When Companies Make Your Day: Happiness Management and Digital Workplace Transformation

Introduction

Digital workplace programs have been used as a strategic change initiative by organizations (Koch et al., 2019). Digital workplaces are seen as organization-wide socio-technical initiatives that provide a positive employee experience by altering work's physical, cultural, and digital arrangements (Dery et al., 2017). In addition, such initiatives promote collaborative network IT (Kissflow, 2021; Panteli et al., 2021) as it can generate employee connectedness leading to a positive employee experience, viewed as a humanistic goal of digital transformation (Sarker et al., 2019). Positive employee experience, thus generated, leads to innovation and productivity, viewed as an instrumental goal of digital transformation (Dery & Sebastian, 2017; Dery et al., 2017).

However, digital workplace transformations trigger significant changes to employee experiences. Prior studies show that employees’ task, social and well-being perceptions are impacted by digital workplace transformations, requiring intentional change management approaches and positive support for employees (Meske & Junglas, 2021). Increasing employees’ positive attitudes that lend support towards digital workplace transformation is vital in the change process. Thus, organizational practices that trigger a positive emotional climate are essential and important to the success of digital transformation programs (Koch et al., 2019; Shin et al., 2012; Parke & Seo, 2017; Ashkanasy & Dorris, 2017; Dery et al., 2017). Moreover, Kane et al. (2021) argue that post-pandemic, it is time for managers to envision the office that employees will return to and consider effective hybrid workplaces, especially since the pandemic revealed the fragility of digitally immature organizations (Fletcher & Griffiths, 2020).

Emotions are a subset of affect. They are short-term intense affective reactions to specific events experienced by individuals or groups (Briner, 1999). They manifest themselves through a range of responses which include cognitive components (e.g., appraisal, evaluation); physical reactions (e.g., heart rate); overt behavior (e.g., avoidance); facial expressions (e.g., frown, smile); a goal structure (e.g., loss, anger) (Briner, 1999; Fredrickson, 2001). Past research shows that the overall balance of people’s positive emotions (e.g., joy, interest, contentment, love) and negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, sadness, anger, and despair) can explain objective happiness at work (Fredrickson, 2001).

The emotional climate is also an affective phenomenon. It is a key organizational-level phenomenon linking individual and group emotions to organizational-level outcomes. It is conceptualized as a shared perception of dominant emotions among organizational members (Parke & Seo, 2017; Ashkanasy, 2003). It can be influenced by objective facts, institutional arrangements, and policies that create shared experiences (De Rivera & Páez, 2007). Practitioners view happiness management as a useful emotion management approach that can create a positive emotional climate during digital workplace transformations. Thus, some French pre-digital organizations have adopted happiness management to initiate digital workplace programs in France. Cooking appliances manufacturer SEB¹, tyre manufacturer Michelin² or French lottery, Française des Jeux³ are some examples. Such happiness management may be introduced implicitly or explicitly by creating new “chief happiness officers” roles (Blomstrom, 2019; Blokdyk, 2021). It is influenced by examples of digital organizations such as Google, Amazon, SAP, and Airbnb described in the media as companies that use happiness management efficiently to develop a positive emotional climate, innovation, and productivity (Clapon, 2020; HEC, 2020).