happy blogs

How Microsoft Teams Keeps Improving Our Remote Working Experience

Before spring 2020, many of us may not have heard of Microsoft Teams — but it's now become a household name. With Teams, you can keep your files, conversations and video meetings all in one place, making remote working so much simpler. Microsoft has been adding new features to the application throughout the course of the year in order to make the software more immersive, flexible and convenient. In this blog, Billy highlights a range of Teams’ latest innovations, which are designed to both enhance user experience and improve productivity in our 'new normal'.

Career Opportunity: Management Apprenticeship, Associate Facilitator at Happy

Happy is looking for facilitators to deliver our Level 3 and Level 5 Development Programmes for Managers. As part of your role, you will facilitate training, carry out progress reviews with learners and their line managers, mark assignments and support learners through their end-point-assessments. Closing date: midnight on Monday 1st February 2021

Let’s Give Everybody an Equal Voice

Imagine at your events if everybody got to speak equally. Imagine the most senior people did not get to dominate the discussion. Imagine the loudest voices weren’t the ones who carried the decisions. In this blog, Henry Stewart goes through nine Liberating Structures, which make it so everybody has an equal voice.

Happy's January competition is back with another set of fantastic prizes. For a chance to win, tell us what challenge you overcame in 2020 and how you met it — or how you will meet it in 2021, if you didn't in 2020. Our top prize includes a free place on any of our one or two day courses, the Happy Planner / Learning Journal, one year's access to our Happy Video Library, and more! Closing date: midnight GMT on 31st January 2021. Winner will be announced on 3rd February 2021.

How to create truly engaging online conferences

Have you, like me, been to a number of online events where you just have to sit and listen while the speakers talk? There may be people that feel they learn well from this approach, but I honestly doubt it. You would probably be better off listening to some TED Talks. In this blog, Happy’s CHO Henry Stewart provides a step-by-step account of how to create a truly engaging online conference.

Let's get rid of annual appraisals and replace them with 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.

The curious case of Teams and unconscious competence

While those of us who have been working on computers for years could adapt to MS Teams with very little difficulty, we shouldn't neglect our colleagues whose roles previously required little or no IT knowledge.  In this blog, Darren looks at how a simple application like Teams is not always so simply explained to newcomers.

Level 3 Business Administrator Apprenticeship Scheme

Earlier this year we received the Silver award in the Apprenticeship Programme of the Year for our Web Development Apprenticeship scheme and have successfully been running our Leadership programmes for several years — so we are excited to now be gauging interest for the Level 3 Business Administrator Apprenticeship scheme.

Overcoming the Fear to Lead

Kill Your Fear With Servant Leadership: How a 1970s essay can help you do this and become happier too.  Servant Leadership is an approach very close to what we at Happy believe to be the role of leaders in an organisation. Here is a guest blog from leadership consultant Alex Holland on the subject.

If you are creating a Mail Merge, make sure that the first and last names are in different columns in your Excel spreadsheet using this handy tip.