We are currently working on 4 R&D projects that we hope will generate new important knowledge about happiness at work.

We are really excited about the results and we’re doing the studies under a fairly rigorous scientific approach. It’s not like we’re expecting any of this to be peer reviewed, but we’re trying really hard to conduct the studies objectively.

Here are the 4 projects.

1: Client impact of our work

We’re doing a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the effect of the work we’ve done for our clients over the last 2 years.

Outcomes:

• An increased knowledge of the effect of our work.
• Knowledge of which of our offerings and tools work best.
• Information to have even more of an impact in the future.

2: Analysis of our happiness surveys

Some years ago we developed an informal happiness at work survey that we’ve been using with some of our clients, mostly in Denmark. In all, the survey has been taken 15,000 times, giving us some cool data to crunch.

Outcomes:

• A benchmark for happiness at work across Danish workplaces.
• Statistics on which of 9 different factors (like co-workers, managers, praise, etc) correlate most with happiness at work.
• A wealth of other statistics like happiness levels in private vs. public workplaces, big or small workplaces or even how happiness changes over the year or during the week.

HeartCount – measuring happiness at work

We’re beta testing a new team-based way to measure happiness at work where team members answer 3 simple questions weekly. It’s called HeartCount and you can read all about it here.

Outcomes:

• Testing a method to give teams useful real-time feedback on how the team is feeling.
• Does that feedback itself influence team happiness?
• Can you keep the team engaged in the survey and response rates high?

Intervention study on happiness at work

What actually makes a team happier? We are testing the effect of 4 different fairly small interventions on 1,200 people in 70 teams from different Danish workplaces. We’ll be measuring team happiness before the study, then each team gets a simple happiness tool which they use for 4 weeks. We measure happiness again after 2 weeks and also after 4 weeks.

Main question we’re trying to answer:

Outcomes:

• Can you increase a team’s happiness with fairly small interventions.
• Which interventions actually end up being used.
• Which interventions have an effect an how much.

All of this is very much a new direction for us. We’ve been using other peoples’ studies for ages so we thought it was about time for us to contribute some research of our own.

Got any questions or suggestions? Write a comment – we’d love to hear what you think.