Implementing the Tadysh Model™

Step One: Shift the Culture and Foster Conscious Leadership

No one is a perfect leader. Conscious leaders continuously seek feedback on how they can improve and better serve their teams. However, most leaders fail to ask for direct feedback, fearing criticism. In reality, employees often provide constructive and supportive responses when given the opportunity. One of the most common workplace complaints is that employees feel unheard. Simply asking employees how leadership can improve—and genuinely listening to their answers—immediately shifts workplace culture toward a healthier direction.

The first step in the Tadysh Model™ is to communicate that employee well-being is a company priority. This commitment must go beyond words. By actively soliciting feedback and implementing changes based on employee input, leaders demonstrate genuine care and intention.

Step Two: The Voice of Happiness

In a toxic workplace, employees may hesitate to share honest feedback due to a lack of trust in management. Introducing an intermediary—known as the “Voice of Happiness”—can bridge this gap.

The Voice of Happiness should be an employee (not a manager) who is well-respected by their peers. Ideally, this individual is someone with strong interpersonal skills who might be a candidate for future leadership roles. The role should rotate periodically to maintain objectivity and ensure fresh perspectives.

By gathering and summarizing feedback before presenting it to management, the Voice of Happiness ensures that concerns are conveyed in a constructive manner. An anonymous feedback system can further encourage employees to share their insights without fear of repercussions.

Step Three: Phrasing the Right Question – The Trinity of Happiness

To effectively gather feedback, managers should consistently frame questions in the following way:

“What can the organization, the manager, and employees do to improve your work, well-being at work, and happiness outside of work?”

This question helps leaders identify specific areas for improvement. Employees are often the best source of insights on operational inefficiencies. For example, a bar owner struggling with low sales per employee during peak hours might assume the issue is a lack of training or poor management. However, employees may reveal that they are spending excessive time chilling glasses due to an inadequate glassware supply—an issue easily resolved by purchasing additional glasses.

A common gripe in a business with friction between the workers and the managers is that people are not appreciated in their work. “No one ever says Thank You at the end of the day”. If this is a common criticism of management among the employees, it is important to hear it and address it. We forget how powerful those words can be and their omission is often unintentional. Knowing how important it is to your team should prompt you to show your appreciation more and even look for excuses to say a genuine Thank You where it is due. It is incredible the weight that two small, simple, words can have, and how easy it is to miss the chance to use them. Feeling and showing gratitude is one of the key factors in nurturing happiness so every time you thank someone, you are making yourself happier too.

Implementing a system to open the communication channels and show your intention to improve the workplace, and life for the employees, will lead to a healthier culture and happier employees. Already you are leveraging the happiness of your employees to improve your business metrics and it cost nothing and wasn’t a great deal of work for the leader. The hardest part has been completed but the process has only just begun.

Step Four: Understanding Employee Happiness

Research by happiness expert Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that approximately 40% of our happiness is within our control, while external factors and genetics account for the rest. Meanwhile, workplace happiness researcher Shawn Achor found that work and our managers have a greater impact on individual happiness than any other factor. By improving workplace culture, organizations can make a profound difference in employees’ lives (see Achor’s “The Happiness Advantage”).

However, work accounts for only about one-quarter of an employee’s life. Organizations often overlook external factors that influence happiness, such as sleep, nutrition, exercise, and social connections. Addressing these aspects can maximize the impact of workplace culture improvements.

Employees may, for example, convey via the Voice that group would enjoy engaging in a regular team sport together, and the manager may help coordinate this, facilitate rotas to allow for it and even fund it, but it is too much work to ask all the questions needed to cover the key factors of happiness, both in the workplace and in employees’ lives outside of work. To maximize the impact, the questions need to be targeted.

Step Five: Measuring Employee Happiness

Serious business goals require measurement. If a company wants to increase profits, it tracks financial data over time. The same principle applies to employee happiness. Organizations must measure current happiness levels, implement improvements, and track progress. This is where you can use the Tadysh Happyometer™ and group keys to make a complex job simple.

The Tadysh Happyometer™ is a free monthly online survey that assesses employees’ overall happiness based on mental, physical, social, and professional well-being over the previous month. Each multiple-choice answer generates advice to improve the score for that particular aspect. An example question relates to how physically active the user has been with options from inactive through to following a training regime. Each answer generates a score which is then distributed to one, two, three or four of the following groups depending on relevance:

Each month the user has a total happiness score and scores for the four spheres of happiness above. The advice is grouped into five boxes of increasing importance from what the user is doing great at, through small improvements down to “If not now then when?”. It helps drive thinking about what habits help or hinder happiness and gives a framework for long-term sustained growth. Following the advice should not cost the user anything and is based on the Kaizen principle of making small changes to affect a greater change.

You could direct employees to the Tadysh Happyometer™ as a way to support their own growth. Any increases in happiness will have an impact on profits and every little helps. Whilst this measures the happiness of the employee it is also a powerful tool to measure the happiness of your entire workforce.

By analyzing this data, organizations can identify areas needing attention and develop targeted strategies for improvement. Employee happiness scores can be anonymously collected and analyzed at team, department, or corporate levels, providing valuable insights for leadership.

Managers of a group can buy a key to add employees’ Tadysh Happyometer™ scores and anonymously collate the results of its members. If employees were asked to complete the quiz to help improve the organization and give feedback to grow employee well-being and improve workplace culture, they would be both improving the group as a whole as well as improving their own happiness. The manager of the key can only see who’s scores have been included in the calculation of the average and when they last took the quiz, they cannot see what anyone scored or how they answered.

Each month, on a designated day, the key will update with the latest scores for the groups’ total happiness along with the score for social, mental, physical and professional happiness.

This is where the Voice of Happiness and the questions they ask can be targeted based on the results. If the Professional Happiness score is low, then it would be worth asking questions directed toward improving it. You may even consider professional training or workplace improvement schemes. However, it is likely that one of the other spheres of happiness will need attention, which may at first seem outside of the remit of the manager or the organization.

This would be a great place to insert text and/or video to promote the Changing Work Collective for those looking to increase the Professional Happiness of teams – improving culture. The contents of this page will be promoted to the largest international companies and institutions and would help to direct interested leads to the work being done within the collective and the services offered by its members.

https://www.changingwork.org

Using the same format of phrasing the questions, it could be asked “What can the leader, the team and the organization do to help you sleep better, improve social connections, eat healthier, exercise better etc.?”. Workplace happiness may have less to do with the workplace and the leader as you would imagine. Shift workers often miss out on making plans for regular sports, social groups, classes and date nights because they never know when they will be free. In this case the schedules could be published further in advance or be employees allowed to select a day they are kept free from the schedule. Maybe a child minding group could help more people enjoy a social life. Once you can target the questions, based on the monthly results of the group keys, then you can really dial in to what would best support the employees. I would advise to invest funds where needed but the idea in general is improve systems without generating a cost to the business.

Step Six: Scaling Organizational Happiness

You are making a difference to the worklife of your employees, you are supporting their growth indivually and you are becoming a more conscious leader as a consequence. With an improved culture, you and the employees enjoy your work, the customers receive better service and the stakeholders are making more profit. Everyone is happier.

Not only can the group keys can be used to collate the scores of individual users, they can be used to collate the scores of other keys, and more parent keys can collate the scores of those keys. A multi-national chain could have scores for each unit, area, region, country and then a global score. With this information, senior leaders can see which managers have the happiest teams and which are increasing the happiness of their teams.

By following these steps any organization, from a small workshop to the largest corporations and service providers can improve their metrics. What would be the impact if you measured the happiness of schools and teachers, hospitals and doctors, the military and its units? What can be measured can be grown.

The Future of Workplace Happiness

The era of “Greed is Good” management is fading, replaced by a growing emphasis on ethical leadership, more humane workplaces and employee well-being. The Tadysh Model™ provides a structured, cost-effective approach to improving workplace culture while driving business success. Organizations that measure, understand, and nurture employee happiness will enjoy long-term benefits, including increased productivity, improved ESG scores, and higher profitability. Click here to see the full financial benefits of a happier workforce.

The group keys are free to try so that you can measure the happiness of your organization or team with no cost. Each key then costs just $500 for a full year of analysis of up to 50 users. Visit www.tadysh.com today and start measuring and growing your own happiness and the happiness of your business. No business is too large nor too complex for Tadysh to measure its happiness and to help you to grow it.