People can be happy at work AND happy people work harder!

People can be happy at work AND happy people work harder!

Check out these two fascinating articles about the possibilities and benefits of happiness at work…

by Margaret Harris

“It is clear that the companies that focus on gaining staff buy-in for company-wide goals and objectives, at the expense of meeting employees’ individual career goals, are going to find it difficult to hold on to top talent. The two go hand in hand in terms of attracting and keeping star performers,” says Kevin Laithwaite, managing director of JobCrystal.

JobCrystal compiles the happiness indicator from the data it collects when candidates enter their details on the talent management portal.

JobCrystal completed a second happiness indicator, which looked at which South African companies had the happiest staff and were the best places to work.

There was a low correlation between companies where employees were the happiest and those rated the best place to work – which has an important lesson for companies, says Laithwaite.

“Even if employees buy into the company culture, vision and environment and so rate the company as a good place to work, they also need to have their individual goals and requirements met in order to be happy,” he says.

To read the full and original aricle…click here

by Jamie Doward

Where Slough’s most famous office manager leads, eminent economists follow. David Brent’s declaration that he wanted to be remembered as “the man who put a smile on the face of all who he met” may once have been dismissed as management mumbo jumbo.

But it appears the Brentmeister General may have been on to something. A team of economists has now produced research that suggests there are clear links between workers’ happiness and their productivity.

The team, led by Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics at Warwick Business School and a leading authority on the relationship between economics and mental health, said its research has important implications for the worlds of politics and business.

“We find that human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity,” the team said. “Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings, while negative emotions have the opposite effect.”

The team conducted a range of exercises in their research. In one, students were asked to add a series of five two-digit numbers in 10 minutes. The subjects were paid an attendance fee, and a performance fee based on the number of correct answers.

Some were then shown a 10-minute film based on comedy routines performed by a well-known British comedian. The film succeeded in raising the reported happiness levels of those who saw it, compared to those who did not see it, or who watched a “placebo” film _ã_ a clip depicting patterns of coloured sticks.

Among the subjects who reported higher happiness levels after seeing the comedy film, productivity was significantly higher than for the other subjects, for both men and women…

…read the full and original article HERE

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