Wow @ Work

Aoife O’Brien is the founder of Happier at Work, a business with the mission to support organisations in retaining top talent. She is passionate about fit and specifically how creating the right environment can help individuals to reach their full potential and support organisations to thrive.

She partners with HR and business leaders to focus on four pillars: engagement and belonging; leadership equity; performance and productivity; and the future of work. She is a self-professed data nerd, with a 20+ year career in market research in the fast-moving consumer goods industry working with clients like Coca Cola, Unilever and Heinz to solve marketing problems using data analytics.

Aoife has been featured by several national media platforms and public speaking events talking about imposter syndrome, fit, employee engagement, productivity, and remote working. Her podcast, Happier at Work, features a combination of interview-based episodes as well as solo podcasting, and has 50,000 listens in more than 50 countries.

She has lived and worked in Dublin, London, Perth, and Sydney and has a MSc in Work and Organisational Behaviour, a Diploma in Executive and Life Coaching and a Certificate in Career Coaching.

Sarah Metcalfe is passionate about happiness in the workplace, and she knows the positive impact this has on the customer experience. Through continuing to innovate and improve the customer journey, Sarah joined Sure Petcare in 2010, taking responsibility for the company’s customer service and guiding it through an extraordinary period of expansion and growth. She now leads a talented multilingual team who deliver outstanding customer service and happiness to all Sure Petcare customers around the world. Sarah left Sure Petcare with a Net Promoter Score of 90+ in over 20 countries.

Sarah now runs her own consulting company, Happy Coffee Consulting to help companies create great customer service and happy workplaces. She is now a partner with Woohoo Ltd and runs the Woohoo Academy, creating Chief Happiness Officers within organisations worldwide and spreading the word that the future workplaces are those that put their people at the heart of what they do.

Sarah is also the founder of the International Week of Happiness at Work summit which takes place each September – an international online summit with Keynote speakers at the forefront of workplace happiness sharing their insights.

Elena Kerrigan is the MD of Think Productive, a UK-based global company that enables organisations to reimagine how they work with productivity tools. They have helped companies as diverse as Aston Martin, American Express, Audi, Boots, GSK, Sainsbury’s and Volkswagen.

Through their courses and workshops they help organisations reclaim time from distractions, unproductive meetings and getting emails under control. This has allowed Think Productive to not only talk the talk the talk but also walk the walk.

Since 2011 they have worked a four-day week: paid for five days but only working four days.

Elena shares how they have done just that and the benefits they have experienced.

Think Productive are presently advising other UK companies who are trialling the four-day working week in 2022.

Stephen and Liliana are joined by author, conference organiser, and remote work expert Liam Martin.

Liam is the CMO of time tracking and productivity platform and also co-organizer of the Running Remote conference, and author of Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers. He has spent 20 years working remotely before we all entered a forced world of work we never thought possible.

In his conversation with Stephen and Liliana, he examines the impact 20th century ideas of work have on 21st century work environments, using Tesla as an example. He also unpacks the concept of asynchronous management: where platforms do the role of reporting across an organisation, rather than relying on layers of management.

Joining Stephen is Henry Stewart, Chief Happiness Officer at London-based training company Happy Ltd. Henry is the author of the Happy Manifesto, a book that helps organisations become great places to work.

An international keynote speaker, Henry advises others like Stephen on how they can transform the world of work for the better.

To learn more about breathwork, visit BreatheNow Hub, and to learn how to create happier workplaces, visit wakeup.ie.

Laurence and Carlos from the Happy Startup School do business differently, and want to help others think differently about the work they do. After running a design agency, their approach to business – integrating ease and play – became their focus, and the Happy Startup School was born.

In this conversation with Liliana and Stephen, the founders of this purpose-led business school unpack what brought them from founding Spook Studio to running a thriving community of entrepreneurs, how they're transforming people's approaches to business, and providing more opportunities to escape Zoom fatigue.

To learn more about breathwork, visit BreatheNow Hub, and to learn how to create happier workplaces, visit wakeup.ie.

Advancements in technology, productivity, knowledge-work and leadership have yet to address the problems of work-life balance and burnout facing people in modern workplaces. This week, Liliana and Stephen dig into the ways in which shrinking the working week can expand our potential to be productive, healthier and happier.

To learn more about breathwork, visit BreatheNow Hub, and to learn how to create happier workplaces, visit wakeup.ie.

This week, Stephen and Liliana talk mojo, and finding intrinsic motivation where it feels like none is available. Stephen shares his passion for the Frisbee, and Liliana describes her yoga practise and her love of rollerblading.

The main topic for discussion is intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation: doing things because we're satisfied by the task rather than because we expect a reward. Drawing on evidence from past experiments, Stephen lays out three steps organisations can take to instil a greater sense of autonomy.

Liliana and Stephen are joined by Patrick McKeown, author of Atomic Focus, The Oxygen Advantage among several other titles, to discuss the ways poor breathing affects day-to-day living, and hampers our success. Patrick is an international breathing expert and author based in Galway, Ireland, working with members of the military, special forces, Olympic athletes and more.

Success has three key ingredients: focus, concentration, and attention span, and Patrick argues that you can't enter a state of flow if your breathing is dysfunctional. So Patrick shares some techniques you can implement today to keep track of your breathing and your attention span, and advocates techniques covered in early episodes of Wow@Work.

And if you want to learn any more about breathwork, visit BreatheNow Hub, and to learn how to create happier workplaces, visit wakeup.ie.

Liliana and Stephen are joined by behaviour designer and serial entrepreneur John Ellison.

John he started his entrepreneurial journey when he dropped out of university at the age of 18 to start his first ecommerce business. Since then he's been working at Harvard's Intersection of Business, Design, and Technology, to help make a world a better place.

He honed his craft as a UX designer at Brighton agency Clearleft, and went on to lead a product team at civic tech startup Peak Democracy in Berkeley, California, where he experienced his first acquisition and ended up meeting Dr BJ Fogg and becoming certified to teach behaviour design, the methodology used to create habit-forming startups like Instagram.

In this interview, John shares his new project: Happy Habits, and his plans for turning his newsletter into a deck of cards with prompts to help build happier everyday habits. Along with Stephen and Liliana, he examines happiness in the workplace, and shares some of the methodologies successful companies are already employing to improve their employees' wellbeing.