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There are many advantages of happiness: increased productivity, profit, motivation, turnover and general well-being, to name a few. Find out more...

But how can any organisation reap these benefits? And how can each and every employee boost happiness levels in the workplace? When you are caught up in daily tasks, it can be hard to know where to start - so people end up grumbling instead of taking action.

That’s were we come in. At iOpener, we conduct unique research into the specifics of how organisations and individuals can improve happiness at work.

So how do we apply it? Well first we identify the issues, then we select the right tools to deal with them. We help boost happiness through investigating what’s good and what to build on. And we do this through:

• Surveying every individual, team or organisation, depending on our brief
• Running focus groups to understand what really matters to people
• Reporting back with specific and relevant recommendations to boost happiness for the company over the long term
• Developing practical solutions for everyday situations.

The rationale

iOpener’s focus on job happiness is based on this assumption: that people actively choose jobs they expect to be good at and that they will enjoy.

People start off well-motivated and committed. Organisations need to ensure that everyone builds on those positive intentions. To get the best out of people, managers need to work with the factors that attracted the employees in the first place. That way employees are happier; they perform better, stay longer and work harder.

What is different about iOpener’s approach?

Until now, most research on job satisfaction and employee performance began from theoretical beliefs about what motivated employees. There is a surprising lack of research that starts from the employee’s perspective, and almost none that examines job happiness.

To fill that gap, we conducted surveys, focus groups and interviews, asking employees to tell us about their experiences in their daily working lives, and to tell us in their own words what made them happy or unhappy at work. It is this grass-roots approach that makes us different. It fits with the overall iOpener philosophy of listening to our clients and taking the trouble to find out what is important right from the very beginning.

Building on our in-house research and our own unique model, we are researching key areas such as work freedom, input/output ratios and tolerance-transgression. These domains have confirmed us as innovators in the field, and allowed us to build an effective tool-box of methods.

What have we found out?

One of the most ground-breaking findings of our research came about when we asked people to say which of 35 issues were most important for their happiness at work. The top five factors to emerge were:

• Being good at my job
• Having work that challenges me
• Doing something worthwhile
• Having control over how I do my work
• Getting things done

It is striking that the issues that are important to employees are strongly related to the attributes that employers want. These findings give a clear message that most employees want to get on with their work and to do it well. Our research also shows that most professional employees are not concerned by working long hours or a lack of lunch breaks. Fulfilment and excellence matter more to them. Our recent survey, looking at the relationship between happiness, overtime and sick leave, showed that employees who are happier work more overtime and take fewer sick days.

What could we do for you?

1) Assess happiness in your workplace

First, we decide on which approach would suit your company best, depending on your industry and your company culture. Then we select the appropriate tools and conduct a survey to find out:

• What matters most to your employees?
• What is happening in the organisation as whole?
• What is happening across different functions?
• What underlying factors affect happiness in your workplace?

And we do all this on-line, focusing on what actually happens at work and recent experiences. This way we can be confident that in the next stage our reports reflect the reality of the situation.

2) Write an in-depth report

The main focus of our reports is on strengths, because we firmly believe that they are the key to your success. We also highlight the practical actions you can take to improve happiness levels.

3) Find the best solutions

Once we have a good idea of what is working well in your organisation and what needs to be changed, we work with all employees to find better ways of performing. These can include coaching, participating in workshops, reading and reflecting. All our techniques are tried-and-tested practical applications that lead to boosting happiness directly.

We know what we do works. Because our clients tell us.