The January-February 2012 issue of the Harvard Business Review explored the effects of happiness on employee productivity and earnings.
“People are not very good at predicting what will make them happy.” Most people, for example, think that achieving a goal will make them happy; it does, but only for a short time. Surprisingly, people who are happy have an easier time reaching their goals. “Happy people are more creative and productive,” says Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard.
It’s not the big hits that make us happy. The frequency of the good things is more important than the intensity of the good things. “Happiness is the sum of hundreds of small [everyday] things” that matter most. “This also suggests that happiness at work may depend more on our routine interactions with co-workers, the projects we’re involved in, our daily contributions,” says Matthew Killingsworth, a doctoral student at Harvard.
“Happy employees produce more than unhappy ones,” say Spreitzer and Christine Porath. And they are more likely to be promoted. “Most people believe that success precedes happiness,” says Shawn Achor, but happiness actually precedes success.
If happiness is so important to productivity, profits, and promotion, why do we so often think of it as frivolous, silly, and a waste of time? This is one of the quirks of modern business.
We frequent a certain restaurant for breakfast. Workers often chat and laugh happily in the kitchen as they work. A waitress complained that there is too much “fun” in the kitchen. Aren’t laughs and conversations an indicator that employees enjoy their work? Yes, there is a balance, but silence and grumpy workers are not good for business either.
There are many ways to increase happiness in daily life, but one of the easiest ways is to develop a sense of humor. How do comedians find humor in even the darkest events? Some simple questions are asked:
• What’s funny about this?
• If this was happening to someone else (eg, your favorite comedian), would it be funny?
• What it’s like? (What’s something similar that would be fun?)
Children laugh hundreds of times a day; adults laugh much less often. Yes, there are what we call “joyful people”. Perhaps they have been told that they have a good laugh and take every opportunity to use it. Or maybe they really do find humor in most things. We can all get to this point, with practice, where we turn unfortunate incidents into laughs and can eventually remember them as funny.