Assessing a company’s performance with happiness

This thesis conducts a systematic review to explore if companies should integrate happiness into the company’s balanced scorecard. The balanced scorecard is a broadly used tool for companies to translate their strategic goals into tactical actions and helps a company to assess its performance. Happiness research has recently become a major area of research within economics and the concept has even been implemented in public policies. As a logical result of this trend, happiness in the working environment is being researched using the concept of ‘job engagement’ amongst others. H. Rampersad suggested to include happiness of the workforce when measuring the strategic goals of a company by expanding the personal balanced scorecard. Complementary to this method, this thesis suggests companies should use the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) as a tool to measure job engagement of employees and the Job Rescources-Demands Model to explain the level of job engagement within a company. With this detailed information a company can take practical steps to increase job engagement and eventually improve the performance of the company.