The week viewed in happiness terms is probably just as you’d imagine it…

Lessons From Measuring Happiness At Work (Part 4)

If I asked you to guess when during a normal week people might regard themselves as happiest…. what would you say?

We charted how people rated their happiness at different times of the week over a 12 month period, splitting each day of the week into three slots — “before 11am”, “between 11am-2pm”, and “after 2pm”

So, back to my question… with fifteen available slots… and without cheating…

At which point of the week do you imagine that people might report themselves as being happiest?

What about the least happy time?

Well, the results weren’t exactly shocking…

If you guessed that Friday afternoon was the happiest part of the week… well done!

And the least happy… unsurprisingly Monday morning. Again, well done if that’s what you guessed.

Aside from the Monday ‘low’ and Friday ‘high’, what surprised us was that perhaps there is some substance to the idea of Wednesday being “hump day” — a term coined in America in the 1950s alluding to the fact that Wednesday is the middle of the work week, meaning that one has made it “over the hump” towards the weekend — a noticeable trough in the chart through Wednesday almost telling the story of what this expression suggests.

Of course, this won’t be true in every company or for everyone and, as always, context is everything… but if this was reflective of the people in your company, or more specifically of a function or team in your company… would it encourage you to do anything differently?

If nothing else, perhaps you might consider doing something “positivity-inducing” first thing on a Monday morning to get people off on the right footing.