Company culture is something that nowadays heavily decides about company uniqueness. Companies that have managed to build exceptional culture are attracting talented people that are looking for something more than just a place to work. Every manager and leader is responsible for building such culture and my view is that this is far more complex task than writing software.

Recently I’ve seen very good slides related to happiness of workers. For me happiness of workers is one of the most important foundations of outstanding culture. Every organization would like to have happy workers. While viewing the slides my attention focused on part where authors are listing 12 steps to Happiness. This triggered me to write this post. In continuous pursuit for great organizational culture I stumbled across some interesting practices and I believe that they may be really useful in fulfilling some of the happiness steps. Let me share them here.

First of all spend some quality time by yourself – that is required prerequisite for any leader that wants to improve organization in a positive way. Not understanding your own goals means that you cannot help others realize their own purposes. Leadership becomes artificial and does not have proper foundation.

Moreover – encourage participating in or conducting of mindfulness training sessions – it is becoming more and more popular for many companies to take care about mental well being of employees. Mindfulness practices are developing positive feelings and happiness. Great article has recently appeared related to this subject. Many companies are introducing mindfulness awareness which clearly shows that this topic is no longer irrelevant and organizations are seeing clear connection between spirituality and work effects.

Invest time to have better and more productive meetings – try walking meetings. Idea is quite simple and brings benefits really quickly – if you want to have a meeting as part of your work do it outside the office while walking in the park or in some other nice place. You may be surprised how change of environment opens your mind and conversation to many interesting ideas. Very easy to do one-to-ones like that, quite challenging to involve more people, but still worth experimenting.

Sticking to meetings – it is always worth to enhance them with healthy food – you will not only make proper food easily available for everyone, but right choice of it will boost brainpower, will have tremendous impact on meeting’s productivity and outcome and, last but not least, people will be more willing to attend the meeting.

Use wealth and richness of online video materials and organize “watch-together” sessions followed by discussion. This may open doors for more effective knowledge sharing and “socialization” or can encourage to start many great experiments.

To summarize – I hope you find some of the tips useful, I promise to post more as this leadership journey I’m on is becoming more and more fascinating.