Which comes first – happiness or success? In other words, does success at work make you happy or does happiness make you more likely to succeed?
Professor Lester Paul Lester and his colleagues spent five years trying to find out the answer to this confounding chicken-and-the-egg question.
They discovered happiness is a superpower when it comes to job performance.
Photo: Michael Burrows / Unsplash
Listen to the interview with Paul Lester
For five years, Professor Lester and his research team followed nearly 1 million US Department of Defense employees, measuring their happiness and optimism.
They found that people with the highest rates of positive well-being had almost four times as much awards recognition as those in the group with the lowest well-being scores.
The results of their study indicate a “modest, but practically significant relationship between well-being in receiving an award for job performance," Lester tells Jim Mora.
“That's after we even controlled for 11 other factors, including age, gender, education, and a host of other stuff that were in some of the statistical models that we were building.”
Relatively unhappy people and pessimistic people still received awards for their job performance, the researchers found, but a difference emerged when they compared happy individuals with those who were unhappy.
“Those who were happy were about four times more likely to actually receive an award for their performance than those who were unhappy.”
The US Defense Department is one of the largest employers in the world with a very diverse workforce, Lester says.
“If you look at most of the studies that have been done on wellbeing and happiness, they tend to be focused on white-collar workers or those who aspire to be white-collar workers, by that, I mean college students. That's not what our study was.
“Our study ran the gamut across white-collar and blue-collar type fields.”
If employers paid more attention to looking after their people they would reap dollar dividends, Lester says.
“I think organisations are just too concerned with their quarterly earnings statements and not concerned enough about the well-being of their workers.”
People are the platform for a company's success, he says.
“We know based on a lot of research that when happier employees are healthier, they come to work more often. So, there's lower rates of absenteeism, they're highly motivated to succeed, they're creative, they have better relationships with their peers, and they're less likely to leave the company and all of those things affect the bottom line of your company.
“While your company might invest in the next technology to keep their edge over competitors, and that's understandable, perhaps consider investing in your employees' well-being, because you don't want your biggest asset to just walk out the door.”
There are three exercises Lester and his researchers developed to increase the happiness of workers.
“The first we call the Gratitude Visit; people prepare and then present a 300-word testimony of gratitude to someone who changed their life for the better.”
The second exercise they call Three Good Things.
“People write down three things that went well for them each day, and what caused those things to go well for them. And they do so each day over the course of about a week.”
The third exercise is based on an individual's "signature strengths".
“It calls on people to fill out a free online survey, they get the feedback, and then they use their top strengths. So, the survey measures character strengths and then they use that top strength in a new way each day for about a week.
“The research showed that the Three Good Things and the Signature Strengths exercise increased happiness and decreased depression over about a six month period, while the Gratitude Visit did the same for about a month. So we know that these things work.”
Leaders at any level of an organisation can start doing these exercises with their workers, Lester says.
“I always recommend that the leaders actually sit down right alongside their workers and do this, so they can role model, the effort of becoming happier over time.”
Professor Paul Lester is an associate professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School.