This year International Week of Happiness at work in Slovenia lasted for more than a week. Actually it has begun on September 2nd and is still lasting. To be honest, it has been a really amazing, inspiring, motivating time, connecting people, companies, and media in one mission – create happier working places. It has been so crazy good and awesome it has almost felt like H@W Christmas! What exactly was going on?
Introducing the concept of happiness at work is not an easy job, we have been thinking about the way to raise additional awareness among people. We have decided to do a survey on how good are days at work all around Slovenia. It has been a huge success and a big surprise for us as we have got over 500 answers – amazing result for a small country of 2 million people, also with the viral effect. Through this survey we have also established many new contacts, we have gained interest from media as well as an enormous support from people all over the country. We have already had quite some media coverage and we still have some to go.
We have presented the results to media by sending them a press release, we have also send the final report to the people that were taking part in our survey and posted it on our blog site. The main finding was that unhappy relationships and overload at work are the biggest obstacles for happier working environments. The results of the survey are very much comparable to global results from similar Woohoo Inc. surveys in the past. People are getting more and more aware about the importance of being happy at work; organisations are getting there very slowly.
Meet ups for HR people
The “happy week” has started with the Meet up for HR people on the 18th of September in Ljubljana. It has been the very first meet up we have ever hosted and around 40 HR people and experts/CEOs from top companies and management faculties were attending. They have found the topic very interesting and inspiring. On 25th of October we have hosted another HR meet up, in our home town Maribor. This time we have focused the meeting on happiness at work, health and well-being.
Media cooperation
On the 23rd of September we have started a campaign “21 day challenge for more H@W” together with the biggest Slovene daily newspaper Delo (in English it means Work J) and its edition Svet kapitala (in english it means The world of Capital). 21 companies from all over the country were invited to participate in this challenge and the journalist visits one company per day to find out how they face the daily challenge. The story is posted on their web site as well as through social media. Among those 21 companies are some biggest employers in Slovenia, a few IT companies and design agencies, company that has just implemented 6-hour workday, business faculty and many more.
Happy at work stories
For some time we have been publishing on our web page and in social media outlets the stories of people happy at work. During the International Happiness at work week we have published five of them, including the story Alexander Kjerulf, the founder and Chief Happiness Officer of Woohoo inc and one of the world’s leading experts on happiness at work.
We have also set up a web page dedicated to H@W week that has got excellent statistics. And last but not least, we have been speaking at the amazing Global online summit on Happiness at work. It has been a really special experience – being in a company of the greatest happy minds on this planet. Maja was talking about the strategic side of happiness at work and Petra touched the very basics – that happiness at work starts with me, with the individual.
It has been an amazing journey and the two of us are really very proud and grateful. We are also very grateful for all the support we have from the moment we have decided on the mission of creating a future that belongs to happy at work. Support by family, friends, people we talk to, people we meet, people we make projects together – everybody that is willing to make happier working environments; we call them ambassadors of happiness at work. And last but not least; the energy, inspiration, knowledge, and experience of all the partners in Woohoo Inc. have just been the cherry on the top of the cake.
We are already thinking about the International Week of Happiness at Work 2020. It is going to be quite a challenge to exceed this year but we are looking forward to new ideas, plans and projects.
Thanks to all of you that spread happiness at work and thank you for doing it also in the future. The future belongs to happy (at work).
We are Maja and Petra, chief happiness officers and positive organisational culture consultants from company Paleta znanj. We have been spreading happiness at work in Slovenia for about two years.
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