Does employee happiness have an impact on productivity?

Clément S. Bellet, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: This article provides quasi-experimental evidence on the relationship between employee happiness and productivity in the field. We study the universe of call center sales workers at British Telecom (BT), one of the United Kingdom's largest private employers. We measure their happiness over a 6 month period using a novel weekly survey instrument, and link these reports with highly detailed administrative data on workplace behaviors and various measures of employee performance. Exploiting exogenous variation in employee happiness arising from weather shocks local to each of the 11 call centers, we document a strong causal effect of worker happiness on sales. This is driven by employees working more effectively on the intensive margin by making more calls per hour, adhering more closely to their workflow schedule, and converting more calls into sales when they are happier. In our restrictive setting, we find no effects on the extensive margin of happiness on various measures of high-frequency labor supply such as attendance and break-taking.

Keywords: happiness; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 I31 J24 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-10-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-hap, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Does Employee Happiness Have an Impact on Productivity? (2019)
Working Paper: Does employee happiness have an impact on productivity? (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1655

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