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Resilience Unravelled

Measuring Workplace Joy: Georgina Woodley on Energy, Culture, and the Joy-O-Meter

Georgina Woodley · October 5, 2026

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Interview with Georgina Woodley

Measuring Workplace Joy: Georgina Woodley on Energy, Culture, and the Joy-O-Meter

Podcast: Resilience Unravelled

October 5, 2026

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Key topicsWritten Off — How Capable People Get Counted Out Before Anyone Asks WhyGeorgina Woodley spent more than 20 years measuring how people behave inside large organisations, and kept meeting the same misread: a capable person whose output drops is handled as a performance problem. She argues that stress and cognitive load change decisions, creativity and collaboration months before anything moves on a dashboard, so the label lands long before the cause is understood. Drawing on the Human Energy Intelligence framework she developed, she shows what reduced capacity actually looks like in a meeting, a decision and a handover, and how it differs from disengagement. Listeners leave able to tell those two apart in their own teams, and to check the state of a person before they judge the work.How to Pilot a Joy Metric When HR Thinks It Sounds FluffyGeorgina Woodley has spent more than two decades designing measurement for boards that only trust numbers, which is exactly the room where the word joy gets laughed out. She built the Joy-O-Meter to survive that room: a method that treats joy as a signal of human capacity rather than a mood score, producing results that sit alongside engagement and customer metrics instead of replacing them. She walks through how a first pilot is scoped, who has to sponsor it, what gets asked, and how findings are presented so sceptics argue about the results and not the premise. Listeners leave with a way to run that test in their own organisation, and language that keeps HR and finance in the conversation.Overdrawn — Why Depleted Teams Cost You Months Before It Reaches the NumbersGeorgina Woodley spent more than 20 years building the dashboards that told Australian boards how their organisations were performing, then noticed those dashboards report human damage last. She argues that when stress and cognitive load cut a team's capacity, the cost lands first in decisions, creativity and collaboration, and only reaches financial and customer metrics months later, by which point it has already been paid. Through Human Energy Intelligence, the framework she developed after leading customer insight at Deloitte Consulting and running BVA BDRC across Australia and New Zealand, she treats human state as a balance leaders spend without noticing, and reads it before the quarter closes. She shows where that spending is visible early: how meetings run, how decisions get made, and what quietly goes undone. Listeners leave knowing which signals to watch so they stop paying for depletion twice, once in the work and again in the results.View all topics →

About Georgina Woodley

Georgina Woodley, podcast guest

Insight Strategist | Human Energy Intelligence

20+ years Customer insight and organisational performance3-part ecosystem Custology Insights, Joy-O-Meter and TTIMBA AGSM at UNSW Business SchoolChief Insights Officer Custology Insights

Human Energy Intelligence/ Organisational/ Performance Leadership/ Customer Experience

Georgina Woodley is an insight strategist in the emerging field of Human Energy Intelligence—a business framework for understanding how the invisible human factors inside organisations influence performance, leadership, customer experience and business outcomes.

After more than two decades leading customer insight and market research for some of Australia's largest organisations, Georgina began questioning a fundamental assumption: what if organisations are measuring performance outcomes while remaining blind to the human forces creating them? That question became the foundation of her work.

Drawing on more than 20 years of experience in consulting, market research and customer psychology—including Deloitte Consulting, Managing Director ANZ for BVA BDRC, and now as Chief Insights Officer of Custology Insights—Georgina combines rigorous business research with a fresh perspective on organisational performance.

Her work explores how human state influences decision-making, creativity, collaboration and innovation, arguing that performance is not just driven by strategy—it is driven by the state of the people executing it.

This thinking led Georgina to develop Human Energy Intelligence, a business framework for understanding the invisible human drivers of organisational performance. Its first application, Joy-O-Meter, is a methodology designed to help organisations measure and better understand those invisible human dynamics.

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More from Georgina Woodley

All episodes →
The Manufacturing Employer cover artworkThe Manufacturing EmployerBoosting manufacturing outcomes by understanding human energy, with Georgina Woodley of Custology InsightsSep 2026Play episode →HR Empowerment cover artworkHR EmpowermentWhy Joy at Work Matters More Than Leaders ThinkAug 2026Play episode →

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