This week, our host Matt Phelan returns to the podcast for an insightful conversation with Olya Yakzhina, Head of People & Culture at Work.Life—sponsors of both the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026 and the upcoming UK edition. Olya also hosts The Modern Employer podcast.

In this five-minute summary of their high-impact discussion, Matt and Olya tackle the delicate friction between building a culture people love and demanding high performance.

We explore:

• 📈 The performance-engagement correlation. Why simply setting up metrics and demanding output fails without engagement. True high performance begins by raising the baseline employee experience.

• ⚙️ Operational hygiene vs. emotional atmosphere. How HR teams get trapped fixing visible, defensible operational tasks while neglecting intangible feelings like belonging and inspiration.

• 🏰 The Disneyland principle of workplace systems. Every system creates an emotional reaction. Like the underground tunnels at Disneyland, HR processes should run seamlessly behind the scenes rather than creating friction in employees' faces.

• 🐅 The sleeping tiger trap. Why organisations over-invest in early onboarding while neglecting long-term employees. Leaders naturally rush to manage immediate risks (the running tiger) while letting tenured talent drift (the sleeping tiger).

• 🏢 Presence vs. real culture. Why presenteeism is a mindset—not a location. Presenteeism bias exists just as strongly in remote and hybrid teams as it does in traditional offices.

Olya argues that every system, framework, and policy must be designed with its emotional output in mind. When HR over-operationalises without considering human feelings, it stops being the solution and becomes part of the problem.

Are you ready to rethink your workplace systems?

This week on the podcast, our host Matt Phelan sits down for a deep, insightful conversation with someone who has been a trusted partner since the early days of The Happiness Index.

His guest is Kay Gunn MSc FCIPD, a veteran people director and the founder of her own leadership development consultancy - Kay Gunn Limited.

Kay specialises in a critical yet chronically under-invested area of business: training first-time people managers. Drawing from her extensive background in professional sport and elite customer service operations, Kay helps organisations stop the automatic promotion trap before it breaks their teams.

We explore

• 📉 The accidental manager stat. Shocking research from the Chartered Management Institute reveals that 82% of managers enter their roles as "accidental managers"—promoted because they are technically great at their jobs, but given zero formal training on how to actually lead people.

• 🧠 The spouse-level mental health impact. A startling global statistic shows that 60% of employees say their job is the biggest factor influencing their mental health. In fact, a manager has just as much impact on an employee's mental well-being (69%) as their spouse.

• 💸 The true cost of the promotion mistake. Promoting your star technical performer into a management role they hate creates a massive financial and cultural tax. It leads to disengaged teams, client dissatisfaction, and an average upfront cost of £19,000 just to replace a basic entry-level manager.

• 🚪 The anonymity of exit surveys. Why traditional exit interviews fail to capture the real reasons people leave. Employees rarely have the emotional energy to risk a hostile reaction, making anonymous data collection essential for uncovering toxic management.

• 🎯 Deliberate development over old work biases. Why organisations must decouple ambition from headcount. True business maturity means building alternative career pathways where an individual’s financial growth and responsibility can expand without forcing them to manage a team.

Kay argues that you would never allow someone to drive a train or fly a plane without a qualification, yet we routinely hand over the physical and mental well-being of entire workforces to completely untrained leaders. With major legislative changes and hybrid complexities on the rise, continuing the accidental manager model is a financial and human risk businesses can no longer afford to take.

Are you ready to stop treating leadership development as the exception and make it the norm?

📊 Check out The Happiness Index https://thehappinessindex.com/

Matt Phelan catches up backstage at Google HQ in London with Andrea D Carter, a renowned neuroscience researcher and a core contributor to the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026.

In this high-impact five-minute conversation, you will discover:

• 🧠 The personal spark. How navigating the real-life pain of raising neurodivergent teenagers drove Andrea to decode the neuroscience of workplace inclusion.

• 🚗 The brake and gas analogy. Why operating in a culture of "fitting in" forces employees into self-protection mode. It is the cognitive equivalent of driving with your foot on the brake and the gas simultaneously.

• 🔋 The metabolic resource. The science showing that when true belonging is present, the brain expends less energy. This allows your people to achieve peak performance with significantly less effort.

• ⚖️ The 50-50 rule. Moving past one-sided accountability. True social cohesion means the manager and the employee share equal responsibility to see, understand, and validate each other.

Andrea argues that belonging is a fundamental human need—just like food and water. When organisations fail to build a culture of genuine belonging, they are actively draining the cognitive and physical energy required for performance.

Are you ready to take your foot off the brake?

🚀 The Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026: https://tinyurl.com/GWHR2026

Matt Phelan welcomes back a good friend and headline sponsor of the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026, Viktoria Otero del Val from Pluxee. In this lightning-fast snippet, Matt fires over one vital question: What is the most important data point for modern leadership?

In under five minutes, discover:

• 🗺️ The multidimensional reality. Why looking at a person as the sum of all their coexisting realities—work, family, and community—completely changes the management dialogue.

• ⚽ The volunteer surprise. The striking metric showing that 66% of UK workers are actively engaged in voluntary work or sports coaching outside of their day jobs.

• 👥 The 1-to-1 connection. The single piece of advice for the 250 CEOs in the room on how to take employee engagement from a theory to a daily habit.

Viktoria argues that managers must stop treating team members as one-dimensional resources. Success requires understanding the whole individual and meeting them exactly where they are on their personal journey.

Are you ready to see your people in full colour?

🚀 The Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026: https://tinyurl.com/GWHR2026

This week, we’re changing things up. Our host Matt Phelan is back in the chair, and he’s turning the microphone on Stefan Tornquist. After spending months hosting our Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026 series, Stefan is stepping onto the other side of the desk as a guest.

Stefan is the lead author of the report and the managing director of Executive Summary Research. He’s spent over 30 years leading complex research projects and translating vast datasets into actionable business strategies.

In this lightning-fast five-minute conversation, Matt asks Stefan to take off his researcher hat and share what surprised him most about the final data.

We explore:

• 📊 The titanic operation. The massive logistics behind crunching 82,000 responses, 1.9 million data points, and 90,000 qualitative open-text answers.

• ⚖️ The gender divide. The striking, everywhere-we-looked finding that women scored lower than men in 28 out of 29 categories across all age groups and seniorities.

• 💼 The workplace paradox. Why companies mistakenly treat employment as a transaction, while your people inherently experience it as a relationship.

• 🔮 The 2027 roadmap. A look ahead at the future of the project, focusing on wider geographic spreads and deeper qualitative context.

Stefan argues that the highest-order elements of work always come down to connection. If you want to build a resilient business, you must stop looking at your headcount as an expense line and start building a real relationship infrastructure.

Are you ready to see the real story behind the numbers?

🚀 The Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026: https://tinyurl.com/GWHR2026

Natalie Semmes from Kind-Hive: What is radical kindness in leadership?

Matt Phelan catches up backstage with Natalie Semmes, CEO of Kind-Hive and contributor to the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026. In this lightning-fast snippet, Matt asks one core question: What is radical kindness, and why is it the ultimate business multiplier?

In three minutes, discover:

• 🧠 The human-first lens. Why sharing your authentic story and showing up as a vulnerable human being transforms the way people view leadership.

• 🤝 Radical kindness. Moving past the fluff to define kindness as a strict, non-negotiable strategy required to inspire true employee outperformance.

• 📈 The EBITDA multiplier. The striking, evidence-based research shows that human-first organisations are 34% more likely to double their EBITDA over 10 years.

Natalie argues that there is a better way to do business. Before you can grow your bottom line, you must first have the courage to show up as a real human being.

Are you ready to tap into radical kindness?

🚀 The Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026: https://tinyurl.com/GWHR2026

Matt Phelan sits down at Google HQ in London with Kaly Little, Head of HR, UK Large Customer Sales at Google and contributor to the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026.

He asks her one quick question: What is radical safety in the AI era?

In under three minutes, discover:

• 🚀 Radical safety. Why absolute psychological safety is the non-negotiable permission slip for Google’s famous moonshot thinking and 10x innovation.

• 🤖 Human in the loop. Moving past the jargon to place human creativity and strategy at the absolute center of technological advancement.

• 🧠 Automation bias. The crucial role of HR in building critical thinkers so teams do not rely too heavily on AI tools.

Kaly argues that the AI era requires leaders who can coach teams to tap into their brains differently, using technology to free up space for bigger, bolder strategy.

Are you ready to build radical safety?

🚀 The Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026: https://tinyurl.com/GWHR2026

Guest bio

Kaly Little is Head of HR, UK Large Customer Sales at Google. She focuses on deeply supporting teams, coaching managers to become better leaders, and championing the "human in the loop" approach to technological transformation.

Matt briefly chats with Dr Amanda Henwood, a key contributor to the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026. He asks her one simple question: What do you mean by clarity is capital?

In under four minutes, discover:

💰 The metric. Why clarity functions as actual business capital, driving productivity and retention.

📉 The hidden tax. How a lack of clear conditions forces employees to blame themselves, triggering imposter syndrome.

🕵️‍♂️ The warning signs. The quiet behavioural signals that prove your organisation is drowning in ambiguity. Amanda argues that defining what good looks like isn't a fluffy nicety. It's a high-return strategy.

Are you ready to stop the second-guessing?

🚀 The Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026: https://tinyurl.com/GWHR2026

This week, we’re welcoming back our host, Matt Phelan, as he takes the baton back from Stefan Tornquist after his brilliant Global Workplace Happiness Report series. Matt dives straight into the deep end with a topic that bridges human emotion and high performance.

His guest today is the exceptional Andrea Carter. Andrea is a performance consultant, researcher, and creator of the Belonging First methodology. She has spent over 20 years studying brain differences, behavioural science, and workplace dynamics. Andrea helps organisations move away from surface-level initiatives to build genuine belonging infrastructure. We explore:

• 🧠 The neuroscience of belonging. Our brains do not distinguish between physical pain and social exclusion. Rejection activates the exact same neural circuits as a physical injury, forcing the prefrontal cortex offline.
• 📉 The manager engagement collapse. Global manager engagement is in a severe decline, driven by invisible emotional labour. Managers are working two jobs by delivering business targets whilst simultaneously absorbing their team’s anxiety.
• 🏗️ Infrastructure over initiatives. Workshops and unconscious bias training have a short shelf life. True infrastructure means changing the actual operating conditions, protocols, and feedback loops that outlast a culture budget.
• 📊 The survey average illusion. A passing grade on a standard engagement survey often hides deep disconnection at the edges of your distribution curve. Traditional metrics measure employee effort, not the conditions for sustainable performance.
• 🧪 The five measurable indicators. True belonging relies on five distinct neuroscience conditions. These are comfort, connection, contribution, psychological safety, and physical well-being.

Andrea argues that an environment lacking belonging infrastructure is a massive drain on cognitive capacity. When your people's threat systems are chronically activated, you are paying a full salary for only a fraction of their performance.

Are you ready to stop running temporary initiatives and start building a real infrastructure for success?

For the final time in this series, we’re handing the host chair to Stefan Tornquist. Stefan is the lead author of our Global Workplace Happiness Report. He has spent the last few months interviewing the brilliant contributors to this project.

While he's signing off for now, Stefan will return next year for our 2027 report.

His final guest is the expert-friendly Dr Sarah Pass. Sarah is a senior lecturer at Nottingham Business School and an advisory board member of Engage for Success. She has spent nearly 30 years researching the employee experience to understand what truly drives engagement beyond just a paycheque.

We explore:

• 🤝 Authentic purpose. A mission statement shouldn't just be a strap line on a wall. Real purpose must be authentic to avoid becoming a diluted tick-box exercise as a company scales.
• ✨ Meaningful moments. There is a big difference between overarching meaning and episodic "meaningful moments". These individual moments are often sparked when a manager notices and values an employee’s specific contribution.
• 🗺️ The strategic narrative. Your people need to know where the organisation is going and why. A clear story acts as a bridge during stressful market cycles or restructures.
• 🛑 The micromanagement tax. Micromanagement is corrosive to meaning. It erodes trust and autonomy, forcing your people to disconnect their emotions and work like machines.
• 🤖 AI as a personal assistant. Technology can help overworked managers by handling the "mundane" work. This frees up time for the 15-minute weekly human connections that are vital for engagement.

Sarah argues that meaningful work isn't just a "nice-to-have" buzzword. It is a tangible business metric that creates resilience and directly impacts your bottom line.

Are you ready to move beyond the Sunday night dread and start building a strategic narrative?

🚀 Download The Global Workplace Happiness Report >