Happy Americans are at the lowest percentage in 71 years - What does it mean for your business?

Just as the index of consumer confidence can predict consumer expenses, the index of happiness at work can predict your employees’ productivity, your customers’ satisfaction, and your rate of employee turnover.

Looking at the latest report on Americans’ happiness, by Gallup, we see that happy Americans are at the lowest overall percentage recorded over the last 71 years.

During the last decade, economists have researched the associated costs of unhappiness and disengagement at work.

Thus, this is what your business shall expect from a lower level of happiness:

• A $12,489 cost per disengaged employee/year (source: Harvard)

• An increase in the number of employees likely to leave. Higher happiness reduces by 59% the probability of employee turnover (source: Gallup)

• Higher recruitment costs. The Society for Human Resource Management has found that the average recruitment cost is $4,129 per employee.

• A 21% decrease in productivity (Gallup)

• A 125% increase of burnout risks (Harvard)

Is your business bound to lose money because of higher unhappiness? Yes, unless you do something about it. People spend a lot of time at work, and happiness at work can be largely influenced.

As a first step, start measuring how good is the human experience in your company. Discover your organization’s strengths and ways to grow happiness, and create a competitive advantage to get ahead of your competitors in 2020. 

Finally, if you want to get all the tools to increase happiness at work, check our chief happiness officers’ online training.

Happiness fuels success: Harvard says Face to Face requests get 34 times more "YES" than emails

If you want to be more successful, invest in face-to-face relationships versus email.
Harvard recently proved that participants had 34 more chances of attaining their objective when they made their request face-to-face rather than when they sent an email. Curiously, or not that much, before the experiment, participants thought that email would be the best way of communicating allowing them to be able to convince with a well-thought argumentation.

Read the Harvard article here

Are you also privileging email versus face-to-face communication? It might be because of a social belief that ignores the science of happiness and, instead of helping you, is drawing your chances to sell your arguments. Let me explain why.

Our society values rationality over emotions. It is so since Descartes, a French mathematician, and philosopher of the 17th century, formulated the "Cartesian method" that praised the mind as the solution for knowing the truth and that can be summarized in his famous quote "I think, therefore I am."  Although this approach has enormous benefits, believing that individuals are rational beings and that we take decisions based on facts can prove us all wrong.  Rafael Nadal won Roland Garros despite coming back from injuries and being technically over the age where tennis men retire. You probably dated this man or girl that your mother gave you reasons not to. You might even be married to him/her!

When we use or pretend that others take decisions solely based on rational criteria, we are scientifically wrong; Neuroscience has discovered that our mind uses both emotions and real observations to take a decision. If we persist on using solely rational argumentation, we will not be using our full potential of persuasion, forgetting that emotions also play a critical role in decision making.  We should say: "I feel and think, therefore I am."

Now, coming back to the Harvard research. How do you think we can achieve to arise more positive emotions to influence others: by email or face-to-face? 
Face-to-face interviews offer the perfect moment for anyone to send our interlocutor a lot of emotional information. How friendly we are, how much we care for them, how truthful we are, and much other relevant information. Our interlocutor will use, aware or unaware of it, all these emotions together with more rational information, to decide whether to say yes or no to our request.

So next time you want to harvest a YES from someone, think of meeting face to face and be mindful of the whole potential of the positive emotions partnering with your thinking!

The science of happiness has proven that those individuals who are happier are also more successful. It is not that they are successful and that makes them happy. It is because they are happy that they are more successful.

I created Feel:)Logic to help companies measure happiness, and set the conditions for their employees to thrive. Within six months, they achieve higher customer satisfaction, employee engagement, retention and, get better bottom line results.