We are offering a unique blended transformational one year programme that is all about uncovering, celebrating, and nurturing your power as a female leader. This programme is about unleashing your brilliance, as well as identifying and enabling greatness in others. It will also create, and connect you to, a network of inspirational women.
Guest blogger Elinor Jansen updates us with a summary of Gallup’s latest (2015) study on the relationship between firm performance, organisational structures and employee engagement.
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.
I often ask groups where they have found the best customer service. Two companies stand out and always come up: Apple and John Lewis. And when lists are published of the UK’s most admired businesses you can be sure that John Lewis is at or near the top. So I felt greatly honoured yesterday to be speaking alongside Charlie Mayfield, Chair of John Lewis (at Tomorrow’s Company “Tomorrow’s Value” event).
Social learning has become a bit of a buzzword in the Learning and Development world nowadays. Organisations that I speak to want to know more about it and most importantly how to foster it in the workplace.
WorldBlu’s freedom at work model directly opposes fear-based work cultures. There are three crucial components to the freedom-centred approach. The first is a freedom-centred mindset. The second is freedom-centred leadership—leaders with a fear-based mindset create command and control management structures. To build freedom-centred cultures, Traci says top leadership must have high self-worth. “Self-worth is being secure with who you are,” she says. The final component is organisational design, which Traci focuses on in her talk at the 2019 Happy Workplaces conference. Watch the complete talk in this blog.
Vivek Menon is a Senior Director of Sales at Danfoss Power Solutions. He works within the eSteering Department which Vivek describes as “the Tesla of farm equipment”. He recognised the benefits of self-managing teams and, when restructuring the department in 2017, Vivek committed to this model even though every other department at Danfoss was very traditional and hierarchical. In this video, from the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference, Vivek talks to Happy’s Henry Stewart about how his team works, the benefits of a self-managing team and challenges you to see if your workforce really is empowered.
Alison Sturgess-Durden is the Director at Mayden, a software business based in Bath with a staff of 80 people. Mayden’s software is specifically created for health professionals and patients. Their most prominent achievement is the creation of a patient management system that’s favoured by most psychological therapy services in the NHS. In 2013 Mayden became a self-managing organisation, comprised of autonomous teams. In this video from the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Alison explains the reasons behind the switch, how they did it and how it works (and some of the challenges they faced along the way!).
Tom Peters is the ultimate management guru. Thinkers50, the list of the top 50 management thinkers, has rated him in the top 10 in multiple years and awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award, one of only six people to achieve the honour, in 2017. "Charismatic, passionate, and insightful, Tom virtually invented the modern thought leadership industry," explained Thinkers50 co-founder Des Dearlove. "He co-authored In Search of Excellence, which helped create the business book industry." Find out more about Tom Peters in this blog by Henry Stewart.
I was honoured to be asked by Thinkers50 to contribute a letter to their Dear CEO book, published in July 2017. Here is my contribution.
At Sky UK, they have embraced Design Thinking to tackle common HR issues. Design Thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based, human approach to problems. It aims to create multiple ideas during brainstorming, which can then be prototyped and tested in a empathetic way that people can easily understand. For Sky, in the final stage, they test people's reactions and gauge if it 'wows'. In this short video from the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Tracey Waters explains how they applied Design Thinking to the question 'how might we help people at Sky have a fulfilling career?'
We all hate tedious paperwork. Filling out transport claim documents, internal KPI tracking documentation, expenses claims… All these things can utterly drain your soul, but we do it because we must, because it’s important. But is it? Well, Michele Zanini would say no, or at the very least, not always, in this talk from the 2024 Happy Workplaces Conference.
“Happy had learners at the heart of the journey, as opposed to other training providers we’ve experienced. We felt that the learners came first all the way through, and that there was a real interest in us an organisation,” says Sarah Rose, Director of Operations at Dorset Mental Health Forum.
Henry gave a speech at WorldBlu's Freedom at Work Conference in Miami in 2015. Henry explains why you should allow your people to choose their manager.
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