What Is a Chief Happiness Manager or Officer and What Do They Do?

Page Updated on February 20, 2023

A happiness manager or officer is someone who helps to create a positive work environment and improves employee morale.

Happiness managers typically have a deep understanding of what makes people happy and engaged in their work.

They use this knowledge to develop programs and initiatives that will improve employee satisfaction and productivity.

Happiness managers often work closely with other members of management to ensure that the company’s culture and values are aligned with its goals.

They also work with employees to identify areas where they can improve their satisfaction.

Rather than being focused on making employees happy, the role can also sometimes be customer orientated, in which case you will be a ‘customer happiness officer’ or a ‘client happiness officer’.

Overall, the goal of a happiness manager is to create a positive and productive work environment and/or positive impression on clients and customers.

Benefits of Having a Happiness Manager & How They Can Help Your Business

While the role of a happiness manager is still evolving, it is clear that they play an important role in helping companies succeed.

Improving employee satisfaction can help increase productivity and reduce turnover and a happiness manager can play a vital role in bridging this gap for you as a business, in building employee satisfaction.

Other benefits of having a happiness manager include:

Improved Employee Engagement and Productivity

One of the key benefits of having a happiness manager is that it can lead to improved employee engagement.

When employees feel more connected to their work and are happier with their jobs, they’re more likely to be productive and engaged overall.

Improved Workplace Satisfaction

When employees are happy with their jobs, they’re more likely to stick around.

This can lead to improved workplace satisfaction and decreased turnover rates.

Greater Creativity and Innovation

Happy employees are often more creative and innovative.

If your workplace encourages creativity and innovation, having a happiness manager can lead to even greater ideas from your team.

Better Customer Service

When employees are happy, they’re more likely to provide better customer service.

This is because they’ll be more engaged with their work and will want to help out customers in any way they can.

How to Create a Happiness Officer Role and What Training to Provide

If you are looking to create a new role for one of your existing employees to become the chief happiness officer, there are certain topics that lend themselves particularly well to shaping this role. These topics include the following:

1. Emotional Intelligence

Teaching emotional intelligence materials — >> See the Emotional Intelligence training materials

Having skills and a solid understanding of emotional intelligence is invaluable for you if you plan to take on the role of happiness officer.

As someone who will seek to make others happy and content in the workplace, emotional intelligence will better enable you to help teach and train other employees on how to:

Better manage stressful situations and manage stress itself at work
Improve their own communication skills and as a result, have a better relationship with colleagues
Be more motivated and better enjoy work
Get on better with colleagues

Furthermore, emotional intelligence will help you to:

Be a good listener and be supportive
Help to manage conflict and find positive outcomes for others
Be open towards others and interested in other people

2. Inclusive Leadership

One sure way to help enable staff to be happy is to improve how colleagues include others in the workplace.

Whether you yourself need to find innovative ways to ensure that everyone feels included or whether you need to train managers to properly understand the importance of inclusive leadership and key techniques, this is a vital topic area to be considered.

Inclusive leadership aims to make all employees feel more included whatever their age, background, and dis/ability, to make the workplace more equal for all.

As a happiness officer, promoting inclusive leadership, by introducing training to managers, is a positive way to bring benefits to all employees.

Inclusive leadership, in essence, helps to promote:

A happier and more engaged workforce who feel included and not isolated
Employees who work better together and hence are happier

3. Employee Motivation and Engagement

As the happiness officer, you should ensure that you have a good understanding of the techniques involved with how to engage employees and how to motivate them.

Motivated employees who enjoy going to work and who enjoy the challenge in the role they have, are normally far happier than those who dread going to work and lack motivation.

4. Happiness Business Certificate

You can also choose, if you wish, to go down the route of doing a ‘Happiness Manager Certificate‘ such as that offered by Madalena Carey

Madalena focuses on providing training for the corporate world and has developed a course that you do in person or at one of her regular events around the world.

5. Stress Management Training

Stress Managment workshops — >> **Stress Management Training Materials**

If you are able to help employees, including managers, to understand basic techniques for managing stress in the workplace, it is a great way to help make everyone happier and more at ease.

Stress management has numerous benefits and these include:

Improved overall mental well-being and health of the employee
More motivated and happier employees
Reduced absence levels from employees
Fewer errors in the workplace
Staff working better in teams

6. Mindfulness for Employees

As you push to help employees become happier, wellness and well-being is a key area that can be extremely useful.

Consider a course such as an Introduction to Mindfulness or Mindfulness for Busy People that teaches staff the basics such as the following:

basic beginner meditation techniques
how to appreciate simple things
how to be a more positive thinker
how to get on better with other people

Short Course for the 2-hour Mindfulness Trainers package

How to Become a Happiness Manager

If you have your heart set on being a happiness manager, then there are a few things you can do to move into this job area:

1. Seek Out an Existing Position

The easiest way is to Google for existing opportunities.

You might though need to do a specific search and to do this you should add quotation marks around the term “happiness officer”.

So I would search, for example, by terms such as the following:

“happiness officer” jobs
“client happiness officer” vacancy

2. Develop the Core Skills Needed

In the previous section, I have mentioned an example of some of the core skills that you will need to be an effective happiness officer.

3. Make Companies Aware of The Role and How You Can Help Them

Another way to find such a role is to start promoting yourself as a happiness officer (provided of course that you have the skills necessary).

You might have done a similar role in a previous company or in your present job but your job role might have been called something very different.

Indeed, there is a lot of crossover between tasks that one might often do in a human resources role and what a happiness officer does.

Reworking and reshaping your CV (resume) and LinkedIn profile, for example, can help push you towards developing an opportunity as a happiness officer.

What Responsibilities and Job Tasks Does a Happiness Officer Normally Do?

Whether you are looking for a position or looking to hire a happiness manager for your business, here is an example of the typical tasks involved with this job role:

Provide training to employees and managers to improve their understanding of topics such as communication, self-wellness, empathy, and how to work with others.
To look for methods and ways to improve the overall workplace atmosphere and environment (including the physical environment – see the post also on plant life at work)
To help onboard new employees to ensure that turnover is reduced (as new employees very often otherwise leave within the first ninety days)
Help build team unity such as through team building events and training
Help to reduce any conflicts that exist or occur in the workplace and to train managers in conflict resolution

Employee engagement teaching — >> **Employee Engagement Teaching Materials**

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Dr Valeria (Lo Iacono) Symonds

Involved with education for over 25 years, Valeria has taught at the University of Bath and Cardiff Metropolitan University (both UK) & Hankuk University (Korea). With a PhD, she has also worked as a researcher (Exeter University) & has many years of industry experience including with Cardiff University in management roles. She is the founder of Symonds Training.