Have organisations engineered joy out of the workplace?

I want to talk about a word that for some reason has become increasingly absent in the workplace. Joy...

Not engagement, not satisfaction, not wellbeing (that one's made it onto enough strategy decks to feel safe), but Joy. The actual experience of finding your work meaningful, energising, fun and memorable. The feeling that the people around you make the day better, not just more productive.

Here's something I keep seeing in the work I do with leadership teams. When individuals go through a personal values assessment, joy comes up again and again as a core driver. Not as a nice-to-have, but as something fundamental to how people experience their best work and their best selves.

And yet when those same people sit around a table to define their organisation or their team's values, joy promptly disappears. It gets replaced by something safer, more corporate, more serious. You often hear teams literally say, "people won't take us seriously if we include joy as a value".

Because we've collectively decided that joy isn't professional. That it belongs in a different category, maybe a team away day, Friday after-work drinks, a virtual quiz or one of the many other 'forced fun' initiatives introduced by organisations seeking to mask the fact that their work is joyless. But when these initiatives are over, it's back to work and joy is not in the DNA of how we work.

The Impact Shows Up More Than We Admit

People are more miserable at work than they've been in a long time. They feel overwhelmed, disengagement is high, energy is low, laughter is minimal (not even expected, even bordering on inappropriate).

Leaders feel it too but they've become conditioned to mask it, ignore it, or, even worse, accept it.

AI Will Make This Worse — Unless We're Deliberate

And now AI is coming, and if it's not introduced thoughtfully, it will strip out even more of what made the work feel human. The spontaneous conversation. The collaborative problem-solving. The moments of levity that make a hard day memorable or at least bearable. The sense that the people around you actually see you.

If we're not deliberate about this, we will optimise our way into organisations that are more efficient and significantly more joyless. And the people who feel that loss most acutely will be exactly the ones whose energy, warmth and human connection were holding the culture together.

The Question Every Leadership Team Should Ask

So here's the question I think every leadership team should be asking as they navigate the AI transition: not just what will we automate, but what will we protect or even re-introduce? What are the conditions that make people genuinely happy to be here – when they look forward to a Monday rather than dreading it? And are we treating those conditions as seriously as we treat our productivity targets? When an organisation starts to consider these questions they are quick to realise that the answers are actually critical performance and productivity enablers.

Joy Is a Signal

Joy isn't a nice to have, it's a signal. When it's present, people bring more. When it's gone, you notice, usually too late.

At CAIA, joy is one of our core drivers and we take it seriously. It's something we pay close attention to in our work with teams: understanding what people actually need to thrive, and how that shows up in how an organisation really works. When people enjoy where they work, they perform better, bring out the best in those around them, and find meaning in what they do. And after all, isn't that why we all work in the first place?