happy Blogs

Make work more fun

Make Work More Fun. That’s the title of the inspirational book from Corporate Rebels, published in 2020. The rebels, Joost Minnaar and Pim De Morree, gave up their jobs five years ago to tour the world visiting the most exciting organisations on the planet. The book tells the story of what they found. In this blog, Henry Stewart unpacks a number of the book's key arguments, which can help you discover a different way of organising companies, one that is more fulfilling for its people and more productive for the organisation.

Liberating Structures: Giving Everybody an Equal Voice

Imagine if every meeting or event that you attended gave every participant the chance to speak and to express their views. That is what is made possible by Liberating Structures, 33 methods that avoid one person dominating and instead give everybody a voice. If you want your online events to be truly interactive, this could be the place to start. In this blog, Henry Stewart offers a summary of 8 different Liberating Structures.

Happy Workplaces are More Successful

The research has been done and the evidence is in: there is a clear link, shown in many studies, confirming that companies with great workplaces are more successful commercially. In this blog, Henry Stewart provides the evidence that happy workplaces simply perform better.

How Microsoft Teams Keeps Improving Our Remote Working Experience

Before spring 2020, many of us may not have heard of Microsoft Teams — but it's now become a household name. With Teams, you can keep your files, conversations and video meetings all in one place, making remote working so much simpler. Microsoft has been adding new features to the application throughout the course of the year in order to make the software more immersive, flexible and convenient. In this blog, Billy highlights a range of Teams’ latest innovations, which are designed to both enhance user experience and improve productivity in our 'new normal'.

Let’s Give Everybody an Equal Voice

Imagine at your events if everybody got to speak equally. Imagine the most senior people did not get to dominate the discussion. Imagine the loudest voices weren’t the ones who carried the decisions. In this blog, Henry Stewart goes through nine Liberating Structures, which make it so everybody has an equal voice.

Happy's January competition is back with another set of fantastic prizes. For a chance to win, tell us what challenge you overcame in 2020 and how you met it — or how you will meet it in 2021, if you didn't in 2020. Our top prize includes a free place on any of our one or two day courses, the Happy Planner / Learning Journal, one year's access to our Happy Video Library, and more! Closing date: midnight GMT on 31st January 2021. Winner will be announced on 3rd February 2021.

How to Create Truly Engaging Online Conferences

Have you, like me, been to a number of online events where you just have to sit and listen while the speakers talk? There may be people that feel they learn well from this approach, but I honestly doubt it. You would probably be better off listening to some TED Talks. In this blog, Happy’s CHO Henry Stewart provides a step-by-step account of how to create a truly engaging online conference.

Let's Get Rid of Annual Appraisals, and Replace Them With Regular Snapshots

Around three years ago, Happy organised a vote of all our employees on whether they wanted to keep the annual appraisal. As we expected, they didn’t – with 83% voting to scrap them. Of course it still makes sense to carry out a regular review, so we replaced it with a four monthly happy@happy snapshot. Find out more in this blog.

The Curious Case of Teams and Unconscious Competence

While those of us who have been working on computers for years could adapt to MS Teams with very little difficulty, we shouldn't neglect our colleagues whose roles previously required little or no IT knowledge.  In this blog, Darren looks at how a simple application like Teams is not always so simply explained to newcomers.

Overcoming the Fear to Lead

Kill Your Fear With Servant Leadership: How a 1970s essay can help you do this and become happier too.  Servant Leadership is an approach very close to what we at Happy believe to be the role of leaders in an organisation. Here is a guest blog from leadership consultant Alex Holland on the subject.