and Performance, happiness at work is a mindset that helps you maximize your performance and achieve your potential, whether you are an individual, team or organization. So what we’re really talking about are a series of internal processes that determine attitude and approach. Our practitioner experience also tells us that this mindset is governed by a set of measurable and specific conditions which lead to measurable and specific outcomes.

The definition of engagement is rather different and depends on the academic, consultancy or practitioner you like the most. It can therefore range between being defined as an attitude, an organizational approach, a practice, a set of conditions, a manager’s responsibility, a series of behaviors, certain outcomes, vigor for the job, energy, levels of stress and so on. That means comparing and contrasting the two is particularly difficult because it depends on your starting point.

We do however have a couple of major differences to clarify.

Our fundamental research done from the ground up began in focus groups. And this focus group work clearly indicated that individuals want to be responsible for and own their personal happiness at work. They know that it belongs to them and not their managers. Of course those managers can help or hinder that happiness but they can’t drive it: they have way too much other stuff to do.

Now this is typically very different from employee engagement which is generally owned by managers who are responsible for their teams’ annual scores. Which explains why these managers quite often ignore their yearly engagement results until the following year. Because the results often get put into the ‘too-difficult-to-do-anything-about-this’ drawer that’s much easier to quietly shut.

But happiness at work makes sense to any 21st century organization in which employees are empowered to take responsibility for and act on key areas that make a difference to them and their results. In these organizations employees are expected to think and act for themselves, to sort problems out, to work effectively together and not to wait for their manager to do it for them. To reflect this empowered organizational style, we’ve developed sophisticated, empirically-based and detailed individual, team anad organizational reports for anyone working with our methodology. Most importantly we’ve developed a suite of effective follow-up tools so that organizations can help themselves address any issues that they find. Expensive consultants don’t need to be the order of the day. These tools, coupled with clear and meaningful metrics are what matters most.

There’s another interesting thing to note about happiness at work. Positive emotions, the highs that indicate you are on the right path, have no place in engagement. But our data tells us that these positive feelings are important. Both social psychology and social network analysis tells us that emotions are contagious and spread within and between people. Engagement holds no place for these feelings which we know make a massive difference. Think about it. If you don’t feel good about what you do, it’s very difficult to keep on doing it.

Which leads us to what we know about senior leaders.

When we look at our data we can see that senior leaders working in tough circumstances will often report that they are highly engaged but unhappy at work. And their intention to quit scores can be surprisingly high. That tells us there may be some social desirability at work here. In other words people are thinking “I’m working so hard and for such long hours, I’ve got to be engaged in what I do. But I’m certainly not happy.”

I believe that we see this because senior leaders also tend to report high Conscientiousness (in personality terms). If you’re conscientious, you’ll put in the hours, you’ll work hard at what you do but it may not make you happy. As one executive board member said to me “I’m engaged alright, I’m putting in the hours – about 90 a week – but I’m 4 out of 10 happy at work.” Interesting stuff. So we’ve just kicked off a research project to investigate this further.

So how do engagement and happiness at work connect? Our view is that happiness at work drives engaged behavior. Here’s how.

Scholarship tells us that happiness promotes career success (Boehm & Lyubomirsky, 2005, 2008). That means happiness comes first, in other words it’s an input that drives fantastic output. Thinking about it in more depth, this implies that employers and employees need to see happiness at work as a personal resource that helps employees meet the demands of their jobs. Nowadays job demands aren’t getting any smaller. On the contrary everyone is expected to do more for less with fewer organizational resources into the bargain. But when job demands and job resources are unequal, there’s a greater likelihood of missed deadlines, project failure and even burnout. So the major untapped resource here is happiness at work. Because this is what drives sustained engaged behaviors.

In conclusion engagement is part of the picture and an important part too – but happiness at work is the precursor and therefore the most vital area of focus. Because it’s this that drives everything else.