How Happiness Boosts Workplace Performance

YouTube video The Human Experiment

Does happiness make you smarter? Take something that requires serious brainpower with life or death consequences. Medical diagnosis.
Cornel university psychologists gave a bag of candy to half a group of doctors. Even doctors aren’t immune to the charms of a little token of appreciation. With their emotional state boosted the happier doctors made their diagnosis nearly twice as fast and were nearly 20% more accurate. Moral of the story? Don’t wait for your doctor to give you a lollipop, if you want an accurate diagnosis, give him one first!
It’s not just Doctors, students who were told to think of the happiest day of their lives just before taking a math test did significantly better than those who didn’t.
What about work performance? Before starting a new job, 272 employees had their happiness measured. Eighteen months later those that were happiest at the beginning received higher evaluations and pay rises. They say if you want a job done well ask a busy person, actually you should ask a happy person!
Shawn Achor from Harvard University, reports on over a decade of research proving that happiness boosts nearly every business objective increasing productivity by 31% and sales by 56%. If you’re still don’t care about happiness, care about happiness because you care about profit. The Parnasus work place fund only invests in happy companies and delivers a nearly 7% higher return. Think about it, when you’re happy, you’re more open, visionary and creative. How much do you we achieve when we’re unhappy: “Life is horrible, I’m pathetic – now let’s go realize our mission!”
It doesn’t take much to boost happiness, giving or receiving a small gift of appreciation, thinking of one of the happiest days of your life, doing a random act of kindness, giving gratitude or just meditating for two minutes.
I always thought success was the key to happiness. Actually it’s the other way round. Happiness is the key to success.
Now Experiment on yourself and your organisation.