Happiness is good for business Ways to boost employees
Bosses who take the time to try to help make employees content are likely to end up with team members who are more engaged and productive and whose company profits rise.
A former Harvard researcher found that keeping people happy is indeed good for business. Shawn Achor wrote in a 2012 Harvard Business Review article that satisfied employees come up with better business outcomes during stressful situations.
An experiment in 2015 showed that productivity among a happy group of employees increased by an average of 12 percent. And, according to Harvard Business Review, unhappy people are not only less productive, they’re costly for companies.
In studies by the Queens School of Business and by the Gallup Organization, disengaged workers had 37 percent higher absenteeism, 49 percent more accidents and 60 percent more errors and defects.
Understanding your employees have a life outside of work, being open and transparent with your team, treating people with respect and being patient with others’ mistakes are great ways to boost satisfaction, but hopefully you’re already doing that.
Here are a few other ways to add to employee happiness that have nothing to do with free doughnuts, sleep pods or a pool table.
Single people out for praise
In 2008, Burt’s Bees’s then-CEO John Replogle was taking the company global. Rather than fill employees’ inboxes with questions about their progress, every day he sent out an e-mail praising a team member for work related to the global rollout.
Praise that is well-deserved and delivered well can give people the drive and motivation to continue doing great work.
Encourage your managers to talk about corporate values
Another surprising way to make people happy is to encourage your managers to talk with their teams about the company’s values.
Replogle also took time away from talking about the global launch to encourage his direct reports to discuss company values with their people. The reason? The values discussion would help people feel more connected to the company’s mission.
Achor wrote that Replogle’s “emphasis on fostering positive leadership kept his managers engaged and cohesive as they successfully made the transition to a global company.”
Exercise gratitude
There’s a school of thought that you can train yourself to be happy by smiling a lot.
But that’s not the only way. Achor ran a session on happiness with some soonto-be stressed out tax managers at KPMG. He trained them to be happy by writing down things for which they were grateful or for exercising for 10 minutes.
Four months later, the tax managers who did these happiness activities scored higher on the life satisfaction scale — a metric considered to be an excellent predictor of productivity and happiness at work, according to Achor — than they did before the happiness training.
Follow the 10/5 path
Social support providers — people who pick up slack for others, invite co-workers to lunch and organize office activities — often are more engaged at work and more likely to get promoted. Supporting these people in their efforts is key.
Ochsner Health System uses this insight. Ochsner’s so-called 10/5 Way encourages employees who walk within 10 feet of another person in the hospital to make eye contact and smile. When they walk within 5 feet, they should say hello.
10/5 has paid off for Ochsner in the form of more unique patient visits, a 5 percent increase in patients’ likelihood to recommend Ochsner and “a significant improvement in medical-practice provider scores,” according to Achor. And, people who work for successful companies that please their clients tend to be more satisfied.
View stress as a performance enhancer
Work is often stressful, so I was surprised to learn that it’s possible to train people to think about stress positively as a force that enhances the brain and body, but also negatively as debilitating to performance.
Researchers showed videos with positive and negative messages on stress to managers at UBS. Six weeks later, the managers who saw the positive video experienced a big health improvement and an increase in their happiness at work, Achor wrote.
Encourage your people to list their stresses and make small, concrete steps to reduce the stressors they can control. Those small steps can nudge their brains back to a positive and productive mind-set.
Hire people with high life satisfaction
If you can’t train people to a higher life-satisfaction score, hire people who already have one.
Gallup researchers found that retail employees in a store who scored high on life satisfaction generated $21 more in earnings per square foot than employees with lower scores in the retailer’s other stores.
That sounds like a compelling business case for hiring happy people.
Peter Cohan is a strategy consultant, startup investor, corporate speaker and the author of 13 books.