If You're Happy and You Know It Your Office Will Get More Done

Why am I writing a short blog post about happiness?

Simple: happy employees (or co-workers) get more done. This isn't just Pollyanna-ish wishful thinking, research backs this up.

There are plenty of offices and companies around the country that work under the theory of “the floggings will continue until morale improves.”

Happy doesn't mean goofing off on the job or wasting the day at the water cooler; happy instead means getting more done with the same staff.

We all know someone (it may be you) who say they work better under pressure, that's not really true.

Too much pressure to perform over time leads to overwork and stress. Both of those factor into unhappy work environments.

And an unhappy work environment is unhealthy and unproductive.

Happy employees are more productive.

Unhappy employees are less productive.

Here's the evidence based on research. 

A research team at the University of Warwick found that happy employees had a 12% uptick in productivity, while unhappy workers were 10% less productive. This shouldn't surprise anyone, but the research indicates, “We find that human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity. Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings.”

“Whatever,” you might be thinking, this really has nothing to do with business. Not true. The research points out that Google has invested in supporting their employees and measured the rise in employee satisfaction. Google is a data-driven company, if they think it's worth spending money on . . . it might be worth at least thinking about instead of dismissing out of hand.

So turn those frowns upside down and focus on improving morale in the office. Your office or business will get more accomplished, plus it's much better to see a bunch of smiling faces everyday.

What can you do?

One thing that annoys anyone in an office is technology that doesn't work as it should. If people don't have the right tools to get their work done – like the network going down frequently, or phones not working, or the copy machine going AWOL again – they get annoyed.

To make sure you're network infrastructure is up to par, we can perform an assessment for you to identify weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. 

We'd be “happy” to help.