August marks Happiness Happens Month, a campaign that invites us to notice and celebrate the good moments in life. I'll be honest, I love it. I've built my career on the belief that people deserve to feel well, at work as much as anywhere else.
I also know how that sounds to some business leaders. Happiness feels soft. You can’t put it on a dashboard, you can’t audit it, and no employer can promise it. Our health, our relationships and our finances all shape how happy we are, and most of that sits well outside any manager’s control.
So who’s right, the idealists or the realists?
In my experience, both.
The idealists are right that happiness matters more than most business plans admit. Early in my career, teaching dance, I saw how dramatically people changed when they felt good. Confidence grew, participation increased and people achieved more than they believed possible. The same is true in the workplace.
The realists are right too. Warm words don’t pay wages, and a wellbeing initiative that can’t show its value won’t survive its first budget review, nor should it.
A University of Oxford study of nearly 1,800 BT call centre employees found that those who reported higher levels of happiness were around 13% more productive than their colleagues. Deloitte puts the cost of poor mental health to UK employers at £51 billion a year, much of it down to people who are at work but struggling to work. Employee experience is a commercial question, whether we treat it as one or not.
The bridge between the two positions is simpler than it looks. Stop trying to make happiness a target and start treating it as a signal. No organisation can manufacture happiness, but every organisation can understand whether its people feel trusted, whether they feel heard, whether they feel recognised when they’ve done a good job, and whether their managers are equipped to support them when work and life gets heavy. None of those questions measures happiness directly. They measure the conditions that make people more likely to thrive.
The honest difficulty is that most leaders can’t answer those questions with confidence. Few people will tell their manager to their face that something is wrong, and an annual survey is out of date almost as soon as it lands. Without a regular, safe way for people to say how things really are, the truth tends to surface in exit interviews, when it no longer helps.
For businesses here in the North East, and across the North, competing for talent with employers who have deeper pockets, this matters more than most. Pay can be matched and perks can be copied. Being the employer that genuinely listens and acts on feedback is far harder to replicate, and it’s often what persuades good people to stay.
So this August I won’t pretend that any business can promise happiness. What I will say is that the businesses doing best by their people are the ones honest enough to hold both truths at once. Happiness isn’t a business strategy, understanding how people experience work absolutely is.
You may never be able to measure happiness perfectly, but you can understand the workplace experiences that influence it. OptiMe Pulse uses regular, anonymous check-ins to help leaders understand how their people are really experiencing work, identify emerging issues before they become bigger problems, and provide employees with personalised wellbeing support along the way. Find out more at www. optimewellbeing.com/pulse.
Bethany Ainsley is the Founder and CEO of OptiMe, an award-winning workplace wellbeing platform built in the North East of England.
bethanyainsley.com