Originally published January 2016. Rewritten August 2026.
Is it time to check-in and realign?
It's not only salary that affects happiness. If you are working more than 60 hours a week and can't connect with 'why' you are doing the work, you are likely to be unproductive and unhappy.
A recent study reported that the tipping point for money earned to make you feel happy is $75,000 to $100,000. The study reported that people paid higher salaries to complete meaningless work did not stay long in their positions. Mind numbing work for high reward does not equate to a happy lifestyle. So if money isn't the driver - what is?
Here's 4 tips to focus on to build a happy workforce without using salary as the motivator.
1. Ask for and listen to ideas
You are paying people to use their brain, so expect them to contribute.
Ask for your team's thoughts, and then be quiet long enough to hear them. They know where the work goes wrong better than you do, because they are the ones it goes wrong on.
Your best ideas are a conversation away. Start it today.
2. Allow creativity and spontaneity
People give their best energy to work they can connect to. Take the connection away and you still get the hours, just not the thinking.
So nurture the unplanned. Some of the best ideas arrive sideways, from somebody who was not asked and had a go anyway. Notice that out loud when it happens, because whatever you notice is what you will get more of.
Let people step outside the comfortable version of their job. That is where the ideas live.
3. Plan to grow
Grow your people, grow your team, grow your business.
Not all development spending pays off. The course nobody asked for, at the wrong time, on something they will not use for a year, is money you will never see again. What pays is growth somebody wanted, timed to work they are about to do.
And here is the part that costs you when you get it wrong. It is easy to leave a place that has nothing to offer you. Why would anyone stay somewhere that never showed them how the two of you might grow together?
Plan it, or somebody else will plan it for them.
4. Align consequence to good corporate behaviour
Catch people doing things right, and tell them what it meant. Not that it was appreciated. What it changed.
Then make sure the consequence actually lands where the behaviour was. Praise that arrives for everyone regardless is not a consequence, it is weather.
And deal with the other kind quickly. Behaviour you tolerate is behaviour you have approved, whatever you say in the meeting afterwards.
I have written about the vision, behaviour and consequence trio properly in Align your Team's Vision, Behaviour and Consequences, and about the harder end of it in Why do we tolerate porcupines in the workplace?
TEAM ENGAGEMENT
You will not get an honest answer by asking directly.
Ask a team whether they are happy and they will say yes.
Our session gets at the real answer through the four things that actually move it: curiosity, critical thinking, talking, and alignment.
Somewhere collaborative, and with somebody in the room
whose job it is to ask the awkward question.
See team engagement solutions Email MJ about your team
The second button opens your email app with the questions already in it. If nothing happens when you tap it, your device has no mail app set up, so use the contact page.
Driving results through people is what we do.
Cite this article
Reference list
Satterthwaite, M-J. (2016) Four tips for a happy team. Revised August 2026. Scope Vision. Available at: https://scopevision.com.au/blog/2016/1/22/4-tips-for-a-happy-team (Accessed: [insert date]).
In text
(Satterthwaite, 2016)
For students, and anyone who wants the evidence
One study is worth reading properly, because the version in circulation is out of date.
Kahneman, D. and Deaton, A. (2010) 'High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), pp. 16489-16493. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1011492107
Killingsworth, M.A., Kahneman, D. and Mellers, B. (2023) 'Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
A note on the number. The figure everybody quotes comes from the 2010 paper and is in US dollars at 2010 values. The 2023 paper, co-authored by Kahneman himself, revises the finding: for most people wellbeing keeps rising with income, and the plateau holds mainly for the least happy group. Any Australian dollar figure attached to this research is somebody's conversion, not a finding.
Keep reading
Feedback: An Elephant or a Gift?
Tip one has a failure mode. Asking for ideas when you have already decided teaches people not to bother.
13 Behaviours of High-Trust Leaders
None of the four tips work without this underneath them.
5 Keys to Holding Great Coaching Conversations
Tip three in practice. Growth is a conversation before it is a budget line.
For anyone still doing sixty hours a week and wondering where they went.
Ask your team if they are happy
and they will say yes.
Ask them what you could stop doing.
The like button just below is how I know this landed.
And if someone came to mind while you were reading, send it to them. That is the better compliment.
