Last week, I added another card to the board that displays my team's tasks for the coming weeks, saying "Having Fun". It stands out because it's green, in contrast to the white task cards.

And tomorrow, I'm going to ask them what things there are that rain on their parade. We will talk about sources of unhappiness at their job and how we can get rid of them.

Yes, I've been on a kind of happiness trip over the last weeks. But it's not because I've joined some joyful cult but because I get paid to maximize my team's productivity. And there is a direct relation between happiness and productivity, as Alexander Kjerulf points out in his blog entry Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster

The 10 reasons he explicates on his blog are:

Happy people work better with others

Happy people are more creative

Happy people fix problems instead of complaining about them

Happy people have more energy

Happy people are more optimistic

Happy people are way more motivated

Happy people get sick less often

Happy people learn faster

Happy people worry less about making mistakes - and consequently make fewer mistakes

Happy people make better decisions

That's a buttload of advantages happy people have over their unhappy colleagues, isn't it? Therefore, I find it one of my foremost duties to take care of my team's happiness. Let's see how well they do on the "I feel good" scale.