We welcome Aoife O’Brien in this episode. She’s the founder of Happier at Work, a business with the mission to support organizations in retaining top talent.
She is passionate about ‘fit’ and specifically how creating the right environment can help individuals to reach their full potential and support organizations to thrive.
She partners with HR and business leaders to focus on four pillars: engagement and belonging; leadership equity; performance and productivity; and the future of work. She is a self-professed data nerd, with a 20+ year career in market research in the fast-moving consumer goods industry working with clients like Coca Cola, Unilever and Heinz to solve marketing problems using data analytics.
Even though she enjoyed her job as a market researcher in the consumer goods industry, she struggled to figure out what to do next, and ultimately decided to leave and began a journey to coach others and use data to solve problems. The problems she decided to focus on didn’t have anything to do with market research and consumer goods, but on people dynamics.
We discuss what’s behind disengagement at work, and how we’ve all felt it and what Aoife’s work does to address this issue and other human-centered problems through data analysis. Engagement data in particular is something that many organizations do but few look at the purpose of collecting data around human dynamics, and what to do in response to the data collected.
Values are at the center of Aoife’s work so we look at the role of values in creating happiness at work. You’ll hear about why it’s essential to find and know your values, as a way of directing your career, your life, your team, and your organization. Values will guide your actions, and behaviors. This in turn creates trust if well done, but if your actions and behaviors don’t track with your values, then you’ll ultimately be at risk of losing employees and customers. Aoife gives us a great example of this with a company that used the word “open” a lot as a value, but acted in a way that was very closed minded. That’s just one example among many that Aoife walks us through.
Aoife also delves into her own personal experience of something that has shaped how she has led her career and work / life balance today.
Listen to this episode and find out how you can be happier at work too!
Resources:
Aoife’s links:
Websites:
happieratwork.ie
Instagram: nstagram.com/happieratwork.ie
YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCm0FKS19I5qSlFFmkx1YGqA
We mention Dan Pink’s book DRIVE, here’s where you can find it: https://amzn.to/3CpsVpj
