This week (21st – 27th September) marks International Week of Happiness at Work 2020. The aim is to encourage employers and their employees to reflect on what makes them happy in the workplace and encourage a continued commitment to ensuring the mental health and wellbeing of staff is treated as a priority. And in a year that’s presented us all with so much stress and uncertainty, focusing on what makes us happy at work is more important than ever.

A report by the University of Oxford Saïd Business School has shown that workers are “13% more productive when happy”. The researchers also found that “those who find their job more interesting and meaningful also report higher wellbeing. Equally, workers who enjoy better work-life balance as well as better relationships with colleagues and managers also have higher levels of happiness.”*

When questioned, Eadon Consulting employees cited “working with kind and considerate people” in a “friendly office environment” with a team they “like and trust,” as some of top reasons they felt happy in their jobs. “Having the option of flexible working” was another, as well as “having interesting work to do” and the “pride felt when delivering work to a client and then seeing that design realised in the flesh.”

Eadon has a strong team ethos and encourages knowledge and idea sharing. One initiative, the 10:30 daily office ‘tea break’ meetings, helps achieve this by bringing the team together and providing an opportunity to discuss projects and other matters. Although this hasn’t been possible in person during the pandemic, daily virtual ‘tea breaks’ have taken place instead.

Since the introduction of home working, the team have been able to take whatever they needed from the office in order to make working from home better for them and flexible working has, as always, been supported. Andrew Bilsborrow said “I feel we’ve managed to adapt to a new way of doing things very well. In some ways it’s forced us to really get to grips with the available tools to the extent that in some cases we’ve managed to improve our working practices. Eadon had contingency planning in place a long time before the pandemic, so when it came to it the systems were all in place and ready to go which has really helped to ease the transition.”