Menlo Innovations is a great place to work. The software company in Ann Arbor, MI, has such a sunny atmosphere that even the delivery guy takes notice: "I don’t know what you do," he told Melo employees, "but whatever it is, I want to work here.”

Richard Sheridan, Menlo Innovations's CEO, has written a book about what it is the company does, called Joy Inc.: How We Built A Workplace People Love. In it, he points out that pervasive fear and uncertainty turn many offices into distinctly un-joyful places. Past experience in the software industry showed Sheridan that prevailing workplace practices produce long hours, mismanaged projects, and low-quality products.

He set out to do things differently: "With joy as the explicit goal, Sheridan and his team changed everything about how the company was run. They established a shared belief system that supports working in pairs and embraces making mistakes, all while fostering dignity for the team."

Though I found Sheridan's book highly persuasive, it's not a scientific study, and you won't find many investigations of joy in the management literature. That's largely true of studies of schools, too, notes an article written by Finnish educators Taina Rantala and Kaarina Määttä and published in the journal Early Child Development and Care.

“In the field of educational psychology, research on feelings is lacking,” the authors observe, “and the little that does exist has focused more on negative rather than positive feelings.” Rantala, the principal of an elementary school in the city of Rovaniemi, and Määttä, a professor of psychology at the University of Lapland, set out to remedy this oversight by studying, yes, joy. Their conclusions have important implications for how we do things in schools and in workplaces.

The researchers followed a single class through first and second grade, documenting the students’ emotions with photographs and videos. Through what they call “ethnographic observation,” Rantala and Määttä identified the circumstances that were most likely to produce joy in the classroom. No doubt many pupils would agree with this example of their findings: “The joy of learning does not include listening to prolonged speeches.”

Such teacher-centric lessons are much less likely to generate joy than are lessons focused on the student, the authors report. The latter kind of learning involves active, engaged effort on the part of the child; joy arrives when the child surmounts a series of difficulties to achieve a goal. One of the authors’ videos shows seven-year-old Esko, tapping himself proudly on the chest and announcing, “Hey, I figured out how to do math!” A desire to master the material leads to more joy than a desire to simply perform well, Rantala and Määttä add: joy often accompanies “the feeling of shining as an expert.”

Likewise, the joy of learning is more likely to make an appearance when teachers permit students to work at their own level and their own pace, avoiding making comparisons among students. The authors recommend that children be taught to evaluate and monitor their own learning so they can tell when they’re making progress. Some pupils will take longer than others—as Rantala and Määttä write, “The joy of learning does not like to hurry.” Because joy is so often connected to finishing a task or solving a problem, they point out, allowing time for an activity to come to its natural conclusion is important.

Granting students a measure of freedom in how they learn also engenders joy. Such freedom doesn’t mean allowing children to do whatever they want, but giving them choices within limits set by a teacher. These choices need not be major ones, the authors note: “For us adults, it makes no difference whether we write on blue or red paper, but when a student can choose between these options, there will be a lot of joy in the air.”

Not surprisingly, play was a major source of joy in the classroom Rantala and Määttä observed (even when that play was not exactly what a teacher would wish: the researchers’ video camera caught one student fashioning a gun out of an environmental-studies handout). “Play is the child’s way of seeking pleasure,” the authors write, and it is a learning activity in itself; it shouldn’t be viewed as “a Trojan horse” in which to smuggle in academic lessons.

Lastly, sharing and collaborating with other students is a great source of joy. One of the authors’ videotapes shows a student reacting with pleasure when a classmate, Paavo, says, “You are so good at making those dolls!” The researchers conclude: “Joy experienced together, and shared, adds up to even more joy.”

Support for collaboration, respect for effortful struggle, promotion of autonomy: Rantala and Määttä, and Menlo CEO Sheridan, seem to have hit on the same formula for generating joy.