In the UK business community there is a growing interest in the topic of employee engagement, sparked by a government-commissioned report in 2009, Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance through Employee Engagement. In November 2012 the report’s authors, David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, established a group called Engage for Success  (EfS) which describes itself as a “movement […]

Even though Ken Keir focused on Honda’s R&D philosophy, explaining that in recessionary times, the company goes against the tide and invests more in R&D rather than less, by the time we reached slide 5 of the presentation on the Honda strategy, vision, values, and behavior, it was pretty clear to me that here was a company founded on positive psychology principles. How did I know?

Unusually for me, my posting for Positive Psychology News this month is a book review, Kate Hefferon and Ilona Boniwell’s Positive Psychology: Theory, Research and Applications. Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s a textbook, in short it’s a highly enjoyable, educational, and engaging read, well worth the £18-£20 it’s currently selling for […]

Issue 2 of the open access positive psychology journal, the International Journal of Well-Being has just been published. It focuses on ‘felicitators’ or producers of happiness, that is the people, places,  ideas and institutions that have made and can make the world a happier place.  People familiar with pos psych research may find the subjects […]

Here’s a great animated video supporting Daniel Pink’s presentation on intrinsic motivation and why profit-related pay (PRP) doesn’t actually motivate people to work harder. According to Pink, psychology research shows that economists have got it all wrong. If you want to motivate and engage people, and get them work harder, they need to experience the […]

Tal Ben-Shahar, Psychology Lecturer at Harvard University talks about how organisations can use Positive Psychology to improve motivation, creativity and loyalty, and ultimately productivity (2.37 mins). Thanks to bigthink.com …

The American Psychological Association has just announced the five winners of its 2009 Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards. The statistics quoted are interesting: Their average turnover rate is 11% vs 39% nationally 85% of their employees reported being satisfied with their jobs vs 61% nationally 87% of their employees said they would recommend their organizations to […]

A couple of years ago I met someone at a networking event whose business card described him as a ‘Chief Happiness Officer’. And no he wasn’t wearing a red nose, curly wig and big shoes…As a corporate role I couldn’t see it catching on (not in the UK anyway) but perhaps I was wrong… This […]

Gallup-Healthways has recently issued details of their Well-being Index – a survey of over 100,000 Americans which shows that employees who are unhappy at work take, on average, an extra 15 days sick leave a year. Yes, that’s right, an extra 15 days a year. The survey assesses well-being at work by asking employees about […]

This month my Positive Psychology News Daily article focuses on the problem of applying Positive Psychology in business. At the moment there are only about a dozen or so validated interventions (i.e. exercises which are scientifically ‘proven’ to increase your well-being); all of them are common sense/what your grandmother knew; none of them are rocket-science. […]

This month’s posting for Positive Psychology News Daily focuses the importance of space in the development of well-being in children, and what this means for the rest of us. …

In our MAPP class today we were fortunate enough to have Mark Templeton, O2s Director of Organisation Development, present to us on the positive psychology approach to leadership development that he has implemented with great success over the past year. One thing that really intrigued me was the mention of David Whyte, a.k.a the “Corporate […]