happy Blogs

Making Your MS Teams Meetings Interactive with Breakout Rooms

Breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams enable you to create virtual rooms of smaller groups, such as putting people into pairs or groups of four, so it allows everybody to have a say. If you have a large number of participants, this makes it easier to have open discussions, brainstorm, exchange meaningful ideas and work collaboratively.  You can use chat and people can be moved to different rooms during meetings. If enabled participants can use the whiteboard and screen share within a given room. In this blog, Happy's trainers Sal and Ebe explain how to create break out rooms in MS Teams to make your meetings truly interactive.

Creating a Culture of Leadership Development

By investing in its people, US e-commerce company Next Jump has experienced both revenue growth and business transformation. In this talk at the 2017 Beyond Budgeting Conference, Kevin and Chris from Next Jump explain how to navigate the "lying, hiding, faking" problem and how investing in leadership development will get you to Beyond Budgeting.

Ambition to Action: The Equinor Beyond Budgeting Journey

Bjarte Bogsnes has worked in finance and HR at Norwegian energy company Statoil (now called Equinor) for over 35 years. In his talk at the 2017 Beyond Budgeting Conference, Bjarte—who's also the Chairman at the Beyond Budgeting Institute—explains how it’s possible to hang onto the flexibility of a small organisation without losing the benefits of being big.

Creating a Happy Workplace at Heart of Kent Hospice

Here are some ideas for creating a great culture from Sarah Pugh, now Chief Executive of Whizz Kidz, about her time as CEO at Heart of Kent Hospice.

How to Approach Conversations That Matter, Without the Worry

Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could have a candid conversation with a friend or colleague but fearing that, if you did so, it might end that relationship? Welcome to the world of conversations that matter. Paul explains how best to approach these conversations in this blog.

6 New Features in Excel 2019 That You May Not Know About

The latest update to Excel 2019 includes six new functions: CONCAT, TEXTJOIN, MINIFS And MAXIFS, IFS, SWITCH and XLOOKUP. In this blog, Edmund, one of our Office experts, explains what you need to know about them.

How to Turn on Online Meetings by Default in the Outlook Web App

One of the great features in Outlook now is that you can automatically set up Teams meeting. With a click of a button, Outlook will create a calendar invite with a link for people to join using Teams — saving lots of time! With many of us now working from home permanently, you can change Outlook to default to online meetings, saving you even more time. In this week's blog by our expert trainers Sal and Ebe, find out how to do it.

How to Expand Your Thinking With Mindmaps

When Happy's Paul Gapper was thirty-eight, he decided he wanted to leave his job as a probation officer and become a freelance trainer. At the time, the BBC had published a series of books by Tony Buzan on Mindmapping, speed reading and memory techniques. Paul was intrigued by the idea that you could start from a central idea and, on a single sheet of paper, expand your thinking around it. In this blog, Paul talks about how Mindmaps have helped with the development of his career, as well as how to develop your own effective Mindmaps.

Leading With Your Heart: The Challenges and Opportunities of Hybrid Working

It is clear we are heading into yet another new phase of working arrangements. Some staff are gleefully returning to working in the office, some are planning on returning soon, and some who are nowhere near ready to do this! So how do we navigate everyone's wants and needs whilst still running our business, and still providing amazing service to our clients? In this blog, Cathy shares how Happy has handled hybrid working over the past 18 months during lockdown and beyond.

Be specific with your values if you want to stand out

In this three-minute clip from the 2017 Happy Workplaces CEO Conference, Dom Monkhouse explains why organisations being specific with their values is so essential and why not doing so means the organisation will just end up being beige.