How Much Fun Should We Have At Work?

TLDR:  A lot more than you think.

Happy employees are more likely to work harder, be more efficient and stay in a job longer.  They are more likely to be innovative, creative and collaborative. There are more scientific studies on this than we can count and we are always running across more, but here is a link to one of our favorite sources, The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor.

If happy employees are the goal, how much fun do we need to get there?  A study published in 2005 by Marcel Losada and Barbara Frederickson calculated a ratio of positive experiences to negative ones required to achieve productivity at 2.9013.  This ratio has become known as The Losada Line; essentially saying you need 3 times as many positive experiences as negative ones to be effective.   There is some debate about the mathematical rigor applied to this study, but in our experience, there is a lot to the Losada line.

Our brains are hardwired to focus on negative information, so it takes a lot of positive information to counteract our negative focus.  If, for instance, someone tells you after your last meeting:

“Thanks for running that meeting, you really helped us focus!”

You will probably feel good and think about that for a hour or maybe even a few hours.  If, however, the feedback from the coworker was:

“That meeting sucked, you were such a task master and by the way, your shoes are lame.”

You will focus on that feedback much longer than if it were positive.  Around 3 times longer, to be precise, and you’re probably never going to wear those fun shoes to work again.

To counteract our brain’s inherent focus, we need more positive experiences than negative ones.  Maybe it’s not exactly 2.903, but aiming for a 3 to 1 ratio is a good start.

Positive experiences don’t have to be big project wins or huge contracts, these experiences can be really small:  smiling at a co-worker in the hall, telling a joke in a meeting that makes everyone laugh, complimenting someone on their really fun shoes or thanking someone.  All of these things are within our grasp to do every single day. And, as it turns out, we need a lot of them; especially when work gets hard and deadlines are looming.  

As you amp up your work game, make sure humor and positivity are part of your arsenal, those tools will get you farther than you think.