I’m having a massively interesting week here. Monday I did a workshop for The Danish Union of Librarians. The workshop focused on making the libraries happier workplaces and on promoting better cooperation between management and union reps.

In my opinion, the one place where management and unions can always meet and work together is happiness at work. On all other areas, like salaries, policies, vacations, leadership, etc. they can easily end up on different sides. But everyone can agree that happiness at work is a worthy goal that serves both employees AND the workplace and that makes it a great place to start to improve working relations.

Today I’m going to Estonia to do a workshop for a new company called Arigato. Arigato is the newest, shiniest fitness center in the Baltic and a company with huge ambitions. Simply put, they want excellent customer service, and they’ve realized that the only way to achieve it is to have happy employees. That’s where I come in :o)

As you may know if you’ve watched Shogun as avidly as I have, domo arigato means thank you very much in Japanese, and one of the company’s core values is indeed gratitude. It’s very difficult to come up with new corporate values (everyone seems to end up with some variation of respect, openness, excellence, quality and trust) but gratitude is new to me. It’s a great idea though – as studies show that gratitude is a key to happiness.

After the workshop my wonderful girlfriend and I will be relaxing for a few days in Tallinn. I’ll be back on Monday, but I’ve set up a few posts to appear for the rest of the week, so things won’t have to go quiet here on the blog.