We build strong cultures, and the leaders and teams who sustain them. Culture strategy, leadership development, communication training and the people who’ve been in the room when it mattered most.
It shows up in how people lead, how they communicate, and whether the good stuff holds when things get hard. We help organisations do that work properly, in a way that sticks.
Our core offer covers culture strategy and mapping, values and mission work, manager and leadership development, communication training and offsites and team experiences. When a brief calls for something more specific, we bring in the Collective.
Janine Jacobs is the co-founder of HappyHQ, where she helps companies turn good culture intentions into confident teams and clear ways of working.
With over 15 years leading high-performing teams, she’s held director-level communications roles in international agencies, partnering with global brands including LinkedIn, Hilton, and PepsiCo. Through that experience, she saw first-hand how culture isn’t built through values on a wall, but through everyday leadership behaviour, communication, and accountability.
She now specialises in culture strategy, values in practice, and leadership communication, helping companies grow sustainably from the inside out.
Janine is known for her fun, creative, down-to-earth style, with an ability to create the kind of environment where honest conversations happen. Forget corporate jargon, her work is practical, reflective, and grounded in the realities leaders face.
She regularly speaks on resilience, performance, and the future of work, and her work has been featured in Courier, Glamour, and Start-Ups Magazine.
Francesca O’Connor is Co-Founder of HappyHQ, where she helps leaders and teams communicate with confidence and real impact when it counts.
With a background in global PR agencies including Edelman, Ketchum and Milk & Honey, Fran built her career in high-pressure environments where pitching, presenting, and getting your message right directly affects outcomes. It’s where she saw how quickly credibility is built or lost, and how few people are actually taught how to communicate at that level.
Her work focuses on helping people show up well in the moments that matter. From leadership communication and feedback to pitching, storytelling, and personal impact, she works with teams to sharpen how they think, speak, and land their message.
Fran is known for her straight-talking, high-energy style and sessions that are practical, challenging, and immediately useful. No scripts, no theory-heavy fluff, just the tools and confidence to handle real conversations and high-stakes situations better.
She is also a speaker, including delivering a TEDx talk on “The Brilliance Bias”, exploring what we reward in leadership and the behaviours that actually drive strong, healthy teams.
Culture work surfaces all kinds of things. A founder navigating a sale. An established business managing a restructure. A leadership team that has lost its way. A brand going through change that its people don’t yet understand. A creative team that has lost its nerve. A leader carrying too much.
We’ve brought together a small group of people who’ve been in those rooms. Different specialisms. The same belief: that practical, human support, from people who’ve done it, changes things.
Well-being comes before the bottom line. We won’t take on work that compromises our team, and we’d rather do less and do it well than stretch ourselves thin for the sake of it. Happy people do better work. We believe that, and we try to live it.
We say what we see. With clients, with each other, and about ourselves. Even when it’s not what people want to hear. Especially then. That includes being honest about our own limitations too. It’s not always comfortable, but it’s always worth it.
Clear, direct, human. If you need a glossary to understand what we’re saying, we haven’t done our job properly. This goes for our workshops, our proposals, our feedback and our values. Including this one.
If it doesn’t change something practical, it wasn’t worth doing. We take ownership of that. We experiment, we measure, we adapt. And we do what we say we’ll do. Everything we run has to leave people with something they can act on the next day. Not a concept. Not a framework to think about later. Something that moves things forward.
Through a delivery style tailored to your unique needs – not confined by rigid rulebooks – we love nothing more than happy clients (and people).
Ready to do the harder work?
Get in touch to talk through what your organisation needs. Every project starts with a conversation about where you are and what you’re trying to build.
Or email hello@happyhq.co.uk
