In the boardrooms I visit, one theme has become unmistakable: leaders want cultures capable of thriving in a fast-changing world. Markets shift rapidly, technology reshapes roles, and employee expectations have evolved. Traditional levers such as pay, benefits, even strategy don’t move people as effectively as they once did. 

What does? A culture where people feel energised, connected and motivated. It’s a culture emotionally healthy enough to adapt. Happiness at work has become a strategic asset. Happier teams are 20–30% more productive, experience far less burnout and turnover, and innovate more readily.

The good news is that happiness is buildable. Its foundations are captured in what I call The Five Ways to Happiness at Work: Connect, Be Fair, Empower, Challenge, and Inspire. When these become everyday habits, work shifts from a cost centre to a high-performing human system. Here is how they come alive.

Connect: The Foundation of Every High-Performing Team

Connection is the foundation of every great team, it’s the quiet infrastructure that supports collaboration, creativity and performance. When people trust each other, they share ideas more freely, challenge constructively and recover faster from setbacks. You can’t unlock innovation in a team that doesn’t feel connected enough to take interpersonal risks.

Yet connection is one of the most overlooked leadership responsibilities. People don’t need elaborate offsites; they need consistent time to talk, understand working styles and build the trust that enables honesty. Time is the rarest resource in any executive’s diary, but it is also the currency of relationships.

Investing time in people is not a soft gesture, it is a strategic one. When leaders are genuinely present, teams feel seen, supported and aligned. And performance follows.

Be Fair: Replace Ambiguity with Clarity

Fairness is the bedrock of emotional stability in an organisation. People are exquisitely perceptive to unfairness, especially in decisions, opportunities and workloads. One aspect matters above all, is transparency.

In my work, I’ve seen repeatedly that secrecy is corrosive. When decisions are made behind closed doors, people fill the gaps with fear, and fear quietly undermines performance. Clarity, by contrast, creates psychological safety. It signals respect, shifts the emotional climate from wary to collaborative, and dramatically improves execution.

Fairness isn’t just principled, it is one of the smartest performance decisions a leader can make.

Empower: Lead as a Catalyst, Not a Controller

Empowerment is often discussed and seldom practised. True empowerment means more than delegating tasks, it is delegating trust. People want ownership. They want to shape their work, not merely execute it. The best leaders set direction, define boundaries and then create the space for people to find their own way.

Among the most effective leaders I work with, I see a clear shift from being prescriptive to being facilitative. They become catalysts, working with the energy of their teams, helping people discover approaches that play to their strengths and align with organisational goals. It’s a coaching stance: supporting autonomy while guiding development.

Empowering others requires giving up some control, but the payoff is substantial. Teams solve problems earlier, take more initiative and move with far greater confidence. Empowerment isn’t soft. It’s an amplifier, and it is one of the fastest routes to innovation.

Challenge: Stretch People Without Breaking Them

This is where many wellbeing narratives go wrong, they focus only on supporting people and forget that happiness isn’t just about comfort, it is also about striving. Meaningful work often involves challenge. People like meaningful goals and the satisfaction that comes from achieving them. My data shows this clearly: boredom predicts unhappiness four times more strongly than stress. People want stretch that feels energising rather than overwhelming.

The craft of leadership is calibrating that balance: ambitious but achievable goals, paired with psychological safety and constructive feedback. When feedback is both supportive and stretching, people feel trusted, capable and motivated. Challenge, when well-managed, isn’t a threat to happiness, it is one of its engines.

Inspire: Make Purpose the Fuel, Not the Poster

Inspiration is the most quietly powerful of the Five Ways. When work feels worthwhile, people engage with it differently, not as a transaction, but as a contribution. In healthcare or education, the impact of one’s work is visible and immediate. That visibility drives extraordinary commitment.

In many industries, however, the purpose sits further from day-to-day tasks. This is where leadership matters. Leaders must bring purpose closer: showing the positive effects of people’s work on clients, communities or colleagues, and how the team achieves more together than anyone could alone.

Values play a role, but only when they are lived. Values on a wall are decoration. Values in action are culture. People want to feel proud of where they work and clear about the difference they make. When leaders embody purpose, inspiration becomes a stabilising force, especially in uncertain times.

Making the Five Ways Live in Your Culture

Too many organisations treat culture as a project, as something to launch or brand. But culture isn’t an initiative, it’s how you do things, day in and day out. It lives in actions, conversations, decisions, feedback, and appreciations.

The Five Ways are practical guides for navigating the relational work of culture-building. They reinforce each other:

Connection strengthens collaboration.
Fairness creates stability.
Empowerment unlocks initiative.
Challenge fuels growth.
Inspiration gives people a reason to care.

Applied consistently, conversation by conversation, decision by decision, they create teams that are energetic, collaborative and creative.

Cultures built on the Five Ways don’t just feel better; they perform better. They reduce staff turnover and burnout while increasing productivity. They turn strategy into action in a way that is emotionally healthy and commercially effective.

Culture isn’t something you launch. It’s something you live. And leaders who use the Five Ways as their compass create teams that are not only happier – but far more successful.

About the Author: Nic Marks is an award-winning statistician, author of Happiness is a Serious Business, and is also a TED speaker with over two decades of experience connecting happiness and data. As the founder of Friday Pulse and creator of the Happy Planet Index and Five Ways to Wellbeing, he has helped hundreds of organisations worldwide unlock the power of happier teams.