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.
In this three-minute clip from the 2017 Happy Workplaces CEO Conference, Dom Monkhouse explains why organisations being specific with their values is so essential and why not doing so means the organisation will just end up being beige.
Across a 25 year career in social work, Isabelle Trowler has consistently railed against a raft of imposed procedures and rules. In this four-minute clip from the 2017 Creating Happy Workplaces in the Public Sector Conference, Isabelle explains what happened when she started to delegate the decision-making as close to the frontline as possible.
The culture is all around you in the Government Delivery Service office, says Alex Segrove, and the organisation understands the importance of internal communication. In this three minute clip from the 2017 Creating Happy Workplaces in the Public Sector Conference, Alex outlines how GDS has established an agile workplace that's highly responsive to the user, based on principles of trust and freedom
The focus of Donna Reeves’ work is internal communication and engagement challenges. Although currently head of engagement at Fenwick, Donna previously worked at British multinational retailing company, Kingfisher, directing internal communication and engagement development. Donna refers back to her time at Kingfisher in her talk at the 2018 Happy Workplaces conference. In this two-minute excerpt, Donna reflects on an expression that she used with the managers: "calm the fish." Just like an underwater photographer has to move in a way that doesn't scare the fish, when a manager enters a room, they shouldn't cause anxiety or stress for their team.
When Laurence Vanhee joined Belgium's Ministry of Social Security, the department was struggling to recruit Belgian citizens to the civil service and simultaneously losing 40% of staff to retirement. Social Security is essential, especially in a country comprising two very distinct groups, so Laurence and her colleagues set out to change the laws in order to gain more flexibility, attract newbies and retain people. In this two minute clip from the 2018 Happy Workplaces Conference, Laurence outlines how the Ministry circumvented traditional HR practices to focus on what staff did well, what was useful to the organisation and what they love to do.
Keeping 85,000 people happy at work is an imposing task. After experimenting with how to make people happy for 100 years, John Lewis has learnt that not everyone finds happiness in the same places. Sarah Gillard is the Director, Insight and Assurance within the Personnel function at the employee-owned John Lewis Partnership. In this two-minute video from the 2018 Happy Workplaces conference, Sarah offers three tips derived from the company’s decades of experimentation.
Dr Jill Armstrong’s Collaborating With Men project aims to tackle everyday sexism in the workplace and lay the foundation for a more gender inclusive workplace. She believes men and women need to be working together more often if we’re ever going to see gender equality in the workplace. In this 90-second video from the 2018 Happy Workplaces Conference, Jill offers some ideas for getting men and women to form more relaxed social interactions in the workplace.
Burnout is a real issue in the creative media industry. To help prevent this, Nikki Gatenby introduced well-being check-ins. Nikki is the co-owner and managing director of Propellernet, a digital marketing agency that's been named as one of the top 10 Best Places to Work in the UK for six years running. In this two-minute video from the 2018 Happy Workplaces Conference, Nikki shares the four questions she uses to prevent burnout – are you taking your holiday? Are you taking your Propel days (their day a month to innovate)? Are you working with our resident coach? And do you know about our health plan?
After 16 years of working in HR, Sophie Bryan has found that appraisals are often used to keep evidence in case things go wrong, rather than to really improve staff performance and develop them as a person. In this two-minute video from the 2018 Happy Workplaces Conference, Sophie asks, "what would happen if your focus was to give feedback to your team in real time, and dig deeper with your questions – or if you scrapped the appraisals process altogether?
Many leaders and managers will continually delegate tasks to the person they know will get it right every time, or else give things to a new recruit who’s full of beans and eager to please. But Happy's Cathy Busani knows this practice is flawed and has instead started delegating to the team and allowing them to decide who does what. In this two-minute video from the 2018 Happy Workplaces Conference, Cathy explains how to delegate tasks successfully.