I recorded this episode of the podcast during the International Conference on Happiness at Work in Copenhagen, where both me and Rich led a workshop. Rich Sheridan is the author of a famous book Joy Inc and also founder of Menlo Innovations - company which has the mission to "end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology.".

​The unique thing about Menlo Innovations and also the main topic of our interview was pairing. It's the way of work, where two people cooperate on one task. They sit together behind one computer, with one keyboard (or even one pen & paper) and discuss and share their ideas. In the first view, a very unusual idea. But one that brings many advantages to company culture.

​We discussed how pairing helps to build feedback culture or how it improves learning within the organization. At Menlo Innovations, pairing is, of course, also an integral part of the interview process and it greatly helps to test for culture fit before looking at the technical topics.

If you'd like to dive deeper into happiness at work, don't miss our international conference coming to Prague (Czech Republic) on October 10th, 2019. For more details about the event, visit happinessatwork.cz.

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Mikael Kamber is a journalist and a news anchor on the biggest Danish TV Channel, he has been CEO of Denmark's biggest regional newspaper and much more. And he is also very focused on positive psychology which he studied in the USA. He wrote two books on the topic - "The Yes Culture" (published 2015 and available in English) and "Stronger" (which will be available in English at the beginning of 2019), he is involved in the International Conference on Happiness at Work in Copenhagen, and he has even managed to introduce "the positive segment" on prime time news on Danish TV.

We had very interesting discussion with Mikael not only about happiness at work, but also about journalism, TV news and Positive Psychology 2.0. What is it? Basically it's about finding a balance between focus on positive thinking and negative stuff that is happening around us. And we just can't ignore it, it's part of the world and we should find ways to handle it while not being overwhelmed. Check out the podcast for a nice explanation by Mikael:

We originally planned to record this podcast during my short stay in Seattle last year. Unfortunately, David wasn't in the city those couple days I passed through. But at the end of the day, we made it! I connected with David online and had a great discussion.

I was really looking forward to this podcast, because TINYpulse is one of the products I really believe could help to build more happiness at any workplace. I used it both at Inmite and Avast and it always gave me some interesting insights into our company culture. The main idea behind TINYpulse is very simple - it asks people in your team one simple question per week. This gives you an almost real-time view of the current mood in your organization and shows things you could celebrate or improve. But that is of course just the tip of the iceberg  when it comes to the app's offerings...

As I found out, David and I have much more in common than "just" a passion to make employees happier at work. David is also a marathon runner (I'm planning my first marathon this year) and traveller. A few years ago, he took a  "Careercation" when he left his job and travelled around the world, while interviewing entrepreneurs and CEOs in various countries and cultures. You can read about the trip in his e-book on-line or from Amazon.

I believe you will enjoy listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it :)

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The last stop during our trip around the world was Canada. And I was very lucky to meet Calvin there. He founded his company, Lykki, 27 years ago. Their core business is delivery of office supplies, but they are doing so much more!

In past few years, lot of Calvin's focus goes to happiness at work. And you can see that at the moment you enter the office: everyone is engaged and interested in what's happening. When I visited them, it was Calvin's first day at work after few weeks of traveling in Denmark and Bhutan. And as I have seen during the morning huddle, everything went absolutely smoothly during his trip. You can see people are motivated and empowered to do a great job there.

We've talked about their hiring for a culture fit, flat organisation structure, simple company values and how they live them but also their interesting charity projects in Nicaragua.

Very inspiring company!

Most of us know Hawaii as a great place to relax. A place where you go for a vacation, when you need to disconnect from your work. But also at Hawaii, there are people going to work every day and companies having their ups and downs. When we were planning our stay here I was very happy to find out there are also Happiness Managers at Hawaii.

One of them is Heather Patterson. We've met during our trip to Oahu (the biggest island of Hawaii), to talk about happiness at work. Heather moved to Hawaii many years ago from the US and recently she started her own consultancy. She is helping Hawaiian companies became  a little happier...

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If you are runner, cyclist or swimmer, you probably know Strava - app for tracking many types of sport activities. It's actually one of my favorite mobile apps and one of the few I use every day. Thanks to Adam, my friend and great triathlete, who also happens to be engineer at Strava, I found out about great company culture they have. And when we spent a couple weeks in Silicon Valley during our travels, I just had to visit Strava HQ.

At the moment of entering the building, you know it's the place where sport is really important part of everyone's life. Locker rooms, bike racks and even a workshop to fix your bike are available just next to office space. But as you will find out from interview with Tracy Lorenz, who takes care of company culture, it's not only about sports. Company really cares about it's core values and builds authentic, diverse and open atmosphere. Check out how they do it in the new episode of my podcast...

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Zappos is probably world's most famous company when speaking about company values and culture. And it was a great pleasure for me to visit their Las Vegas headquarters for a short tour and a great chat with Jon Wolske - Culture Evangelist, TEDx speaker and all-around Rock Star.

It's almost 18 years since Zappos was founded as on-line store with shoes. But it soon became much more than that. During it's history, it went through many big changes. Two most significant were probably acquisition by Amazon and a change of company structure to holocracy. But they still live their values and deliver wow every day...

How did they manage to keep company values alive? Was it a significant change to become a part of huge Amazon? And how does the holocracy work on day to day basis? Find out in the newest episode of the podcast:

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After our European family trip we had a christmas break from travelling. Enough time to visit friends and families back home... But we've soon started moving again. For this year we planned a trip around the world!

Our first longer stop was in Australia. And I was lucky enough to visit it's most famous happy company - Atlassian. There I met with Dom Price, head of R&D and the "Work Futurist".

Atlassian is very interesting software company founded more than 15 years ago. From the very beginning, company culture and values were extremely important for them. And they still are now, in company of 2000 people around the globe. They have some very inspirational practices - like regular company-wide hackathons called ShipIt days. Where anyone can work on absolutely anything for 24 hours. Atlassians are focused on letting teams do a great job - they try to keep the teams small and company structure very flat while providing great communication tools for everyone.

For more inspiration, check out their website, where they share some of their tools: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook

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The last stop of the European part of our tour was Italy. In Milan I met with Giovanni Battista Pozza, founder of happiness think tank FullGlass.

My most important topic during our dicussion was the current state of "happiness at work" in Italy. Many of us know Italians as a very friendly and happy nation from our vacations. But this is not the case in the workplace...

Happiness at work is not a topic in Italy yet. Only younger generations and younger companies are thinking about it's importance. And it's quite difficult to explain the concept to traditional Italian bosses. In contrast to Scandinavian countries (see my podcasts from Denmark below), Italy was often rated as one of the unhappiest countries in Europe. Why is it so? And what is Giovanni and his FullGlass doing to improve it?

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After our visit in Italy we planned a short break. But the second phase of our trip is coming. Stay tuned for the World tour!

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To record the sixth episode of Happiness at Work Podcast I visited Spanish headquarters of Vygon in Valencia. I was welcome there by their CEO, Florent Amion.

Visiting the office itself was a great experience - they call it the first optimistic building in Spain and one can feel the difference from the moment he enters.

With Florent we've discussed the changes they went through in a past few years after they decided to implement humanistic model of management. It's based on Management by Missions, positive psychology and other inspirational approaches.

One of my big questions was, why was it possible to do all those people-centric changes. The answer is simple - Vygon is based on the great foundations. Although its a big international company now, it's still a "family business". Owned by the 3rd generation of the founding family. And people are very valuable asset in such environment.

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