Sam Falconer

This article was taken from the Februray 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Happiness and work. The two words don't seem to sit well together. Work is about the stuff we have to do. Work is about effort. Work is tough. Happiness, in contrast, is about fun things.


Happiness is light. Happiness is even a bit soft and fluffy. So perhaps it is not surprising that people's happiness at work is not taken that seriously by organisations. But I want to explain why this is a serious business mistake and a serious misreading of what happiness is really about.

When we are in a good mood, not only do we smile more but we can also literally see more -- our peripheral vision is enhanced Nic Marks

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Happiness is essentially an emotion that we experience and, like all emotions, it has an evolutionary purpose. Anger and fear are central to the fight-or-flight mechanism that has helped us survive and thrive over the millennia. So what is the evolutionary purpose of happiness? Barbara Fred-rickson and colleagues at the University of North Carolina have shown from more than a decade of lab-based research that happiness is about creating and responding to opportunities. She calls this the "broaden and build theory" as the experience of happiness enables us to broaden our range of possible responses to situations and over time helps build our confidence and skills. For example, if we smile, it opens up the possibility of an interaction with someone, as a smile is a signal that we can be approached. Over time this builds functional relationships. When we are in a good mood, not only do we smile more but we can also literally see more -- our peripheral vision is enhanced. So when you are in a restaurant and you can't get the attention of a grumpy waiter, it might not be that he is ignoring you, but that he physically doesn't see you. He is not scanning the horizon for opportunities, which results in poor customer service.

But there is a further benefit of happiness that might be even more impactful in helping businesses survive and thrive. Happier people and happier teams are more creative. In her research, Fredrickson looked at how teams functioned in business meetings.

She observed that high-performing teams were characterised by much more positivity as well as being more inquiring and innovative. This particular piece of research can claim only to show that high-performing teams are happy. It does not say anything about causality (does high performance create happier employees or vice versa?). Researchers at Gallup have, however, looked at this relationship between employee perceptions (related to what I would call happiness at work) and performance. Using data from more than 2,000 teams with 150,000 members, it showed that both pathways exist but that the impact from happiness at work to performance was twice as large as the other way round. In other words, happiness at work directly leads to higher performance.

What these pieces of research suggest is that businesses should be taking happiness at work more seriously. Of course, this poses the question of how to do this. You can't just tell people to be happier.


Daniel Pink, the renowned business author, has noted the irony that in a feedback-rich world the workplace is "one of the most feedback-deprived places" in modern civilisation. This is where people in my trade -- researchers and statisticians -- can help.

But we can't just publish technical papers or reports that almost require a PhD in statistics to read. Instead we need to create tools that support and inspire people. One idea we have developed is a happiness-at-work-survey tool that mimics the human emotional-feedback system. Standard staff engagement surveys are themselves pretty disengaging, so we are aiming to create innovative and engaging tools that provide instant feedback, enabling individuals, teams and organisations to develop together in becoming happier and critically more functional. In this way we hope to convince the business world that the words "work" and "happiness" do go together.

Nic Marks is the founder of the Centre for Well-being at the New Economics Foundation, London. The survey is free to take at happinessworks.com