The Long Term Research On Happiness

While happiness should be placed ahead of the knowledge, skills, or talent needed for a job, we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers, because the risks are low and the benefits could be important.  Many organizations already use a vari...

Not surprisingly, money matters to employee happiness too — but research has shown that is chiefly for those employees who indicated that money is important to them.

In a recent study, the relationship between income and happiness was over four times greater for people who reported that mo...

The relative importance of some of those environmental factors has shifted recently.

The “World Happiness Report 2021” noted that within the workplace, happiness before the pandemic was largely due to employees’ sense of belonging within an organization and among coworkers, the flexibility...

Some people just seem happier, and researchers have looked closely at heritability (factors we’re born with) and how our environment shapes our happiness. Research suggests that heritability accounts for about 40% while 60% is attributed to other factors, especially life experiences.

Resea...

Within the workplace, we know that happier employees are more likely to emerge as leaders, earn higher scores on performance evaluations, and tend to be better teammates. We also know, based on substantial research, that happier employees are healthier, have lower rates of absenteeism, are highly...

Given all the training and development requirements placed on most organizations, the thought of actively trying to develop happier employees may initially seem daunting, time-consuming, and expensive. However, the academic literature repeatedly shows that training initiatives targeting employee ...

The pandemic has reminded us of some tough realities, namely that organizations can contract in turbulent times just as fast as they expand when the economy is booming.

• Organizations need happy employees because happiness is in fact contagious.
• Like happiness, un

The toll that working through the global pandemic has taken on employees’ job satisfaction and emotional well-being has focused business leaders on fostering workforce happiness as never before. While many — if not most — of us are motivated by genuine caring for the people who power our organiza...

Beyond hiring, employee happiness should also be a consideration when measuring organizational performance. Yes, objective performance still matters greatly. But, while a high-performing division within a company may bring short-term profit, if that performance was driven by toxic leadership and ...

Employee well-being initiatives work best when confident leaders present the material and when senior leaders place significant emphasis on the overall effort. Leaders must be willing to invest their efforts into making the initiatives successful by not only advocating for them — for example, by ...