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Is it possible to make a happy worker? If it is, how would you go about doing it? What are the ingredients? I love old movies. I can’t count how many times I have seen “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” or its hilarious predecessor, “Young Frankenstein.” Both movies have the same basic theme: taking something dead and giving it life. Not just giving it life, but intelligent life so it can think, work or, in the case of Young Frankenstein, dance.

In the workplace, we face some of the same hurdles. Different areas and departments might be significantly underperforming. Breathing life back into those areas and improving productivity isn’t always easy. Most companies won’t even try. They’ll downsize, re-org, right-size or just fire everyone, person by person, until they’re all replaced.

There is a saying that goes, “The company with the best people wins.” I absolutely believe in that statement, but I also believe most people won’t work beyond their capabilities without the right motivation. It’s possible you could have stellar performers working for a de-motivating manager. Worse yet, you could have people who were never properly trained.

Sally Haver, senior vice president of The Ayers Group International in New York, makes a great point about happiness in the workplace: “You can be, generally speaking, happy in your work but not happy in a specific company, due to a variety of factors such as a bad boss, a bad corporate culture, or a colleague who makes your life miserable. At the same time, some people are unhappy “situationally’ and some are just systemically unhappy, no matter where they are or what they are doing.”

So, must workers be happy to be productive? My initial reaction was no, but let me clarify. There are plenty of people who don’t find their work fulfilling, but they do a good job anyway. There are others who, because the job they’re doing doesn’t meet their lifestyle goals and they feel the job itself is beneath them, turn in a lackluster performance at best. If you think about it, you can probably come up with quite a few reasons people underperform.

The reasons people perform well are a little trickier to quantify.

What makes one person happy might make another unhappy. A company that spends $500 on a Foosball table is providing a benefit only to those employees who like Foosball. In everyone else’s opinion, the company just wasted a lot of money.

Marilyn Gardner recently laid out seven things employees want most to be happy at work. The answers were much different from the tangible items I had expected, like on-site child care and concierge service.

Here’s what Marilyn Gardner’s extensive research revealed:

1. Appreciation

2. Respect

3. Trust

4. Individual growth

5. A good boss

6. Compatible co-workers

7. A sense of purpose

Like I said, everyone is different, and not everyone will appreciate the same things. But the right effort toward these types of objectives just might be the difference between employees staying and leaving.

Nick Reddin is the business development manager at Manpower Inc.’s Des Moines office.