Ben Rogers is a Project Manager and IT expert, who was a permanent member of staff at for Happy for 5 years. He now works freelance as a project manager and writer. He is a big fan of Excel spreadsheets, especially Pivot Tables and XLOOKUP.
Happy workplaces have many key similarities, such as giving their people more trust and autonomy. From studying and learning more about these similarities, all organisations can become happier and more successful. This is something that Isaac Getz has dedicated his career to, studying what makes progressive organisations successful, both in his home country of France and around the world.
Giving your staff more autonomy means they don’t require as much oversight, freeing up the time of managers. It allows people to take ownership of their work, feel trusted and confident, and creates more joy at work. Implementing it, however, can be tricky. Alun Pomfrett, HR Manager at Leicester-based Cocoa Amore and graduate of Happy’s Level 7 Senior Leadership Apprenticeship Programme has developed a very simple way to make autonomy work for your staff, as he explains at the 2023 Happy Workplaces Conference.
How much money would you trust your employees to spend, without checking with their manager first? £50? £100? How about £50,000? Helen Taylor from the London Borough of Hounslow, who is currently enrolled on the Level 7 Senior Leadership Apprenticeship Programme, explains in this talk from the 2023 Happy Workplaces Conference how she has implemented a system where her staff are Pre-Approved to spend £100,000.
Many years ago, an apprenticeship was something that young people did at the beginning of their careers to learn a vocation in a hands-on way from an expert. However, in the last 20 years that has drastically changed. Apprenticeships are now available to anyone, of any age and at any stage of their career, in a range of subjects. Happy has run leadership apprenticeship programmes for several years now at Level 3, Level 5 and Level 7. Emma is an alumni of Happy’s Level 5 Apprenticeship Programme for Experienced Managers which she found invaluable. Emma talked about her experience with the programme and how it’s affected how she works at the 2024 Happy Workplaces Conference.
We all hate tedious paperwork. Filling out transport claim documents, internal KPI tracking documentation, expenses claims… All these things can utterly drain your soul, but we do it because we must, because it’s important. But is it? Well, Michele Zanini would say no, or at the very least, not always, in this talk from the 2024 Happy Workplaces Conference.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Beyond Budgeting is only about, well, budgeting. However, it’s about so much more than that. Budgeting isn’t a sole element of a business, it’s a facet that appears in every department and at every level. Whether you want to take a business trip, implement a new IT system or simply get some new stationery, that will impact, and be impacted by, your organisation’s relevant budgets. However, an organisation’s attitude towards budgeting often reflect more than just its fiscal responsibility. In this video from the 2023 Happy Workplaces Conference, Bjarte Bogsnes explains how budgets might be holding back your organisation.
Every successful organisation proudly boasts of how great their culture is and how that has enabled them to succeed. But creating a happy workplace can’t be forced, and getting rid of a bad culture can be a very challenging undertaking. In this video from the 2024 Happy Workplaces Conference, Nigel Paine explains the hallmarks of a happy workplace and how you can emulate this in your organisation.
Daniel is a champion of Happy’s leadership and management programmes, as he explained during this talk at the 2024 Happy Workplaces Conference. Daniel learned of Happy two decades ago, when he had set out to start his own business and wanted to undertake some learning to ensure that he would have the skills and knowledge to make it a success.
Caron has a wide array of experience across charity, regulation/law, policy, member support, and professional ethics and has been awarded with an OBE. In this video from the Happy Workplaces 2024 conference, Caron explains her management philosophy of "leading with love".
"I would have just been going through some things that required me to really think on my feet and be responsive to people and I looked back and thought, actually, this has been going on since I started my businesses." For Femi, great leadership is leadership that’s agile and authentic, that adapts to everyone’s unique strengths rather than trying to treat everyone the same way, and seeing everyone as valuable individuals. During her talk at the 2024 Happy Workplaces Conference, Femi talked about her long and varied career and about examples of this type of leadership she’s either experienced or provided herself over this time.