How to Pilot a Joy Metric When HR Thinks It Sounds Fluffy

Piloting a Joy Measure in a Sceptical Organisation: scoping, sponsorship, and presenting results HR and finance accept

Boards that only trust numbers are exactly the room where the word joy gets laughed out. Georgina Woodley 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.

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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Boosting manufacturing outcomes by understanding human energy, with Georgina Woodley of Custology Insights
0:00 / 40:16
The Manufacturing Employer· Listen to Georgina Woodley on air