Employee Engagement Isn’t Enough. Here’s Why Joy Is the Real Growth Driver

Illustration: Inc; Photo: Getty Images

Most organizations run on a straight-line growth model. People do their work, the company achieves results, and you make more money. Repeat. It’s logical, measurable, and reassuring to people who like dashboards. The problem is that this model assumes that results and money will sustain motivation and maximize performance. 

The truth is, sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, the usual response is to double down on the same model and hope motivation catches up.  

The more human circular model 

There is another model that may look less efficient but often works better in real life. Instead of chasing performance directly, you build a culture of joy that people actually want to be part of.  

Joy creates positive energy. Energy improves performance. Performance produces success. Success increases pride. Pride strengthens the culture of joy, and the cycle keeps feeding itself. It’s not linear. It’s circular. 

The question most leaders never ask 

Richard Sheridan, founder of Menlo Innovations and author of Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love, built his company around a question most executives never think to put on a dashboard: Are people excited to come to work?  

For Sheridan, excitement was the visible sign of joy. Joy was the sign that the culture was working. He treated joy as the core measure of success. If the culture lacked joy, he assumed something in the system was wrong.  

Examples of joy fueling performance 

At Menlo Innovations, people work in pairs, talk constantly, and laugh more than you expect in a room full of programmers. The company has stayed profitable year after year in the volatile tech industry, in a workplace that looks nothing like the typical software company.  

Under Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines built a culture where humor, personality, and informality were not only allowed but expected. In an industry famous for bankruptcies and mergers, Southwest stayed profitable for decades while keeping employee loyalty and customer satisfaction near the top of the charts.  

At Trader Joe’s, the difference is obvious from the moment you walk into a store. Employees talk to customers, joke with each other, and seem unusually relaxed for retail. The company invests heavily in autonomy, internal promotion, and culture. The result is some of the highest sales per square foot in the grocery business.  

Experiential leadership moment: Do this now 

Rate 1 to 10: How excited are you to go to work most days? Just notice your number. It’s a data point that may be more useful than the quarterly report. 

Reflection questions

1. When did work last feel genuinely energizing instead of just necessary? 
2. Do people around you seem alive at work or professionally responsible? 
3. What in your culture might produce results but not joy? 

Different industries, same loop. Joy produces positive energy, which leads to better performance. This grows pride, resulting in more joy. While the linear model tries to drive results and hopes joy follows, the circular model builds joy and lets results follow. 

Why joy improves performance

Barbara Fredrickson’s research shows that positive emotions such as joy expand thinking, creativity, and resilience. This helps people perform better over time. Positive affect in the workplace also suggests employees who feel good while working show higher creativity, better decision-making, and stronger performance than those who do not. 

Bottom line? How people feel at work is not separate from results. It helps drive them.  

5 leadership steps to infuse joy into the system 

1. Make progress visible and collaborative. Set up the workplace so people naturally show their work, get input, and help one another as they go. 
2. Remove one daily irritation. Fix one process, rule, or habit that everyone complains about but nobody changes. 
3. Bring personality to work. Encourage conversation, humor, and human interaction instead of treating professionalism as an emotional restraint. 
4. Track joy as a performance metric. Regularly ask how excited people feel about the work and share the results. 
5. Make joy a leadership responsibility. Treat excitement about the work as something you and the leadership team are responsible for enabling. 

Leadership team talk 

Ask everyone on your team to rate from 1 to 10 how much they enjoy coming to work lately. Write the numbers down without discussion. Then ask what would raise the score by one point. The answers are usually small, practical, and surprisingly revealing. 

Your inspirational challenge 

Most leaders were taught that if the results are good, the system must be working. The truth is, you can hit your numbers and still feel something is missing. The work gets done, the goals are met, and yet the excitement isn’t there — for you or for the people around you. 

When people are excited to come to work, when they are joyful, the culture is usually healthy. When they aren’t, something in the system needs attention. Every day this month, ask yourself a simple question: Am I excited to go to work? If the answer is no, you may just need a different model.