Can Happiness Be Measured? Why It Is Managed

Can happiness be measured? Can you measure love? The honest answer is no: neither is a physical quantity. You cannot equalise them, and you certainly cannot add them up like metres or kilograms. When someone is two metres tall, we all picture a tall person, but nobody can say one person is a 10 in happiness and mean the same as the next, because that value can be different for each of us.

Can you measure love and happiness?

What does exist are personal tools. The wheel of life (or wheel of happiness) and the love wheel let you score areas for your own use, for example to compare yourself today with a month ago. They are not a universal measure that you can use to compare yourself with someone else.

There is also a ranking: the World Happiness Report, an annual publication supported by the United Nations that ranks countries by how people rate their lives, along with factors such as GDP per capita. We look at its latest edition in the best information about happiness. It is a useful tool for governments, but whatever it is called, measuring organizational happiness or how happy employees are does not turn people into machines. Workplace climate has been managed for years by industrial psychology, and now some self-styled gurus have turned happiness into a marketing mantra.

A philosophical point: quality cannot be counted

Business scholar Queralt Prat-i-Pubill argues that if we think of happiness like beauty, love or anything we value, it is a qualitative judgement that cannot be quantified, because the abstraction that makes counting possible always leaves out the quality. In other words, there are two ways of knowing reality: one abstract, which allows numbers, and one concrete, which is qualitative. A question about happiness belongs to the second, so the answer depends on the person and nobody, not even the most expert, can question it.

Rankings and their limits

Those studies have even had the backing of a Nobel laureate, but many happiness experts consider some of their starting assumptions reductionist, because happiness is personal. There are no happier or less happy countries as such, only people who need to find their happiness in the right place. A ranking can also put countries where the human rights of gay people are not respected above others that do respect them, which says a lot about what a single number leaves out.

Measured or managed?

So can happiness be measured? At a personal level it is natural to say “I am happier today than yesterday”. But in organizations, happiness is not measured, it is managed. That is why Happiness Play offers a full personal assistant to manage it: first you assess your happiness, then you choose what you want in life from a catalogue of preferences, and you set the changes you want to make. Your data stays confidential.

Organizations use Happiness Play Pro to manage the whole process. The idea is to move from worrying to doing something, and to turn pointless complaints into energy for action. Here is how organizations can help people manage their happiness:

Use a happiness dashboard to analyse workplace climate while supporting employees at every stage.
A cloud-based system adapted to different devices, with individual follow-up to know how engaged users are.
Climate statistics by attribute (gender, region and so on) to build action plans.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a test that tells me how happy I am?

There are many questionnaires, and none is universal. A wheel of life is a better use of your time because it ends with something to do.

Why do people insist on measuring happiness?

Because numbers are convenient for reports and comparisons. The difficulty starts when the number is taken for the thing itself.

What should I read next?

Start with the myths about happiness and open your eyes to how the marketing works. Beware of cheap courses that promise a diploma from a supposed university on how to “measure happiness” or “measure love”: the science of happiness, like the science of poker or other sciences invented by some marketers, is often just a way to sell.

For the workplace view, read happy employees. For a critical view, read the science of happiness.

Or explore one area at a time: