I was having lunch recently with a dear colleague I used to work with, reminiscing about our early-2000s days at Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, a creative agency with a generation of alumni who loved working there. Genuinely joyful years (#IYKYK). And we found ourselves asking each other: Where did all the joy go?

Many industries are grappling with a happiness problem—education, healthcare, hospitality, tech—and advertising is no exception. The traditional agency model is going through radical change: shrinking margins, brands pulling work in-house, AI redefining how we’re valued. 

Tensions play out on forums like Reddit, where burnout, low junior pay, long hours, and job insecurity are common threads.

And it’s been building for years. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found daily stress, anger, and sadness are still well above prepandemic levels.

All of this got me thinking about the correlation between happiness and business performance and the need to get back to joy if we are to drive growth.

It’s time we focus our attention on the health and happiness of a workforce not as an outcome of business performance, but as a driver of it. 

Economists have long used a version of this logic on governments, tracking GDP alongside national “happiness scores” on the theory that the two move together. The World Happiness Report maps these scores, and found that countries that experience economic growth also tend to experience happiness growth.

Researchers at Oxford’s Saïd Business School tested the same concept at work. Over six months at British Telecom’s call centers, they found happier employees made more calls per hour and closed more sales, a 13% productivity gain tied directly to reported happiness, not to any change in workload or incentive structure.

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