Here you can find all of Happy’s blog posts, covering our Excel hints and tips, ideas for creating happy workplaces, and ways to be more productive at work — and more.
It can feel as though these days everything is a project and everyone is a project manager. And that represents a significant shift in organisational thinking from only a few years ago. And everyone seems to have heard horror stories about bad experiences with projects (and project managers). But what makes something a project, rather than just a complex piece of work? And what can we do to give ourselves a better chance of success?
Is your organisation one where people can move quickly and get new ideas out there, or is it stymied in levels of approval and hierarchy? In this blog, Henry talks about some of the various approaches of several well-known companies, as well as Happy's own policy towards this.
Let’s stop asking for degrees in recruitment. Santander recently announced that they would remove the requirement for a 2:1 degree from its graduate scheme, and is apparently the only bank to allow graduates with a third-class degree. I would go beyond that and ask why degrees are necessary at all. Maybe graduate schemes should be changed to simply employ the brightest and the best, whether or not they have a degree.
Most people are so busy going from meeting to meeting, with one meeting spilling over into the next. No time to plan meetings, no time to reflect on what might work better — just getting through the day. But there is one thing that brilliant leaders do all the time. In this blog, Dr Carrie Goucher shares this one ridiculously simple thing you can do that will improve all of your meetings.
I’m now back from my sabbatical and, while I was away, our people at Happy decided to make the four-day week (currently a six-month pilot) permanent. It has been a remarkable success. In this blog I talk about the key results of the survey that informed the decision to go permanent.
The Happy Manifesto Podcast, based on the principles in the award-winning management book The Happy Manifesto, will be launching on 12th January 2023. The aim of the podcast is to help people to create happy, productive workplaces. The podcast will be hosted by Henry Stewart, the author of The Happy Manifesto and CEO of Happy, and Maureen Egbe, Senior Facilitator and Confidence Activator at Happy.
When I read Maverick in 1992, it transformed what was then Happy Computers. I went from being a micro-managing boss, who rang every day from holiday to check things were going ok, to – eventually – a fully trust-based environment. For me it is the best business book ever written. I have given copies to many of the staff at Happy and I have given over 500 copies away to others. So, on my sabbatical I decided to re-read it, on its 30th anniversary.
Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based subscription service that has evolved over the years and soon the Microsoft Office Apps found on the Web and Desktop (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) will fall completely under the Microsoft 365 umbrella.
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.
Do you need to compare information in different lists? For example, you may need to find out which values exist in two lists and highlight differences. There are several ways to compare two sheets or even workbooks in Excel. You can use functions like EXACT, IF, Lookup or Conditional Formatting to compare lists of data. In this blog, Happy's trainers Sal and Ebe will use Conditional Formatting to highlight values in one list that do not appear in another list.