We have written before in this space, and I have talked about this in some of my seminars, workshops and even when I conduct workplace audits, about the importance of having happy workers and employees. Happy workers lead to more productive workers and workers who are more safety conscious and thus less injury-prone.

I have also addressed the extreme and common-sense importance of having focused workers instead of ones who are distracted by other things – home life, financial issues, etc. Workers who are more focused on the job mentally and physically tend to be better, more productive workers and tend to be less injury-prone and are at work more often.

[Image courtesy of Schristia from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Daydreaming is a normal mental activity, but recent research has revealed that daydreaming may be even riskier to workplace health than we thought bfore – because it actually adversely affects not just focus, but our mood.

Now let’s think about those two things coming together. We all know of people who daydream or let their minds wander, right? Often we think that minds wander because the task we are doing is just too boring or miserable and we like to go off mentally into our “happy place” to feel a little bit better about our lives and what we are currently doing. But if there is a theory that daydreaming makes us happier, then we should be more produtive – but as our mind wanders, we lose focus on what we’re doing, and we run a higher risk of injury.

Can you be in a hospital with a smile on your face? Anyway, while you ponder that question, I found some information on a recent research study about mind-wandering and how it relates to happiness, and I have to say I found the study and the results fascinating, and may be an object-lesson for everyone in occupational health and safety.

Two Harvard researchers developed a smartphone app (Track My Happiness) and tracked 2,200 adults giving more than 250,000 reports several times aday about their moods, what they were doing and if their mind was focused on the task at hand or was it wandering in another direction. From these data points, the researchers concluded that a wandering mind is actually an unhappy mind. Here are the main highlights of the findings from the study:

  • Our minds wander almost half the time (47 percent).
  • Even when we have pleasant thoughts in our mind-wandering, respondents reported being less happy than when they were focused on the job at hand.
  • Even during boring tasks like the daily commute to work, people reported being much happier when their minds were on the boring task and not wandering
Admittedly, a little bit of this surprised me. Usually people’s minds wander for different reasons based on what they’re doing at the time – and I guess I had always thought that the mind either wandered off to something more interesting than what they were working on or they did it because they weren’t happy with what they were doing and they wandered their minds to feel happier. When it seems the results indicate that more happiness is not necessarily the result of mind-wandering or daydreaming. So the stereotypes we have always known about daydreaming are wrong.
In other words, what I have always been talking about hold  true even more with this research. If you really want to increase productivity and reduce injuries and absenteeism at work, this research seems to confirm our teachings – as safety officers, we need to train our workers to stay focused on the job because that will leave them happier than if they are daydreaming. So not only is it important for us to do what we can in the workplace to ensure worker happiness when they come to work, but also help them develop the discipline to remain focused on the work. Distraction and unhappiness lead to injuries, and daydreaming by itself raises the risk of injury substantially depending on the moods our workers are in before they daydream.
No matter what they have going on, even if it’s negative, we have an obligation to keep our workers focused on the job when they’re on the clock – if not for the company’s bottom line, but certainly for the workers’ overall mental and emotional well-being, as this research suggests. Keep them focused, keep them happy, keep them safe.