You Need to Know Where You Are on the Happy Productive Worker Scale.

It is widely believed that there is a correlation between your happiness at work and your productivity. And while this claim has been backed up by decades of research on how happiness can make you more productive, that research lacks an important context. It turns out that you can be both productive and unhappy, but that’s not good for you. Let’s take a look at the science and bust the myth that productivity only happens when you’re high and find out if you really need to strive for more satisfaction despite your stellar performance.

What is the thesis about a happy productive worker?

The happy productive worker thesis is basically the theory that happier workers perform better and has been studied for decades. However, as with any theory or hypothesis, the more it is studied, the more the big brains that study it disagree. For example, a study published in 2008 found that in many past studies, happiness was measured by participants’ job satisfaction, but “job satisfaction may not be an effective measure of happiness”. Fair enough: you may be satisfied with your income and benefits and reasonably satisfied with your job, but not happy or satisfied.

In 2019, researchers elaborated on this thesis by suggesting that instead of “happy-productive” and “unhappy-unproductive”, the worker could fall under four models: “happy-productive”, “unhappy-unproductive”, “happy-unproductive”, and “unhappy-productive”. Like their predecessors in 2008, these researchers were also irritated by the previous focus on job satisfaction, so they measured happiness in both hedonic and eudaimonic terms, i.e.). They found that more than half of the people they studied were actually unhappy-productive or happy-unproductive, which is bad news for the old belief that happiness and productivity go hand in hand.

They ultimately concluded that workers are more complex than the initial thesis of a happy productive worker gives them a place. In fact, workers can be hedonically unhappy but eudaimonic happy, or vice versa, that is, at work there can be fun and joy, but not satisfaction, or vice versa.

What does this mean for you?

Despite all the energy invested in this kind of research and the ink spilled on this kind of research, it doesn’t shock ordinary people that you can be both unhappy and productive at work, but unhappiness eventually catches up with you one way or another, so you should strive for happiness. . The main takeaway from the study is that happiness is not unidirectional. You should enjoy your surroundings and get satisfaction from what you do. Using the Hierarchy of Needs to assess your performance is a good start if you feel like you need to make changes, whether you’re inside the company or moving to another.

Don’t think that just because you’re meeting benchmarks and doing some serious work, everything is fine and great. Just because that’s what the old wisdom preaches doesn’t make it right; in fact, you can be unhappy and productive and not even spot it until it’s too late and you’re on your way to burnout. Spend some time re-evaluating your work-life balance to see where you can improve your hedonistic and eudaimonic joys. Perhaps you will become even more productive when you become even happier.