Happiness pays

It’s official then: the 2012 Olympics in London were the best ever. Or at least so say the people of Great Britain who, it turns out, get to decide. Barring the people of Brazil reviewing their games in four years’ time and coming to the conclusion that London – for all it lacked in beaches, Christo Redentor statues and impromptu carnivals – was indeed the best, it seems a safe bet that the accolade will pass to Rio.

But they really were good games. The success of the British helped enormously, of course, but from my personal experience one of the greatest successes were the volunteers. It might sound like a term dreamt up by a consultant but ‘games makers’ was actually a pretty accurate way to describe their contribution. At Eton Dorney they welcomed us with such extraordinary cheerfulness, and were so unremittingly helpful, that you couldn’t help wondering if a generous helping of recreational drugs had been handed out at their morning briefing. The lady I chatted to whilst queuing up for a sausage sandwich was, by some distance, the most charming, erudite and efficient sausage sandwich queue monitor I have ever had the fortune to meet.

What was abundantly clear was that the key was in the volunteering. These were people who didn’t have to be there – who had chosen to give over two weeks of their lives to be involved in something and who were, as a result, delighted to be doing it. They’re all back doing their day jobs now, those people, and I have little doubt that they’re half as happy or half as effective as they were when they were volunteering. Which raises an interesting question:

Are people happier and more effective when they’re not being paid?

The answer, of course, is that payment isn’t really what matters here; what made the difference is that the volunteers were doing something they wanted to be doing. Which puts me in mind of a conversation I had recently with the head of HR for a city council in the UK.  Asked what one piece of advice she would give to consulting firms which wanted to win more business from her, she told the story of a consultant with whom she had worked, who enjoyed his work so much, and who had become so interested in the success of this council’s HR function, that the line between what he was and wasn’t being paid for seemed to have ceased to matter to him. “As a result,” said the head of HR, “that firm are going to win a lot more business from me.”

Of course pro-bono consulting is nothing new (particularly at the moment), and you’ll find stories about consultants going the extra mile just about anywhere you care to look. Nor, ultimately, do the economic realities of for-profit business allow pro-bono work to happen unless the consensus is that it’s in the long term financial interests of the firm for it to do so. But perhaps, again, this misses the point. Which is that if you can put consultants where they want to be, rather than where the structure of your firm needs them to be, they become the best sales force you’ll ever have.

It’s all pretty obvious stuff really, but it’s something that, based on our conversations with clients, you get the impression many consulting firms appear to be missing. So perhaps the most important question a consulting firm can ask its staff when working out who to put on a project is: “if you could choose to do anything, would you do this?” After all, happiness pays everyone.