happy Blogs

Why You Should Give Staff Freedom Within Clear Guidelines

Henry Stewart speaks to the Eth Word about management and creating freedom within clear guidelines for staff. "Most people don't want complete freedom," argues Henry. "If you ask them, 90% or more say 'we don't want to be told what to do... we want some guidelines, and then the freedom to operate within those.' And that's what we work hard to create, so that people feel... in control of their job. They can do stuff and know what the boundaries are."

Dear CEO: Let Your People Choose Their Managers

I was honoured to be asked by Thinkers50 to contribute a letter to their Dear CEO book, published in July 2017. Here is my contribution.

Save 15% With Our Project Management Bundle

Managing a project effectively can be a real headache. As well as keeping track of various tasks, priorities, teams, and deadlines, you have to ensure your project is delivered on-time and on-budget too.

Recruit for Attitude, Train for Skill in Practice

One of Happy’s key principles is “Recruit for Attitude, Train for Skill” – but what does this mean in practice?

Being Assertive and Building Trust: Keys to Workplace Satisfaction

Your experience at work will be enhanced – in terms of performance, personal satisfaction and long term behavioural benefits – by building trust and becoming more assertive. Find out more in this blog by Billy Burgess.

We can all admit that our actions aren’t always entirely pleasant. This could be caused by external stresses, unsatisfied expectations or self-involved flutters of the ego. Accordingly, we often face difficult situations or somewhat fractious interactions with the people we encounter in our day-to-day lives.

We recently attended a free seminar hosted by Herman Miller and Office Principles, with talks by Bertie van Wyk and Hannah Nardini. The theme was based around the idea of creating more productive and profitable workplaces by improving general staff happiness and wellbeing. They had some brilliant ideas about how this can be achieved – and many of their ideas are easy and can be implemented straight away. Here were our five favourite tips from the day.

"Thank you." These simple words are two of the most important in your vocabulary. But when was the last time that you said thank you to a colleague?

BrewDog introduces ‘paw-ternity’ leave for staff

As you may have guessed from the name, multinational craft beer chain BrewDog is very dog-friendly. Dogs are welcome in each of their 47 bars, and their head office in Scotland has 50 office dogs. However, they have now taken this a step further, launching a new Puppy Parental Leave scheme for all members of staff.

Is it time to move beyond budgets?

On 6th February we are holding the 3rd UK Beyond Budgeting conference, in partnership with the Beyond Budgeting Institute. Speakers like Bjarte Bogsnes of Norway’s Statoil, and Mira Gvozdenovic of Coloplast in Denmark – and several more – will explain how their huge organisations run without annual budgets.