Happiness isn’t always a good metric to deliver against. Why? Because happiness can be manipulative.
Extreme example:
I have an employee who scores high on the employee engagement survey. They show up as “super happy.” When I meet this person, they’re happy. When others talk of this person, they say “oh my gosh, they’re sooo happy.” At the end of month the employee’s outputs are negative or nominal at best. Wait I thought they were happy?
Analysis: happiness lied! If anything, we learned this person might have been happy doing nothing!
Another example:
Someone wants you to do something for them. They signal that if you do the action they will become happy. The incentive for you to do the action is to generate happiness in the other person. You are a people pleaser, and you do the thing for the other person. You spend the money, you invest the time, you buy the things, you break your back, and you do all you can to please that person. The problem is — the person is never pleased.
Analysis: happiness lied! Happiness served as the means to an end, a red herring.
To my knowledge, you - faithful reader, do not have the ability to control the feelings of others. You can do things that cause someone to experience the world a certain way which causes a reaction. But can you make a feeling happen? To my knowledge, no. And if that’s true, why deliver against happiness?
A more useful metric would be to deliver against commitments, or better yet — against spec. Now the weight is on the person who benefits (the employee or the requestor) to describe their need in detail and for you (the manager or the do’er) to decide if delivering on that spec is your work that matters.
Parting thought: don’t discount happiness all together. Enjoy it for what it is — a byproduct of a job well done.