That principle is the core of everything we do at Happy (a training business in London, UK). Think about whether you agree with it. If you do, and I find over 95% of people do, then what should be the key focus of management? By simple logic, it should clearly be creating an environment where people are happy and feel good about themselves.

When I speak at conferences, I like to ask the audience to raise their hands if that is the main focus of management in their organisation. Generally one or two in a hundred raise their hands. (I suspect I’d get a different response if I spoke at Zappos.) Yet there is strong evidence to suggest such a focus makes good business sense.

For remainder of post click through to the Delivering Happiness Blog

“Happy Computers’ Learnfizz is an innovative application that is aimed at crowd-sourcing learning content within the public domain and making it readily available on a world-wide basis. Contributors are encouraged to develop their own, or highlight, learning content that is freely available and then, in a collaborative environment, it is made available throughout the world in an easily accessible format.

“The programme has the potential to create enormous benefit in both deprived and wealthy communities, and it is an excellent example of the way in which social media technology and collaboration architecture can integrate learning resources in the public domain and make them accessible through an advanced learning portal.”

“I am so delighted with this award”, explained Happy Chief Executive Henry Stewart. “It is a great endorsement for what we believe is a product that can help shape the way people learn in the future. We hope that whether you are a learning professional, an inner-city teacher or a child in Africa this will enable you ton find great learning resourcers – for free.”

Runners-up in the award were BT and the Open University. The Learning & Performance Institute was until last year known as the Institute of IT Training.

We worked with one company who had a problem with their Marketing Manager. Let’s call her Sarah. Now Sarah was brilliant at marketing and vital to the company’s success. But she was not good at managing people and lost around half her staff every year as they moved to other jobs.

Click through to Delivering Happiness for the full post

Last night Learnfizz won Gold for Social Media Learning Product of the Year at the 2012 Learning Awards, competing against BT and the Open University. This is very exciting for a product that is still very much in beta, but shows the potential people see in it. We hope it will become an essential tool for anybody wanting to learn useful stuff for free.

What is Learnfizz?

Charles Jennings described Learnfizz as ‘Delicious for Learning’. Bill Thompson preferred “Trip Adviser for Education”. Both are fair descriptions. Like Delicious, Learnfizz is based on social bookmarking, but gets its real value from the potential for  curation. There is a hell of a lot of information out there on the web and we need tools to keep track of what we find useful and easily curate it. The idea of Learnfizz is to use crowdsourcing to find the best free learning, to rate it and then make it easy to create combinations (or ‘mixes’) to use and share with others.

Some stuff is easy to find on Google. If you want to find historical facts, Google will normally take you to a pretty reliable page on Wikipedia. But try to learn how to do appraisals or write a business plan or give a great presentation and Google normally takes you to lots of sites trying to sell you stuff – courses, or reports or products. Yet on all these subjects there is lots of great free stuff available on the web. Its just hard to find. What we need is a site to make it easy to find and organise the best free learning on the web. That is what Learnfizz aims to do.

So whats the business model, people ask? What we are trying to do is create a business that has real positive social benefit, in helping people to learn, but also works financially. The idea is that anybody will be able to use the site for free. Thats vital to ensure we get enough links added. But large organisations tell us they will pay for a subscription version, branded for them, tracking how their people use it, linking to their resources as well as web-based ones and where they can decide what is included and what is prominent.

Where it all started

Last May a client asked for links to free online learning for Learning at Work day. Despite having seen lots of great stuff, I had no easy way to share it. Eventually I spent an hour going through my twitter feed and managed to send around a dozen links. If she asks me this year, I will be able to quickly send over hundreds of great links, organised conveniently into mixes. I don’t think I’m alone in this. At the Learning & Performance Conference in September I asked learning professionals if they had somewhere they stored their favourite learning links. About half said Yes. I asked those if they could easily share them. None of them could.

With Learnfizz you can, at little more than the click of a button (once you’ve added the Fizzit button to your toolbar), store any piece of learning or information that you come across. You can share it as an individual link or you can add it to a mix and share that. Over time we hope to build up a range of great combinations of learning, all of it freely available – whether you  are a learning professional in a big organisation, a teacher in the inner city or a child in Africa.

Create learning resources quickly, really quickly

Last week I heard Ray Kurzweil talk about the Singularity, the point at which machines will allegedly become more intelligent than humans. It was quite a talk, both inspiring and terrifying and there were dozens of information-packed slides. The slides were not available and the talk left many questions unanswered. So I did some research and quickly collected together a mix on the topic. It included a similar slide talk, a 7 minute talk by Kurzweil, more detailed explanations and also his critics. So the next morning I was able to tweet round this learning guide, and hundreds clicked through to learn more about a topic that had sparked their interest.

That is the potential of Learnfizz. Anybody in an organisation will be able to quickly create a curated learning resource by simply linking together different pieces of information. And in much less time than it takes to create traditional e-learning. Indeed, as I did with Kurzweil, you can create a resource that is very useful in under an hour.

We are still in our early days at the start of what we hope will be an exciting journey. Its still too clunky to create a mix but please do try. Please add the Fizzit button, bookmark some pages and create a mix. And then let me know how you found it. We are keen to find out how people will use Learnfizz and what to develop next.

Please do try it out, let us know what you like and what would make it even better for you. We want to create a resource that reflects what people like you need.

But at Happy …..

Click through to Delivering Happiness blog for the full post.

What makes people unhappy is being micro-managed and lots of layers of approval which get in the way of getting things done. Great management is, for me, about getting out of the way and here’s a simple way to do that.

As a manager you will often task an individual or a group to solve a problem or come up with a new way of doing things, and ask them to report back to you. Don’t ask for that. Instead approve the idea before they come up with it. Agree the guidelines, the budget, maybe who is affected and needs to be consulted but “pre approve” the implementation.

Avoid being a barrier to innovation

We are a training business and I received an email from one of our associates, thanking me for three changes which made it easier for her to do her job and help the customer. I was struck by two things. First, I didn’t know the changes had happened. They hadn’t come across my desk for approval. But second I realised that, if they had come across my desk, I would have rejected two of them. I thought up many of the methods we use and I, like many managers, am a natural barrier to changing them. I realised that, to avoid blocking innovation, the best way was to make sure new ideas did not have to be approved by me.

This year we applied Pre Approval to our web site. It’s a pretty important part of the business and, in the past, I had always been actively involved. The result was that the Webmaster never fully owned the task and always felt the site could have been great if not for my changes. This time round we agreed the principles in advance but I only got to see the new site the night before it launched. And visitors tripled immediately.

What can you pre-approve today?

But say you want to find out how to run an appraisal, do a great presentation or write a business plan. Use Google and you will get thousands of links, but the ones at the top are generally trying to sell you stuff, whether courses or resources. The web is full of free learning resources but they can be hard to find. As Charles Jennings put it today at Online Educa Berlin, one role of learning professionals now is content curation. To help people learn, we need to help them find the good stuff easily.

We need a web site to help find, organise and share learning resources. And that is what we are trying to build at Learnfizz. Add great links that you find, and use the Mix facility to organise and group them. The aim is to build the best guide to great free learning on the web, all curated by real people. Here’s a great example Mix that Julie Wedgwood created for her talk on content curation at the Berlin conference.

Store & Share Great Links for Learning

At the Learning & Performance Institute conference in September I asked people if they had links to all their favourite learning resources stored in one place. About half said yes. I then asked if they could easily share it. Although there are some tools to do this, none said Yes. Generally the links were stored in Favourites on their PC. The idea of the Learnfizz Mix is that you can group a set of links together and share them with your colleagues. Here’s one I created on Great Presentations.

Do come and try it. Register for Learnfizz and help us build the best guide to great free learning content. The idea is that it will always be free to use. So – whether you are a learning professional in a big corporate, an inner city teacher or a child in Africa – Learnfizz will help you find great learning.

It is one week since the book launch and so far we’ve sold just over 500 copies. That is not going to get The Happy Manifesto into the best seller charts but it is 10% of the print run and enough to pay off 80% of the total production costs. Which is nice given that we self published it.

Most of the sales have come from the crowd sourced funding. Inspired by a crowd-funding workshop I attended at the ClearlySo conference I offered a deal of £100 for 20 copies plus 1% of the income from the first print run (or the half that is being sold). Now we could have paid for the book, as we did with Relax, out of Happy’s cashflow but the key piece I learnt at the workshop was that crowd-funding is as much about the people as the money. I now have a whole bunch of people outside of Happy who are committed to the book and to spreading its ideas.

Indeed the crowd has been crucial to this book. I put the first draft of the book online (calling it the beta version) in the summer of 2010 and the feedback was invaluable. It pointed out elements which were not clear, led to a variety of changes and the comments I received make up half of the quotes on the cover. And it reassured me that there was a need for the book, with 83% rating it 9 or 10 on how likely they would be to recommend it to colleagues.

Then came the debate on the cover. We got down to the choice below and I was being advised that the sun cover was childish and would put people off. I liked it, but was concerned by the reaction. I remembered how Harvey Mackay had been sure “How to swim with the sharks and not get eaten alive” was a better title than his publishers were suggesting and only persuaded them after commissioning an opinion poll to prove it. Luckily getting feedback is easier nowadays and so I put the two covers out to a public vote.

I asked my twitter followers and I asked all those who had downloaded the book from the web. The verdict was clear, over two to one in favour of the sun version. Though it also led to changes. The original was supposed to show the sun emerging from the clouds. But many found the cloud a dampener and there was debate about whether the sun was emerging or being covered up. The cloud was taken out. So the crowd not only delivered a verdict but improved the chosen version.

Interestingly it got the biggest response on Twitter I’d ever had. It is clear that people respond best when asked to help.

Some people have asked why give the book away online. Why will people buy it if they can get it for free on the web? Well one reason is that I’m as keen to spread the message as I am to sell the book. It felt great to get an email the day before the launch, from somebody who had downloaded it in Australia, saying “after reading your book I feel like people must feel when they find a new religion”.

But I’m also sure it makes commercial sense. Over half the people who chose to join the crowd funding were a result of an email sent to the 600 who had downloaded the book from the web site. And many more will buy it or recommend it. Though I guess it means there is no incentive for Kindle users to buy it, as they can sue the PDF version.

So the book is still available for free download on our web site. Though there are also details of bulk discounts in case you want to buy one for everybody in your organisation. Or you can order it from Amazon.

And I look forward to lots more inter-action with the crowd. Indeed I’m hoping the next book will be entirely based on feedback, with stories of how people put the ideas into action. Watch this space.

Happy Ltd & Action for Happiness calling for happier workplaces for all.

The evidence is clear: Happy workplaces are the most productive & successful.

Today sees a call for radical change in the way we treat people at work, as Henry Stewart, founder of Happy Ltd, and Action for Happiness launch a new Manifesto for happier workplaces. A happy, fulfilling work environment isn’t just great for staff, it also delivers huge benefits to business in terms of a more motivated workforce, improved productivity and ultimately better long-term financial performance.

“Imagine a workplace where you are energised and motivated by being in control of the work you do”, explains Henry. “Imagine you are trusted and given freedom, with support,  to decide how to achieve results. Imagine you can get the life balance you want. Imagine you are valued according to the work you do, not how many hours you spend at the desk.”

“Wouldn’t you want to work in such a place? Wouldn’t it also enable you to work at your best and be most productive?”

An increasing number of companies are finding that focus on creating a happy workplace is just about the most important thing management can do:

• A major restaurant chain found the most important factor in growth and profits was how happy staff are (and then changed manager’s bonuses to be based on this)
• Over 25 years, investing your pension in happy workplaces would get you £230,000, against £100,000 in standard stock market
• Latest opinion poll shows only 2% work simply to pay the bills. For 90% it is important to be happy at work.
• Yet over half of British employees say they are unhappy at work.

Book Launch: “The Happy Manifesto: make your organisation a great place to work – now”
Monday 21st November, 6-8pm. Cass Business School, 106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ

“A wonderful book – a gripping read and so interesting, as well as wise. It is truly inspiring”
Professor Richard Layard.

This campaign is part of a global movement for change. In the US Tony Hsieh (who sold his shoe retailer Zappos to Amazon fro close to a billion dollars) has signed up thousands to his “Delivering Happiness” approach. In Denmark Chief Happiness Officer Alex Kjerulf has influenced many workplaces. In India 80,000 strong HCL shares the philosophy of “Employees first, customers second”.

Henry Stewart is founder and CEO of training company Happy Ltd. Happy have been rated the best company in the UK for customer service (by Management Today) and one of the best 20 workplaces in the UK for the last five years (Financial Times / Great Place to Work Institute). Henry himself is a popular business speaker and is listed in the guru radar.

Action for Happiness is a movement of people and organisations taking practical action to create a happier society for everyone. Founded by Lord Richard Layard, Anthony Seldon and Geoff Mulgan, it was launched in April 2011 and already has 18,000 members who are taking positive action in their homes, workplaces and communities.

Sources of Data:

Restaurant chain, full details in the Happy Manifesto
Investing your pension
Only 2% work just to pay the bills, Bloomsbury
Over half of employees are unhappy at work: Mercer

The Happy Manifesto, my call for change in the way we work, has now been published and is available at Amazon. I’ve tried to get the message across as succinctly as possible (just 128 pages) but for those who want a quick summary, here are the 10 key points – each covered with examples and stories in the book:

1.  Trust Your People

Step out of approval. Instead pre-approve and focus on supporting your people.

2.   Make Your People Feel Good

Make this the focus of management

3.  Give Freedom within Clear Guidelines

People want to know what is expected of them. But they want freedom to find the best way to achieve their goals.

4.  Be Open and Transparent

More information means people can take responsibility and ownership.

5.  Recruit for Attitude, Train for Skill

Instead of qualifications and experience, recruit on attitude and potential ability.

6.  Celebrate Mistakes

Create a truly no-blame culture, to enable people to innovate without fear

7.  Community: Create Mutual Benefit

Have a positive impact on the world and build your organisation too

8.  Love Work, Get a Life

The world, and your job, needs you well rested, well nourished and well supported.

9.  Select Managers Who are Good at Managing

Make sure your people are supported by somebody who is good at doing that, and find other routes for those whose strengths are elsewhere. Even better, allow people to choose their managers.

10.  Play to Your Strengths

Make sure your people spend most of their time doing what they are best at.

When I first published this list I had just 9 points. But my good friend Clive Hutchinson, of Cougar Automation, complained that I had missed out the most important thing we taught them – to make sure you’ve got your people doing what they are best at. So now there are nine points. (Which also explains, in case you wonder when you read the book, why all the other points have a chapter on them but this one doesn’t!)

Find out more: Download the The Happy Manifesto for free at www.happy.co.uk/about/free-publications