In Active Connector, we take happiness at work very seriously. Like VERY seriously.

Yesterday, 12 people in the company who have been so tight in many deadlines and pressing responsibilities decided to dedicate their precious one whole business hour to commit themselves to do Yoga hard in the office. Yes, Yoga.

You hear a lot about people in Google do table tennis at their work place, do Yoga, meditation in their office and all, and you think people can do this because they are in the company like Google. Active Connector is no way like Google in terms of size of the company and business state, but we decided to do Yoga class in the work hour.

Why do we do this? Why do small company as small as team of 14 people decided to do Yoga class at the work place? Are we getting crazy? Are we not serious about the work?  Doing Yoga class at the work place is one of our “Chief Happiness Officer” initiatives in Active Connector. In Active Connector, every two months, two people from the team get nominated to lead the role of Chief Happiness Officer. Their responsibility as Chief Happiness Officer (CHO) is very challenging yet extremely valuable and crucial: make the whole team in the office happy. CHOs are supposed to dedicate their time to come up with unique and also effective way to make the team happy with the monthly budget allocated by the top executive.

CHO initiative is started because Active Connector is very visionary and we want to make a positive change in the society NO MATTER WHAT. We want to see everyone in the world pursuing their passion and talent in their work place, and be the change agent in the society, i.e. find their IKIGAI. We know that to realize this vision is not an easy task especially in the country like Japan where everyone is living under the pressure of “conformity”.  Because this vision is difficult to achieve, we have got to grow ourselves fast and we have to be focused in our goals and vision.

To achieve our ambitious goal and get the team together and maximize their potentials to their fullest, we believe the source of the success is to have everyone in the team happy. This is based on the study by Harvard University professor, Shawn Achor who found out that “a decade of research proves that happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37%, productivity by 31%, and accuracy on tasks by 19%, as well as a myriad of health and quality of life improvements.”(Source)

For us, committing to the team’s happiness is not just a company’s welfare program. It is about company’s growth strategy. And we take this happiness very serious.

Going back to our initial talk, that is why we did Yoga yesterday at the office 🙂 CHO invited his good friend who is a Yoga teacher (Yoga master!). People who participated the session commented that the Yoga class was very successful in a way to make people very happy because they could get rid of unnecessary stress and bad thought through Yoga.

We can’t wait to have next CHO initiative in the team 🙂 Do you ever want to be a part of this exciting happy team? Please e-mail Active Connector [email protected]   Even if you can’t join our team, if you are interested in finding the work place as exciting as Active Connector, you can find the best matched jobs here in our website:https://www.active-connector.com/jobs/    We are dedicated to screen the good startups in Japan and we will be dedicating to help you prepare for the job process, talk with you and listen to you stories so that we can help you find the best jobs that you can really feel your IKIGAI.

There is one student who seems like long way to go to become a Yoga master.

This day’s office dress code was “Yoga friendly” dress. You can see how people were well prepared for it 🙂

CEO was absent from Yoga class. No, they are not bowing for CEO. Active Connector is pretty flat company in that sense.

Thank you Yoga Teacher for giving us this amazing opportunity! We loved it!!