Want to boost productivity? Keep your employees happy
Perhaps the ping-pong tables, free food and other employee perks beloved of trendy tech companies aren't just gimmicks after all.
Adding new product lines, expanding into new markets or simply cutting costs are some of the ways businesses typically boost their profits. But according to a study entitled "happier workers, higher profits" companies can also do this by increasing employee satisfaction.
The findings are based on an analysis of the 2011 "Workplace Employment Relations Survey" which looked at 2,680 UK workplaces between March 2011 and June 2012.
"We find that those workplaces with rising employee job satisfaction also experience improvements in workplace performance, while deteriorating employee job satisfaction is detrimental to workplace performance," it said.
"Employee job satisfaction is positively associated with workplace financial performance, labour productivity [and] the quality of output."