Put Happiness to Work: 7 Strategies to Elevate Engagement for Optimal Performance

CHAPTER 1

Happiness Drives Engagement

Organizations have spent more than a decade and billions of dollars trying to engage employees in their work. And with good reason: the data tying employee engagement to increased productivity and bottom-line results is rock solid. Yet over a decade of focused effort has had very little effect on actual engagement numbers. In fact, in the United States, Gallup’s engagement index—the gold standard for measuring employee engagement—has remained stubbornly within a 5-point range of 30 percent since 2000.¹

There’s a reason for this: our approach to employee engagement is all wrong.

Engagement is simply a measure ...