Mayden: Managing the Work, Not the People

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!).

4 Good News Stories From May 2020

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.

Let's Get Rid of Annual Appraisals, and Replace Them With Regular Snapshots

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.

Happy’s 4 Day Week: How is Our Progress? (A 3 Month Update)

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: What are Impact Players and Why are They Important to Your Organisation?

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.

Prices Changing for Public and Private Courses in 2025

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.

£50 Billion for the Banks, or £1,000 for Every Adult in the UK?

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?”

8 Companies That Don't Have Managers

At Happy we let people choose their managers, an idea which has been seen as very radical when I’ve spoken about it. However there are companies that have gone a step further and got rid of managers altogether. Some are small but some are billion-dollar companies:

Book Review: A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled by Ruby Wax

Ruby Wax recently released A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled – we were intrigued by the book, and asked Billy Burgess to write a review of it for us. Here are his thoughts.

Excel Hints & Tips - Calculating Age

You’d think that there would be an AGE function that worked out how many years since the anniversary by passing in a date. However, life is not that easy. Our trainer Ian Balboa explains step-by-step how to calculate how many years since an anniversary – both the easy way and the hard way.

The Key to Being a Top Performer? Being Happy

Recent research confirms that happiness and wellbeing have a huge impact towards success in the workplace. Here at Happy, creating a culture where people feel good about themselves is one of our key principles. How can you develop and nurture happiness within your workplace?

Recruit for Attitude, Train for Skill in Practice

One of Happy’s key principles is “Recruit for Attitude, Train for Skill” – but what does this mean in practice?

In February I wrote about the government decision to outsource all its training – in all subjects and for all departments – to one supplier, Capita. I suggested that contracts like this rarely produce better value, as any savings from economies of scale are offset by the extra cost of administration. The recent report by the National Audit Office, on the Capita contract, appears to support my view:

What is Power BI and Why Should You Use it?

Many of us use Excel for analysing and presenting data, and whilst we have become adept at VLOOKUPs and Pivot Tables, it is a challenge to combine large amounts of data from different sources.