Happiness can drive greater performance - and technology can help!

As organizations - both business and academic - strive to increase productivity and unlock new levels of achievement, so they should look to technology to foster greater well-being.

While findings from the most recent World Happiness Report 2019 show varying levels of happiness across the Middle East and Africa region, many countries recorded positive results. At least five other countries in the region ranked in the top 50 happiest countries in the world, in the World Happiness Report For 2018.

Results like these are highly encouraging – not only is happiness key to business productivity, but also other key drivers of economic growth, such as academic achievement. In fact, according to new research conducted by the Economist and supported by Microsoft, 80 percent of educators maintain that well-being is critical to academic success, as well as the development of communication and collaboration skills.

And technology can be a powerful driver of improved well-being.

Behavioral insights increase engagement

In fact, tools, such as Microsoft Workplace Analytics, are already harnessing advanced data analytics to provide behavioral insights that can be used to improve productivity, workforce effectiveness and employee engagement.

Using Office 365 and calendar metadata, the tool shines a light on the ways in which organisations collaborate and spend time. In other words, the data produced by employees on a daily basis is transformed into a set of behavioral metrics. This means managers are able to make practical improvements – for example, reducing employees’ travel times to meetings, which can then ultimately lead to greater satisfaction and well-being.

And this same strategy can be applied to a wide range of business elements that affect staff happiness, including time spent in meetings, after-hours time and time spent e-mailing.

I personally leverage Microsoft Workplace Analytics to uncover collaboration patterns that lead to higher revenue and more effective complexity. We’ve also integrated new data sources to augment behavioral insights from Office 365, which have informed our leadership initiatives and development, enabled salesforce transformations and driven diversity and inclusion efforts.

Well-being drives academic excellence

Beyond the world of business, advanced technology is also being used to improve the well-being and learning experiences of students.

The Economist’s research shows that there are three specific areas of technology that can help academic institutions provide students with the tools they need to succeed. This includes collaboration tools such as Microsoft’s OneNote Class Notebook, which encourages students to work together all while the teacher provides real-time feedback and coaching.

Data and analytics have also become vital to the education process, empowering learning institutions to better understand students’ needs and, therefore, how to support these needs.

One example of the technology that facilitates this level of involvement is DataSense. Owned by Microsoft, DataSense is leveraged by schools and educational institutions to ingest and report on insightful information, ultimately driving the best possible learning outcomes for their students.

Immersive experiences can also help drive well-being by fostering a greater sense of empathy in students.

This is key because immersion allows users to experience the world from someone else’s perspective. In fact, virtual reality has been known to reduce stereotypical attitudes and increase the empathy users feel towards one another. And technology such as HoloLens 2, which draws on Microsoft’s cloud and AI services, is taking immersive mixed reality experiences to a new level of sophistication.

Even well-known tools such as Skype are being used by educators to teach students empathy and global understanding. By empowering learners to create connections with students around the world, they not only develop compassion, but also new friendships.

The more businesses and institutions across MEA leverage technology to improve well-being and engagement, the more they’ll begin to realize the benefits of greater productivity and success.

At the end, it’s not only about being successful, it’s about enjoying life, and I believe that technology can help in that.