You can’t afford to ignore happiness
Happiness might seem like a silly thing for a business to focus on.
You can use similar labels if you like – people experience, staff engagement, culture change, mental wellbeing, addressing psychosocial risks.
But no matter the label, this stuff isn’t fluffy.
There’s a very clear link between how your people are going, and how your business is going
(Photo by Sunder Muthukumaran on Unsplash).
Here’s just a snapshot of the data.
Happiness >> performance, productivity, profitability
Academics “reviewed cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental data showing that happy individuals are more likely than their less happy peers to have fulfilling marriages and relationships, high incomes, superior work performance, community involvement, robust health, and a long life” (source).
More recently, researchers from Oxford found that:
happy workers were 13% more productive (source)
firms with high staff wellbeing “subsequently outperform standard benchmarks in the stock market” (source)
Engagement matters
Organisations in the top quartile for employee engagement enjoy an 18% increase in productivity, a 23% increase in profitability, and a 64% reduction in safety incidents, compared to organisations in the bottom quartile, according to an international meta-analysis by Gallup (source).
Purpose matters
People with a strong sense of purpose at work are more productive, more likely to stay long term, more resilient and healthier, according to a huge range of studies including research by McKinsey (source).
In one study, Teresa Amabile found the key to consistent motivation amongst knowledge workers was the feeling that they had made progress on meaningful work, the previous day. Purpose matters.
Connection matters
Psychological safety is the key characteristic in high-performing teams, according to Google’s Project Aristotle research (source). And having a best friend at work is strongly associated with employee engagement, retention, and business profitability, according to Gallup.
Work that matters, matters
Workload is often the biggest source of stress for employees, but more than half of people’s time is going into ‘busy work’. Only 1/3 is spent on true value-add tasks (sources 1 and 2).
Investing in happiness matters
Organisation-wide investments in employee wellbeing generate an average return on investment of 5:1, peaking at a return of 12:1, according to research by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research and Xero (source).