Yes, by a margin you can measure. In the most carefully designed studies, people produced 12 to 13% more when they were happier. In Gallup's data on 3.35 million employees, the most engaged teams are 23% more profitable than the least engaged. And Bank of America made one of its call centres 8% faster with nothing more than a new coffee-break schedule.
The call-centre manager couldn't work out why some teams did so much better than others that seemed much the same, so researchers from MIT put sensor badges on them for six weeks. The best predictors of a team's productivity turned out to be how much, and how evenly, its members talked to each other outside formal meetings. The manager then went against standard efficiency practice and rescheduled breaks so each team took theirs together. Call-handling time fell 8% across the centre and by more than 20% among the weakest teams, and the manager forecast $15 million a year in gains once the new schedule reached ten of the bank's call centres, which employed 25,000 people (Harvard Business Review, 2012).
Engaged teams outperform
The 23% comes from Gallup's latest meta-analysis, published in 2024, which pools data from 183,806 teams across 53 industries and 90 countries. Compared with the least engaged quarter of teams, the most engaged quarter showed:
- 23% higher profitability
- 18% higher productivity measured by sales, and 14% measured by production records
- 78% less absenteeism
- 21% lower staff turnover in organisations where turnover usually runs high, and 51% lower where it usually runs low
Because these figures compare the best and worst teams, they show how closely engagement and performance move together. On their own they can't prove which one drives the other.
Most workplaces sit a long way from the top of that range. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that 20% of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025, and put the cost of low engagement at around $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP. In the US, 31% of employees were engaged in 2024, down from 36% in 2020.
Happier people produce more
The 12 to 13% comes from two studies designed to rule out the obvious objection, that productive teams might simply be happier because things are going well for them.
Economists at the University of Warwick randomly gave some participants a mood boost before a paid task. That group produced 12% more, and the quality of their work held steady. A second study by the same researchers found the pattern in reverse, with real unhappiness, such as a bereavement or illness in the family, going with lower productivity.
A team from Oxford, MIT and Erasmus University then followed about 1,800 sales staff across BT's UK call centres for six months, asking each week how happy they felt. Staff made around 13% more sales in weeks when they were happy than in weeks when they were unhappy. To check that the happiness came first, the researchers used the weather. Gloomy weather lowered mood more in offices where staff could see outside, and sales fell along with it. Most of the gain came from converting more calls into sales, with a smaller part from handling more calls each hour.
The pattern reaches share prices as well. From 1984 to 2009, a portfolio of the companies on the "100 Best Companies to Work For" list earned 3.5% a year above risk-adjusted benchmarks, according to research by the finance professor Alex Edmans.
Where the effect comes from
The Bank of America study suggests that culture reaches output through the relationships between the people doing the work. Several other lines of research agree.
Friends at work
Gallup found that only 2 in 10 US employees have a best friend at work. Since the pandemic, having one has become more closely tied to whether people would recommend their workplace, whether they plan to stay, and how satisfied they are overall.
Being left out
In experiments with more than 2,000 people, participants played a simple online game of catch in which some of them were rarely thrown the ball. Afterwards, the players who had been left out put less effort into a task that earned money for their team. On a task that paid only themselves, they worked as hard as everyone else.
New starters
When Microsoft studied its onboarding buddy programme, 56% of new hires who met their buddy at least once in their first 90 days said the buddy helped them become productive quickly. Among those who met more than eight times, the figure was 97%.
What weak connection costs
Loneliness is common and expensive. One in five employees worldwide say they felt lonely for a lot of the previous day. A 2019 survey of about 6,000 US workers for Cigna estimated that loneliness costs US employers more than $154 billion a year in stress-related absence. Lonely workers missed more than five extra days a year and were nearly twice as likely to say they planned to quit.
Culture also shapes who stays. In research for MIT Sloan Management Review covering 34 million employee profiles, a toxic culture was 10.4 times more powerful than pay at predicting how many people a company lost compared with its industry. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs between half and twice their annual salary.
Remote work tends to take the blame for all of this, and the data is more mixed. In Gallup's US figures, fully remote workers are more engaged than on-site workers in jobs that could be done remotely, 37% against 29%. A study of 61,182 Microsoft employees did find that moving the whole company to remote work made collaboration more siloed, with fewer connections between teams. Wherever a team works, the connections that used to form by accident now need someone to plan for them.
Two things the research warns against
The first is making people take part. In a Wharton field experiment with several hundred salespeople, a workplace game improved how people felt about their jobs, but only among those who bought into it. People who felt it had been imposed on them ended up feeling worse about work, and neither group sold more. Whatever you introduce needs a real way to opt out.
The second is expecting a short break to sharpen concentration. A review of 22 studies found that breaks of ten minutes or less raise energy and reduce fatigue, but make no measurable difference to performance on demanding work. The authors suggest that recovering from that kind of work takes longer than ten minutes.
Five rules for building culture in Slack
- Share the moment. Bank of America's gains came when whole teams took the same break. In Slack, that means a recurring post at a time everyone knows, in a channel the whole team reads.
- Make it a habit. Pick one small thing and run it on the same days every week. A small routine is easier to keep going than an occasional big event, and people come to expect it.
- Let people opt in, whenever suits them. Compulsory activities can lower morale, and anything that needs everyone online at once leaves out whoever is in another timezone or stuck in a meeting.
- Take the work off the manager. Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, according to Gallup, and their own engagement worldwide fell from 31% to 22% between 2022 and 2025. The person who cares most about a team's culture is often its most stretched, so the ritual should keep running through a busy week without anyone organising it.
- Mix the teams. Remote work can narrow who talks to whom. Use channels that bring people from different teams into the same conversation.
Our guide to team building activities for Slack has more formats that fit these rules.
Making the case for budget
If you need sign-off for culture spend, three findings carry most of the argument. Replacing one employee costs between half and twice their salary. The most engaged teams are 23% more profitable than the least engaged. And a Bank of America call centre got faster by changing when people took their coffee break. Put the cost of a small weekly ritual next to the cost of one resignation, and a finance team has the comparison it needs.
Where TriviaStack fits
We built TriviaStack to follow those rules. You build a trivia game around the topics your team cares about, choosing the categories, the difficulty and the number of questions, then schedule it to post in a channel. People answer in their own time without leaving Slack, and the results and leaderboard post back to the channel for everyone to see (and argue over). Once it's scheduled, it runs on the days you picked with nobody organising it, and playing is always optional. If you'd rather not choose topics, the Daily Stack gives you ten new questions from the news every morning.
We haven't measured TriviaStack's effect on productivity, so none of the figures in this post are claims about our product. They are the research we used to decide how it should work.
Every figure in this post links to its source. If one has gone out of date, tell us and we'll correct it.