happy Blogs

Excel Hints & Tips - Timeline

Learn how to create simple Timeline filters that provide a slider type interactive filter.

Excel Hints & Tips - Florence Nightingale & Excel

What on earth has Florence Nightingale got to do with Excel? Florence Nightingale famously created a polar area diagram (a type of pie chart) in 1858 to show the cause of death in British military hospitals in the Crimean War. This highlighted the extent of preventable deaths (such as from typhus and cholera). The result was that the British government took action and commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a new civilian hospital – reducing the death rate to just 1/10th of what it was before. This important use of data visualisation shows how powerful charts (and especially pie charts) can be.

“Pick Your Own Manager”

Choosing your own manager is becoming more popular, allowing staff to choose a manager who really motivates them. Find out more in Henry's blog.

A big thanks to Marion Janner of Star Wards, @starwards, for alerting me to this fabulous approach to an annual report. And its not from a cutting edge startup, but from the public sector, the good old NHS: The annual report for Whittington Hospital Trust for 2004.

Bring Back the People, We Need More than Technology

This festive period I was avoiding Amazon (because of their UK tax avoidance) and found myself in a real bookshop. And what a delight. I could have spent hours there. I know, it is sad that this is rare experience for me.

Bring Generosity to the Heart of Your Business

One of our trainers, Dhira Wiggins, has spent most of October and November providing free database support for local charities. He had been allocated to a two month database training project, and then the client cancelled – leaving Dhira with an empty diary. It didn’t make sense, for him or for Happy, to have nothing to do so we emailed our charity clients asking if any needed some free help setting up or fixing a database (as this is Dhira’s speciality). It proved quite a popular offer and Dhira ended up providing support to eleven different charities, including.

Make Your People Happy, Like John Lewis Does

I often ask groups where they have found the best customer service. Two companies stand out and always come up: Apple and John Lewis. And when lists are published of the UK’s most admired businesses you can be sure that John Lewis is at or near the top. So I felt greatly honoured yesterday to be speaking alongside Charlie Mayfield, Chair of John Lewis (at Tomorrow’s Company “Tomorrow’s Value” event).

If you want to be happy at work, don’t go and work in the financial services industry. That is the message from the Career Happiness Index 2012, conducted by City and Guilds.

Twitter: It's the Only Effective Way to Complain

This week BBC2 will broadcast “Who’s the Boss,” the first of three programmes exploring how companies could transform their recruitment with Collaborative Hiring. It goes out this Tuesday at 9pm, and the two following Tuesdays.

Radical Innovation In a Key Part of UK Government

If you have ever felt envy when you scan the Rich List or read about a millionaire (and, to be honest, who hasn’t?) then a recent discussion on Quora provides a useful antidote. Answering the question “Is getting rich worth it?” several very wealthy people described lives that do not sound enviable.