It makes sense that happy employees are more productive than their unhappy peers, but a new study from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School attempts to quantify just how much of a difference happiness makes.

The study found that happy workers in the contact centers of the British telecoms firm BT, were around 13% more productive than their unhappier peers.

“We found that when workers are happier, they work faster by making more calls per hour worked and, importantly, convert more calls to sales,” the researchers say.

Happy employees

Of course, this is not a new topic, and indeed links have been made in the past between happiness and productivity, but the researchers believe that none of these have been as strong as in their research.  They believe this matters as recent evidence suggests that paid workers in the UK are incredibly unhappy at the moment.

“There seems to be considerable room for improvement in the happiness of employees while they are at work,” the researchers explain. “While this clearly in the interest of workers themselves, our analysis suggests it is also in the interests of their employers.”

Each volunteer in the study was asked to rate their happiness every week for six months via an email survey.  Data on each employee was also tracked to gauge things like attendance, sales conversions and general customer satisfaction.  The researchers also collected firm-level data on work schedules and productivity.  They even collected data on local weather conditions to see what effect the weather had on mood and productivity levels.

The data revealed that happy workers typically did not work any longer hours than their unhappier peers, but they did appear to be more productive with the time they did spend at work.  Of course, they could be a correlation and causation issue here, as Harvard’s Teresa Amabile famously suggested that the key to happiness at work was making progress, so it seems plausible that those who are doing the most at work were also the happiest as a result.

Either way, it seems sensible for managers to focus both on making employees as happy as possible, and on making them as productive as possible.