The Mystery of the Humongous Excel File

My colleague sent me an interesting email today. She had tried to send one of our Excel exercise files to a trainer, only to find that the file had grown from a perfectly reasonable 108KB to 30MB!

What Would You Do If You Had More Free Time?

What would you do if you won the lottery? The amount is up to you: one million, five million, fifty million. The question, however, is not what you would spend it on (gold shoes, obviously) but what you would do with your time?

Happy: One of the World's Most Democratic Workplaces

Happy is today named as one of the most democratic workplaces in the world, in a unique list of companies seeking to run organisations with more freedom and empowerment of their people. Here is the piece I have written for Huffington Post on the subject.

People management is a crucial role, and it is different from leadership.

10 Ideas for Taking Time at Work to Reflect

If you take 15 minutes to reflect at the end of the day, you can improve your productivity by 22.8%. That’s the conclusion of a study at Harvard Business School. Participants spent 15 minutes writing in a journal to embed their learning from the day, and produced these dramatic results.

7 Reasons Why Collaborative Hiring Makes Sense

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.

First Happy Workplace Ireland Conference

The first Happy Workplace Ireland conference took place in Dublin on 29th October. This was jointly organised between Happy Ltd and locally-based happiness entrepreneur Stephen Dargan of Wake Up!.

Tom Peters: A Leadership Guru Ahead of His Time

Tom Peters is the ultimate management guru. Thinkers50, the list of the top 50 management thinkers, has rated him in the top 10 in multiple years and awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award, one of only six people to achieve the honour, in 2017. "Charismatic, passionate, and insightful, Tom virtually invented the modern thought leadership industry," explained Thinkers50 co-founder Des Dearlove. "He co-authored In Search of Excellence, which helped create the business book industry." Find out more about Tom Peters in this blog by Henry Stewart.

How Easy Is It to Get Things Done in Your Organisation?

Is your organisation one where people can move quickly and get new ideas out there, or is it stymied in levels of approval and hierarchy? In this blog, Henry talks about some of the various approaches of several well-known companies, as well as Happy's own policy towards this.

What Are the Benefits of Employees Being in Control?

Last month I wrote a LinkedIn post suggesting that staff should decide the CEO’s salary, based on my own experience of doing just that. So far it has received 344,000 views and 505 comments. And it seems to have been controversial.

Change Please: A Tale of Innovation, Social Enterprise and Good Coffee

Cemal Ezel has a company called Change Please which helps homeless people become baristas, access vital services and get safely, and sustainably, off the streets. Sir Richard Branson called Change Please his ‘start-up of the year’ in 2019 and it was rated the ‘Best Social Enterprise in the World’ in 2018. Cemal personally was rated the 46th Coolest Person in the World in 2015, and we definitely agree with that! In this video from the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference, Cemal takes us through Change Please’s journey from inception to the modern day, and beyond.

Would you like to transform the culture of your organisation? Our Level 7 Senior Leadership Apprenticeship Programme is practical and hands-on — designed for senior leaders who want to make a real cultural change in their workplace. This is a Level 7 qualification and the equivalent of a postgraduate degree or MBA. But you do not need a degree to join the programme, and as an apprenticeship qualification, the focus is on implementing ideas and on-the-job learning rather than sitting in long, dull lectures.

Pre-Approval in Practice at TLC: Talk, Listen, Change

Are you making the most of your people’s skills and knowledge? Michelle Hill talks about how the charity TLC: Talk, Listen, Change has used pre-approval in practice in this three-minute video.

Can You Use Happy Manifesto Principles in a Charity?

In this 20-minute video from the 2017 Happy Workplaces CEO Conference, Michelle talks about leading the charity through a period of growth and transformation. She highlights what she did to bring her staff team along on the journey with her, using the principles from the Happy Manifesto, and what the impact has been on both the people they work with and their bottom line.