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When was the last time your boss told you to find more joy outside of the office?
It may seem like a strange suggestion from an employer, especially given seemingly more pressing matters such as rising costs and economic uncertainties, but studies show that finding more happiness outside of work makes employees more productive on the job.
Consider a 2019 University of Oxford report, which asked U.K. telecom employees to rate their happiness weekly, over six months, through an e-mail survey containing five emoji buttons representing states of happiness. It found workers were 13 per cent more productive when happier, which translated into them making more calls per hour and converting more calls to sales.
A more recent study, published this year in the Harvard Business Review, found that part of being happy simply means working fewer hours rather than more. If that sounds like something from #WorkTok – where younger workers vent about workplace “issues” such as being at the office for 40 hours a week – the reality is more nuanced, emphasizing both the importance of having time away from work and using that time productively.
The researchers, who surveyed 1,500 Harvard Business School alums now well into their careers, found the average spent 50 hours a week working and a further 12 hours on non-work responsibilities such as housework. After accounting for time spent sleeping, commuting and tending to basic hygiene, there were 26 hours left during the week to spend on other activities.
Not surprisingly, the researchers found that those extra 26 hours – and not the hours spent at work or doing housework – were where people experienced the most joy.
But it was how people spent those extra hours that truly made them happier, the study shows.
After constructing a “joy scale,” the researchers found that the most satisfaction came from spending time with others as opposed to spending it alone. Closely related to this is the finding that the leisure time was best spent in something other than passive activities such as watching TV, scrolling social media, gaming or – most passive of all – taking naps.
Instead, exercising or pursuing a hobby made people happier. Still, it’s important to choose the hobbies carefully; the research shows that the happiest people were those who picked activities they liked rather than ones considered worthwhile.
Interestingly, there is a tipping point when it comes to hobbies and happiness; the study shows someone who gets so absorbed in an activity that it consumes them is less happy than someone who varies their hobbies. So maybe doing an ultra-competitive sport every day after work won’t also make you more productive on the job.
Other research supports the idea that some of the most successful people have active hobbies aside from their main jobs. A 2022 study published in the Creativity Research Journal found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists were disproportionately likely to be “renaissance” intellects with diverse interests including many in creative areas.
In the words of the researchers, their “combinatorial approach to learning and doing enables them to perceive unusual problems at the intersections of disciplines, to transfer ideas and techniques from one field to another.”
It’s a notable conclusion given the increasingly prevalent view that we will need soft skills such as creativity empathy as well as hard ones such as data mining or financial modelling to deal with the emerging economy.
The World Economic Forum has cited creativity as being one of the skills that will be most needed in the future – and it could be argued that it’s one that needs to be honed both in and out of the workplace.
Many organizations today are understandably worried about where the business cycle is headed and may be focused on budget cuts rather than workers’ joy scales. While that makes sense on the surface, the reality may be that a stressed, overworked labour force may not be able to deliver the results that companies need.
Encouraging workers to seek a life outside the office may be counter-intuitive and it doesn’t seem like a great career move for employees looking to get ahead. However, that might be a flawed way of looking at it from both an employer and employee perspective.
There might be something to be said for telling workers to basically get themselves a life. For workers, the challenge – other than carving out time away from work – is finding a meaningful way to spend that spare time to get the most joy out of life and possibly your career.