happy people

Creating Great Customer Experience Through Happy Workplaces

Sarah Metcalfe is Head of Customer Service at Sure Petcare and she knows that a happy workplace is essential for enhancing the customer experience. Sarah points to research indicating that by 2020, 90% of customers will be choosing where they do business based on the customer experience. To achieve a net promoter score of around 9 or 10, it takes a human going to great lengths. In this full length video from the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Sarah explains how Sure Petcare have created an environment that allows people to bring their whole selves to work.

4 Good News Stories From May 2020

We’re currently enduring the worst public health pandemic in 100 years. Life has already undergone dramatic change and a return to “normal” is still a long way off. But despite seeming to move from one cataclysm to another in recent months and years, we live in profoundly progressive times. Modern humans are capable of amazing things. Here are four good news stories to provide respite from the doom and gloom of a regular news bulletin.

New Features Added to Office 365 in April 2020

New features are regularly added to Microsoft Office 365’s assorted apps to improve user experience. The updates are so frequent that even regular 365 users won’t necessarily be up to date with all the new additions. In April 2020, new features included the ability to drag relevant emails into a group mailbox. Find out more about this and the other newly added features in this blog.

Five Good News Stories From the Past 12 Months

It's been a tough 12 months. In 2019, the UK has had a lot of change — Brexit, a change of Prime Minister and then a general election. In winter, the UK suffered from severe flooding, and now, in spring, we are currently on lockdown due to Coronavirus (COVID-19). However, there is hope in this dark time. In this blog, Billy looks at five good news stories from the past 12 months that you may have missed.

How to Maintain Resilience in a Time of Crisis

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak will affect all of us for months to come and combating it requires cooperation on a mass scale. If you're feeling overwhelmed, don’t be hard on yourself. We’re experiencing something genuinely unprecedented. But we can take certain actions to avoid a mental health deterioration equivalent to the current biological and economic woes. In this blog, Billy outlines four ways that you can maintain your resilience during this stressful period.

A Remote Working Guide: How to Stay Focused and Maintain Work-Life Balance

The stigma around working from home has gradually dwindled in recent years. Office workers desire flexible working options and bosses are seeing the benefits of delivering them. However, the Coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) still may be the first time that you and your team have had to work from home. Here is our guide to maintain your work/life balance and stay focused while working remotely.

How to Make Human Resources More Human

At Sky UK, they have embraced Design Thinking to tackle common HR issues. Design Thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based, human approach to problems. It aims to create multiple ideas during brainstorming, which can then be prototyped and tested in a empathetic way that people can easily understand. For Sky, in the final stage, they test people's reactions and gauge if it 'wows'. In this short video from the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Tracey Waters explains how they applied Design Thinking to the question 'how might we help people at Sky have a fulfilling career?'

The Pursuit of Joy at Work at Happy

Cathy Busani's goal for the staff at Happy is that they experience joy in at least 80% of their work. In this video from the the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Cathy explains how she aims to achieve this by focusing on strengths-based working — asking staff to think about what they are great at and seeing how they can incorporate it into their day-to-day working.

Happy's Web Development Apprenticeship is a 2020 Learning Awards Finalist

Today we started the first Drupal pre-apprenticeship programme. The idea of the course is to find school leavers with an interest in and aptitude to coding/web development and help a young person get their foot on the ladder to employment. This intensive two week course will cover the basics of using Drupal, HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript. Currently four organisations have committed to taking on an Apprentice, so we will prepare this group of school leavers and get them ready to go out to an interview.

Mayden: Managing the Work, Not the People

Alison Sturgess-Durden is the Director at Mayden, a software business based in Bath with a staff of 80 people. Mayden’s software is specifically created for health professionals and patients. Their most prominent achievement is the creation of a patient management system that’s favoured by most psychological therapy services in the NHS. In 2013 Mayden became a self-managing organisation, comprised of autonomous teams. In this video from the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Alison explains the reasons behind the switch, how they did it and how it works (and some of the challenges they faced along the way!).