A simple book on employee happiness and engagement, Mark Price’s Happy Economics is an effective guide to greater profitability. It is aimed at workplaces struggling to improve their bottom line while retaining their talent. A general management notion is that pursuing one of the two goals gets in the way of the other, and that a certain amount of pain and suffering on the part of employees needs to be taken for granted while the workplace leaps forward in economic terms.
Old-fashioned wisdom states that if profits and growth are the main goals, your employees are likely to be working unhappily while simultaneously facing an uncertain future as more and more work is outsourced in order to reduce costs, and, if the main goal is to keep employees happy, workplaces may have to be indulgent and allow their growth ambitions to slow down. Price’s book clears these misconceptions. Employee happiness is quite compatible with a growing workplace intent on achieving more profitability.
Happiness at the workplace leads to greater engagement, as employees voluntarily use their discretionary time and effort in being innovative and productive. A happy workplace creates more revenue and more profit, and if workplaces keep employee happiness as the primary goal, the collective economic gains will ultimately add to the national wealth. This is the underlying philosophy behind Happy Economics.
Good in theory, but how does it work in practice, you might ask. It works very well, is the answe.