Case closed: Happier workers are more successful workers.

 

The research, which recently appeared in the Journal of Happiness Studies and was summed up by its authors in an MIT Sloan Management Review article, starts from a simple question. What comes first, success or happiness? Does being successful make you happy or does being happy make you successful? 

 

To find out, the team--Paul Lester, Ed Diener, and Martin Seligman (who is often dubbed "the father of positive psychology")--set out to collect a huge amount of data. To do so they looked to the world's largest employer: the military. The researchers worked with the U.S. Army to follow nearly one million soldiers over five years, measuring both their well-being upon entering the army and their performance over time.

 

 

 

And while we are on the subject of happy employees, what exactly does make employees happy? We have always thought happiness was an important metric of employee satisfaction and engagement. You can't be fully engaged if you are constantly down in the dumps. In short, if you want to succeed at any venture, you really, really want a happy workforce (this MIT article has specific suggestions). It's also probably worth putting in some effort to make yourself as happy as you can be.