OMG here comes another “deep thought” posting! GOK what they’re putting in my tea this year?!

David Colquhoun at DC’s Improbable Science has a reputation, along with Ben Goldacre, of exploding the myths of bad and pseudo science. In a post yesterday he’s got his knife into “Wellbeing“, that subject so beloved of the much reviled HR departments.

Sure we all like wellbeing. Who wouldn’t. But can we sensibly measure it? Can big (or small) organisations do anything meaningful to change it? I suggest the answers are no and no. It is a wimpy way for terminally ineffective and unnecessary droids to appear to do something useful. In fact I maintain it is divisive and destructive.

Divisive in that it ultimately sets one group of people at odds with another; eg. those who want extra time off for parents against those who have to pick up the extra work; us against HR. Destructive because it wastes time and money which could be better used.

Throughout my working life I have taken part in countless wellbeing type surveys: my former employer conducted just such a survey of employees every couple of years. There was a standard core of questions, and a set which varied according to mood of the year. It was supposedly used to measure employee morale and tell senior management what we thought of company policy, management, etc.

I must have completed well over a dozen, maybe as many as 20, such surveys in the course of my employ. Although optional I always took part on the basis that that however ineffective I thought they were, if you didn’t express an opinion then certainly nothing would change.

And that is exactly what happened: nothing changed. Not once in almost 35 years did I see any action result from survey feedback. Senior management were allegedly incented on increasing morale etc. (as measured by the survey). But this was never more than lip-service. Over the years morale steadily fell as HR policies became less sympathetic to the employee (pay freeze, less empowerment, emasculated pension schemes, downsizing, etc.). But neither senior management nor HR people ever suffered. Unlike the rest of us they always went on to bigger, better and more lucrative jobs.

Should this surprise us? Well no, not really. Because apart from a few headline figures (like the morale index, based on some fixed core questions) all the opinions expressed were aggregated and thus watered down into useless generalisations by the time they reached senior management. So the high-ups could then say things like “But that doesn’t tell us anything”, “That’s meaningless” or “They [employees] don’t understand”. And thus our views were universally ignored, despite platitudes to the contrary.

Result: a huge waste of time and money which could be better spent moving the business forward. At best all it did was to act as a brake on some of the more oppressive ideas which might have come out of the profit-hungry upper echelons. At worst it wasted 2-3 hours per employee. In a company of 250,000+ employees worldwide that’s an extra 400-500 people to develop the business.

Should it have been this way? Of course it shouldn’t. But such, I fear, is the way of the organisation — large or small. It is all too easy to cover a multitude of sins in smooth management platitudes; even I can do it!

But, you say, wellbeing is important. Yes, of course it is, at a personal level. It is at the peak of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and is surely the hallmark of a civilised society. And morale should certainly be important to any organisation.

But I would maintain that wellbeing and morale are best changed at a personal level. They’re my responsibility. We don’t need a “wellbeing industry” composed, as it so often is, of quackery and get-rich-quick scams. Wouldn’t it be better to empower (and teach) people to look after themselves? Empowerment is, after all, one of the quickest ways to improve perceived wellbeing and morale at all levels.

I can’t do justice to Colquhoun’s latest article; it just contains the exposure of too much corporate HR hokum and sociobollocks. You need to go read it for yourselves. It’s too good to miss!