Henry is founder and Chief Happiness Officer of Happy Ltd, originally set up as Happy Computers in 1987. Inspired by Ricardo Semler’s book Maverick, he has built a company which has won multiple awards for some of the best customer service in the country and being one of the UK’s best places to work.
Henry was listed in the Guru Radar of the Thinkers 50 list of the most influential management thinkers in the world. "He is one of the thinkers who we believe will shape the future of business," explained list compiler Stuart Crainer.
His first book, Relax, was published in 2009. His second book, the Happy Manifesto, was published in 2013 and was short-listed for Business Book of the Year.
You can find Henry on LinkedIn and follow @happyhenry on Twitter.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your whole team could find their voice and participate in meetings? Liberating Structures can help — 33 methods of that avoid one person dominating a conversation and give everybody a voice. In this blog, Henry goes through two of the most popular methods to get you started.
Happy has just started the six month trial of a four-day working week being organised in the UK by 4 Day Week Global. We are joining over 60 other organisations in this pilot. We discussed it at a staff meeting earlier in the year, carried out a survey and our people voted 16-1 to go for a permanent four-day week, as long as the pilot succeeds.
How productive are you when working from home — do you get more work done, about the same, or less? This was the question I asked my followers on LinkedIn recently, following the recent comments from Boris Johnson and notes that Jacob Rees-Mogg left on the desks of civil servants in his office. Of the almost 500 that replied, the result was overwhelming.
Having no meetings and not checking email before 11am is the Monk Mode Morning concept that Bruce Daisley set out in his book The Joy of Work. Since my holiday I have adopted it and spend the first 2.5 hours of each morning getting stuff done. I can manage 5 Pomodoros (25 minute focused sessions) in that time. How would your day be if you could get your most important tasks done before 11?
Andrew Barnes is one of the leading promoters of the four-day week across the world. As CEO of Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand, he implemented this approach back in 2018. Andrew will be speaking at the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference on 12th May.
Recently I went to a webinar on "how people learn". The first slide stated "people learn by doing," and the last slide said "Don't give a lecture." Yet the 45 minute webinar was a lecture with no interaction with the attendees and certainly no learning by doing. This was especially ironic because of the topic, and the message, but is true of so many webinars. What is stopping people from making online webinars engaging?
What makes the difference between somebody who is simply a contributor and somebody who makes a real difference? That is the question that Liz Wiseman addresses in her new book, Impact Players. Liz was a standout speaker at our 2020 conference, and is back again for our 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference on 12th May.
I am often asked whether you can build happy trust-based workplaces within a larger more hierarchical organisation. So I was very interested to hear about the eSteering team at Danfoss, a 120 person unit within a 40,000 strong company. Vivek Menon, a Senior Director at the Danish company Danfoss, explained at the Teal Around the World Conference how they created a culture of trust and freedom. Vivek will be speaking at the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference.
Last year, Happy held our first recruitment for online facilitators. As we always do in our interviews, we avoid asking questions and get people to do what they would do in the role. After a disastrous first round of interviews, find out how Henry and the team set up their interviewees to succeed in this blog.
For me the best business books include stories and No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer is packed with them. By the end you will understand all about the remarkable Netflix culture. And you will be challenged. Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, has teamed up with Erin Meyer, a Professor at INSEAD business school and author of The Culture Map. She interviewed 200 Netflix staff and so produces an interesting balance to the normal totally gung-ho approach of a book like this.