I was having lunch recently with a dear colleague I used to work with, reminiscing about our early-2000s days at Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, a creative agency with a generation of alumni who loved working there. Genuinely joyful years (#IYKYK). And we found ourselves asking each other: Where did all the joy go?
Many industries are grappling with a happiness problem—education, healthcare, hospitality, tech—and advertising is no exception. The traditional agency model is going through radical change: shrinking margins, brands pulling work in-house, AI redefining how we’re valued.
Tensions play out on forums like Reddit, where burnout, low junior pay, long hours, and job insecurity are common threads.
And it’s been building for years. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found daily stress, anger, and sadness are still well above prepandemic levels.
All of this got me thinking about the correlation between happiness and business performance and the need to get back to joy if we are to drive growth.
It’s time we focus our attention on the health and happiness of a workforce not as an outcome of business performance, but as a driver of it.
Joy as business imperative
Economists have long used a version of this logic on governments, tracking GDP alongside national “happiness scores” on the theory that the two move together. The World Happiness Report maps these scores, and found that countries that experience economic growth also tend to experience happiness growth.
Researchers at Oxford’s Saïd Business School tested the same concept at work. Over six months at British Telecom’s call centers, they found happier employees made more calls per hour and closed more sales, a 13% productivity gain tied directly to reported happiness, not to any change in workload or incentive structure. This points at something agencies should be paying attention to: Happiness isn’t the reward for good performance. It’s an input to it.
The correlation is clearly being recognized at high-performing companies like Google, Deloitte, and Unilever that focus not just on the stock price, but on happiness, too. They’ve created roles with titles like Chief Happiness Officer or Chief Well-Being Officer to manage workplace culture and employee satisfaction—in their pursuit of strong financial performance. I can hear the CFOs in our industry groan at the thought of hiring a CHO, but giving happiness and joy attention in pursuit of stronger performance should complement CFO efforts. Retention alone can make the case; replacing burned-out talent costs more.
How do we get back to joy?
No, it’s not through employee sentiment surveys or a pool table in reception.
The behavioral science explanation for employee happiness comes from Self-Determination Theory, elaborated by the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. They posit that people have three basic psychological needs, which are echoed closely in Gallup’s employee engagement research:
- Autonomy—the feeling that you control your work and your future, and are trusted to make the calls that matter.
- Competence—the sense that your skills are being used and stretched, and that you can see the impact of your work. Learning is key.
- Relatedness—a meaningful connection with your team, your manager, and the purpose behind the work.
That last one is especially important because so much of it comes down to the line manager. Feeling supported by someone who cares, gives feedback, and builds your strengths is paramount. Research from the Workforce Institute at UKG, a human capital management platform, found that 69% of employees said their manager shapes their mental health more than their doctor or therapist. Gallup puts it plainly: “A great manager can make a mediocre job feel meaningful. A terrible manager can make a dream job feel like a nightmare.” I think we can all relate.
If happiness drives performance the way the evidence suggests, it shouldn’t sit outside how we run the business. It should sit inside it. That means measuring it alongside growth targets and holding leaders accountable for their direct reports having autonomy, growing their skillsets, and feeling genuinely connected to the work and to each other.
In advertising, we spend enormous energy trying to engineer the conditions for growth: better creative, better data, better tools, better processes, better tech. But ours is still fundamentally a business powered by human ingenuity.
So perhaps we’ve neglected one of the most powerful conditions for unlocking it: People do better work when they enjoy doing it.
We know how to deliver financial performance. It’s time we got as disciplined about joy if we want to continue to drive growth.
