According to Arnall's research, our collective sense of wellbeing can be calculated using a simple formula based on six key variables: (O) outdoor activity, (N) a connection with nature, (S) social interaction with family and friends, (Cpm) positive memories of childhood, (T) the average temperature and (He) the expectation of a holiday. These variables are likely to peak this year on 17 June, he claims.
Furthermore, as this month's supplement demonstrates, there is an ever-growing realisation among employers that enhancing the health and wellbeing of employees can be a simple formula for organisational success.
'Happy staff means happy customers' goes the mantra, and it is an argument that clearly makes good intuitive sense to the leadership teams of more and more organisations.
But when the baton gets passed to the HR team to actually make health and wellbeing happen, things can sometimes get a little less rosy. And that's not because HR does a bad job - far from it, many of the initiatives it has put in place have had a transformational impact on individuals and organisations alike.
It is because HR departments typically set out to assess the impact of these initiatives using existing HR data as a baseline - data which, let's face it, is often focused on negative measures: absence, stress-related illness, accidents and injuries, disputes and grievances.
As a result, the objectives HR sets for health and wellbeing initiatives can appear to the rest of the organisation to be looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope - focusing on making negative things smaller rather than magnifying and enhancing the positives.
Now some people may argue that this is mere semantics. But I believe 'mere semantics' can have a profound impact on the way HR is perceived within an organisation.
To draw a brief parallel, which of two cosmetics companies do you think would be the more successful - the one that promises to make you 'less ugly', or the one that promises to make you 'more beautiful'?
Which is why I was particularly excited to see the latest findings of an ongoing study conducted by my colleagues at McDonald's UK in partnership with the Centre for Performance-led HR (CPHR) at Lancaster University Management School. This is a study that has, over the past few years, with the highest levels of statistical rigour, positively linked a wide range of people factors to organisational performance.
For this phase of the project, Dr Shashi Balain of the CPHR analysed the employee survey data for over 26,000 staff in more than 600 restaurants across the UK to create three measures:
First, to identify a subset of the overall survey data that would give a robust measurement of the sense of wellbeing felt by individual employees.
Second, to aggregate the individual results to calculate the wellbeing score for each restaurant.
And finally, to identify a correlation between employee wellbeing and one or more of the six key measures used by the business to assess restaurant performance.
The results were simple and striking: the higher the sense of wellbeing in a restaurant, the better that restaurant performed against every single one of the six key measures.
As a result, the messages that HR could send out to the wider organisation were ones that were looking through the right end of the telescope: effective wellbeing initiatives can make your business 'more beautiful'.
So, if the weather is fine on 17 June and a weekend of sunbathing, barbeques and relaxing with loved ones is looming, I would invite you to reflect on what Cliff Arnall said when he first created his wellbeing formula, because his aim was less about creating an empirical measurement and more about "getting people talking about what makes them happy".
Or put another way, if HR sets out to measure and, more importantly, to talk about the positive impact employee health and wellbeing initiatives can have, might the warm glow of mid-June happiness be sustained right through the year?