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.
Recognising your feelings is the starting point to managing your responses and using them in a way that serves you best. And that, in a nutshell, is what Emotional Intelligence (EI), is. This blog identifies 4 ways you can help boost your EI for a healthier social and professional life.
Last month I wrote a LinkedIn post suggesting that staff should decide the CEO’s salary, based on my own experience of doing just that. So far it has received 344,000 views and 505 comments. And it seems to have been controversial.
You may have seen rather gleeful headlines recently reporting that Marie Kondo has relaxed her stance on tidying up after the arrival of her third child. These days she’s focusing less on the mess and more on the joy. We love this quote from her: “My home is messy, but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me at this time at this stage of my life.” At Happy we were inspired by her idea of things sparking joy, so much so that our strapline is ‘Creating Joy at Work’. It’s something we practise, and we measure regularly, aiming for all of our staff to spend a high proportion of their time at work doing things that bring them joy.
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.