Here you can find all of Happy’s blog posts, covering our Excel hints and tips, ideas for creating happy workplaces, and ways to be more productive at work — and more.
Recent research confirms that happiness and wellbeing have a huge impact towards success in the workplace. Here at Happy, creating a culture where people feel good about themselves is one of our key principles. How can you develop and nurture happiness within your workplace?
At the 2021 Happy Workplaces Conference, we had a fabulous presentation from Sarah Pugh. I ask the speakers at our conferences to share 'nickable' ideas that people can put into practice and Sarah came up with no less than 15 of these. Sarah has just become Chief Executive of Whizz Kidz, so a lot of this relates to when she was CEO at Heart of Kent Hospice.
At Happy we are engaged in the UK four-day working week pilot, with 70 UK companies testing the idea from June to November 2022. We've had huge interest, with my blogs on LinkedIn getting up to 10 times as many views as my other posts. But some respond by saying that it wouldn’t work in their sector. So I was very interested to read the book Shorter: How Smart Companies Work Less, Embrace Flexibility and Boost Productivity by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. This gives a whole range of examples from different sectors.
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.
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.