There is widespread evidence that happiness in the workplace results in greater productivity and commercial success for companies. Do happier, more engaged employees provide similar benefits to organisations in the public sector and charitable organisations?
In If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?, psychological researcher and happiness coach Raj Raghunathan argues that happiness is our natural state. Several aspects of socialisation can lead us astray, but Raghunathan aims to remedy this by identifying the “seven deadly happiness sins” and resolving each of them with a corresponding habit of the highly happy. Here’s the second half of our easy-to-read distillation of the book’s key arguments – check out Part One first if you haven’t read it yet!
Working from home was often perceived by cynical bosses as a way for employees to take an unofficial day off. However, the Covid-19 pandemic saw many workers forced into home working and this displayed to employers and their staff that it was a feasible alternative. Now more workers are seeking flexible working options and bosses are no longer suspicious of remote working. In this blog, written by our Digital Marketing Assistant Dolly Osborne, we give you some tips on how to make working from home work for you.
In this talk from the 2023 Happy Workplaces Conference, Alex focuses on the key messages from his second book, Rest: Get More Done When You Work Less, which explores the hidden role of rest in the lives of exceptionally creative and prolific people.
XLOOKUP is a new feature in the latest version of Excel. It means you'll no longer need to use either VLOOKUP or Index and Match, as it's a much more powerful and accurate tool. It also allows you to use Wildcard characters such as * or ?, which means you can match parts of a string or account for misspellings. In this two minute video, Gill explains how to use XLOOKUP with an example scenario.
Try locating the word ‘workhappiness’ in the English dictionary. You won’t find it. In Danish, however, there is a word for this condition – arbejdsglaede. Woohoo inc claim to be the happiness-at-work experts. Arlette Bentzen is the Danish company’s Chief Happiness Officer, meaning there’s no one better positioned to give tips on attaining arbejdsglaede. Watch Arlette's full presentation at the 2018 Happy Workplaces Conference, in which she offers three work-happiness tips derived from some of Denmark’s most progressive workplaces.
“How many of you feel you need to be managed?” asked Alison Sturgess-Durden at the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference. Nobody raised their hand. Alison, a Director at the software company Mayden, asked why we assume that people need to be “managed” at work. A small, but growing, number of organisations are taking a different approach.
This year at Advanced Technology Services UK Limited, Derek Hill and his team have focused on increasing transparency and job ownership. This is particularly important as ATS has 185 locations across the globe, primarily in the US, Mexico and UK, and need ways to maintain and strengthen their company culture across borders. In this short video from the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Derek explains what ATS has done to increase transparency and job ownership across the business.
Sarah Metcalfe is Head of Customer Service at Sure Petcare and she knows that a happy workplace is essential for enhancing the customer experience. Sarah points to research indicating that by 2020, 90% of customers will be choosing where they do business based on the customer experience. To achieve a net promoter score of around 9 or 10, it takes a human going to great lengths. In this full length video from the 2019 Happy Workplaces Conference, Sarah explains how Sure Petcare have created an environment that allows people to bring their whole selves to work.
Fortune magazine tracked companies from the great workplaces list over 12 years, and found 3-fold outperformance over the stock market.
Managing a project effectively can be a real headache. As well as keeping track of various tasks, priorities, teams, and deadlines, you have to ensure your project is delivered on-time and on-budget too.
At Happy our aim is that staff find joy in at least 80% of their work. (And, yes, we do measure it.) So I was delighted to find that an NHS Trust, indeed the one our training centre is based within, has come to the same conclusion and sees Joy in Work as a key driver for improving quality.
I founded Happy Ltd in 1987. Of that 28 years of running this award-winning business, the last five have definitely been the hardest. Visit our website.
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?'
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