Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten says happiness is the key to boosting productivity in the country's workforce.

At a speech on Thursday night, he called Australia's productivity performance over the past decade woeful.

He says the solution is for employers to stop blaming unions and labour laws and look instead at increasing the happiness of their staff.

"I'm not naive. Not everyone can go to work everyday and be happy," he told The World Today.

"But what I do know is that the happier your workers, the better your business is performing.

"It is not unreasonable to aspire to, if you are a worker, to want to have a good job where you don't feel like taking sick leave, where you don't feel like changing jobs on a regular basis, where you feel valued, where you feel that what you do is an intrinsically worthwhile something and where you feel that your potential is being fulfilled."

He says happy workers could add to the nation's productivity.

"I have no doubt that Australia's productivity growth has been lower in the last 10 years than it was in the last 30 years," he said.

"The low productivity growth of the last 10 years has haunted national and state governments of all political stripes.

"Whilst there is a lot to be said about workplace regulation, I actually think that is far less important than what happens at the enterprise itself - if you have got a workforce that think that they are not wasting their time, that inefficiency is not the rule of the day at the business.

Mr Shorten says a good job will attract good people.

'What makes a good job is the sense that you are valued at work, a sense that there is safety of work in terms of the work practices, a sense that innovation is rewarded, that there is not waste," he said.

"Australians hate that they spend their time doing wasted tasks, wasting their time or that there is inefficiency.

"The key to improving the productive capacity of Australian workplaces rests more and more on what happens in the relationships at work than it does in sterile debates about the merits of reinstituting unfair statutory individual contracts or complaining about unions."

Common sense

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He says he cannot quantify the contribution happy workers make to productivity, but he says it makes sense.

"In America, research shows that employers will always hire happier workers over unhappy workers," he said.

"Common sense tells every parent in Australia they want their kids to go to work, to be flexible, to be adaptable, to be happy at work, to have a better standard of living.

"Common sense can never be regulated, common sense is a fact of life, common sense is that happy workers mean more productive workplaces."

But he says happiness is something that can be institutionalised.

"Fair Work Australia has got a role, I think, to make sure that agreements contain content between employers and employees which go towards making businesses successful, go towards making employees have some control over the jobs they do," he said.

"There is a role for business leadership to be better at its day job which is managing people.

"There is a role for government to make sure that all the support in terms of life long education and skills."