The Calming, Remedial Influence of Mindfulness

Mindfulness, put simply, is an exercise in attention. It’s a practice that revolves around calming the mind through meditation.

Work Less Hours, And Get More Done!

On the one hand we learned last week that Goldman Sachs view of work/life balance was to tell their interns to leave the office at midnight and take Saturdays off, limiting the working week to a mere 102 hours. A very different approach is being taken by Gothenberg City Council, in Sweden. In a new experiment, they have asked half their care staff to work 6 hour days instead of 8 hours to see if they get as much done. There are examples out there that suggest less time can be more productive:

Vivek Menon at Danfoss: Building a Teal Bubble in a Large Company

I am often asked whether you can build happy trust-based workplaces within a larger more hierarchical organisation. So I was very interested to hear about the eSteering team at Danfoss, a 120 person unit within a 40,000 strong company. Vivek Menon, a Senior Director at the Danish company Danfoss, explained at the Teal Around the World Conference how they created a culture of trust and freedom. Vivek will be speaking at the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference.

How to be a Great Chair for Your Next Online Meeting

When people attend the Chairing Remote Meetings workshop, they often come looking for insight into the best online tools: Jamboard, Miro, Sli.do, Mentimeter, etc. We discuss them, and then we talk about the most important tool that a remote chair can use: the tennis racket.

Five Good News Stories From the Past 12 Months

It's been a tough 12 months. In 2019, the UK has had a lot of change — Brexit, a change of Prime Minister and then a general election. In winter, the UK suffered from severe flooding, and now, in spring, we are currently on lockdown due to Coronavirus (COVID-19). However, there is hope in this dark time. In this blog, Billy looks at five good news stories from the past 12 months that you may have missed.

Do You Make it Easy For Your Customers to Give Compliments?

Sitting in the reception of Central & Cecil Housing Association, one of our clients, I flicked through the information leaflets. Alongside the pamphlet on how to make a complaint was a more unusual one – a Compliments Guide. Yes, Central & Cecil had taken the trouble to create a guide to how let their people know when they’d done well.

What I Do Well + What is Useful + What I Love = Happiness at Work

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.

The link between staff happiness and engagement has been shown in countless studies to improve staff retention, improve productivity and increase profits – and it’s also been shown to dramatically increase share growth.

Being Assertive and Building Trust: Keys to Workplace Satisfaction

Your experience at work will be enhanced – in terms of performance, personal satisfaction and long term behavioural benefits – by building trust and becoming more assertive. Find out more in this blog by Billy Burgess.

Boost Your Confidence at Work With Our 6 Tips

Confidence is a multifaceted term that refers to a psychological attitude and a set of behavioural attributes. It’s commonly regarded as a compound of self-assurance and competence. Such confidence is a great asset in the workplace: the most confident, assertive people will often get their ideas over the line and bag lucrative opportunities.

The Mystery of the Humongous Excel File

My colleague sent me an interesting email today. She had tried to send one of our Excel exercise files to a trainer, only to find that the file had grown from a perfectly reasonable 108KB to 30MB!

What Would You Do If You Had More Free Time?

What would you do if you won the lottery? The amount is up to you: one million, five million, fifty million. The question, however, is not what you would spend it on (gold shoes, obviously) but what you would do with your time?

People management is a crucial role, and it is different from leadership.

10 Ideas for Taking Time at Work to Reflect

If you take 15 minutes to reflect at the end of the day, you can improve your productivity by 22.8%. That’s the conclusion of a study at Harvard Business School. Participants spent 15 minutes writing in a journal to embed their learning from the day, and produced these dramatic results.