What is this The Happy Things session?

Part of the weekly team meeting held every Monday, The Happy Things session is a series of Google Drive slide presentation where each team member is given one (or more slides, depending on our content) slide to fill in with photos, text and links – haphazardly, yet with love – of things and activities that made us happy the week before. Once filled in, everyone will present and elaborate on their respective slides of those items.

How does it work?

To give an idea of how much we look forward to it, here’s a rough idea of the weekly team meeting agenda:

• 11:00 am – 11:30 am EST: Status updates
• 11:30 am – 11:45 am EST: Announcements
• 11:45 am – 12:30 pm EST: Happy Things

The first half an hour of the meeting is reserved especially for the serious stuff – catching up on projects, asking questions, troubleshooting and other work-related conversations. To save time, a team member (usually Sani) will prepare the blank slides in Google Drive and share the link with us so we could fill in while we are waiting for the rest to finish with status updates. At this point of time, those who are already done were already sitting at the edge of their seats – just could not wait to tell what we had been up to the week before. As we work remote, mostly all meeting are conducted through Skype, and fortunately this is where the most fun lies 🙂

The Happy Things Highlights

Looking back at the repository of The Happy Things slides in our Google Drive, it was just surreal to discover the amount of great things and also mischiefs we have been up to – individually or with each other. Here’s a point to illustrate (and some highlights to follow):

Shaiful was presenting his happy things (apparently about crab soup and working from the library with a view) through Skype while the rest us were listening, until he let out a huge shriek and disappeared from the Skype call for about 5 minutes. When he returned, all still panting and gasping, he said, “There was a stupid cockroach.” Intuitively as the most supportive team members ever, we decided to put up cockroach pictures all over his slide presentation (and poor him, all over his crab soup too) in between our unsuppressed laughter.

This was when Sani first joined as our junior front-end developer, all ready to take up new challenges, so we photoshopped his face on Daniel Craig’s dreamy body.

There was also an obscure Freddie Mercury video shot and food pictures, which happens every single week (the food, not Freddie Mercury) – sending us scrambling to the kitchen soon after the meeting is done.

This was when Shaza found out that Iwan was getting engaged, and was supposed to keep it a secret from the rest of us. But that wouldn’t stop her from relaying all the hints, intentionally in hot pink and Comic Sans just loud enough to catch the bait.

Of course, there are updates about all sorts of gadgetries and gaming.

Stampede wouldn’t also be Stampede without travel photos.

Eventually, after many weeks, we would still find the cockroach making another appearance – and even larger than life.

Why do we do this?

An idea of Shaza’s, she realised that while everyone was looking forward to achieve bigger and bigger things in life, it is also important to delight in smaller things that make us happy every day. Besides, isn’t Plato was also saying something about you could get to know people by the things they love? (I was kidding, the exact quote is this)

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.

Does your workplace also have similar activities to get the employees to look forward for Monday? We’d love to hear about them!

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