Are your job candidates happy? In the war for talent, it’s important to find out

In the war for talent, a focus on employee engagement and wellbeing supports retention. But are you checking to see if prospective employees are happy? 

A Feb. 16 report in the MIT Sloan Management Review delves into recent research on employee happiness by Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Paul B. Lester, an associate professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School, and the late Ed Diener, a psychologist, professor, and author.  

In following a structured approach, one of the steps is measuring happiness in both employees and job candidates. The researchers put “hiring happy” into perspective: “While we do not believe that happiness should be placed ahead of the knowledge, skills, or talent needed for a job, we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers because the risks are low and the benefits could be important.” 

Companies can use assessment tools rather than just intuition or observation. For example, employers should add questions about happiness and optimism to the applicant survey, the researchers noted. Hiring an employee who is already relatively happy and optimistic will “influence exceptional performance and reduce turnover,” the researchers found. 

Their assessment is based on following almost 1 million U.S. Army soldiers for nearly five years. The soldiers were asked to rate their wellbeing, and the researchers then tracked which soldiers later received job performance-based awards. “We saw four times as many awards earned by the initially happiest soldiers (upper quartile) compared with those who were unhappiest initially (lower quartile),” according to the report. This was consistent when accounting for status (officers versus enlisted soldiers), gender, race, education, and other demographic characteristics, the report noted.

“If you extrapolate our findings from the military study to a private sector context where 1,000 hires are going to be made, using wellbeing as a hiring criterion should lead to about 11 more exceptional performers than if the company simply hired personnel without considering wellbeing at all,” according to the report.

The researchers affirmed that military data does apply to the business world. The U.S. Department of Defense is the “single largest employer in the world, dwarfing Walmart by nearly 1 million employees,” and it has almost $3 trillion in total assets, they explained in the report.

Ultimately, an individual’s happiness is influenced by drivers such finding a sense of meaning, the report noted. However, the researchers recommended a bigger portion of the “happiness pie” for employees can result from factors including supportive managers, workplace flexibility, and reasonable pay. You can learn more about the study and additional steps to supporting workplace happiness here.

See you tomorrow.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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Big deal

Morgan Stanley's The State of Equity Plan Management 2022 Report focused on global public and private company equity plans and the factors that drive them. Business leaders are placing equity compensation at the intersection of talent acquisition, according to report. But one of the key findings is employees are holistically reevaluating work, not just compensation. About 55% of business leaders who said their current equity plan was not successful in talent retention or acquisition reported that workers are leaving for opportunities with stronger or more work-life benefits.

Going deeper

A new whitepaper, Strategy Execution: An Incomplete Component of Business Education?, released by The Business Architecture Guild and the MBA Roundtable, examines how strategy is taught in graduate business degree programs. A survey was sent to administrative leads of graduate programs from a broad cross-section of colleges and universities. Executing on strategy is often taught in a casual manner, the survey found. Most of the courses that covered strategic management and leadership topics, like change management, only focused one or two weeks on strategy execution. While these topics are important, "they do not explain the details of how to perform strategy execution comprehensively and how to link the execution layer (projects) with business strategy and ongoing changes to business strategy," according to the report. This could be contributing to the strategy execution gap so many organizations face, the report noted.

Leaderboard

Andy Kitzmiller was named EVP and CFO at Meridian Bioscience, Inc. (NASDAQ: VIVO). Kitzmiller joins Meridian from Hillenbrand, Inc., where he was VP, chief accounting officer, and corporate controller. Prior to Hillenbrand, Kitzmiller was the VP of finance and corporate controller of Milacron, spent five years in various global finance roles at GE Aviation, and spent 10 years in the audit practice of Deloitte & Touche.

Thierry Piéton was named CFO at Renault Group, effective March 1. Piéton has served as deputy CFO, SVP, and controller since February 2020. He previously served as SVP and CFO at Nissan Europe. Piéton joined General Electric (GE) in 1998 and held various finance positions in the health care division. In 2004, he became CFO for Europe, Middle East and Africa for GE Security. He then took on the role of global financial planning and analysis manager with GE Consumer & Industrial. In 2007, Piéton became CFO for GE Oil & Gas Global Services. In 2011, he became CFO for GE Power Conversion. Piéton started his career as an auditor with PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1995.

Overheard

"When it comes to my investment strategy, I am laser-focused on strategic investments in healthy lifestyle brands and products that my wife, Kourtney, and I already use."

—Justin Turner of the Los Angeles Dodgers on his decision to invest in Ripple and why he is a fan of the plant-based lifestyle, as told to Fortune.