Forget Perks—Here's What Truly Satisfies Employees

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0:55Arthur Brooks:I have the data on this. It's very, very clear. Your happier employees are more profitable, more productive employees. That's just the way it is. If you can have a happier workforce, you're going to have a better company, and the results are going to be there. And I know this because of the work of Irrational Capital, which is a research firm on Wall Street, which I've done some informal advisory unpaid to them because I'm so interested in their data. And what they do is they've looked at 7 ,500 companies, all publicly listed companies, the entire S &P 500, the entire Russell 1000, big companies, little companies, and they've looked retrospectively at these companies, and they have some proprietary data on workplace well-being.

1:32Arthur Brooks:And they measure it in a whole bunch of very robust ways. And what they find is, for example, if you're in the top 20 % of workplace well-being, you will be on average about 520 basis points above the S &P 500 in your stock price over the past year. This stuff is really performing. It really, really is a good investment. The problem is people don't know what workplace happiness means. It's ill-defined. I spend a lot of time in California, and I'm talking to Silicon Valley firms and they'll ask their employees, what would make you happier? And the police don't know. They just know they're not happy.

2:06Arthur Brooks:And so they'll say stuff like, I don't know, a ping pong table. How about avocado toast? I don't know. And so they'll be like, okay, avocado toast and ping pong tables and the people are still not happy. And that's because that's not what they want. They want friendship. They want to actually have friends at work. They want to feel empowered and like they're getting better at their jobs. They want to feel like management is listening to them and taking their suggestions. They want efficiency. They don't want to have their time wasted with stupid meetings all day long. By the way, those are the top four of the six variables that we're talking about here.