Is the smell of stress contagious at work?

Ever walk into an empty elevator and smell the lingering perfume of the previous passenger?

The person left an aromatic stamp on the air, strong enough to stick around until you arrived and even possibly evoke long-forgotten emotional memories of someone you knew who smelled the same.

Research from the journal of Psychological Science suggests this instantaneous emotional communication via smell happens far more often than we realize and the implications are profound for stress-based work days.

The study used a double-blind experiment to assess how strong emotions could be transmitted by smell, finding that participants who had experienced fear or disgust would release a scent that transmitted those distinct emotions to other participants.

At work, common stressors like rushed projects, overwhelming tasks and even office drama all often boil down to instinctive fear. Fear serves as an impetus for stress, which is the body's physical way of preparing itself to handle a threat. Therefore, we can suggest that stress, experienced at work or otherwise, is indeed contagious by smell.

This is just the beginning of nonverbal signals, like body language and facial expressions, that spread positive or negative emotions like wildfire at work.

The subtly of how stress is spread is especially important for leaders to consider as they have a disproportionate influence on the entire team. If managers are mismanaging excessive stress, they can innocently be creating a negative ripple effect to everyone around them.

Even though companies pride themselves on being buttoned-up, emotionless entities fueled by calculated logic, the truth is the emotional tone of a company is shaping every business outcome and determines things like levels of productivity, creativity and problem-solving.

"Organizations that have a lot of happy employees have three times the revenue growth, compared to organizations where that's not true," according to Michael Bush in "This is what makes employees happy at work."

As teams better understand how loudly they communicate their emotions, without saying a word, they can maximize not just how teams feel and perform, but how companies grow.

Designed to be on alert 24/7, the survival brain automatically sorts through every data point in the environment and places it in the category of either friendly or threatening and this analysis doesn't stop at work.

Even though the logical brain can be persuaded by words that drip like honey, millions of years of conditioning gives us an instinctive ability to accurately read and immediately respond to the finest unspoken details around us.

Ultimately at the office, we're a tie-wearing tribe with an ancestral ability to "sniff out" fear and the presence of threats.

What's the solution?

Happiness is the physical counterbalance to stress. Just as our physical chemistry changes in a state of fear, it also morphs into a high-performance machine when we balance that stress with a good feeling like happiness at work.

For example, the next time you start to wonder about the stress smell-trails you're leaving behind you as you walk through the halls, you can take a quick detour from your day and do something nice for a colleague.

Getting a coffee for a coworker, leaving change in the vending machine to prepay for someone's snack and generally performing an act of kindness not only makes you feel good, but activates the prefrontal cortex. This super-special part of the brain helps you master stressful emotion and exercise willpower.

This is one of several ways that cultivating happiness at work changes how your brain processes stress, helping you to get more work done and uplifting the people around you.

As we see a growing global movement that champions happiness at work, it's encouraging to think about the positive side of smell research and how wonderfully fragrant happiness is in the office. We should bottle up that smell and sell it.