Office 365 subscribers will know that Microsoft regularly unfurls new features and updates for the software’s constituent apps. But given the frequency of these updates, there’s a chance you either haven’t caught up or are yet to take full advantage of the exciting new additions. Here’s a look at some attention-grabbing features to have shown up in recent months.
I am proud to announce that Happy has qualified as a WorldBlu certified Freedom-Centred Workplace for the fourth time. We are one of only three UK companies to make the list this year and are honoured to be there alongside John Lewis.
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.
I often ask groups where they have found the best customer service. Two companies stand out and always come up: Apple and John Lewis. And when lists are published of the UK’s most admired businesses you can be sure that John Lewis is at or near the top. So I felt greatly honoured yesterday to be speaking alongside Charlie Mayfield, Chair of John Lewis (at Tomorrow’s Company “Tomorrow’s Value” event).
Happy has just started the six month trial of a four-day working week being organised in the UK by 4 Day Week Global. We are joining over 60 other organisations in this pilot. We discussed it at a staff meeting earlier in the year, carried out a survey and our people voted 16-1 to go for a permanent four-day week, as long as the pilot succeeds.
Andrew Barnes is the head of New Zealand's biggest corporate trust company, Perpetual Guardian, but he's probably better known as the father of the four-day week movement. Andrew trialled the four-day week at Perpetual Guardian in 2018, despite a lot of fear and opposition from his board and management team. It was a resounding success and has grown into a movement with unprecedented momentum. In this video from the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference, Andrew explores some of the data supporting the four-day working week and challenges you to think about how it would work in your organisation.
I recently did a podcast with Liz Wiseman, the author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (and Impact Players). Her book, Multipliers, has had a transformational impact on Happy and on our programmes. All of our ‘people managers’ are Multipliers, who enable their people to do their best work, and we’ve began training others on how to be a Multiplier on our leadership programmes.
Alison Sturgess-Durden is the Director at Mayden, a software business based in Bath with a staff of 80 people. Mayden’s software is specifically created for health professionals and patients. Their most prominent achievement is the creation of a patient management system that’s favoured by most psychological therapy services in the NHS. In 2013 Mayden became a self-managing organisation, comprised of autonomous teams. In this video from the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Alison explains the reasons behind the switch, how they did it and how it works (and some of the challenges they faced along the way!).
We’re currently enduring the worst public health pandemic in 100 years. Life has already undergone dramatic change and a return to “normal” is still a long way off. But despite seeming to move from one cataclysm to another in recent months and years, we live in profoundly progressive times. Modern humans are capable of amazing things. Here are four good news stories to provide respite from the doom and gloom of a regular news bulletin.
Around three years ago, Happy organised a vote of all our employees on whether they wanted to keep the annual appraisal. As we expected, they didn’t – with 83% voting to scrap them. Of course it still makes sense to carry out a regular review, so we replaced it with a four monthly happy@happy snapshot. Find out more in this blog.
How is Happy's 4 Day Week going 3 months into the trial? Happy's Founder and Chief Happiness Officer Henry Stewart looks back at how things have progressed and the impact it has had so far.
Liz Wiseman is the CEO of The Wiseman Group, a talent development and research organisation in Silicon Valley, California. Liz is also the author of bestsellers Multipliers and Impact Players, and is consistently rated by Thinkers50 as a top ranked thinker. In her book Impact Players, Liz identifies two types of people: Ordinary Contributors and Impact Players, and noted that there were five practices that differentiated the Impact Players from the Ordinary Contributors. In this video, from the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference, Liz tells us more about the concept and takes us through the five characteristics of Impact Players.
All of our course prices will be increasing by 5% in 2025. All prices will increase from 1st January, with the exception of our public leadership and personal development programmes which will change from 1st March 2025. This is the perfect time to book your training for the year ahead - you will still receive the same pricing, even if you book for June 2025.
This week the Bank of England decided to pump an extra £50 billion of electronic money into the UK economy, bringing the total of quantitative easing to a huge £375 billion. Scanning the responses to this I retweeted this suggestion from @andyo: “Rather than pumping £50B into the banks, the BoE could give each household £2K. Surely that would have more effect?”
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