The metric of the future should be happiness, with investors asking a company about their employee happiness levels, says  Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Wellbeing and creator of the Happy Planet Index

"In 1992 I had this crazy idea that GDP was the wrong measure of progress; having a measure of how much money a nation makes can't be the best way of measuring progress," Marks told the audience at the Happy Startup School's Summer Camp in Hyde Park. Marks is convinced that we can measure progress better by creating a measure of "our lived experience", and at the Summer Camp -- largely attended by young startups or those considering launching a new business -- Marks was on a mission to convince the audience of the same. "I want to convince you it's absolutely vital. It's not just about this plastic happiness. Real happiness is a vital part of our humanity and it's important."

Negative emotions, he noted, have been understood from an evolutionary stand point for some time. Fear, for instance is of course integral to the flight or fight response, and survival. The point of happiness, on the other hand is a relatively young topic of investigation and has, up until recently, been perceived as merely being useful as a signal of good function: "I'm happy, carry on" etc. Drawing on studies of the past few decades, Marks insisted it was empirically proven that happiness makes for more creative and productive employees.

Barbara Fredrickson, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, for example, has famously gathered evidence for a happiness "tipping point" at which the emotion begins to drive creativity and productivity.

"She would do things like show half a roomful of people a video of cats playing, and the other half footage of cats been killed. She manipulates moods and then judges how volunteers perform tasks differently. [She found that] positive emotions broaden our repertoire of responses and reactions, and help us do more things and be more creative."

"If you're happy, you smile, which is an approach signal so you build better relationships. If you're unhappy and scowling people will stay away from you. Over time this builds our resources, we expand over time. In a business context, if you catch people doing things right, tell them. Build on it. Positives are about opportunities and negatives are about threats."

It makes sense that reactionary good work carried out due to fear of failure or punishment is far less creative than work done in a supportive environment. According to Fredrickson, who carried out an empirical study (published in 2005) which involved monitoring the meetings held by 60 different teams, the magic number was three -- three positive comments to every one negative is the tipping point at which you get the most out of people. Anything more than eight, and things get a bit weird. "You need some grit in the system," says Marks. "Negative emotions are functional. When one of Nasa's spacecraft's crashed, they said too many people were agreeing with each other. Challenge is good. But continually being negative is stifling."

Although it might be of comfort to have empirical evidence that positivity pays off, the theory has recently been trashed in  a paper published in American Psychologist, which states that there is "no theoretical or empirical justification for the use of differential equations drawn from fluid dynamics, a subfield of physics, to describe changes in human emotions over time", that there are "fundamental conceptual and mathematical errors" in Fredrickson's study, and that the concluding positivity ratio is "entirely unfounded".

Marks did point to other studies that back up the theory, however. Jim Harter, chief scientist for Gallup's workplace management practice, for instance, has carried out studies that have concluded the impact of happiness at work on performance is twice as large as from performance on happiness at work. And for anyone convinced that a focus on employee happiness should always come second to a focus on profitability, Marks' point could not be better stipulated that with this fact, produced by a 2012 study: "Companies listed in the '100 Best Companies to Work For in America' generated 2.3 to 3.8 percent per year higher stock returns than their peers from 1984-2011."

Unsurprisingly, it's figures like that which convince people. Marks is hoping to build on that with his startup Happiness Works, which creates surveys specifically to measure employee happiness at work. "Numbers make it seem real," says Marks. "But it's the conversations that make change, not the numbers. Our surveys are like a mirror, you see what is, but also like a window, you see through to what could be."


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