Henry Stewart, Chief Happiness Officer and Founder of Happy Ltd., was key speaker at our Hackney Social Founders' Forum in October 2024.

Speaking to 40 social founders of all backgrounds, ages and experience, Henry faciliated a fast-paced, insightful and participatory half-day seminar, based on his 30 years of learnings and practice at Happy. What a privilege for those of us who were there.

Read Henry's blog below, and maybe you'll change your job title!

Let’s Create Happy, Productive Workplaces - a blog for founders and leaders by Henry Stewart, Chief Happiness Officer - and Founder - at Happy Ltd

At Happy one of our core principles is that “people work best when they feel good about themselves”.

I have asked many thousands of people whether they believe this is true, and well over 90% say yes.

If that is the case, what should be the key focus of leadership in an organisation? I would suggest it is creating the framework for people to feel good at work.

When I speak at conferences, I ask people whether that is the focus of leadership in their organisation and only about 1 in 50 say yes.

Yet when I get them to discuss the concept, the results are always positive. If that was the focus, they say, there would be greater retention, less absenteeism, less office politics, greater innovation and greater productivity.

The research backs this up. Harvard Business Review did a cover story on happy workplaces. They found that happy workplaces result in a 37% increase in sales, a 31% increase in productivity and a 300% increase in creativity.

People sometimes ask me what does make people happy? My answer is, ask them.

What doesn’t work is “the golden rule”, that you do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Instead there is the “platinum rule”, that you do unto others as they would want to be done to them.”

Happy Ltd. staff team

Pre approval

Let me ask you a question. Think of a time when, in work, you delivered really great results. Hopefully you’ve got a lot of these, but think of one specific example.

I’m willing to bet it was a time when you were challenged, but also when you had the trust and freedom to make your own decisions.

Let me give you an example of how to create more trust and freedom. Do you ever ask somebody to solve a problem or come up with a solution and then ask them to get approval from you?

I would ask you to stop that final approval.

Instead approve the solution before they have thought of it.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

At Happy we had a 19 year old in charge of our café. She wanted to improve it.

What we didn’t do was ask her for a proposal that we would discuss. We also didn’t get her involved in working with a committee to do it.

What we did do was agree the budget and checked she understood the values of Happy.

I saw the improved cafe for the first time when it had already been created. And I loved it.

But how do you think she felt, 3 months into her first job, walking into her café? Absolutely proud.

Some years ago, a trainer sent me an email with the 3 things we had done to make life easier for her to serve the customer. When I looked at those 3 things, I realised they hadn’t come across my desk. I didn’t know they had happened.

But when I looked again at them, I realised that I would have rejected two of them.

Because, as the original founder, I set up most things at Happy, and, like most managers, I am a barrier to change.

So I decided to make as few things as possible come across my desk.

So next was our web site. Now in the early days of our web site, I used to get very involved, I would suggest changing this and that. As a result the person in charge of the web site, never felt in charge of the web site. Have you experienced something like that?

So this time we decided to pre-approve the web site. Now pre-approval does not mean complete freedom. It means freedom within guidelines.

So we did a branding exercise, so the colours were clear. We agreed the metrics of the web site, how many people viewed it and how much income was generated. We also insisted that Jonny speak to the customers so it wasn’t just down to his ideas.

When I saw the web site, the night before it launched, I wasn’t actually that keen. I thought what was this about, and what was that about. But it was completely within the guidelines so up it went.

When we got the metrics a month or two later, views had risen threefold and income had doubled. Even without the benefit of my expertise.

Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, has a good point on this:

“At most companies, the boss is there to approve or block the decisions of employees. This is a surefire way to limit innovation and slow down growth. When the boss steps out of the role of “decision approver,” the entire business speeds up and innovation increases.”

So what can you pre-approve today?

Google did some deep research into this question. They looked at tens of thousands of performance appraisals to work out which managers enabled great performance from their teams.

They came up with 8 key behaviours and ranked them. The top 3 were:

3: Show interest in your people

2: Empower, don’t micro-manage

1: Be a good coach

So what do coaches do? I have asked lots of people this question and the most common answers are: they build confidence, they ask questions and they let you find your own solution.

This is the role of the coach, and this should also be the role of the manager. Do you have a coaching culture in your organisation?

Play to your strengths

Gallup has surveyed over a million people on the question, “do you get to do what you do best at work”. In the UK, the answer is very low, just 17%, one in six. Yet where people do get to do what they are best at, Gallup reckons they are 30-40% more productive.

So, at Happy, we recruit to a job description. But then we throw it away and work out what their actual talents are. Often in our admin teams they will get together every six months and put their current roles on a post-it on the wall. And then they will work out which roles they want to do in the future, based on their strengths.

At Happy, we seek to have our people have joy in 80% of their work. And we measure it. Originally it was 74%, but now it is 86%. For this we look to Daniel Pink in his book Drive, where he talks about mastery, autonomy and purpose.

We like to think we have a clear purpose, and we have a clear sense of autonomy. But the move from 74% to 86% has been very much about people doing what they are best at.

Managers who don’t manage

I talked recently to a client who said when she started her job, her manager came to her and said, “I’m not very good with people. I probably won’t remember your name. I would much rather be at my desk writing reports.”

Some people’s strengths are often not about managing people. Have you noticed? That manager should never be involved in managing people. They should indeed be writing reports and, if they are good at that, they should be paid well for it.

We had a client called Cougar, a software development company, whose project managers went on our management programmes. At the end they went up to our facilitator and said they didn’t really want to manage people.

So they went back to the organisation and decided to set up two sets of promotion, one for managing people and one to be great coders. Indeed they set up a system so coders could be yellow belt or brown belt or black belt. To be a black belt coder was the ultimate and something software developers definitely wanted to achieve.

Do you have managers who not great at managing people? Could you set up two tracks of promotion?

Celebrate mistakes

There is a company called Huntsman in Middlesborough, where they used to have a red button on the wall which – if pressed – would discharge the company’s chemicals into the local river.

One day a scaffolder came along and - you guessed it – pressed the red button. His scaffolding company responded by sacking him.

But Huntsman said no, don’t sack him, send him back to work for us and they had a tea party to thank him.

Why? Well, nobody saw him press the button, he could have easily scarpered. Instead he went into the control room, said I’ve pressed this button. As a result they could solve it in 20 minutes instead of a possible 24 hours, there was little discharge into the river, and no fine.

Why did they hold the tea party? So they could tell everybody that this is a “no blame” culture.

The problem is normally the cover up, not the mistake. If somebody comes to me with a mistake they have made with our biggest customer, then if it is straight away I can usually fix it, but if in a month’s time it could be less likely.

I know one of the things that staff at Happy appreciate is that if they do something risky or difficult and it all goes wrong, we will celebrate it.

Carry out these ideas and I believe you will enable a happy, productive workplace.

Thanks for reading my blog, and below is our Happy Manifesto.

Henry Stewart, Chief Happiness Officer - and Founder, Happy Ltd.

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