Happiness at work – the Tyler Grange way

The International Week of Happiness at Work is fast approaching. The initiative marks its 5th year, running from the 19th to the 25th of September 2022 and we salute it. Starting in the Netherlands and spreading to over 30 countries worldwide, the international week of happiness team believes in the importance of their cause: a desire to make happiness the norm, not the exception.  

In the wake of this important week, we wanted to have a look at our approach to happiness at work. It’s the reason we started Tyler Grange in the first place, so it really speaks to us.  

“We started the business up when we left a large corporate and we wanted to set a business up that was based not around profit, but around having a good time and enjoying work.”  

To us, being happy at work takes more than just a week. It’s more than just a decision your boss makes, or how you’re supposed to feel after a team building day or being allowed to wear your jeans to work on the last Friday of the month.  

It’s a journey. The one we’ve been on since we started and we’re still finding our way.  

“Happiness is not what we’re trying to achieve 24/7. It’s about being authentic. Being able to be who you are at work without having to put a mask or a filter on it.”  

Everyone is going to feel stress and pressure at some point either because of work or because of something happening outside of it. If you’re going to have the chance to experience happiness at work, we believe you should be able to be your most authentic self.

It’s unrealistic to expect people to be happy every day, what’s more, important for us is that our Tribe can meet challenges with resilience and have the ability to respond constructively in a way that is genuine to who they are.  

We recognise it takes a balance of the right attitude and the right support to get us closer to where we need to be. We take the mental health of our Tribe seriously. While it may be coming from a desire to help, unqualified support can do more harm than good. That’s why we’ve found help from some pretty amazing experts:  

• We have an experienced in-house psychologist who supports our Tribe on a monthly basis running clinics in person and via Zoom. 

• Everyone at TG is eligible for free, qualified counselling if they choose to (it’s optional but we really recommend it). 

• We’ve enlisted the help of elite sports coaches to support our Tribe in dealing with periods of pressure, criticism, and stress.  

• We run a mentor’s course where members of our Tribe can gain the skills needed to provide mentorship for their colleagues.  

• Our psychologist runs a course entitled emotional fitness: a demanding 6-month course that really stretches and pushes our Tribe to help them better understand their emotions. 

“I think we’re now learning that a happy business is probably not what we want. It’s a good rule of thumb, but what we want is an authentic business.”

You can’t force happiness on a person. What if somebody is dealing with something at home? Or what if there’s a particularly tough project or a difficult client? What if they’re just feeling crappy? 

This might sound counterintuitive when we’re talking about the international week of happiness at work.

Don’t get us wrong, we want to feel happy at work, but we also want to be authentic, emotionally strong, and honest about how we feel.

For us, that’s what this initiative is all about. An opportunity to celebrate our journey, to celebrate what we try to do every day.  

And we mean just that, we’re trying.  

We’re a long way off where we want to be, and we know the journey will probably never ever end for us.

We’ve made our mistakes along the way but we’re learning, adapting and changing, just like everyone else.