5 Powerful Tips on Happiness at Work
In November 2019 I hosted the Happiness at Work Summit: 20 interviews with 20 experts over five days, on laughter, mindfulness, meaning and what actually makes a working life feel worth having.
I came out of it with more notes than I knew what to do with. Years later, five ideas have survived. Not the cleverest five. The five I still catch myself using, and still repeat to people.
Here they are, with a short video from each of those speakers so you can hear them for yourself.
1. Laughter doesn’t need a reason
Dr Madan Kataria, founder of Laughter Yoga International
The thing that startles people about laughter yoga is that there’s no joke. You simply start laughing, usually badly and self-consciously, and within about a minute the fake laughter has turned into the real thing because everyone around you sounds so ridiculous.
Dr Kataria’s insight is that the body doesn’t check your paperwork first. You don’t have to earn the laugh by finding something funny. This is the same principle as the Dalai Lama on smiling: the expression can lead, and the feeling follows.
At work, this is a two-minute intervention, not a programme. Watch what happens to a tense meeting when one person laughs first and means it.
2. Ask better questions, in company
Nina Grunfeld, founder of Life Clubs
Nina’s work is built on something quietly powerful: most of us never stop to ask ourselves a decent question about our own lives, and almost never do it with other people in the room.
Life Clubs puts a small group together and gives them structured questions. That’s it. No guru. The value is in the structure and the company.
I think about this a lot, because it’s the same mechanism that makes a daily meditation group work when solo practice keeps collapsing. Being expected somewhere changes what you do.
3. Mindfulness at work isn’t a productivity hack
Gayle Van Gils, author of Happier at Work
The version of workplace mindfulness I like least is the one sold purely as performance: meditate so you can squeeze more out of your team.
Gayle’s framing is warmer and, I think, more durable. Mindfulness at work starts with how people are actually treated, and with compassion being part of the job rather than a wellbeing perk bolted on next to the fruit bowl.
The test is simple. If your organisation offers meditation sessions but nobody can say no to a 9pm email, it isn’t a mindfulness programme. It’s a coping mechanism for a culture problem.
4. Measure what you actually care about
Dr Saamdu Chetri, Gross National Happiness Centre, Bhutan
Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness idea gets treated as a charming curiosity. It’s more radical than that. It says: whatever you measure is what you’ll optimise for, so choose your measures with enormous care.
Bring that into a working week and it gets uncomfortable fast. What does your team actually measure? Hours? Output? Responsiveness? And what does that quietly train everyone to do?
5. Chasing happiness is the trap
Professor Steven Hayes, originator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
This was the interview that changed my thinking most, and it’s the least comfortable idea of the five.
Hayes argues that treating happiness as the goal sets you up to fail, because it makes any unpleasant feeling into evidence that something has gone wrong. In ACT, the alternative is to hold the difficult stuff more lightly and put your energy into what you actually value instead.
Applied to work: a meaningful job will include boredom, frustration and the odd awful Tuesday. That isn’t a sign you’re in the wrong role. Expecting otherwise is what makes it unbearable.
What I’d do with these five
If you want one practical takeaway rather than five, it’s this: all five experts pointed away from the individual and towards the conditions around them. Company, structure, culture, measures, expectations. Not one of them said “try harder to be happy at work.”
That’s worth sitting with if you manage anybody.
For the personal end of it, a few minutes of practice before the day starts does more than any amount of resolving to be more positive. I sit with a small group every weekday morning at 7.30am UK time in the Daily Mindfulness Club, and your first 7 days are free if you’d like to try one.
You might also like my happiness at work infographic, which condenses a lot of this into one page.