The Link Between Employee Happiness and Business Success

Ten tips for creating a positive workplace culture

Earlier this year, Lincoln Financial Group released Happiness and the Bottom Line: The Happy Worker Prescription, a whitepaper in which Dr. Les Kertay, Lincoln’s group protection chief medical officer, discusses components of happiness and the links between employee happiness, productivity, and success.

The paper draws from research demonstrating a direct connection between employees’ well-being and their performance at work. Well-being: or happiness: is more than just feeling good. It includes engagement, a sense of meaning, and positive relationships. Employees who are unhappy at work are seven times more likely to be absent from work, twice as likely to give themselves low performance ratings, and seven times more likely to look for a new job, according to recent findings by Healthways-Gallup.

In the whitepaper, Dr. Kertay offers his “Happy Worker Prescription”: ten tips to help employers create a positive workplace culture:

• Make sure managers understand that employee happiness impacts productivity and helps keep your workforce fully engaged and productive.
• Hire happy people.
• Invest in managers’ emotional intelligence.
• Provide recognition in the way employees value most.
• Provide opportunities to socialize, and encourage it.
• Provide benefits that are important to your employees and enhance their financial security: and emphasize the value of those benefits.
• If there are issues with performance, address them directly, starting with the positive.
• If an individual or team is showing signs of stress, listen without judgment.
• If you have done something wrong, apologize.
• Express interest in staff well-being, including when an employee is out of work.