Happy@Work

This Blog Has Moved!

2011-02-08T08:32:00.000-08:00

This will be the last entry at this URL, as my blog has moved to the new Happy web site. Check out the new design and I hope you will continue to follow me there.

Click through here for Henry's blog

Happy Computers is 20!

2011-01-31T01:23:00.000-08:00

The origins of Happy date back to 1987, when I first registered the company and started provided training to friends and contacts. However 4th February 1991, twenty years ago this week, was the date on which Happy Computers established its first training centre in Wicklow Street, near Kings Cross. It had just one training room and the only staff were me and Tina, a part-time administrator. From there we grew steadily to our current training centre, with 14 training rooms and 20,000 people trained last year.

At the time WordPerfect 5.1 was the latest word processing software, taking over from Wordstar and Multimate. Windows 3 had only just being released and Word for Windows had barely been heard of. Supercalc and Lotus were the spread-sheets of choice, and were a bit basic. I remember how, to print in landscape, you ahd to teach people how to enter a 12 digit code. The idea of the world wide web was still being worked on by Tim Berners Lee at CERN. And I remember investing £1,300 per machine to get 16 MB of hard disk space and a whopping 4MB of RAM in the PCs.

A lot has changed since then. The technology is miles ahead, the software is much easier to use and the web has changed just about everything. We now train online, and deliver webinars as well as our core class room training. But the core principles on which Happy Computers was founded, of involvement and making learning about computers fun – and having a positive effect on society, remain in place. And we are very proud of our record of 20 years as an independent training company.

Any other memories of the early days of IT training welcome. Do post a comment.

It Is Good to Pay Tax

2011-01-07T03:18:00.000-08:00

There have a been series of demonstrations, organised by UK Uncut and others, against companies who have been avoiding paying their tax. I say good luck to those protestors. How about forming a group of companies committed to paying their tax, to put extra pressure on those multi-nationals seeking to avoid it?

But I'm having difficulty finding companies to join! I asked our accountants if any of their clients were happy to pay their tax in full. He thought for a moment, casting his mind over hundreds of companies, and said "maybe one". I wrote before of finding, when looking for a new auditor, that the focus of nearly every auditor we met was how to help me avoid paying tax.

Where is our sense of social responsibility? We expect to get the benefits of public spending. We expect our workforce to be educated, we expect health care for when we or they are ill, we expect to be protected against crime, we expect good transport and infrastructure.

I don't want to seem holier than thou. To be honest, we haven't made a lot of profit in the two years of recession. But when we did well in the previous years, it seemed only appropriate to pay our fair share.

So next time you hear a representative of a company, whether large or small, talking about corporate social responsibility and their contribution to society, ask them a simple question: Is their company committed to paying their full UK tax bill?

Why Economies of Scale Lead to Poor Service

2010-11-26T06:11:00.001-08:00

As the government embarks on programmes of shared services, let me give an example of why this approach can be disastrous. At the local school where I am Chair of Governors we have just gone through BSF (Building Schools for the Future). We were promised the economies of scale would result in better service and lower prices. In fact they have led to the reverse.

Lessons of BSF
Let's take the example of IT support. Before BSF we had a team of four staff, who had taken the school to a leading position in the use of IT in education. They were directly managed by the school and any problems could be dealt with directly.

Now we have an external firm managing it. But we don't have a direct contract with them. They have a contract with the lead contractor. The lead contractor has a contract with the Local Education Partnership (LEP). The LEP has a contract with the local council. And the local council has a contract with the school.

In the first year the service was terrible, so bad that penalty payments sometimes exceeded 50% of contract value. Previously we could have dealt with this through performance management. If we had simply employed an IT support firm, with a sensible contract, we could have simply terminated and found another provider. But a distance of four complex contracts and a first contract break point of five years, there was very little we could do. Economies of scale had resulted not in better service but in a complex, costly service over which we had little power as customer.

Now BSF is well known for its costly, centralised legalistic approach. Anybody involved will tell you how it wasted billions of public money. But the shared services approach is set to follow a similar route.

Shared Services in Training
Take my business of training. In most of our contracts we have a direct relationship with clients. If they are not happy they can simply choose somebody else (though this rarely, if ever, happens). Under shared services, the client will have a contract with the service purchaser, who will have a contract with the main contractor, who will have a contract with the training provider. And it will be a long-term contract, to justify the complexity of the procurement.

Rather than getting economies of scale, we can expect to get complex contract relationships (which raise costs) and only indirect control over quality. Once again the lawyers will do very well, but the government clients probably won't.

Why Economies of Scale Can Lead to Higher Prices

2010-11-24T02:27:00.001-08:00

Once again we have a government talking about saving money through shared services and combined procurement. It seems to make sense. If you buy 100, say, televisions you would expect to be able to negotiate a better price than if you only bought one. The same must be true for when the government buys services, mustn't it?

Actually the answer is often no. Let's look at my industry, training delivery. Parts of central government are now talking about combining all their training spend - for IT, management, health and safety and much more - across many departments. To bid you will have to be a truly massive company, the likes of Capita or Serco - and they certainly won't be as cheap as buying direct from a training provider. And control of quality will be fair more indirect.

For a government agency in, say Exeter, the best value training would probably be sourced from the local college or a small local provider. But neither of these will bid for a national contract. By making the contract so large, the competition is cut down to a small number of big companies who are rarely either best for value or best for quality.

Small Companies Can Provide Better Value and More Flexibility
One agency I know, after a full procurement some years ago, hired a one person company to provide their IT training. They provided the best value, most flexible, most responsive service I have come across anywhere outside of my company. (I know about it because Happy Computers was the back-up provider, for any courses he couldn't train.) But he certainly couldn't bid for any national contract and the large providers would have little reason to include him.

At the same time as going for larger procurement contracts, the government talks of including more small businesses - apparently unaware of the obvious contradiction. I've heard government representatives talk of how small businesses can be included as sub-contractors to the big bidders.

But this is a profoundly stupid approach. The benefit of contracting with small firms is better value and greater flexibility. You lose both by only contracting these companies as part of large contracts.

If the government goes ahead with its determination to centralise procurement you can expect some very complex legal contracts (yes, the one set of people who will definitely benefit are the lawyers), less direct contact with the providers and a far more bureaucratic approach. What you almost certainly won't get is lower cost.

The Happy Manifesto: 9 Steps to a Great Workplace

2010-11-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

The latest draft (beta 1.6) of the Happy Manifesto can be downloaded from here. Here is the manifesto, the key 9 points:

1. Trust Your People
Step out of approval. Instead pre-approve and focus on supporting your people.

2. Make Your People Feel Good
Make this the focus of management

3. Give Freedom within Clear Guidelines
People want to know what is expected of them. But they want freedom to find the best way to achieve their goals..

4. Be Open and Transparent
More information means more people can take responsibility

5. Recruit for Attitude, Train for Skill

6. Celebrate Mistakes
Create a truly no-blame culture

7. Community: Create Mutual Benefit
Have a positive impact on the world and build your organisation too

8. Love Work, Get a Life
The world, and your job, needs you well rested, well nourished and well supported.

9. Select Managers Who are Good at Managing
Make sure your people are supported by somebody who is good at doing that, and find other routes for those whose strengths are elsewhere. Even better, allow people to choose their managers.

Thoughts, comments, feedback, additional suggestions welcome.

Is the Government Serious About Supporting Small Business?

2010-11-03T07:52:00.001-07:00

I'm not a great fan of the coalition government but it was great to hear David Cameron talking about the role of small business. Personally I have always thought the complaints about red tape were so much hot air but he is spot on when he talks about "the shocking way in which small and medium sized firms are locked out of procurement opportunities by central and local government".

This makes sense. Small businesses can often provider more flexibility, better value and a more local approach.

But does Cameron mean it? Since June the only trend I have seen is to larger contracts aimed at the largest suppliers. I have just written to Cameron to ask if he will reverse the move of the Skills Funding Agency to minimum contract values for apprenticeships. From 2012 they say they will only sign annual contracts of £1 million or more. Clearly they have no wish to work with small business.

Here's my letter. I will post any reply I receive:

David Cameron
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA
3rd November 2010

Dear Mr Cameron

As a small business owner can I say how delighted I was to see your statements this week on supporting small business, especially in giving us a fair chance in government procurement. As a training business that provides extensive services to government, I hugely welcome your proposals.

Let me make you aware of one place where the government has, since June, introduced changes that appear to be designed to prevent a government agency contracting directly with small businesses. I write in the hope that you will be able to stop it

The Skills Funding Agency is introducing new minimum annual contract values for delivery of apprenticeships. Last year Happy Computers, as a small business, had a contract for £170,000 which enables us to deliver excellent training and certification to around 75 apprenticeships. This year a minimum contract value of £250,000 has been introduced. Next year this is to be raised to £500,000 and, we are told, the year after it will become £1 million.

At the moment a small local business may be the best provider to meet the needs of the local community and may only have demand for around 20 apprenticeships. In the future small businesses like this, and like ourselves, will not be allowed to contract directly with the Skills Funding Agency.

Instead small businesses will have to sub-contract through larger training providers. This will introduce an extra layer, mean more non-delivery work and will mean a % top sliced away.

This would only make sense if the government believed the way to improve services was to use only large organisations. It makes no sense for a government committed to small businesses, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Yours

Henry Stewart
Chief Executive
Happy Ltd

Assess Learning not Teaching

2010-09-28T07:36:00.000-07:00

This morning I took part in a trial Ofsted at the secondary school where I am a governor. The inspector commented that, in assessing teachers, the focus needed to be more on learning than teaching.

I like that approach. Changing the focus from whether the teacher has carried out the 15 different tasks on the checklist, to the quality of the learning that is taking place has the potential to transform the classroom.

Learner Focused Training
It is similar to the change that Happy Computers went through around 8 years ago. Challenged by the Institute of IT Training on whether we were focused more on course objectives or personal objectives, we developed a new approach. We called it Learner Focused Training.

Most trainers go into the classroom focused on the set objectives to be achieved and the material to be covered. Instead be guided by these objectives but flexible to the needs of the individuals. Always remember that your role is to help your learners be more effective in their job, which is much more important than what material has been covered.

A Change in Direction
So stop assessing what the teacher or trainer is doing. And instead assess the learning that they are enabling. Look more at what the students are doing than what the teacher is. I look forward to the effect this change in approach could have.

Five Steps to Great Service

2010-09-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

I've just been brainstorming with a colleague who is teaching a 50 minute Active Listening course tomorrow. It brought to mind a great story from "Influencer" by Kerry Patterson et al - a book I strongly recommend. It is about a regional hospital in the US where feedback was that families didn't feel treated with care, dignity and respect.

The core message of Influencer is to find "positive deviance". This is to identify where people are successful, identify what are their key behaviours and copy them. In this case they identified 5 specific actions:

1 Smile
2 Establish eye contact
3 Identify yourself
4 Let people know what you are doing and why
5 End every interaction by asking "is there anything else that you need?"

None of this is rocket science and none of it is about medical expertise. They are simple behaviours that make people's experience better. But relentlessly pursuing them resulted in dramatic improvements in customer feedback and the centre becoming best-in-class among its peers within a year of the new focus.

What simple steps can you and your people take to ensure your customers feel appreciated?

Employees First, Customers Second

2010-08-02T03:59:00.000-07:00

That is the core philosophy of HCL Technologies and the title of the new book by its CEO, Vineet Nayar. It is a title very similar to one of the key books that influenced Happy Ltd from its earliest days: The Customer Comes Second by Hal Rosenbluth.

HCL is one of the leading Indian IT out-sourcing companies and employs 55,000 people. He took over as CEO in 2005, when he felt HCL was slipping - only growing at 30% a year! He used the philosophy of Employees First, Customers Second (EFCS) to radically change the culture, empower the staff and deliberately reduce the power of managers and of himself. Some examples:

Transparency: HCL introduced full transparancy of the performance of every unit in the company. Seeing their benchmarks, and being able to compare their performance with others, increased shared learning and provided powerful incentives to improve.

Internal Service Tickets: Most IT support companies have external service desks, with tickets and response times. HCL introduced this for all internal services, like HR or finance. The effect was to reduce the involvement of managers (who'd previously been called on to get another dept to respond) and improve response. especially when the target became not quick response times but reduced tickets.

Beyond 360 Degree Evaluation: Most big companies now get managers to be evaluated by peers and by some of those they manage. HCL's innovation was to open this up, so you could evaluate anybody in the company that you came into contact with. As well as the widespread feedback, the unexpected result was that managers began to be judged by how responses they received. It became a measure of their circle of influence.

Sharing CEO Problems: I love this idea. Vineet decided to create a portal to share the problems he was having difficulty solving as CEO and the challenges he saw for the company. He involved the whole company in understanding his role, the big picture and in coming up with solutions.

Employee Passion: HCL decided to survey not just employee satisfaction (for which the company was ranked no. 1 in India in 2009) but also their passion, and to share the results. People got to think about what drove them to act passionately and how they could best leveredge this at work.

Employee First Councils: To get people to embed their passion, Employee First Councils were created. Initially on subjects like health and hygiene, art etc but were extended to core work areas. Now there are 2,500 Councils - each with elected leaders driving forward change throughout the company and, as Vineet explains, pushing control away from the office of the CEO and the conventional hierarchy.

Customer-Employee Value portal: This portal is for employees to put forward ideas, which custoemrs then read and feedback on - leading directly to improved ideas and improved service.

Make all manager plans public: Previously the 300 most senior managers had prepared their plans for the next level up. Instead HCL published them all to all staff in the MyBlueprint portal, so they could see and compare them. As well as increasing transparency, Vineet comments that it led to much more work being put into getting the plans right.

Thriving in Difficult Times: Faced with the challenge of the 2008, and seeking to avoid wholesale layoffs, HCL reached out and asked its people how they should respond. From the massive response, the HCL management drew up 15 initiatives which were to result in "huge" cost savings and enabled the company to continue to grow. When Vineet asked their customers why they thought this had happened, they responded: "Your employees made the magic happen".

And it was the Employees First, Customers Second philosophy that made this possible. Indeed one impressive aspect of the story is the way the philosophy is shared with customers - explainign to them why HCL puts its philosophy first. Rather than putting off customers, it has actually led to many adopting some of the same ideas.

When I tell the Happy story, people often ask if the ideas of trust and freedom for staff would work in a large company. HCL is another example of how these kind of ideas work brilliantly in the largest of enterprises.

Why Presentations Must be Inter-Active

2010-08-02T03:54:00.001-07:00

I liked this from Seth Godin's Tribes:

People don't believe what you tell them
They rarely believe what you show them
They often believe what their friends tell them
They always believe what they tell themselves

For Seth this means that leaders must give people stories, that tehir people can tell themselves, rather than directions. True but also it emphasises that any presentation must include involvement. The more you get the chance to talk (and tell yourselves) or discuss, and have your friends and colleagues tell you, the more chance there is of affecting attitudes and beliefs.

Anybody who just stands at the front and tells people things (even with nice graphics) is not going to have much effect on beliefs and attitudes.

Download Free Book: The Happy Manifesto

2010-06-24T00:58:00.001-07:00

The second Happy book is almost finished. The first book, Relax, was a business fable about how to create a great workplace. It got some great reviews. The Happy Manifesto is based on the real experience of Happy and many other organisations.

The aim is to enable you to pick up ideas and approaches that you can put into practice to make your workplace great. Now.

Download The Happy Manifesto, free

This is a beta version. I want your feedback. I want to know what you like and where you think it could be improved. But, above all, I'd love to have stories from your workplace that illustrate any of the points in the book.

So please download it now. Read it. And send me your comments and suggestions.

To download a copy of the first book, Relax, click here.

"Everyone is a Winner" is the Way Forward for Business

2010-04-08T05:12:00.000-07:00

Schools in the UK are often criticised for seeking to reward and praise all students. The common criticism is that there shold be winners and losers, and that only a few exceptional students should be rewarded.

Now research reported this week by Fortune magazine reveals that the "Everyone is a Winner" approach is the one that works best in business. Boston-based Globoforce found that widely spread rewards work much better than rewarding only the very top performers.

And the remarkable thing is that rewards so not have to be huge to be effective. The average prize, they suggest, should be just $110 (£72). Small rewards given often, ideally reaching 80-90% of staff over the year, are what gets the best results.

I love findings like this, that show once again that treating all people well is the way to create the most effective companies. And that the big bonus culture of the banks and financial sector does not really make sense.

Most Admired Company in the UK?

2010-03-10T01:19:00.000-08:00

Fortune magazine reveals that the two most admired companies in the US are Apple and Google. Both are innovative and inspirational businesses, with great workplaces and great products.

But the most admired company in the UK, chosen from a survey of executives, directors and analysts, is apparently none other than British American Tobacco (BAT). I couldn't believe that when I first read it. The most admired company in the UK in the corporate world is a business whose products create addiction and kill its customers.

The choice was limited to large businesses but even then there are many UK businesses doing great things: Waitrose and the John Lewis Partnership; Marks and Spencers; Co-operative Bank would all be on my list.

Now BAT has tried to clean up its image. But doing odd bits for the community or the environment cannot make up for the deadly effect of its cigarettes - and the fact it continues to seek to increase sales of and addiction to that product, especially in the third world.

Around twelve years ago, when British American Tobacco was first trying to improve its image, it approached one of the big 5 UK consultancies about employing them to help BAT with its corporate social responsibility. That consultancy responded that it would be delighted to help, provided BAT dropped its main product. They of course weren't prepared to do that and the consultancy, to its eternal credit, showed them the door. If only the whole of the corporate world, and the social responsibility movement, had the same attitude.

Let People Choose their Managers

2010-02-15T00:39:00.000-08:00

The role of managers is to help people perform at their best. Their job is to support, coach and challenge. We all know from personal experience that some managers are great at this, and that others aren't.

Bad management undermines morale, creates stress, reduces productivity and causes companies to lose some of their best people. A massive problem but there is a simple solution: Let people choose their managers. If they don't like the one they've got now, let them decide who they want instead.

Check out some of the research: There is the recent study from CMI that found that 47% of respondents left their last role because they were badly managed. There is the recent US survey that found that employees spend 19 hours a week (13 at work, 6 at home) worrying about "what a boss says or does". And there is the CIPD Employee Outlook report that found employee satisfaction in the UK at an all time low.

People see their manager as very important to them. The CMI study found that 49% would be prepared to take a pay cut if it meant working with a better manager.

Choose Your Manager
At some of the best companies to work for, that simply isn't necessary. At Gore (makers of Gore-Tex) staff (or partners as they call themselves) can choose their manager from anybody in the company. At my company, Happy, you can choose your 'co-ordinator' and change them if you would prefer somebody else.

When, at a recent awards ceremony, the host mentioned that at Happy people chose their managers the audience interrupted into a spontaneous round of applause. People know it makes sense. People can see that it would make their lives better, and more productive, if they could choose the right manager for them.

To put this into practice, there may need to be some changes in organisation. Most managers play a dual role. On the one hand they are responsible for strategy and decision-making. On the other they provide the support and challenge to people. Split those two roles (because they need very different skill-sets) and it becomes possible to let people choose their manager.

Please don't read this and forget it. Spread the idea. Let's end the archaic idea that the company knows what's best for you and should decide who manages you. Let people decide for themselves.

Watch this space. I will be blogging with more ideas, more explanations and more examples of this in practice.

Promise less than you can deliver

2010-02-14T00:34:00.001-08:00

I was reminded of this important principle as my son was taken into surgery to have his appendix removed this week. I noticed a woman getting annoyed with the hospital staff and chatted to her about what was wrong. She had been told her husband's operaton would only take 30 minutes and it had been 90 minutes now. She was very worried.

We've had four surgeries in our family in the last three years. All have gone well but, in each case, it has been a lot longer than we were told before the person returns from the operation. Every time we've worried that something has gone wrong.

I think two things are happening. First, we are given a best case estimate because the surgeon wants to reassure us now. Second we are given the time from the surgeon's perspective, not that of the customer - we have to wait for the patient to come round from the anaesthetic before we see them.

Make them feel good after the service, not now
We are all tempted to do it: "It will only take 5 minutes", "We will have the report with you by the end of the day". But reassurance now leads to frustration later, if we can't deliver on it. It is always best to under-promise.

If you are in an aeroplane waiting to take off and the pilot tells you it will be a 45 minutes wait, but it turns out to be 35 minutes - you feel pleased, and you feel the pilot has delivered on his promise. But if she says 15 minutes and it turns out to be 25, you feel frustrated and let down.

I changed the local taxi firm we used when I found one that would actually you how long the taxi would be, instead of always saying "Its just round the corner". And I again remind myself to do the same, to make a promise I can take a delight in beating.

My son is doing fine by the way, touch wood (though he was late, of course, back from the operation). And the Royal London (an NHS hospital in East London) is just marvellous - friendly, helpful, responsive, informed.

Recent Press on Happy

2010-02-12T10:28:00.001-08:00

The word about our workplace is spreading. Here's some recent articles and blogs:

Forster & Kreuz: Das Geheimnis erfolgriecher Firmen
No idea what this one says. The google translation is weird!

Independent: Even poets have been cited
Roger Trapp was the first journalist to write about Happy, back in 1996

Thinkers 50 Video: Henry Stewart Interview
My best attempt at capturing our beliefs in 15 minutes.

Calcalist Israel: On transparent salaries
Google translate gives a good sense of thsi one, if your Hebrew isn't strong!

Indian Economic Times: Management's motive should be to nurture people
A piece by me on what management can be like if it was people-focused.

MIT Sloan Management Review: What is your management model?
Interesting piece on Happy and others.

Forbes India: Virgin would never hire Branson
Actually my quote says the opposite of the title but never mind.

Enjoy! Thoughts welcome

Henry

The Servant Leadership Approach

2010-02-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

At Happy we've worked a lot with the UK Greenleaf Centre for Servant Leadership. The idea of the leader as one who serves others provides a great perspective. This story (moast recently posted by Phil Johnson in LinkedIn) is a great leadership tale:

A legend tells of a French monastery known throughout Europe for the extraordinary leadership of a man known only as Brother Leo. Several monks began a pilgrimage to visit Brother Leo to learn from him. Almost immediately, they began to bicker about who should do various chores.

On the third day they met another monk going to the monastery, and he joined them. This monk never complained or shirked a duty, and whenever the others would fight over a chore, he would gracefully volunteer and do it himself. By the last day, the others were following his example, and from then on they worked together smoothly.

When they reached the monastery and asked to see Brother Leo, the man who greeted them laughed. "But our brother is among you!" And he pointed to the fellow who had joined them.

Today, many people seek leadership positions, not so much for what they can do for others but for what the position can do for them: status, connections, perks, advantages. They do service as an investment, a way to build an impressive resume.

The parable about Brother Leo teaches another model of leadership, where leaders are preoccupied with serving rather than being followed, with giving rather than getting, with doing rather than demanding. Leadership based on example, not command. This is called servant leadership.

Can you imagine how much better things would be if more politicians, educators, and business executives saw themselves as servant leaders?

Science says Don't Give Bonuses to Bankers

2010-01-29T02:31:00.000-08:00

Just back from Daniel Pink, who was speaking at the Wired breakfast at RIBA this morning about his new book Drive. The key message is that short-term financial rewards, like the banker bonuses, do not produce great performance.

The science on this is clear, he explained. The carrot and stick approach may have worked in 1850s management: As Dan Ariely explains in the March 2010 issue of Wired UK, "Bonuses can boost activity, but not the quality of the work."

One example is the candle experiment. People are given a candle, matches and a box full of tacks and are asked to fix the candle to the wall. The secret is to empty the box, pin it to the wall and put the candle in the box. This became interesting when experimenters offered rewards of 5% for being in the fastest 25% and $20 for being the best.

Those in the incentivised group took, on average, 3.5 minutes longer to solve the problem. The reward actually increased their 'functional fixedness' and got in the way of creative approaches.

Pink explained that studies of companies show that cultures based on high short-term bonuses result in poor long-term performance. Instead companies need to build intrinsic motivation based on:

Autonomy - Search for Mastery - Purpose

Contrast Microsoft's failure with its Encarta encyclopedia (Encarta is now just a dictionary and thesaurus) with the success of Wikipedia. Microsoft paid its contributors well and hired managers to ensure delivery on time. But it is Wikipedia, with its editors contributing for free on topics they are passionate about, that has become the encyclopedia of our age.

This is true of Open Source generally and the success of Linux, Apache and more. Pink emphasised the importance of feedback. Many of the programmers who get involved in these projects probably only get feedback once a year or so in their main jobs, at their annual appraisal. But in the Open Source world they get regular feedback and can build a real reputation purely on the quality of their work.

"Motivation is not something you can do to somebody else", explained Dan. The message is that to get the best results -instead of bonuses - give people control over the work, a sense of purpose and a chance to learn and develop. Could be straight out of the Happy Manifesto.

Great Workplaces lead to Commercial Success: The Evidence

2010-01-21T16:05:00.000-08:00

I've been asked to write a piece for the Journal of Direct Marketing on whether there is evidence of there being a link between having a great workplace and growth and profits. This is some of what I found:

Research into the companies that appear in the best workplaces indicates there really is a close link between a great work environment and commercial success. An investment in April 2001 of £100 in the 23 publicly quoted companies in the 2006 UK rankings would have been worth £166 by 2006, compared with £132 invested in the FTSE All Share Cumulative or £125 invested in the FTSE 100. (Financial Times, May 18, 2006).

This was backed up by a Gallup 2006 study, of 89 organisations, which found that earnings per share (EPS) growth of organisations with engagement scores in the top 25% was 2.6 times that of organisations with below-average engagement scores.

The 2009 Macleod report to government, “Engaging for Success”, found a wide range of evidence indicating a direct link between employee engagement and business results. They defined an engaged employee as one who “experiences a blend of job satisfaction, organisational commitment, job involvement and feelings of empowerment”.Gallup’s research has identified 12 core elements of employee engagement that they believe predict performance. These range from knowing what is expected of you to having the opportunity to do what you do best, every day, having a supervisor who seems to care about you and staff feeling their opinions count.

The Gallup 2006 study, of 23,910 business units, compared the results from those in the top 25% of engagement with those in the bottom 25%.
Those with engagement scores in the bottom quartile averaged 31 – 51 per cent more employee turnover, 51 per cent more inventory shrinkage and 62 per cent more accidents.
Those with engagement scores in the top quartile averaged 12 per cent higher customer advocacy, 18 per cent higher productivity and 12 per cent higher profitability.
(Gallup, 2006)

MacLeod also quotes a global survey from HR consultancy Tower Perrins in 2006, based on surveys of over 600,000 staff in a wide range of industries. “Companies with high levels of employee engagement improved 19.2 per cent in operating income while companies with low levels of employee engagement declined 32.7 percent over the study period.”

One of the strongest correlations was in the area of innovation. “Fifty-nine per cent of engaged employees say that their job brings out their most creative ideas against only three per cent of disengaged employees."

Of course it could be the case that a strongly performing company leads to strong engagement, rather than vice versa. Marcus Buckingham, previously of Gallup and now behind the Strengthfinder approach, “concludes from various longitudinal studies that it is engagement that leads to performance, and this is a four times stronger relationship than performance leading to engagement. (Macleod Review 2009)

There are a range of clear benefits from engaged staff:

70% of engaged employees indicate they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs; only 17 per cent of non-engaged employees say the same. (CIPD 2006)
Engaged employees are 87 per cent less likely to leave the organisation than the disengaged. (Corporate Leadership Council 2004)
78% of engaged employees would recommend their company’s products of services, against 13 per cent of the disengaged (Gallup 2003).

Many of the best companies in the world know this. Microsoft and Google, for instance, have made creating a great workplace one of their key strategic priorities. They know it makes them more effective, more innovative and also more attractive to potential employees.

Away with Long Hours

2009-12-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

At Happy, if we find somebody working long hours, we try to work with them to reduce them. It may be the result of a heavy workload but it is as likely to be the result of working less effectively than they could. For myself, if I know I'm going to be at work until 8pm I work with a lot less urgency than if I know I have to leave by 5pm.

Salina Gani, Learning & Development Manager at Paul (the bakery chain), backed up this view when I met her last week. "The most productive time of my life has been the time I've worked less hours", she explained. I used to feel guilty if I left at 6.30, and that was my official leave time. I worked long hours and it made me ill."

"What changed? A new manager who didn't expect those hours. My job is to identify my workload and get it done. I manage my own time. I'm happier, I'm less stressed and I just get more done. My manager says I do the equivalent of several times what she's seen others do at other firms."

The same is true of me. Before we had children my wife was completing an MBA and I worked long hours - and was in the office most Sundays. When our first baby was born, I cut back my working time by around 2 hours a day - and cut the Sundays, to be at home with the baby. But the remarkable thing was, I didn't seem to get any less done. I was simply more focused and effective, knowing that I couldn't just catch up that evening.

Do you, or your colleagues, work longer hours than you would like? is it because you really need to, because its expected at work, or simply because you've got into the habit of it? What would happen if you cut back and did something that you enjoyed and revitalised you?

One law for the banks

2009-12-22T04:15:00.000-08:00

This morning the OFT (Office of Fair Trading) withdrew from its battle against the banks exhorbitant penalty charges, following the court case ruling against them last month.

I have to declare a personal interest in this. I was one of the original group of 5 who set up a Bank Charges Action Group in 2004, following an article by barrister Richard Colbey in the Guardian money section. Here's details of one of the first cases with Stephen Hone, one of the original group members. Though it was, of course, the likes of Martin Lewis at Money Expert who turned it into a compaign involving millions.

There has been much press debate about whether the charges are fair, with some arguing that it is quite right that those who go overdrawn should subsidise the more well behaved account holders. But the argument ahs never been about fairness but about the law. What Colbey pointed out was that, under well establihsed UK law, it was illegal to levy penalty charges that were greater than the cost incurred.

In the early days the banks argued that the charges did reflect their costs. I was one of the first to go to court, in 2005, and NatWest won that one because their barrister persuaded the magistrate that the £35 charge per bounced cheque reflected their actual costs.

In fact it later emerged, from internal bank leaks, that the true cost was closer to £2. A penalty charge so out of proportion to the cost was clearly illegal and so the banks changed their argument, claiming that it wasn't a penalty but a charge for a service provided.

In reality we all know they are penalty charges, and they used to be referred to as such. And we all know, as Peter McNamara - ex Head of Personal Banking at Lloyds - acknowledged on the Today programme this morning, they are used to cross subsidise other personal accounts - an act that would be illegal if they were recognised as penalties.

It is sad that the OFT has chosen to withdraw from the battle to get the banks to obey the law of the land, which could have benefitted millions. So the banks will be able to continue, as John Humphreys put it this morning, to "rip us off".

Believe the Best ... and Get Paid

2009-12-10T04:27:00.000-08:00

A key part of the Happy philosophy is "Believe the Best". The idea is that, however somebody asks, to assume always the best intentions. To assume that, given their experience and the information they have, that they are doing the best they can.

My colleague Diye Wareibi, whose Digibridge company provides our technical support, gave a great example of how this worked for him with a debtor. In fact he changed his debt collecting strategy after borrowing a copy of "How to win friends and influence people" from our bookshelf.

This classic book, written by Dale Carnegie in the 1930s, encourages you to understand the people you work with and to 'walk in their shoes'."I had been chasing this debt for weeks", explains Diye "and it was getting increasingly antagonistic. I had threatened court action and he had responded with 'see you in court'.

"After reading the book I took a different approach. I knew he had been having a difficult time and there had been health problems in his family. So I emailed him and then we talked on the phone. I expressed my concern and my understanding that he had been having a difficult time and to ask if there was any way I could help.

"We had a really good talk and I think that meant something to him because I know others have been giving him a really hard time. I didn't mention the debt at all. But, you know what - within a few days I got a cheque for £1,000 in the post. And, just today, I got a second one paying the debt off in full. Treating him as a friend and trying to understand where he was coming from resulted in my bill getting paid. And hopefully we will continue to do business together for many years."

Seeking Enterprising Participation

2009-11-13T09:58:00.000-08:00

"There is no contest between the company that buys the grudging compliance of its workforce and the company that enjoys the enterprising participation of its employees", Ricardo Semler

With thanks to John Noble who chose that quote from my business hero and put it on the back of my badge at this year's excellant Servant Leadership conference.

Why Good Managers are Like Sheepdogs

2009-10-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

I'm returning from Bucharest, after speaking at the Thinkers50 conference - where they announced the 2009 list of the leading management gurus in the world. No, I'm not on the list. But I was included in their "Guru Radar", the list of the thinkers who we believe will shape the future of business.

Top of the gurus was CK Prahalad, whose "Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" is credited with focusing a huge range of business on serving the needs of the poorest.

Check out the list at www.thinkers50.com.

"Great ideas change the world", explains Stuart Crainer who compiles the list with Des Dearlove. "And these gurus represent the most influential management thinking of our time."

A great conference with a range of great ideas from some of the gurus:

CK Prahalad (No. 1 in list) : "A good manager is like a sheepdog. A sheepdog has 3 rules to obey. First, bark but don't bite. Second, lead from behind. Third, know where you are going and don't lose a sheep." "I want leaders who can listen, so they can understand the future. If all you do is tell, you can only talk about the past."

Gary Hamel (No. 10): "Surveys show that in no country is more than 20% of workforce actively engaged at any one time." His key point: Think of the potential for increased productivity for companies who can raise that figure.

Lynda Gratton (No. 18): How to create an innovation Hot Spot: 1) Co-operation rather than competition. 2) Cross boundary co-operation, between different departments and different companies 3) Be ignited by a purpose, or a question. eg, Lord Browne's question to BP: "How do we become a force for good?"

Marshall Goldsmith (No. 14): An executive coach who focuses on civility. Just getting managers to say please and thank you can apparently make a big difference. And his offer is, if manager's behavious doesn't change - don't pay me.

Jonas Ridderstrale (No. 23) had flown in from Stockholm to speak at the conference: "Management: throughout the 20th century management was the art and science of stamping out deviance. How? By rules and conformity." He showed a great slide of a typical group of 50s white male managers in their identical suits and suggested the focus on uniformity was efficient.

"But of the Forbes 100 in 1917, how many beat the market between then and 1987. Just two, GE and Eastman Kodak. The others fell back not because they were inefficient but because they were irrelevant." Their lack of diversity, in their people and their approach, made them unable to respond to change.

Thinkers 50 has videos of many of these figures and more at www.thinkers50.com which is a fantastic resource. Check it out now before they start charging! I'm told the one for Howard Gardner (No. 16) is especially good.

And a huge thanks to Bogdan Ungureanu and all the folks at Publica for great organising and being wonderful hosts. I'm hoping to see my book Relax published in Romanian!

Engaging staff: Lessons from Asda

2009-10-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

When I talk about Happy and how we've tried to create a great workplace, there are two very common questions: "Would what you've done work in a much larger organisation" & "Could you create that environment with staff you inherit, and are disengaged?"

I strongly believe the answer to both questions is Yes and I heard a great example of it from David Smith, the inspirational ex-Head of People at Asda. Speaking at the MLab conference on Employee Engagement, at London Business School, he explained that Asda had been 10 days from bankruptcy back in 1990.

By focusing on their people, they turned it around and grew to the company they are today: £18 billion in sales, 170,000 employees and rated the Best Place to Work in the UK in 2008. David set out 7 key points:

1) Hire for Attitude
"We realised we wanted gregarious, outgoing, chatty people - who will make it a pleasant experience to shop at Asda. We invest in recruitment, even the most lowly paid staff go through half a day at an assessment centre as part of th recruitment process.."

2) Overdose on Communication
"Talk in human language to reach people. At every staff change-over, every day, we had a 5 minute briefing to inform people."

3) Listen
"All my best ideas came from shop floor people"

4) Change Management Style
"Retail is a military operation. But we needed to move managers away from the old management style. One third of managers were enthusiastic, one third followed us and one third were resistant. "

5) Remove Under-performers
"Be ruthless with this, and most of the third of managers who were resistant are no longer with us"

6) "Money is a De-Motivator"
"Focus on financial rewards is not the way to motivate. We focused on recognition, even having an oscar ceremony for great service"

7) "Work made fun gets done"
"bring yourself to work". Bring all of your character, and be part of the community.

The turnaround has been based on a focus on engaging the front-line staff. Their measure of engagement has risen from 55% in 1990 to 91% today and Asda was rated the best company to work for in the UK in the Sunday Times survey in 2007.

"We have 360 separate P & Ls and I have done the calculations", explains David. "There is an absolute positive correlation between staff engagement and profitability. If a branch can achieve an engagement level of 94% I guarantee the profits will grow exponentially."

Watch out for David's forthcoming book "Asda Magic", out in 2010.

What Do Employees Want From Managers?

2009-10-05T05:40:00.000-07:00

"Just about the only management book written from the perspective of the employee is Dilbert" commented Julian Birkinshaw, head of MLab at the London Business School, at their excellent event on Employee Engagement last Friday.

Its a good point and poses the obvious question: What would an organisation be like to work for if management was based on what front-line staff wanted, to enable them to do a great job. Here's some thoughts:

A manager who is more of a coach than somebody who tells you what to do
Managers role seen as focusing on making people feel valued and motivated, happy and satisfied with their work
Believe the best: the first assumption - whatever difficulties arise - that people are trying to do their best, given their circumstances
Managers chosen for their people skills - because they are good at supporting and challenging - not for technical skills
Able to change manager if its not working out and you'd like a different one
No blame culture, where mistakes are celebrated
Open and transparent - all information is shared so there are no secrets
Flexible hours - that suit the way you want to work
Clear guidelines on what is needed, but then freedom to achieve the results your way, and trusted to do so
Involved and informed about the things which affect you.
Fairly paid, and know what need to do to get a rise
Clear feedback, in a positive way, about how you are doing

I admit this is rather similar to the Happy management philosophy but I have always called it "management as if people mattered". Do let me know what you think? What other elements would you add?

Coal Mining or Indian Food?

2009-10-04T13:08:00.000-07:00

At an LBS MLab conference on Friday, I found this statement from business author Stuart Crainer staggering: "More people in the UK now work in the Indian food business than in coalmining, shipbuilding and steel-making combined".

One hundred years ago, when my grandfather was leaving school, almost 10% of employment was in the coal industry alone. And probably nobody in the UK worked in the Indian food industry. Even 30 years ago, when Mrs Thatcher came to power, there were probably half a million people working in those 3 industries. (The membership of the NUM, for instance, was then around 200,000.)

Is this a statement of tragic decline or a testament to the economy's ability to change. It makes you wonder which industries, that may hardly exist today, will be the big employers in 30 years or 100 years time?

Remove the Rules: Learn from Netflix

2009-08-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

When Happy was voted the best company for customer service in the UK, I asked the judges why we won it. David Jackson, chair of the judges, replied that we clearly knew exactly what our customers wanted. "But", he continued "that is not unusual. Most companies understand what their customers want. But most companies then put in place rules and procedures which prevent their staff from delivering what the customers want. You don't."

Learn from Netflix
I was reminded of this when I was sent this great slide show from Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix. (Netflix is the leading US DVD rental service, the equivalent of Lovefilm in the UK - and a company that has won awards for some of the best customer service in the USA.). There are a lot of slides (123) but they are packed with interesting ideas:

http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664?src=embed

Many companies assume you need more rule as you grow. Reed rejects this idea, saying that since Netflix went public in 2002 and continued to grow, they have substantially increased employee freedom.

Netflix Expenses Policy: 5 Words
For instance Netflix has no vacation policy, instead judging people on the work they do rather than the time they are in the office. Their policy on expenses, entertainment, gifts and travel is just 5 words long: "Act in Netflix's Best Interests". This is backed by guidance such as "Travel as you would if it were your own money". Instead of lots of rules they trust their people and rely on their common sense. As one Netflix employee puts it:

"There is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one has come to work naked lately" Patty McCord, 2004

What happens when trust doesn't work and your people do something dumb? Reed suggests you don't blame them but ask what part of the context you failed to set for them.

"Flexibility is more important than efficiency in the long-term."
That is an interesting view from Reed. It reminds me of my current dealings with my bank, NatWest. I would forgive their inefficiency (making 5 penalty charges for a payment I never made) but not their refusal to fix it, despite me being a telephone banking customer, unless I write a letter explaining my case.

For Reed the approach is based on ensuring you have only the most talented people and paying the top market rate. "One outstanding employee gets more done and costs less than two adequate employees." Look at the rules in your company. Do you really need them? What would happen if you replaced them with guidance and gave your people ore freedom to do a great job for your customers?

Yearn for the Vast and Endless Sea
To finish, I love this quote (again from Reed's slides):

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea"
Antoine De saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince

Truly Great Customer Service: Learning From Bernie

2009-07-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

We have got the builders in at home, Bernie and his gang. And they are rather amazing, they keep finding extra things to do. They changed the lock that used to stick, have fixed the window that has had a crack in it for years and sorted the leak from the shower. All for no extra charge. It is, of course, an inspired approach. None of that costs them much but it really delights us. I may have no idea whether their brickwork is better than the next guys but I was already all set to recommend them.

So what unexpected extras can you provide, just to delight your customers?

But it didn't stop with the little things. This week he's had one of his men spend 4 days re-pointing the back of the house. Again, no extra charge. This morning he discovered dry rot in the floorboards and he says he'll sort that too. Now this is getting ridiculous. But Bernie explained: "I hate charging extra so I build in some contingency in the original quote."

Would that approach work for you? Make the quote a bit higher and find some serious extras to include once you get started, that really meet the needs of the customer.

The result: Bernie hasn't had to search for work for years and won't need to even in the current climate. Everybody recommends him. Me included: if you want his details, just get in touch (henry@happy.co.uk). Though he only works in North London, and doesn't actually stray far beyond the streets of Stoke Newington and Crouch End.

Management Lesson from Tiger Woods

2009-07-07T01:37:00.000-07:00

The July 6 2009 edition of Fortune has Tiger Woods, among others, talking about the "best advice I ever got".

'When I was young, maybe 6 or 7 years old, I'd play on the Navy golf course with my pop. My dad would say, "Okay, where do you want to hit the ball?" I'd pick a spot and say I want to hit it there. He'd shrug and say, "Fine, then figure out how to do it." He didn't position my arm, adjust my feet, or change my thinking. He just said go ahead and hit the darn ball. '

I think there is something profound here about how to help a talented individual develop. Let's translate it into management speak:

When you sit down with one of your people to plan their development, get them to set their own objective. Then ask them to figure out how to achieve it. Don't tell them how to do it, let them work out their own way. With your support.

That's it.

In Defence of Hackney

2009-06-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm a proud dad this morning. The Times this morning published my 15 year old daughter's letter defending our fair borough from a savage attack by Giles Coren:

Hi Giles

I'm 14 years old, female and living in Stoke Newington, HACKNEY. When you finally decide to venture out into the world where multiculturalism is the norm and bicycles are seen more often than cars, let me know. You're assumptions on the hoodies and canals (or sewers as you prefer to all them) are what make me never ever want to move to Highgate/Islington/Hampstead

Miriam Stewart

The original article is here. That was the edited version. This is her full letter:

Hi there Giles,I'm 14 years old, female and living in Stoke Newington, HACKNEY. I am also embarrassingly upper middle class. I got the gist from the article that you are too, except unlike me, you've never ventured out from under your rock in hampstead heath or highgate. It's people like you that give middle classers like me who live in Hackney a bad name.

My family have lived on our road for, coming up to 20 years, and we have never once locked our car. And never once has it been stolen. Yes i admit it is a bit of a rubbish family minivan but none the less, my point remains the same it has never been stolen. I imagine you probably don't drive a minivan, I also imagine that you have a receding hair line and drive a BMW because your midlife crisis makes you too self conscious to be seen in anything but that.

I'm even imagining you wearing glasses, which by the way, you really should go and see an optician about because you seem to be having some real trouble opening your eyes. When you finally decide to venture out into the world where multi culture is a norm and bicycles are seen more often cars, let me know, because until then you're opinion is absolutely worthless to me.

You're assumptions on the hoodies and canals (or sewers as you prefer to all them) are what make me never ever want to move to Highgate/Islington/Hampstead, because like you clearly cant stand Hackney, i don't think i could stand you.

Miriam Stewart

P.S commenting on your sat nav problem, they are, as you clearly know, useless. the only reason you have one is because you are either too lazy, incompetent or up yourself to be seen reading an A-Z.

To Giles' credit, he did send a very nice reply and encouraged Miriam to stay angry when she writes!

Staff Surveys, Recruitment and Retention

2009-06-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

Written for The People Bulletin:

Nandos, the popular restaurant chain, some years ago carried out research into what were the key factors that explained why sales at some of their restaurants grew faster than at others. After detailed analysis they found one factor stood out above all others in explaining the difference. This was how happy the staff were, as measured in the annual staff survey. In response they changed their bonus system, so that 50% of each manager’s bonus became based solely on those staff survey results.

So do you know what your staff think of working for you?
It gave a powerful message to managers that the root of success laid in happy and motivated staff and also of the importance of bothering to find out how they felt. In these challenging times it is more important than ever to create great working environments, where people feel valued. When we work with organisations to improve their workplace, our first step is generally a staff survey, plus interviews with employees, to find out how people feel at that particular moment in time. In particular, the results can show what needs to change to keep people, and thus improve retention.

It’s not just about pay
Managers are often in denial about staff dis-satisfaction and assume that people leave for jobs with better pay or prospects. Indeed research published in the Harvard Management Update[i] found 88% of managers believe this. But research among the people who leave jobs indicates the opposite is true[ii]. The Saratoga Institute[iii] followed up 19,500 people who had left jobs in 18 different organisations and found that only 12% left for better pay or prospects.

The other 88% left due to factors related to the job, the manager, the culture or the work environment. If we assume this may be true of your organisation too, and many of those are people you want to keep, then you need to be working out what in your organisational culture is driving people away.

There is really only one way to find that out, and that is to ask your employees. What do they like about working for your organisation? What don’t they like and could cause them to leave?

Our own back yard
At Happy we have been carrying out staff surveys and upward appraisals for over a decade and I am pleased to say that they are now very positive. But it hasn’t always been that way. One of the first appraisals I received was truly shocking. I hadn’t seen it coming. I thought I was doing a great job of representing the company, networking and bringing in business. My staff agreed. But they also told me that, back at the office, I wasn’t listening well, wasn’t appreciating the work people did and wasn’t engaging enough – and that this was important to them.

My response was to put myself on monthly appraisal. I was determined to change and I figured it was no good waiting six months or a year for feedback. As I responded to the feedback, steadily my ratings improved. It was a crucial period for me and I believe the growth we’ve had since then wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t done those surveys and I hadn’t made those changes to my behaviour.

We are very proud of the fact that Happy was this year rated the best company in the UK for staff health and well-being, and has been rated in the top 20 workplaces in the UK for the last four years by the Great Place to Work Institute.[iv]

I know that upward appraisals are controversial in some organisations. But my view is to not have them is unfair. How can you be sure how you are doing as a manager if you don’t get clear feedback from those you manage? How can you improve and develop without that?

Staff surveys, whether they are about the company as a whole or appraisals of individual or collective management, are essential if you truly want to create a great place to work through more than guesswork. And, providing you phrase it to get the positive as well as the negative, you may even be pleasantly surprised by some of the results.

Free staff survey
You can create your own staff survey using easy-to-use software like www.surveymonkey.com (just $200 a year for as many online surveys as you want to create) or use the free staff survey at the Happy People web site: register at http://www.happy-people.co.uk/resources/resources/free-staff-survey/, get your staff to complete it and receive a full report, including benchmarking information.

[i] ‘The keys to retaining your best managers in a tight job market’, Marie Gendron, Harvard Management Update June 1998. Obtainable directly from Harvard Business Publishing

[ii] The 7 hidden reasons employees leave by Leigh Branham in association with the Saratoga Institute, published by the American Management Association, 2005

[iii] A human capital measurement service part of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Details can be viewed at http://www.pwc.com/extweb/service.nsf/docid/de40ffb0d40981d385256f17005397cd

[iv] www.greatplacetowork.co.uk

Trust Even for MPs?

2009-05-29T01:23:00.000-07:00

At a speech this week on giving people trust and freedom (key components of creating a great workplace) I was asked how that fitted with the MPs expenses scandal? We were just down the road from parliament at Millbank and the questioner wanted to know if this is what happened when you trusted people.

My answer was that trust needs to be combined with transparency. It is unlikely that they would have made such extravagant claims if they had known the details would be published. Or will in the future, now that they know the details will be available to all.

Indeed that is a possible solution for all companies. Instead of complex expenses rules you could have one that simply stated: “Claim what is reasonable, but be aware the details will be available for anybody in the company to see, on the intranet.”

The common complaint of MPs has been that their salaries have not been allowed to rise and so they have had to rely on the expenses allowance as effective income. A quick check of the facts shows this to be total nonsense. In 1983 the MPs’ salary was £14,500. If it had kept pace with inflation, it would now stand at £32,180. If it had increased in line with average earnings the salary would now be £51,952. In fact they are now paid £64,766 a year. So they earn over three times median earnings (revealed by the TUC this week as £19,600) and have had rises over the last 25 years well in excess of most people.

Fancy a Jog from Birmingham to London?

2009-05-29T01:10:00.000-07:00

I met up with my sister at the weekend after she ran from Birmingham. Now I wouldn’t mind cycling from Britain’s second city to London. But running along the canal, through the night, is a whole different achievement. 148 miles in total, taking just under 40 hours – and you get disqualified if you take a break of 40 minutes or more.

As the web site (http://www.gucr.co.uk/), this is Britain's longest, toughest, non-stop running race. I met Lindsey in Southall (there was a 4 mile diversion from the canal), 135 miles in and found her a little bit down. But we remembered the classic Lance Armstrong line (“Pain is temporary, quitting is forever”) and she was soon back on track.

A remarkable achievement. I wonder what she will do next?

Richard Branson, This Time you are Wrong

2009-04-30T01:44:00.000-07:00

Richard Branson has stated his opposition to the new 50% tax rate, for those earning more than £150,000, claiming it will be a "block on the next wave of entrepreneurs".

The reality is that, of the hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs in the UK, very few pay themselves over £150,000 or even aspire to. If an entrepreneur makes a fortune it is from the sale of their company. The most successful one I know was shocked not by how much tax they paid when they sold up, but by how little. After the Brown-Blair tax reforms of 2001 the amount he paid on the tens of millions he received was just 18% - less than the lowest income tax band, paid if you earn just £15,000 a year.

Opponents of the 50% tax seek to focus on the cuddly entrepreneur because they know the public will have little sympathy for the professions who actually are the highest-paid. These are bankers, accountants, lawyers and consultants. And I would be surprised if Branson sees those professions as the ones that drive innovation and enterprise in the UK.

Worlds Most Democratic Workplaces

2009-04-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

Happy has today been listed as one of the most democratic workplaces in the world. Although there are 40 companies on the list, organised by WorldBlu, Happy is one of only two in the UK:

http://www.worldblu.com/worldblu-list?company=happy

So what makes a democratic workplace? Does it mean all staff vote on everything? Of course, if we use our standard model of democracy it would mean the staff electing the company's leaders once every 5 years and then leaving all decisions to them!

I've never actually described Happy as a democracy, especially as certain principles (such as training Being based on involvement) are not up for discussion. To the extent that we are democratic, its because it makes for a better business.

Its About involvement
We don't involve everybody in every decision but we do seek to involve people in decisions that affect them. Its common sense. That way you tend to get better decisions and you certainly get more commitment to them.

So when we were getting ready to move to our current site, we took everybody there to decide whether it was the right place. The vote was unanimous and so, despite it adding 20 minutes to the commute of most staff, there was total commitment to the move and we didn't lose anybody.

Now the question is whether to go to the conference for those inspiring companies who made the list. Is it a good use of funds in the current climate? We're going to put it to a vote.....

Listen to the Protestors

2009-04-02T02:01:00.000-07:00

I joined the G20 demo in London on Saturday (March 28th). I was struck first by the energy and sense of fun. Though that was partly because I found myself alongside the drumming band Rhythms of Resistance. But also the geneuine sense that another way was possible. I especially like the philosphy of 'tactical frivolity' - we could do with a bit more that in the business world!

These demonstrations have been taking place for a decade, since Seattle, and as I marched I was struck by how they had been proved right. An appropriate chant would have been "We were right, you were wrong."

The world leaders, with the IMF and World Trade Organisation, placed total faith in markets, in deregulation and in financial systems. They were wrong, disastrously wrong.

They may dismiss the demonstrators as weird or whatever, but there are many more sensible proposals for how the world should be run in the alternatives on offer here. The best thing the G20 could do? Invite the demonstrators in and listen to the view from the other side. Its certainly better than listening again to the same old people who got it wrong last time.

A Parable of Management

2009-03-15T05:42:00.000-07:00

It was management guru Peter Drucker who said: “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work”

This parable, which a colleague sent me, is a great illustration of this:

http://www.slideshare.net/fforfaisal/the-ant

Or, if you haven't got time to see the presentation, here is the transcript

The Ant ... A Fable ... Or Maybe Not

Every day, a small ant arrives at work very early and starts work immediately.

She produces a lot and she is happy.

The Chief, a lion, was surprised to see that the ant was working without supervision.

He thought if the ant can produce so much without supervision, wouldn’t she produce even more if she had a supervisor!

So he recruited a cockroach who had extensive experience as supervisor and who was famous for writing excellent reports.

The cockroach’s first decision was to set up a clocking in attendance system.

He also needed a secretary to help him write and type his reports and …
... he recruited a spider, who managed the archives and monitored all phone calls.

The lion was delighted with the cockroach's reports and asked him to produce graphs to describe production rates and to analyse trends, so that he could use them for presentations at Board‘s meetings.

So the cockroach had to buy a new computer and a laser printer and ...
... recruited a fly to manage the IT department.

The ant, who had once been so productive and relaxed, hated this new plethora of paperwork and meetings which used up most of her time…!

The lion came to the conclusion that it was high time to nominate a person in charge of the department where the ant worked.

The position was given to the cicada, whose first decision was to buy a carpet and an ergonomic chair for his office.

The new person in charge, the cicada, also needed a computer and a personal assistant ,who he brought from his previous department, to help him prepare a Work and Budget Control Strategic Optimisation Plan …

The Department where the ant works is now a sad place, where nobody laughs anymore and everybody has become upset...

It was at that time that the cicada convinced the boss , the lion, of the absolute necessity to start a climatic study of the environment .

Having reviewed the charges for running the ant’s department , the lion found out that the production was much less than before.

So he recruited the owl , a prestigious and renowned consultant to carry out an audit and suggest solutions.

The owl spent three months in the department and came up with an enormous report , in several volumes, that concluded : “ The department is overstaffed ...”
Guess who the lion fires first?

The ant , of course, because she “showed lack of motivation and had a negative attitude".

Adapted from Portuguese by PR. Obrigado Mário.

Happy Becomes Carbon Neutral

2009-03-13T10:12:00.001-07:00

I'm delighted that my company Happy has just achieved the status of being Carbon Neutral, based on reducing our energy use - and then offsetting what is left. TrainingZone has asked me to write 10 tips on reducing your company's carbon impact so here they are:

10 Tips for Reducing Your Carbon Impact
We are all aware of the threat of global warning and its easy to feel the problem is too big for us to do anything about it. However all our businesses contribute and we can all do our bit to reduce our carbon impact. The good news is that most of the steps result in lower costs or more engaged staff. Morrisons, for example, has saved £3.4 million a year by reducing its energy use.

1 – Measure It
The first step is to find out what your carbon impact is, and which areas of the business are causing it. We used www.co2balance.com, at very reasonable cost. The Carbon Trust can also be very helpful, often for free.

2 – Turn Equipment Off
A single computer left on permanently can cost over £30 a year. Several dozen left on overnight are not only a waste of energy but a considerable waste of money too, and the cost soon adds up. Ours turn off automatically if not in use. O2 reduced its electricity use by 15% simply by ensuring heating and air conditioning was turned off when buildings were empty.

3 – Install Low Energy Light Bulbs
An old fashioned light bulb can use as much energy as a computer. The easiest way to reduce energy use, and electricity bills, at home is to ensure all your light bulbs are low energy. The same is true at work, though it may be harder work to find the low energy versions. And turn those lights off when not needed.

4 - Source Energy Renewably
One of Dell’s steps to carbon neutrality was to invest directly in wind energy but most of us have to rely on the existing electricity suppliers. All the mainstream companies offer green alternatives, with Scottish and Southern now sourcing 11% from renewable. Then there are specialists like Green Energy, EcoTricity and Good Energy, who are 100% renewable. The cost may be a bit more but as well as getting a warm feeling for doing good, you also avoid the government’s energy tax.

5 - Reduce Car & Aeroplane Use
Encourage car sharing, trains and bicycles. Explore teleconferences instead of air travel. Use the government scheme which provides your staff with new bicycles at up to half price. It doesn’t cost you a penny but does give you the benefit of fitter, healthier staff.

6 – Make Your IT Greener
Data centres and IT generally can be a major part of a company’s energy use. There are complex issues involved, but technology like thin client and virtualisation can have a big impact. Get your techies to check it out .

7 - Set up an Office Recycling and Reuse Scheme
Not just for paper, but also for card, cans, plastic cartons, cups – and also mobile phones and tonner cartridges. And ensure, wherever possible, you buy paper and other products from recycled and sustainable schemes.

8 - Engage Your Staff
Get your people activity involved. Set up green teams to find ways to reduce your energy use. Our Green Group came up with a range of changes. For instance, switching from paper towels to Dyson power dryers saved us £800 a year.

9 - Green your Supply Chain
Work with your suppliers. Simply including a question in your procurement, about carbon reduction plans and offset commitments, will get people thinking about the issues.

10 - Offset What's Left
The above steps will reduce your carbon impact but there will be some left. To be carbon neutral you can offset this by paying for projects which save as much carbon as you use. At Happy we’ve been unofficially doing this by endowing rainforest since 1991. This time we used the www.co2balance.com project Rhino Ark, a conservation charity which helps build energy saving stoves that reduce the need for firewood by 70%. This conserves the woodland and wildlife habitat that live in and around the Aberdale National Park in Kenya.

This will make your company officially Carbon Neutral. As I’ve said its not only good for the planet but it makes business sense. It saves money, increases staff loyalty, gives a positive picture of the business and helps with answering those government procurement questions on your impact on the environment.

Cadbury Does the Right Thing

2009-03-05T02:20:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Cadbury on its decision to make Dairy Milk a fairtrade product. This seems to be a rare but genuine example of a major corporation using its power and influence for positive effect. Chief Executive Todd Stitzer has done well.

Despite loving chocolate, I have not always been a fan of Cadbury. I remember listening to Chairman John Sutherland at a Business in the Community conference some years ago, just after Channel 4 had broadcast a powerful documentary on the role of slavery in chocolate production in the Ivory Coast. The programme had reduced me to tears. I was hopeful that I would hear this corporate giant proclaim that slavery had no place in their industry and they would get the leading companies together to create a programme to outlaw it.

I was to be disappointed. Mr Sutherland chose instead to whine about the role of the media and how consumers might blame Cadbury, even though they sourced very little from the Ivory Coast. For a company that claimed a positive role in society (while selling consumers vast quantities of not very healthy products) it was a truly feeble response.Many companies proclaim their commitment to corporate social responsibility.

However for many it is little more than a marketing gloss. This is obvious in extreme cases like British American Tobacco. BAT has a great community programme but its effect is trivial compared to the devastation wrought by its main product. If BAT had any genuine commitment to society it would at least stop marketing its cigarettes (especially in the third world, where it now focuses most of its pernicious efforts).

Let's hope that Cadbury's decision will be good for sales and will lead other companies to do the right thing. This could be shifting to fair trade products. Or it could be to simply ask the question of what they would do differently if they actually put ethics at the heart of their company.Imagine. Mobile phone companies might give lower rates for customers who hang on to their old models, rather than endlessly persuading them to upgrade. Supermarkets could restrict their special offers to healthy products, rather than 2-for-1 on giant packets of crisps and the like. Electricity companies could do more to help their customers waste energy.

If companies were genuinely committed to social responsibility they would put ethics and values at the heart of their products. It is great to see Cadbury doing just that.

Radical Idea: Don't annoy your customers

2009-02-25T12:27:00.000-08:00

Why do some companies have rules that can only annoy their customers? My daughter's phone is with 3 Mobile and is in my name. She is on a £15 a month contract, which includes 600 texts. Seems a lot to me, but not to her. The latest 3 offer is a £15 a month contract with unlimited texts.

So I rang up 3 and asked if we could switch. The answer was, of course, no. The offer was for new customers only. Now this concept has been brilliantly parodied by Mark Benton in the Nationwide adverts. The ads, showing how Nationwide does not have offers for "brand new customers only", are said to have brought them a million new customers.

I asked the two customer service people I talked to from 3 whether they thought it better to follow a strict rule or to make a customer happy. They both laughed and agreed it would be good to make the customer happy. But they weren't allowed to. They weren't even allowed to give me a contact number or email for somebody who might be allowed to.

Why does 3 (and many other mobile companies) do this? The extra cost of the new contract is marginal. Much of that £15 actually goes to subsidising the cost of the phone that came with the contract. But the rule is rigid and you can only have the original deal you signed up to.

I am happy to give 3 a simple idea for their next marketing campaign. Why not offer any customer signing up to them the chance to swap to any other contract of the same monthly cost that comes out over the period of their contract? It would be a simple promise that they value their customers and want to keep them happy. And it would cost very little.

Of course 3 aren't alone here. I could give stories of dreadful recent service from Sony, Virgin and many others. I have a simple principle here: Don't have rigid rules that annoy your customers. One day I hope that won't seem too radical and crazy an idea.

It is good to pay tax

2009-02-13T02:31:00.000-08:00

Some years ago my mother was cold called by a financial adviser. The conversation went something like this:

"Hello, can I help you pay less tax", he said
"No, I'm not interested" replied my mum
"No, really, I can save you money" he continued
"No thank you" said my mum
"Please, just give me 10 minutes of your time and I can prove that I can help you pay less tax."
"No, you don't understand" explained my mum. "Its not that I don't believe you. But I'm a socialist and I believe in paying my taxes"
Quick as a flash the adviser came back "Perhaps I can help you pay more taxes?"

My mother declined this kind offer but her attitude, believing paying taxes was part of being a responsibile member of society, is all too rare nowadays.

When we tendered for a new auditor in the summer the main focus (even obsession) of nearly all the accounting firms who presented was how they would help me avoid paying my tax. All I wanted to know who would do my audit best and give good business advice.

Over the last two weeks the Guardian has shown the extent of tax avoidance among the UK's leading companies. Many of these make much of their corporate social responsibility. But theya re exposed here as complete hypocrits. While they spend a few million on the local community, they go to great lengths to avoid paying hundreds of millions, if not billions, in tax.

And you can be sure that the bankers wallowing in their millions in bonuses would have found a hundred-and-one ways to avoid paying the proper level of tax on it.

One of the principle social responsibilities of any business is to pay the tax that enables the health service, the education system, the country's infrastructure and much more besides.

So I hope I can live up to my mother's example. And I hope one day tax avoidance will be as illegal as tax evasion - doing a lot of our leading (and supposedly socially responsible) consutancies out of a major source of business.

Happy Wins Double Gold

2009-02-09T03:59:00.000-08:00

Last week was the Institute of IT Training's annual awards. And it was a great night for Happy Computers. We won Gold for IT Training Company of the Year and Gold for IT Trainer of the Year.

Which was fantastic and a complete surprise. We had got Silver in Training Company in 2006, 2007 and 2008 but I wasn't sure it was our year. Apparently the judges were especially impressed by our social responsibility work.

It was great that Ed Lepre won Trainer of the Year. Ed is profoundly deaf and teaches his courses using British Sign Language. He originally joined us on a work experience scheme 3 years ago and has had such dedication to learning and improvement.

Socialise at Work And Get More Done

2009-02-02T03:58:00.000-08:00

Should you let your staff spend time at work on social networking? Some recent research suggests that if you don't, your staff may be less committed and effective.

The research was presented at London Business School's Management 2.0 conference last week. Bruce Rayner, of employment benefits company You at Work, found that those staff who spent up to an hour a day on non-work emailing, texting and social messaging were far more committed than those who spent no time on those activities.

Big Issue for Generation Y
And its an especially big issue for Under 25s, the group known as Generation Y. The survey found that 33% of this age group were frustrated by employer restrictions over the web (compared to just 9% across all age groups). Over three quarters of under 25s said they were "less likely to leave a company that encourages me to socially interact with colleagues”.

Bruce divided companies into 3 categories: the 'ban-its', the 'agnostics' and the 'embracers', those companies who actively encourage staff to use social networking. He argues: "If employees take a 'social networking' slice out of their day it doesn’t mean the 'value adding' work slice decreases - it means the overall pie increases. Trust is repaid through higher creativity and productivity"

So is your company in the "ban-it" category or are you ready to join the forward-thinking embracers like Cisco, IBM and Microsoft?

2008-12-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

Your Manager: Would you prefer supportive or effective?
That was the interesting question put last week at a conference that I was speaking at. They were using voting pads and so we got an instant response. There were 2 sessions, each with about 200 people, but the response was pretty much the same: in the morning 71% went for supportive, and in the afternoon 69%, so overall:

Effective: 30%
Supportive 70%

This was in a regulator body in the health sector, where getting a decision right is important. But people's views were clear. What was most important for managers was to be there for them.

As one participant put it "If they are supportive then we will cover their backs and make sure they look effective. If they aren't supportive, then they are on their own."

Now ideally we are both effective and supportive as managers. But which are you most focused on: being supportive or being effective?

Etape 2009 (Tour de France) Route Announced

2008-10-24T03:09:00.000-07:00

And its Mont Ventoux in the French Alps. For route and altitude, click through to my cycling blog. If you'd like to join me and Diye in training for it, do contact me at henry@happy.co.uk.

"How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?"

2008-10-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

There is much truth in that old Irish saying, quoted this week by Charles Handy. Or, as the great management guru Peter Drucker said when Charles asked him how he learnt. "By listening", he said, "to myself".

I have always found that I work out my view or understanding of something by talking about it. It gets my brain connections working. And I don't think its just me. The logic is simple. If you want people to work out what they think about something, give them time to talk about it. Break up your presentation with time to talk to your neighbour. It is a very simple technique but one rarely used.

Charles was talking at a brilliant Common Purpose event, organised by the irrepressible Julia Middleton, where a range of leaders gave one hour presentations - giving those of us attending a choice every hour of which to go to. Charles had other pieces of wisdom to share:

"In 15 Indian languages there is no word for teach, only for learning."
"Great teachers tell stories. That is really all they do."
"How can you turn your students into teachers so they really learn?"
"Everybody has something good in them"
"You need a purpose that is bigger than yourself - a passion. You win people over with the infection of your passion, never by force feeding them."
"You need to keep on living vicariously for the triumph of others, taking secret pleasure in their achievements that only you know you have played a part in."

A very wise man, of great humility. I felt lucky to have been able to hear him.

And a very interesting thought from a member of the audience: "If you are not a bit scared about delegating to somebody, then you are not delegating enough." I might come back to that one.

Note to Julia: I know the event was under "Chatham House rules" (confidential) but Charles Handy was kind enough to give me permission to quote him.

Share Your Ideas

2008-10-10T10:30:00.001-07:00

"I never try to protect my ideas. I've told every idea I've ever had to as many people as possible", Mike Harris

Mike is one of the UK's most successful serial entrepreneurs, having built 3 billion pound businesses (including the internet bank Egg). And I like that approach.

Mike went on to quote Jeffrey Sachs:
"When you share an idea, it gets bigger"

I was once asked by a journalist how we protect our intellectual property. My response was that we give it away for free on the internet. I was referring to the manuals that are our most concrete product. We do now charge for them (at www.happymanuals.com) but it is still true that any IT training company can easily obtain and use all our step-by-step manuals. Or learn the secrets of our training approach, Learner Focused Training.

In contrast I remember attending a session on how to succeed on the internet back in 2000. "First, hire a lawyer" was the advice from one expert. Indeed a survey at the time found that internet entrepreneurs put getting the legals right at the top of their list and customer service at the bottom. Not surprising, perhaps, that most of those companies are not still around.

So if you have a great idea, tell people about it. Get their input get their thoughts, make it bigger, make it better. And one final thought from Mike to cheer us up in these challenging times:

"During recessions, the best ideas happen"

Facing the Consequences of Your Actions

2008-09-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

When I've gone to my bank for financial support, like all small business owners, I have been asked to give personal guarantees and to put my house on the line. As the banks ask for financial support, perhaps they should face the same terms that they give out. Imagine how it would concentrate their minds if they knew they could lose it all.

The government claims to be on the side of small business and the entrepreneur. But its a funny thing that the only people who stand to lose their home if they make a mistake (or often when they don't, but are hit by things outside their control) are small business owners.

Chancellors can be personally responsible for losing billions and not lose a penny. (Lamont's £10 billion lost in the ERM collapse comes to mind as does the £2 billion lost by Gordon Brown in the Tube Lines fiasco.) Bank directors can bring great institutions to their knees and not be penalised. Indeed they hang onto the huge bonuses of past years and, often, get an bonus for departing the sinking ship. Even convicted criminals are unlikely to lose their house.

Only entrepreneurs are told that we should face the consequences of our actions in terms of personal loss.

And, of course, it won't be those responsible who pay the price now. It will be front-line staff who face the sack. It will be small businesses who have the plug pulled by anxious banks. Even as I write there are probably bank managers working out which part of the month is the best time to pull the overdraft to make sure the bank gets its money, and never mind a consequences.

As small business people get together, there is one refrain on which we all agree and on which we all have bitter experience: Never trust a bank.

The True Leader Serves Others First

2008-08-08T03:13:00.000-07:00

Broadly there are two models of leadership in our society, the power model and the service model. Sadly the former is dominant, based on achieving power and getting people to do things for you. But there is an alternative approach. The service model is based on supporting others and helping everybody get what they need.

This Autumn we are organising a conference to explore different approaches to leading by putting your people first. I am very excited to be jointly organising this event with the Greenleaf Centre for Servant Leadership.

Leaders Serving People
Conference: 3rd & 4th November 2008
Ambassador Hotel, Euston
Cost: 390 (280 for charities)
More Details
Simply email me on henry@happy.co.uk if you are interested in coming.

Speakers include comedian Ruby Wax on emotional intelligence, myself and Cathy Busani from Happy, Ella Heeks of Abel & Cole, Lynn Sedgemore, CEO of the Centre for Excellence in Leadership and Kent Keith from the US Greenleaf Centre.The idea is to fully involve you and give lots of space to discuss, reflect and meet like-minded people. Numbers are limited to around 100 so please book early.

Robert Greenleaf created the concept of Servant Leadership with his essay 'The Servant as Leader', over 30 years ago. You may not have heard of him but his ideas have had wide effect with key management thinkers like Steven Covey, Ken Blanchard and Peter Senge acknowledging him as a key influence.

The concept is simple but challenging. Take your role in your organisation, whether you are Chief Executive, or have no management function. (Everybody can be a leader.) You have probably been brought up to fight your corner and put yourself first. Instead the service model proposes that true leaders listen to others and work out how to support and help them, how to be there for them.

And those organisations that have Servant Leadership at their core, such as SouthWest Airlines in the US, are some of the most successful in the world. To quote from Kent Keith's book The Case for Servant Leadership:"We have to decide. Are we going to grab, or give? Are we going to use people, or help people?"

Which model do you follow: the power model or the service model of leadership?What would you do differently tomorrow if your primary focus was on serving others in your organisation?

Government Procurement: A Hopeless Mess

2008-07-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

The marking of SATs (national exams for children aged 11 and 14) is a national joke with many papers unmarked and some not even collected. These were outsourced for the first time this year but, we are reassured by a government spokesman, all the proper procurement procedure was followed in selecting the company to do it.

This reminds me of the old 19th century verdict on amputations, that “the operation was a success but the patient died”. The fact is that most government procedure is a bureaucratic joke and if it chooses the best supplier it is probably by accident.

Reality check: The process chose the wrong company to mark the SATs papers. Rather than checking if the right boxes were ticked during the process, they should be asking "What is wrong with our procurement system that we cocked up so badly?"

Any of us who have been through government procurement can give some clues. In a recent government tender for IT training, there was just one question on IT training itself and 37 on health & safety (learning about computers being a notoriously dangerous practice).

The bid by Happy Computers was thrown out because the accounts were slightly out of date, a requirement that wasn’t even specified. The fact that a survey by the same body had found Happy to be the most employer-focused provider, and the one most highly regarded by its clients, of any in the UK was apparently irrelevant compared to the 3 month delay in posting accounts.

There clearly need to be formal controls in procurement to stop corruption and to ensure responsible companies are chosen. Would it be so radical to have a process that was simple, that involved minimal paperwork and that focused on the company’s ability to actually do the job?

“Pain is Temporary, Quitting Lasts Forever”

2008-07-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

The immortal words of Lance Armstrong capture my state of mind as I struggle up the mighty Tourmalet, at 7,000ft the highest pass in the Pyrenees (over twice the height of any mountain in England). The rain is sleeting down and the temperature is near zero, despite it being July, and I am wondering what possessed me to enter the etape – the public stage of the Tour de France.

The local newspaper is to describe the weather as “apocalyptique” and the conditions as ”Dantesque”. And, unlike the marathon, the battle is not just with yourself. Following behind the cyclists is the ‘broom wagon’, which sweeps you off the street if it catches you. Of the 8,500 starters almost two and a half thousand were eliminated.The Tourmalet is a two hour continual climb to a point twice the height of any mountain in England.

But that is not the end. After an exhilarating but freezing descent through the beautiful Gorge de Luz, there is the 5,000 ft Hautacom to conquer. Eventually I finish the 169 kilometres in 9 hours and 6 minutes, 45 minutes ahead of the wagon and the sense of achievement is overwhelming.I have been training for five months but I realise as I ascend the mountain that it is all about determination.

It reminds me of Lance’s statement that it is not the fittest cyclist who wins the race, but the one who can endure the most pain. His quote that “Pain is Temporary” rings true for me after the ride. But it applies not just to physical endurance but also to any activity where it feels too difficult to carry on. In the short term it can feel easier to quit. But in the long term….

Serious cycling has also taught me the power of the group. Going at 21 mph as part of a ‘peloton’ (a group of cyclists in formation) is easier than 16 mph on your own. This is partly down to science (you need far less power when ‘slipstreaming’ the cyclist in front) but also reminds me of the energy and drive of a group of people working towards a shared goal.

And my thanks to our friends at training company Maynard Leigh. It was their Start the Year event in January that set me on this crazy target. And it reminded me that when you really focus on something – and put in the work – anything is achievable.

Systems not Rules

2008-06-15T15:07:00.001-07:00

How Celebrating Football Fans Prove the Point
Tonight my local streets are going wild in celebration. Hundreds of flag waving football fans are blocking the main road and cars are hooting wildly. I live off Green Lanes in Hackney, you see, and Turkey have pulled off a spectacular come-back to qualify for the quarter-finals of the European Championships. Their red-and-white flag is everywhere.

No traffic is moving and I feel especially sorry for the drivers of the 141 and 341 buses, who have now been stuck there for over an hour. There are no cars stuck, apart from those displaying red-and-white flags and participating as they have presumably turned round and found other routes.

But the buses stay there, because they presumably aren't allowed to go anywhere else. It is a classic case of the need for Systems not Rules. A Rule is something that must be followed. A System is the best way we know to achieve something, but it can be changed if you think you've found a better way.

The buses follow a Rule: They must go down a specified route, and are only trained to do that. They can't bend the rule even if the route is blocked. Whereas the actual aim is to get the passengers to their destination. Which certainly isn't happening at the moment.

It may be that the drivers don't have authority to make a change. Or it may be that the route is set in law and even their managers can't authorise a change. Would allowing some autonomy lead to anarchy on the buses? Or would it mean, as now, when the roads are completely blocked they find a solution - as the car drivers have?

Do you have set rules which specify exactly how something must be done. Or do you have a clear aim, with a system to achieve it - and encouragement to find a better way if you can?

2008-06-06T01:55:00.000-07:00

Note to Entrepreneurs: Avoid Lawyers
The founder of a new start-up company came to me yesterday for advice. He had lots of exciting ideas for how his company was going to be different but had hit one problem: They were taking extensive advice from lawyers and this seemed to be getting in the way of building the company the way they wanted. The employment contract, for instance, was full of "You must" and "You must not" and undecipherable legalese. He wanted flexible hours and employers able to do what they liked on the internet, but he'd ended up with a contract requiring staff to work 10 to 6 every day, and make no personal use of IT.

My advice was simple: ditch the lawyers. No great business I've ever heard of was built by lawyers. At Happy there was a period of 5 years where we paid a total of 200 Pounds to lawyers, and that included signing a 1 million 5 year contract with the NHS.There are legal requirements you must follow and you must, for instance, give your people employment contracts. But you are far better going to somebody like the Federation of Small Business, who will let you know what the legal requirements are and supply a sample contract, and check yours once you've created it, than any lawyer I know.

Lawyers will come up with 101 things you've got to protect yourself against, so you don't get sued. In reality the best way to ensure you never get sued is to be nice to people (staff, clients, partners). Make sure, even when you have to let somebody go, that you leave them feeling good about themselves. We, for instance, give people 3 months to find a new job if it hasn't worked out at Happy. Its much better to have ex-staff who think you are great (and may hire you into their next company) than bad mouthing you to everybody they meet.

Of course there things you need to be firm on. Our contract is very strict on staff not leaving to join clients of Happy. But keep contracts to a minimum. Our client contracts are effectively one paragraph: this states the price, payment and cancellation terms and says they can claim their money back in full if they are not happy with the service.

So my advice to any entrepreneur: Cut the lawyers and keep the contracts to a minimum. Focus instead on delivering such great service that it never crosses anybody's mind to resort to the contract.

How to get people to embrace change

2008-06-05T07:36:00.000-07:00

One of the most common questions I get, after one of my speeches on creating a great workplace, is "My people are so resistant to change, how do I get them to accept it?". In answer I like to give the story of my friend Marion Janner how she has enabled a remarkable programme of change in the NHS mental health sector.

I saw the effect at first hand when I spoke at her conference last year. Present were 150 staff from mental health hospitals across the country, all enthusiastic and positive about the changes they were introducing to improve the life of their patients.

Example: Changing the Mental Health System
Marion is not an NHS manager and is not even an NHS employee. Her experience was as a 'service user'. In the summer of 2005 she was sectioned and spent a month in a North London mental health hospital. This left her full of ideas of how mental health wards could be made into places that really engage their patients, and therefore better helped their recovery.

She came up with a set of 75 practical, easy to implement ideas, created the term Star Wards for the project and published a guidebook for trusts. These range from patients starting to manage their own medication to having pets on the ward. A recent newsletter reported from a ward arranging design competitions and space hopper races.

18 months after its launch, over half the mental health wards in the country are taking part in Star Wards. What staff, patients, managers, commissioners and regulators have found so heartening is the speed with which small changes are being introduced and having a substantial impact on patients’ experiences. And on staff morale. This creates a virtuous cycle of motivation, energy and creativity.

Now Mental Health Today publishes a 4 page supplement on the project every 2 months, Marion has been praised in a Guardian editorial and was one of 3 finalists in the Daily Telegraph Great Briton awards, (Public Life and Campaigning category). All this because one person, with no ostensible power, had an idea that things could be better.

Contrast this with how the government would have approached such a change. They would have started by attacking the work currently being done (as they have with teachers, police etc), and talk about the number of staff not doing a proper job. They would then prescribe a specific set of actions every trust must follow, set targets, introduce league tables and name and shame those not doing well. And then they would wonder why the changes were not being eagerly embraced.

Change Based on Respect
Marion did not prescribe, she suggested. Reading Marion's newsletters you find examples only of the great work certain wards are doing. There is total respect for the professionals involved. There is no set way of doing it, just a range of ideas to try out with people encouraged to come up with new approaches. (Star Wards II will describe the many great pieces of work going on.)

A core belief at Happy is that people work best when they feel good about themselves. Marion's work is a living embodiment of that, and shows the effect of praise, support and encouragement. Questions for YouMy questions to those who want to get their people to change:

Are you seeking to impose the change you want or actively engaging your people in the change?
How can you involve your people in deciding what needs to happen?
Are you focusing on praising the good developments or criticising the problems that remain?
Is it a top-down or bottom-up approach?

It isn't change that people resist, but change imposed from above. I'd love to hear your stories of change. Email me on henry@happy.co.uk or ring on 07870 682442

More from Marion:
Here are some of Marion's further thoughts after reading this piece:

“Some of the other things that contribute to Star Wards’ popularity are:
It is a very collaborative project. At ward level, the structure (or lack of one!) is very conducive to patients and staff, and also staff from different professions working together. Nationally, Star Wards’ members not only share resources and ideas but have an ‘open source’ approach, adapting and then sharing each others’ ideas and practical resources, such as benchmarking toolkit is so flexible.

Wards which are already providing excellent services can find or adapt (as well as contribute) complex ideas for improvements. And wards which are functioning at a much more basic level, discover that even very simple ‘innovations’, such as having a ‘film night’ (with a chosen DVD + popcorn) can make a real difference to ward dynamics and culture. It is very visible.

The improvements themselves are all very tangible and because most ward members chose to carry out regular benchmarking exercises against the 75 ideas, everyone can measure and savour the progress.”

(If you would like to contact Marion, drop me an email.)