How happy are you at work?

Out of a tal&dev sample of more than 1,000 working professionals worldwide, 21% rated themselves dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with their overall business career.

That is a staggeringly high number, especially since a career spans across multiple jobs, employers and years. And one that can be difficult to change without great resolve and support.

More importantly, the frustration generated by the lack of happiness at work and the impact on performance can be extremely high as our brains function much better in a positive mood rather than in a negative or stressed one. 

Happiness instead leads to increased problem-solving ability, increased memory, higher accuracy and more creativity. So, as we become happier, we become more successful too.

In other words, rather than becoming happy after a certain milestone is reached, happiness contributes more to success than the other way around. and is a key driver and precursor of success.

Higher productivity, higher profits, and higher success rates would say that employers should do everything in their power to increase happiness levels within the workforce but unfortunately, with the exception of few truly progressive employers, that is seldom the case.

While we at tal&dev can only suggest employers what to do, we can anyway help each individual business professional understand what they can do to improve their own happiness at work. 

And that starts by understanding and tracking your own happiness at work.

The idea of helping people manage their own happiness destiny came from Michael Hinssen who, through his years of experience in multinational organizations had identified this as a key gap area for many and encouraged us at tal&dev to provide individuals (and may be companies too) with a scalable tool to monitor, support and guide for happiness.

With that in mind, we launched a happiness product meant not only to monitor your happiness through jobs, employers and life events but also to help you reflect upon and understand your own drivers of engagement, what matters to you the most in the workplace and what efforts and sacrifices at work are ok for you.

By developing your “happiness spec”, defining the critical few elements that make you happy at work you will obtain a useful compass that will come very handy to you throughout your professional life and help make well thought moves when you want to improve engagement in your current job or change job/employer by focusing on your top “happiness” priorities.

Through the tal&dev assessment you’ll be able as well to privately rate your happiness level at your current job and employer. This is not the usual top down company administered engagement survey, rather your own way to analyze your situation and come up to your own conclusions. 

Once your self reflection is complete, you’ll have some options ahead of you within your current career, job, employer: stay, voice or exit.

The happiness assessment is best suited in conjunction with our potential and ambition assessment. The two tools together should provide useful insights to find your career sweet-spot, that is, the career and level of achievement that you are most willing, able and ready for as well as making you enjoy your professional journey.

And if you need help with your self assessment or decision making process, our coaches will be there to help.

Michele Volpi (Founder & CEO tal&dev)