Webinar Impressions: How Can Happiness Help Any Business Thrive?

Our guest at the last Heartcount webinar was the CEO of Contento Cultness, Nicolás González Restrepo. He shared with us an inspiring story about bringing happiness to a call center, where employees call people who owe money and arrange for them to pay it back.

How Did Contento Become Happy Place?

Contento has been a family business for 54 years, and it’s name wasn’t Contento from the beginning. It all started five years ago. As the job at the call center for most people is transition work (during the faculty, etc.), the turnover is high. To improve that field, they decided to go back to the roots. They brought the central values their founder has promoted and put people first. They decided to transform the working experience and help people grow while they work there, in every way. So they decided to start researching happiness at work, and after five years of applying that in practice, they changed their name into Contento Cultness, which means The culture of happiness.

What Can You Learn from Contento’s Experience?

During the five years of learning about happiness at work, they have tried many things, made many mistakes, and created many positive changes at their workplace. During the webinar, Nicolas pointed out four things he has learned along the way:

• Every company is unique, so it doesn’t work with a copy-paste system. A certain solution that has worked for someone else may not work for your company. Instead, dedicate yourself to finding out what is going on at your workplace. This brings us to the second point.
• Listen to the people. Stop making assumptions about what people want and start asking and talking about what people think and how they feel about certain things. During the webinar, Nico shared with us how the Contento company has figured that out.
• Happiness is not the opposite of productivity. It is meaningful to make people aware of why certain things are important and make them want to implement the change.
• Gratitude is the easiest and the cheapest way to bring happiness to work. In the webinar, Nico told us how they use it at their call center.

What are Contento’s business results based on happiness at work?

The Contento’s activities make people happy and have a positive impact on business as well. For instance, their turnover rate has decreased, the percent of absenteeism was 10%, and now it is lower than 3%. Also, productivity during one year has increased by 16%, which is, among other things, the result achieved by doing activities that would increase happiness at work.

Learn more about the interesting Contento Cultness path of happiness at our webinar video and find inspiration to help your organisation become happier.