This is what makes employees happy at work | The Way We Work, a TED series

Transcriber: Ivana Korom Reviewer: Camille Martínez We survey CEOs, police officers, truck drivers, cooks, engineers. If people are working, we've surveyed them. And what we know, in terms of their happiness: workers all want the same things. [The Way We Work] There's three billion working people in the world. And about 40 percent of them would say they're happy at work.

That means about 1.8 billion, or almost two billion people, are not happy at work. What does that do, both to those people and the organizations that they work in? Well, let's talk about money. Organizations that have a lot of happy employees have three times the revenue growth, compared to organizations where that's not true.

They outperform the stock market by a factor of three. And if you look at employee turnover, it's half that of organizations that have a lot of unhappy employees. The miracle thing is, you don't have to spend more money to make this happen. It's not about ping-pong tables and massages and pet walking. It's not about the perks.

It's all about how they're treated by their leaders and by the people that they work with. So I'd like to share a few ideas that create happy employees. Idea number one: in organizations where employees are happy, what you find is two things are present: trust and respect. Leaders often say, "We trust our employees.

We empower our employees." And then when an employee needs a laptop -- and this is a true example -- 15 people have to approve that laptop. So for the employee, all the words are right, but 15 levels of approval for a $1,500 laptop? You've actually spent more money than the laptop, on the approval.