A professor named Daniel Sgori recently published an article that outlines the connection between happiness and productivity. In short, the impact is enormous.

If you’ve got a knack for digging through academic language, the complete post is worth a read. Here’s a few words from a key paragraph, with emphasis added:

With this in mind, my colleagues and I address the question: does happiness make people more productive in a paid task? Using an experimental methodology, we find that it does. … Effort increases. Precision remains unaltered. In our first experiment, we induce short-run shocks to happiness and find a pronounced positive effect on productivity. In our second, we turn to the longer run when we ask whether subjects who have experienced recent “life shocks” perform significantly differently, and again, we find that they do.

How did they do it? In Experiment #1, subjects were paid to perform some math problems. Some of the participants were asked to watch a short video clip of a stand-up comedian before starting work. They were on average, 10% more productive than those who did not view the program. (Why economists call enjoying some comedy a “happiness shock” is in itself, rather comedic.) Here’s the actual data of participants who have been “treated” with some entertainment:

Daniel Sgroi and his colleagues are good researchers. They worked to ensure that there weren’t other factors effecting this outcome. They checked for differences in performance by gender and saw nothing significant. They compared between different sessions at different times of the day, and again, there were no meaningful differences. They looked at the work conducted in detail, and divided it into “effort” (number of attempts) and “precision” (percentage of correct answers), and saw that “precision” remained constant but “effort” increased after watching the video clip. They even tried varying the payment system and tried showing the control group a boring clip of “dull visual images.” None of these adjustments had any affect.

Does that mean you should start you day with a session on YouTube? Probably. Here, enjoy this and you’ll probably read the rest of this blog post even faster:

So what was Experiment #2? Instead of the “shock” of a comedy video, participants were asked to assess their own happiness. After finishing the tasks, those taking part in the study were provided with a questionnaire about recent negative life events. The survey included topics such as loss of a family member, parental divorce, or health factors.

Once again, people who were happier in general were more productive. Happiness leads to productivity. It’s what we’ve been saying for years.. For more information about how you can work smarter and be more satisfied, contact Slaughter Development today!

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