how to keep your employees happy

In a quote frequently attributed to John Lennon a boy was asked what he wanted to be wanted to be when he grew up and he replied that he wanted to be happy. He was then told that he did not understand the question, to which he retorted that the person asking him didn’t understand life. And he’s right, we all want to be happy. That’s especially true at work, where most of us will spend nearly a third of our waking hours and we’ll deal with countless stresses big and small on a daily basis, seemingly for nothing more than a paycheck. Work should be interesting, give us some sense of worth and purpose, but 70% of all workers are apathetic about, or outright hate their jobs, which clearly means whatever your bosses are doing to make you happy simply isn’t working. Though I’m sort of making a big assumption that your bosses are even trying to make you happy, much less care that you exist, or that they need to worry about whether you like the job they have you doing. And that, objectively, is perhaps the most worrisome part of it all…

You see, social scientists and doctors have long figured out what makes you happy, why it is in the interest of every company’s bottom line to keep employees happy, and how your perpetual case of the Mondays could be eliminated, or at least severely reduced. Most American workers, as we can see from the statistics, are dealing with the stress of being at a job they dislike, which increases their levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that hardens arteries and increases the odds of having a heart attack. If they’re not there yet, the prolonged stress also causes a host of very unpleasant issues like irregular sleep, disordered eating, anxiety, and depression. In fact, close to a quarter of the American workforce is depressed, which is estimated to cost over $23 billion per year in lost productivity. We also know exactly why people hate their jobs, and unlike many business owners think, it has nothing to do with employees being greedy and lazy, it’s usually a terrible management policy, and feeling as if they’re utterly disposable and irrelevant.

People who are unemployed for a year or more are almost as likely to be depressed as working stiffs and their odds of being diagnosed with depression go up by nearly 2% for every time they double their time out of work. So while a bad job can make people miserable, not having one is every bit as bad if not worse. And these are just the numbers for one year of unemployment, so what lies beyond that could be far scarier since every trend shows mental health suffers without work or purpose, and physical health quickly deteriorates as well. This leaves us stuck in an odd dilemma. We know that people need to, and want to work, and we know full well that when they hate their jobs, their performance lags, as does their health, forming a vicious cycle of bad work and disengagement contributing to poor health, worse work, and more disaffection on the job. It seems obvious that something should be done to address this, for the last 15 years, there has been no change in the stats. Why? The short answer? Terrible management.

One of this blog’s earliest posts explored experiments in which scientists confirmed that often, a group chooses a leader based on little more than bravado, overlooking the results. In follow-up experiments, we even saw mathematical evidence that companies would be better off randomly assigning their managers instead of promoting them the way they do now. Managers also tend to think they’re a lot better than they actually are, while in reality, half the workforce put in a two week notice specifically because of their bosses, and despite often giving themselves very high praise, managers are almost as disengaged as their employees, with 65% of them simply going through the motions of another day. Go back to the most frequent reasons why people are not happy at work. Half of them are about being micromanaged, left in the dark, and treated like a disposable widget rather than a person. They’re primed to see themselves are less valuable, if not useless, and we know that negative priming leads to terrible performance. Tell people they should just be lucky you don’t fire them, and you’ve effectively set them up for failure.

Think about your own worst bosses. They never hesitated to tell you that you were wrong, or to look down on you, or watch over your shoulder because they had no trust in you and turned any inevitable slip-up or small error, even if you immediately caught and corrected it, into some new justification for watching you like a hawk, right? Or if not, did they simply never talk to you about anything, merely dropped off more work and expected you to be done silently? Combine those daily putdowns with a constant threat of being outsourced simply to save a dollar, being shoved to an open office where you have no personal space or privacy and have constant distractions, on top of a lack of any career progression path in sight, and tell me that’s a job even those who live to work would find engaging. As many organizations grow, managers disassociate from the people they are managing, seeing them as little more than numbers on a spreadsheet because that’s what they are in their daily list of things to do. This breeds disengagement, which breeds frustration, and which causes talented employees to run away for greener pastures.

Keeping one’s employees happy should not be one of those HBR think pieces that makes your executive team “ooh” and “ahh” in a meeting where you run through PowerPoint slides showing how much money you’re losing to turnover, depression, and bad management. It should be the top priority of middle managers and supervisors because happy employees work harder, show loyalty and dedication, and help recruit more good talent. Yes, spending on benefits like catered lunches, or gym memberships, or better healthcare, or easy access to daycare, or flexible time off policies sounds exorbitant, I know, and many businesses can’t afford all of that. But showing employees that you care, that you listen to them, and treating them with respect pays off as the engaged employees become more productive and dedicated. In a knowledge economy there’s no excuse for the employee-employer relationship be much like one between a master and the indentured servant. It should be a business partnership with benefits for both parties extending well beyond “here’s your paycheck, now get to work.” The science says so, and besides, when you’re a manager, isn’t keeping employees motivated and productive your top priority?