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Are You a Good Gardener?
Last Friday I gave a talk at London Business School to help launch their report on Employee Centred Management with HCL (a hugely inspirational Indian IT company).
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.
Last Friday I gave a talk at London Business School to help launch their report on Employee Centred Management with HCL (a hugely inspirational Indian IT company).
I am a huge fan of Pret A Manger, the UK-based sandwich chain. It’s a combination of the enthusiasm and friendliness of their people with the quality of the product and systems focused on delivering a great service.
Develop your people's responsibility: Promote all your people to be in charge of something, and something reasonably important.
While a profit driven workplace might not be a happy workplace, a happy workplace can most definitely be a profitable one.
It is never enough to explain what the customer needs - get your staff to walk in your customer's shoes and experience their life.
Fortune magazine tracked companies from the great workplaces list over 12 years, and found 3-fold outperformance over the stock market.
“Improved psychological well being (PWB) leads to a more productive and successful workplace. The case has been proven in academic studies over the last ten years.” Those were the words of Ivan Robertson, giving a seminar on well-being at the LSE this week.
Being CEO of Happy means I get to deal with anybody who we have upset and who my colleagues haven’t managed to make happy. This doesn’t happen often and it’s never good to speak to a customer who we have let down but I do actually enjoy the task. Based on being open, admitting anything we got wrong and finding out what they need, there is nearly always a way to meet people’s needs.
The origins of Happy date back to 1987, when founder Henry Stewart first registered the company and started providing training to friends and contacts.
These are the two ends of customer service. On the one hand you have you have the foxes, eagerly scouring the internet to find any negative mention of their name and responding directly to the customer. And then there are the ostriches, burying their heads in the sand, and somehow managing to ignore negative feedback even when it is submitted on their own feedback forms.