Ten years ago, Henry Stewart wrote The Happy Manifesto, outlining 10 principles for happier workplaces. Among them: Make your people feel good; Be open and transparent; Celebrate mistakes. 

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Henry joins Gemma and Ross G the relevance of these principles in 2023. Spoiler: They’re even more important. 

We discuss: 

• how the workplace has evolved 
• the emergence of ‘self-managing organisations’ 
• the factors that stop leaders creating a happy workplace. 

 

During the discussion, Henry recommended the following books: 

• Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet 
• Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux 
• Maverick by Ricardo Semler 
• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer 

 

He also mentioned the paper: Edmans, A. (2011). Does the stock market fully value intangibles? Employee satisfaction and equity prices. Journal of Financial economics, 101(3), 621-640. 

• actions you can take when budgets are tight 
• how the lessons of 2008 can be applied today. 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross discussed the use of cannabis to unlock creativity at work (or not, as it turned out): economist.com/business/2023/01/12/how-to-unlock-creativity-in-the-workplace 

The original paper is at: Heng, Y. T., Barnes, C. M., & Yam, K. C. (2022). Cannabis use does not increase actual creativity but biases evaluations of creativity. Journal of Applied Psychology. 

Henry discussed neurodiversity, sparking Ross to recommend this Learning Guild article from Judy Katz: learningguild.com/articles/designing-for-autism-adhd-and-more-representing-neurodivergence/?rd=1 

For more from Henry, see https://www.happy.co.uk. Or you can contact him at: [email protected] 

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   

Connect with our speakers    

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter: 

• Gemma Towersey - @GemmaTowersey 
• Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT 
• Henry Stewart - @HappyHenry