What does Happy mean to Henry? As his title at Happy embraces, happiness is something Henry thinks about a lot.
Named on the Thinkers50 list Guru Radar of the top 50 business thinkers worldwide, he loves speaking at events - sharing his enthusiasm about how to create great workplace cultures.
Happy, the company Henry founded, focuses on helping organisations to shape happy workplaces, by working with their leadership to enable a culture of trust and freedom.
They know that people don't like being micromanaged, being told what to do, and blame culture. What they do like, and what enables them to thrive, is doing something they are good at, having the freedom to do it well, a manager who coaches rather than dictates, and a culture that celebrates mistakes.
What an uplifting and infectiously heartwarming experience it was talking with Henry. I hope you enjoy it too.
In our uplifting and empowering conversation, Henry:
- Explains how Happy helps businesses to create positive workspaces, and his role as Chief Happiness Officer.
- Expands on how Happy delivers training, relevant to businesses at all stages of their business journey, and how their government funding works.
- Drills down into company facts – how and why Happy started, its size, its turnover and its pricing.
- Describes Happy’s recruitment philosophy, including why they interview people in groups of six.
- Talks about the moment Henry first realised a business like Happy could succeed.
- Highlights some of the unorthodox ways that Happy is structured, including having no managers, and empowering the staff to decide Henry’s salary.
- Discusses Happy’s B-Corp certification, the process they had to go through to get it and what they’ll need to do to keep it.
- Shares an overview of Happy’s early years, and how they work today – for example how they measure staff happiness, how amazing their staff retention rate is, and their core values including the number one: ‘make people feel good about themselves’.
- Opens up about future plans – working with as many people as possible to create more happy workspaces, and learnings he’s picked up along the way, including trusting people, letting yourself make mistakes, getting rid of middle management and letting people define their own roles.
- Explains the concept of psychological safety – the idea that anyone can speak up, and ways you can structure meetings to have more positive outcomes.
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