Practicing What We Preach – Guest Blog by Esther Stevenson

Trust and empowerment in Angola agriculture

How Many of These Mistakes Do You Make in Your Online Meetings?

Love them or loathe them, we go to more meetings than ever, especially as more work is done in collaborative cross business teams. There are some simple steps we can all take to improve these group conversations dramatically and create leaps forward in clarity and progress. Meetings are surprisingly complex human interactions so making them more purposeful, more honest and easier to follow can have a seriously helpful effect. Try these five simple ideas to start with.

Well-Being Check-Ins: How To Prevent Staff Burnout

Burnout is a real issue in the creative media industry. To help prevent this, Nikki Gatenby introduced well-being check-ins. Nikki is the co-owner and managing director of Propellernet, a digital marketing agency that's been named as one of the top 10 Best Places to Work in the UK for six years running. In this two-minute video from the 2018 Happy Workplaces Conference, Nikki shares the four questions she uses to prevent burnout – are you taking your holiday? Are you taking your Propel days (their day a month to innovate)? Are you working with our resident coach? And do you know about our health plan?

Being seen as credible at work can be a key indicator of your professional success. Wherever you sit in your organisation’s hierarchy, this one-day workshop will give you time out to reflect on your current working behaviours and how they impact and influence those around you.

By the end of this one-day intermediate level course you will be confident in using Styles to automatically format parts of your document. You will use Styles to navigate around a document. You will create sophisticated graphics. You will create templates and Building Blocks (Autotext) to save time. You will be able to Mail Merge within Word and to Outlook email.

We have all been there. We have attended conferences with one ‘death-by-PowerPoint’ presentation after another and wondered if there was another way. The good news is that there is. There are techniques to use the strength of PowerPoint (visual reinforcement) without making it a bland reading of bullet points. This course does not teach PowerPoint features, but instead how to use your slides in a more engaging way so that your presentation is memorable and effective.

This one-day Coaching Fundamentals programme will enable you to distinguish coaching from mentoring and other leader behaviours. We will build a clear ethos of coaching and help you discover its benefits. You will leave with a simple coaching model that you can start to use straight away and the confidence to use coaching skills in the moment to nurture an individual’s ability to uncover the deeper issues impacting their situation and solve their own problems. During the day, you will not only practice doing that but also get to experience it as a coachee and observer.

We offer a range of public Live Interactive Learning Online courses from our IT skills, Personal Development and Leadership programmes. These sessions are open to all. We also offer a range of Classroom courses as public dates.

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.

Google: Hire Great People and Give Them Lots of Autonomy

At the Happy Workplace 2013 conference Yvonne Agyei (Google Head of Benefits) explained how Google creates happy and healthy Googlers.

Pre-Approve It!

What is the key to creating a happy workplace? I’ve just a written a book with what I see as the 10 key principles of a great workplace but for me one thing stands out.

Epic's requirements were commercial capability and culture transformation. The key test was whether the new company could not just survive but successfully expand its services. Here's what we did.

How Microsoft Excel Can Increase Your Productivity

Microsoft Excel is certain to improve your life at work. Microsoft Excel is one of the modern workplace’s most indispensable computer programs. The daily operations of a huge variety of businesses – from travel adventure companies and art dealerships to retail stores and sports broadcasters – would be considerably tougher without the utility of Excel. It’s no exaggeration to call Excel the preeminent spreadsheet program, but for those unfamiliar with its workplace contributions, here’s a look at some productivity-boosting features.

Improve Collaboration for a More Productive Workplace

Would you like to collaborate and work better with your colleagues? In this blog, Billy gives his five tips to improve collaboration, starting with working on your Active Listening skills.