What Happy Companies Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Company for the Better

Chapter 12. Return on People

Reaping a “meaningful reward,” an important goal of for-profit businesses, is usually understood to be a reasonable payoff for the money, effort, and time that go into creating the enterprise. A meaningful reward can also signify psychological or moral values associated with the reward as well as the size of the reward itself. This sense of human moral value, of intrinsic importance, energizes and engages employees, who in turn work harder and more effectively on the company’s behalf. This chapter explores the steps needed for companies to engage employees, to reward them appropriately, and to improve the companies’ overall financial performance by thinking about profit in its broadest sense.

What exactly, then, is ...