The 3 pillars of workplace happiness and how to use them

Researching the science of happiness at work is not always a happy experience. You might begin full of optimism, but the deeper you get into it, the harder it is to maintain a positive outlook. The main reason is that, no matter which way you look at it, a lot of people are not happy at work. 

Workplace happiness can be viewed through many lenses, one of those being how highly engaged — or not — an employee is at work. You can seldom be happy at work if you’re not engaged by what you are doing. Every year Gallup releases some of the most illuminating data in this area in their annual State of the Global Workplace report, and it doesn’t make for particularly happy reading. 

In 2024, they found that a disarmingly large number of people reported feeling disengaged in the workplace, with only 23% of workers saying they were engaged at work, 62% not engaged, and 15% actively disengaged. 

There are similar results when looking at burnout, with McKinsey finding that almost a third of all employees worldwide reported experiencing burnout symptoms sometimes, often or always. In the highest-ranked country, India, almost 40 per cent of workers reported feeling this way.

Now, you could drown yourself in negative statistics, or you could look closer at some of these megatrends to realize that, while some statistics might be grim from afar, the amount of power an individual has to shape their own happiness at work is actually considerable. So let’s dive into some of the scientifically proven ways you can become happier at work. 

#1 Understand you don’t need to be happy all the time

Many people are under the assumption that workplace happiness is all or nothing. That is, you are either content with your job all the time, or none of the time. But this has been disproved by the “science of meaning” at work. 

Take a research study done on faculty physicians in the Department of Internal Medicine at a large academic medical centre. A 2009 study found that doctors who spent 20% of their time doing tasks that were meaningful to them were less at risk of burning out than those who didn’t. 

Doctors generally perform varying tasks, like caring for patients, research, education or administration. They found that the amount of time spent working on activities that were most meaningful to them was strongly related to the risk of burnout. Those spending less than 20% of their time on the activity that was most meaningful to them had higher rates of burnout. The researchers also found a “ceiling effect,” which showed that even if doctors spent more than 20 per cent of their time on meaningful tasks, the effect on their levels of burnout was the same.

The takeaway? If you want to have a happier workplace then spending just a fifth of your time on activities you enjoy can make a meaningful difference to you. You don’t need to love every single thing that you do, as long as you love just some of it. 

#2 Small tweaks can have big impacts 

In 2001, Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton wrote a research paper together that proposed a novel theory. They are now professors at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania and Michigan Ross School of Business, University of Michigan respectively, and two of the leading experts in how we experience work. But two decades ago they defined a simple way that anyone could use to increase their ability to find meaning at work. Their theory was born when they noticed that most employees didn’t follow the job descriptions that were handed to them when they started a new position, and instead used them as a starting point from which they actively shaped their jobs to fit their own needs, values and preferences.

They called their theory “job crafting,” and it’s emerged as one of the most interesting areas studied by researchers who investigate meaning at work. It basically means having a clear awareness of what you personally find meaningful at work, and altering parts of your job to emphasize those areas. Most of us have more leeway than we realize, and scores of researchers have now proven that making small changes can increase how engaged you feel, your performance, and your psychological wellbeing.

Job crafting can be done in three areas: tasks, relationships and cognitively. The first area has to do with actively deciding to take on more or fewer tasks to improve the way you feel about your job. To shape your job, you can add tasks, emphasize areas you like or redesign them to make them more meaningful. 

The second area is relationships. You can alter which interpersonal relationships to lean into and which to decrease in order to improve your work environment. To create more meaning at work, build relationships with people you want to spend time with, reframe existing relationships in a more positive light, or adapt how you interact with others through initiatives like mentoring, which benefits both parties.

Lastly, you can change the way you think about your job on a wider scale. This one requires some mental gymnastics in order to reframe your motivations. Take the example of an administrative assistant whose job is to keep the office tidy, organize calendars, and perform other odd jobs. They can think about their role in terms of the tasks they have to do, or they can reframe it cognitively, seeing their job as helping make other people’s lives easier. This simple flip can allow you to find more meaning, just by thinking about it differently.

#3 Working less can improve mental health and well-being

You probably don’t need to hear that working less intensely can improve your mental health and wellbeing, but one fascinating question is how much do we actually need to work? Many of us just assume that working five days a week, from Monday to Friday, is a given. It’s something we’ve rarely questioned.

But one researcher has. Around 15 years ago, Brendan Burchell, a professor at the University of Cambridge, was invited to give a talk at Birmingham University on any topic he wanted. Burchell had always been interested in how work affects our wellbeing, especially when it comes to unemployment, job insecurity, and work intensification, and as he pulled together his slides for the presentation, he had a particularly obvious question that he was trying to find an answer to: what is the optimal amount of paid work for employee wellbeing? Brendan was certain that someone must have a definitive answer to this question. But during the process of researching and presenting the seminar, he realized that nobody had actually figured it out.

There are lots of clear, and well researched, benefits we derive from work. The main ones are economic gain, social status, social interaction, time structure and a sense of purpose or meaning. But, Burchell wondered, how much work do we need to do in order to attain the positive mental health benefits we get from working? Brendan and his colleagues researched this question using data from more than 70,000 British residents between 2009 and 2017.

The results from the Employment Dosage Project surprised everyone, including Burchell. The initial research showed that working just one eight-hour paid day a week delivered the same mental health benefits as working five full days a week. “I didn’t believe it at first,” Brendan told me. It turns out that we don’t need to work as much as we think we do.

Brendan often explains his findings using an analogy to vitamin C. You only need a small amount of vitamin C to get all its benefits. If you have less than that, you get scurvy and eventually die, but every amount above the small dosage that your body needs is not actually useful. “Health food shops will try and sell you these massive doses that will be the equivalent of eating a hundred oranges each day. It doesn’t do any harm, you just piss it all out, basically,” he says. “And work is the same.” In other words, we all need to work far less than we think to get the positive mental health benefits it brings.

Of course, working one day a week isn’t practical, but the outcome of his research was not to force a movement to work just eight hours a week, but to highlight that many of our preconceived notions about work are flawed. In the aftermath of the pandemic, a large number of people have reported that the importance of work diminished for them during the Covid years.

Suite of tools

We now have access to a remarkable suite of tools to allow us to work in better ways, from the increasing popularity of four-day work weeks to growing acceptance of hybrid and flexible ways of working. Using the correct combination of these to increase your levels of enjoyment and satisfaction at work is an important way to increase your happiness. If you can understand that you don’t need to be happy all the time, reduce your working hours, and make small changes to craft your job to better suit you, anyone can take back some power and learn how to use science to become happier at work.