Turns out, you can’t force your staff to be happy. But you knew that already, right? The New Yorker’s What Makes People Upbeat at Work looks into why workplaces with mandated codes for how employees need to act often times have the worst employee engagement — and clients can tell. Last year, researchers found “an inverted-U relationship between rule explicitness and effectiveness: If rules were overly vague or overly prescriptive, they had a demotivating effect. (Customers, too, were disappointed, giving both employees and their shopping experiences lower ratings.) Where the rules generally had their intended effect was in the moderate range: When there were some explicit guidelines, but flexibility in how they were to be implemented. A second study, of a hundred and seventy-five salespeople, found the relationship to hold for sales numbers as well: Sales were higher in environments with moderate rules, while environments with too few or too many rules suffered. The highest performers of all were those in a moderately regulated environment who also felt a high degree of autonomy, as determined by their responses to a single statement: “My job permits me to decide on my own how to go about doing the work.”