All it took was a trip to the United States in 2013. After a stay in Silicon Valley, including an inspiring tour of Google’s offices, Florelle Moire’s boss offered her a position with a surprising title, still extremely rare in France: chief happiness officer (CHO), or “corporate happiness manager”. So far, simple chief officer, tasked with managing workspaces, communication between teams or general services of the company, the employee then officially becomes responsible for the well-being of her colleagues. To do this, she organizes team building between employees, arranges the premises, creates an internal gazette to highlight the successes of certain employees. “In reality, it didn’t change much in my missions. It was mainly a somewhat flashy title, to highlight the important themes of mental health and happiness in the workplace,” the former CHO admits today.
The Nantaise remembers the reluctance of some colleagues, “who didn’t really respect this title”, and the feeling of having to “justify myself more than before” about her missions. But, at the same time, she also observes “a great interest” from some HR managers for her work, and does not hesitate to speak in the media or at conferences dedicated to the themes of well-being in the workplace. “The problem is that the position was quickly underestimated and caricatured, as if the CHOs were only responsible for bringing fruit platters or setting up a table football”, she regrets. Far from a profound restructuring of the way of working or attentive listening to employees, many companies are then seeking to surf on this trend coming straight from the United States, often in an artificial way.
A “totally overused” title
Laurence Vanhée, herself a former CHO at Belgian Social Security, witnessed the rise and then the fall of happiness managers in companies in the late 2010s. “In many start-ups, these jobs were given to young people fresh out of school, who had absolutely no influence on HR policy, did not know the company’s management culture, had no control over the management of spaces and performance,” she laments. These young recruits, faced with the major challenge of the “happiness” of their colleagues, often did not benefit from the resources, decision-making levers or hierarchical support allowing them to carry out this mission. “In 2017 and 2018, I received emails very regularly from CHOs who said they were burnt out, who were criticized for having spent money on organizing birthdays without reducing the absenteeism rate. In short, the managers who had hired them had understood nothing about the position,” analyzes Laurence Vanhée.
Olivier Toussaint, founder of a CHO network in 2017, is just as critical of the evolution of the profession. “The title has been completely overused. By focusing on this cosmetic notion of free snacks and ping-pong tables, we forgot to recall the essential bases of well-being in the workplace: flexible hours, work-life balance, flex office, telework options or inclusion, themes that were then beginning to emerge,” he explains. In 2020, Covid, its imposed confinement and the urgent subject of employee mental health ended up burying the position.
“It was a kind of poorly defined job, whose main weakness was that it took a bit from management, HR, CSR, marketing… With Covid, all psychological health issues rose to the top of the list, and were directly taken over by HR”, recalls Benoit Serre, deputy vice-president of the National Association of HR Directors. In a few months, the original or avant-garde measures put in place by the CHOs have thus been integrated by most HR departments in companies. “These are now normal topics, handled by a normal profession: many CHOs have become HR, or have retrained”, explains Benoît Serre. In fact, the job search network Indeed points out that in this month of July 2024 the number of positions with the mention “CHO” does not exceed ten on its platform.
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