If you’re looking for reasons to be cheerful as winter drags on, I wholeheartedly recommend this Marketing Week article. The gist is that, while chatter over workplace well-being got going in 2017, this year is all about that conversation moving into boardrooms and becoming a central tenet of company policy. Employee happiness is finally gaining the position it deserves.

Wonderful, isn’t it?

Of course, the proof’s going to be in the pudding – or perhaps, to echo the article, in the employer branding. If well-being considerations start to surface at that level of a company’s operations, then you know there have been a lot of discussions about it, a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of rubber-stamping. It’s a good sign. Particularly for those of us who are a little less robust, knowing from the outset that a prospective employer has your back in terms of well-being is a huge plus point.

The onus is on all of us, then, to keep the well-being conversation going. This hasn’t happened in a vacuum, after all. Social media is a powerful force for – well, for many things! – but one of them is the peer support of emotional honesty. Let’s not forget that #MeToo is a movement rooted in workplace well-being, while more and more men are finding the strength to talk on social media about their struggles with mental ill-health. The more normalised these discussions become, the more bizarre it will seem for a company to ignore this very crucial aspect of reality.

And if we really need to make the business case for it, well, it’s pretty simple: a happy workforce is a productive one.