Happy is moving. A month ago, just before the deadline for the landlord’s break clause approached, a law clerk arrived at our office and served a notice to quit. The landlord plans to redevelop the building and we have to be out of our office by 30th October.
Over the last couple of years, Happy has undergone a transformation. Why? Because as chief happiness officer Henry Stewart revealed at the beginning of his talk at the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Happy was losing a lot of money. Assessing the financial downturn, Henry and his leadership team realised they’d lost sight of some core principles. So instead of cutting things and getting more hierarchical, the turnaround was made possible by revisiting their core principles and acting in accordance. One thing that Henry decided to do is make no decisions. Find out why in this video.
Do we want people to make mistakes? The answer I generally get to this question is 'Yes', because people recognise that this is how we learn and discover new ways of doing things. In this blog, find out about eight companies that celebrate mistakes by staff, and how they do it.
Sometimes, the best way to facilitate change in an organisation is to behave as though you have no authority – suggesting best practice, rather than imposing change on others. In this blog, Happy’s Senior Facilitator Paul Gapper takes a look at the ways you can facilitate change positively within your organisation.
If you analyse data in Excel then you’ll love Power BI Desktop.
“Leadership is a term, much like ‘strategy’, that is misused and misunderstood. I don’t believe that being a leader is about being the CEO, hierarchy, wielding power and control or having all the answers. Yet leaders can have a hard time breaking out of the traditional concepts of leadership and embracing a different approach. And others fail to recognise their own leadership qualities considering themselves too junior or lacking that leadership ‘title’,” says Caron Bradshaw OBE.
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.
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.
One of the perks of being an Office 365 subscriber is Microsoft’s regular unfurling of new features and updates for the software’s constituent apps (Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Visio and Word).
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