We recently caught up with Debbie Martin from AND Digital, who filled us in on what it’s like to be a ‘Chief Happiness Officer’.
Hi Debbie, can you start by telling me a bit about yourself and your background?
Academically, my background is in Psychology. Whilst completing my Bachelors degree, I was interested in how psychology could be used in the workplace – the humanity within business. So I decided to become a management consultant and use my degree in a business context.
My career as a consultant was hugely varied, but latterly I started to focus on Change and Transformation projects, I then looked at HR teams’ structures and process, to try and make them more efficient and effective in supporting their business teams.
My next move was working in-house within an HR team, designing a new Employee Engagement survey and process. I also ran key strategic projects around Diversity & Leadership Performance.
When AND Digital launched I was offered this incredible opportunity to design the company values from scratch and build them into the business as it grew. This work created a really engaging culture and a people proposition that spoke to the talent we wanted to attract and retain. And finally, I measure and address our Employee Engagement, keeping it a key focus for the Leadership team in order to put our people first. During this time, I also completed a Masters in Positive Psychology.
And for those people who might not have heard of AND Digital, can you tell us a bit about the company?
AND Digital is on a mission to close the world’s digital skills gap.
We do this by blending software and product craft skills with our award-winning approach to talent development. This enables us to build impactful products and high-performing teams simultaneously, rapidly accelerating the development of world-class digital capabilities for the organisations we work with.
You’ve got a fantastic job title ‘Chief Happiness Officer’ – What does this involve? What’s a typical day look like for you?
There’s no such thing as a typical day!
This week I was working on our people strategy with all of our “people practitioners” on Monday, and also ran a comms brainstorming session on the same day.
On Tuesday, I was interviewing grads and working in our assessment centre, and today my focus has been on our defining our culture and how that can support us – and similarly how we can protect it as we grow.
No two days are the same, and I never know who I’ll be speaking to or working with, as I could be approached by colleagues for help and support at any time, which you can’t always plan in.
So how do you define happiness?
My masters in Positive Psychology taught me to define happiness in terms of both Eudaimonic and Hedonic well-being.
Hedonic well-being is about pleasure and enjoying things in the moment, think more short-term gratification. Eudemonic well-being is more about fulfilling a purpose; feeling as though you can contribute to something bigger than yourself.
I think both of these are absolutely relevant in the workplace. We need to be able to provide a vision and a purpose that people are excited about and can contribute to, but it should also be fun!
People are looking for an environment that’s nice to work in – whether it’s colleagues they get on with, or natural light and good coffee – the small things make a difference!
Why do you think AND Digital decided to put a ‘Chief Happiness Officer’ in place, rather than go down the normal HR route?
Right from the start we wanted to do things differently, we didn’t want to follow the norms.
The CEO has run another company before that was really successful, and he has known from the start that how people feel about coming to work is as much of a factor about your commercial success as anything else. So, in order for our organisation to be successful, we always aim to put our people first, rather than as an after-thought.
The use of ‘Happiness’ at work has so often been mistaken for frivolity, but more recently we’re recognising more roles with titles like this (see our past blog with Happy Socks’s Daniel Alund). What do you think has changed for organisations to be taking ‘happiness’ more seriously?
That’s a really good question, and I do feel like there has been a movement in recent years.
I guess it started with employee engagement. When it got to the point that the government were looking at it and setting up a taskforce (Engage for success), then you know it’s been taken seriously, and I think that was the start.
There’s a big overlap between engagement andhappiness and there’s now plenty of scientific data showing the impact they can have on productivity, creativity, profitability, etc. When the evidence is so compelling, it’s hard to refute that people feeling happy or engaged at work is good for business – it’s as simple as that.
What do you do to promote happiness with your employees?
One of the key things for me is about authenticity. Letting people be their full selves when they come to work. At AND Digital, our job titles set the tone for that from the start – everyone includes a hobby, or passion, or skills (Debbie is Chief Happiness Officer AND Seamstress Wannabe!) so, as soon as we join, there’s something we connect with and talk about. I think authenticity is then a big part of our culture – we get good feedback about minority groups feeling really comfortable and able to be themselves.
We also really encourage open dialogue and give people opportunities to talk to the leadership and engage with them. Hopefully that also helps them to get that sense of connectedness to the organisation.
We have a big focus on the social aspect to bring people together. Each week people get together, play games and have some drinks as well as knowledge sharing. We also have quarterly events in groups of about 80 people to reconnect outside of the normal work constructs and build meaningful relationships.
How do you measure happiness?
We measure employee engagement and use Culture Amp to do that, which has been great. We also have focus groups to delve deeper into what the data is telling us.
Happiness is incredibly difficult to measure and, whilst there are a couple of positive psychology models we could use, they’re not particularly work centric. Employee engagement and happiness are so intrinsically linked that we’re comfortable this is still reflective and representative.
Are there any top tips you can give our readers? Or things to avoid?
I think the idea of forced fun is always to be avoided!
Happiness at work isn’t always about people grinning or giggling all the time – happiness can look very different to different people and organisations’ cultures, so the most important thing is about understanding what’s important to your people.
Happiness isn’t always about having table football in offices or other perks. For me, happiness is about people feeling that they’re contributing to something bigger and having those personal connections with their colleagues. So, if you had to list it, I’d focus on purpose, authenticity and making those real connections.
And finally, what makes you happy, both inside work and outside of work?
Outside of work I would say connecting with nature – we got our first dog about a year ago and we just love being out and about on long country walks.
Inside of work, I love helping people. I know it sounds like a cliché, but if someone comes to me with a blocker, challenge or frustration and I can find a way to help, it’s really satisfying.
Thanks Debbie, it’s been great talking with you today – have a happy week!
