U.S. Government Needlessly Reinventing the Wheel on Wellbeing

I just read on the front page of The Washington Post that the U.S. government is going to create measures of subjective wellbeing that “could become official statistics.” The article goes on to loosely define wellbeing as an emerging new science and lists key academics involved, including Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, Carol Graham, Justin Wolfers, Angus Deaton, Arthur Stone, and Bob Groves. These names are to behavioral economics and wellbeing what Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle were to the Yankees and baseball.

Here is my concern today: This whole invention is already done. Gallup has already asked these exact same people for their guidance and advice on making it. And they gave it. Every one of these super scientist-academics listed above are today, or at one time have been, “senior scientists” at Gallup. Their purpose here was and is to work on the creation and advancement of this new science of wellbeing. (Note: A senior scientist at Gallup is not an employee, but a part-time, paid adviser.)

Over the past eight years, Gallup and Healthways have together spent $100 million creating and perfecting this wellbeing invention. We spent our own R&D to get this right with the very people listed in this article. Honest to God, this invention is done. Of course, it is never really done, but Wellbeing 1.0 is done and works. We track it every night in the United States with an annual sample of 365,000 completed interviews, and measure it every year in more than 130 other countries. With the help of these scientists and $100 million, we have this badly needed invention...done.

The article ends with a statement by U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Director Steve Landefeld, “...my concern is how would you use it?”

The answer is that advanced metrics of wellbeing help predict and address workplace productivity, community job creation (too long to explain), healthcare costs...all the way to revolution. Because packed into wellbeing are the dimensions of suffering, struggling, and thriving. Gallup saw wellbeing rapidly decline in both Tunisia and Egypt -- a change other measures like GDP missed. Gallup saw the role these shifts in mindset were playing in the revolution before just about everyone else.

Since Gallup and Healthways have already spent $100 million building this with the best experts in the world, why doesn't the U.S. government just use it? And save a bunch of money.

What Makes Workplaces Miserable

A recent congressional hearing caught my attention. It focused on the subject of miserable employees -- more specifically, the record-low engagement of employees in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

DHS was advised to spend time and money “training” managers and supervisors. The problem, the agencies were told, stems from poor work-life balance, benefits, pay freezes -- that sort of thing.

This is completely misguided. I can identify a root cause of the problem, just from knowing Gallup’s decades of research on management: About 60% of employees we’ve studied in government organizations tell us they don’t clearly know what’s expected of them at work. That is a much bigger problem than pay, benefits, and vacation days. In fact, what neither Congress nor the federal government knows is that the more you aim solutions at those aspects, the worse you make the workplace.

Huge workforces, like Wells Fargo (roughly 300,000 employees), have highly inspired workplaces with fewer benefits, vacation time, etc., than the typical federal agency. They have highly engaged employees who have fun at work serving customers. What’s so different?

DHS employees aren’t miserable for the reasons Congress heard. They’re miserable because -- unlike the employees at Wells Fargo -- they have lousy managers and supervisors. Yes, lousy managers, not lousy benefits, create miserable workplaces. And lousy managers tend to create lousy, miserable employees.

Gallup researchers discovered there actually is a silver bullet: Just name the right manager. Gallup’s big breakthrough discovery is that absolutely nothing fixes the problems caused by a manager who has no talent for the task at hand. Solutions come when employers understand that the art of supervising and managing in the new millennium is closer to being a coach than to being a boss.

To predict an employee’s engagement, the single most important question you can ask is, “Does your manager care about your development?” When and if you nail that one, it fixes compensation, benefits, and work-life balance -- and misery magically disappears.

Until employers take the testing and selection of managers and supervisors seriously -- promoting those who can honestly develop people -- they will continue to build factories of disengaged, miserable employees, as the federal government has at DHS.

Hard-Hitting Commentary, From Our Leaders to Yours

My name is Jim Clifton, Chairman of Gallup. In "The Chairman's Blog,” you will hear directly from me about what we have learned from studying human nature and behavior for more than 75 years. We aim to provide short, hard-hitting commentary on current events about which Gallup has overwhelming evidence that is contrary to the conventional wisdom of world leaders. We also want to help readers better understand how and why we do what we do. Gallup hopes to bring a different perspective based on a wide variety of leader constituencies or, more simply, “the will of the world.”