Speaker 1: Pushkin, Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Today, I want to share
Speaker 1: a special episode from our friends at Fixable, who recently
Speaker 1: had me on their show to talk about how we
Speaker 1: can all become happier at work. On the show, I
Speaker 1: chat with business leaders Anne Morris and Francis Frey about
Speaker 1: the conditions we all need to thrive on the job.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Speaker 2: Francis kiss us off today? What made you happy this week?
Speaker 2: To word Caitlin Clark.
Speaker 3: Let me explain the WNBA is riveting and awesome and
Speaker 3: even though I played basketball in college, I wasn't watching
Speaker 3: it as diligently as I am now. And so what
Speaker 3: made me happy this week?
Speaker 2: I have a new Caitlin Clark jersey.
Speaker 4: It has definitely brought a new level of joy into
Speaker 4: the house. Thank you to my dear sister in law,
Speaker 4: Zoe Rodriguez for sending the jerseys.
Speaker 5: Which I wear every time I watch the game.
Speaker 2: Sparking joy for the rest of us as well. Can
Speaker 2: I ask the fall question?
Speaker 4: Yeah, we just did a great episode on routines. Do
Speaker 4: you have a game day routine for watching Caitlin play?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 3: I sure do so I begin every morning at breakfast
Speaker 3: to tell the boys what time the game is on.
Speaker 3: They don't watch the game with me, but I tell
Speaker 3: them when the game is just so that they know
Speaker 3: what I will be doing.
Speaker 2: And they're teenage boy they don't register time and plan.
Speaker 2: But that's where it begins.
Speaker 3: And then there is a cascade of planning that I
Speaker 3: keep checking the clock. I keep saying every time I
Speaker 3: see you, I say what time the game is. Anytime
Speaker 3: I think of anything. And then I set up on
Speaker 3: the couch so that my feet are elevated.
Speaker 2: I'm watching.
Speaker 3: I have my apple juice and my pretzels as I watch, and.
Speaker 2: I get ready to go.
Speaker 3: But I need a light.
Speaker 6: Nobody can sit right next to me. I need a
Speaker 6: lot of space. I have a little lot of moves.
Speaker 6: Nobody wants to sit right next to you for this experience.
Speaker 6: I'm not sure I'm ready to dig the set of
Speaker 6: activities by calling it a ritual. But it is what
Speaker 6: you do every single time, every single time. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 6: let's get into today's conversation. The secret memo to happiness
Speaker 6: at work. Our guest is the expert on happiness. Tell
Speaker 6: the people who she is.
Speaker 3: Oh Professor Laurie Santos. She's a cognitive scientist and professor
Speaker 3: of psychology at Yale. Super Smart. She teaches the most
Speaker 3: popular course in the school's history, not like this year
Speaker 3: or last year, in the whole history of the school,
Speaker 3: and it's about the science of happiness, which is so
Speaker 3: alluring to me.
Speaker 4: Yes, something like a full quarter of the entire student
Speaker 4: body takes this class every year.
Speaker 3: That is amazing to me. I think if all courses
Speaker 3: were voluntary, there wouldn't be another course that the quarter
Speaker 3: of the student body would take.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 4: So she also teaches this course on a platform called Coursera,
Speaker 4: where another five million people have taken it, and she
Speaker 4: hosts a terrific podcast called The Happiness Lab. I've been
Speaker 4: a follower for years where she keeps this conversation going
Speaker 4: and talks with experts about the latest science on happiness.
Speaker 2: I can't wait to get into this.
Speaker 5: I have so many questions and so much to learn.
Speaker 2: Doctor Lorie Santos, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Speaker 4: We are very big fans of yours. Let me start here.
Speaker 4: What parts of your own story would surprise your younger self?
Speaker 5: Oh, I mean, I think so many parts of my story.
Speaker 5: You know, I got interested in psychology not because I
Speaker 5: was interested in happiness, but because I was interested in
Speaker 5: what makes human special. And so I spent a lot
Speaker 5: of my time studying monkeys and how they make decisions
Speaker 5: about the world and how they make sense of the world.
Speaker 5: And that was just kind of what I was doing
Speaker 5: for you know, over twenty years. I got interested in
Speaker 5: the well being work in part because I saw, like
Speaker 5: in my students, the kind of crisis that where so
Speaker 5: many young people are experiencing today. I took on this
Speaker 5: new role at Yale, where I became a head of
Speaker 5: college on campus, which meant I was like living with
Speaker 5: students and hanging out with them in the dining hall.
Speaker 5: And that was when I really saw just how much
Speaker 5: students were struggling these days. You know, students in my
Speaker 5: college who were experiencing depression and anxiety, you know, having
Speaker 5: panic attacks, you know, experiencing suicidality. Like it was much
Speaker 5: rougher than I assumed things were, you know, among young
Speaker 5: people today. And so that was when I sort of
Speaker 5: developed this new focus and asked, Okay, what is my
Speaker 5: field of psychology have to say about the kinds of
Speaker 5: things we can all be doing to feel better, whether
Speaker 5: that's in college with my students, or in the workplace,
Speaker 5: or just in our own personal lives. And I realized
Speaker 5: there's so many things that our field has to say
Speaker 5: about what we can do to feel less burned out,
Speaker 5: to feel less stressed, and so on, And so I
Speaker 5: just made this like complete pivot to kind of doing
Speaker 5: the happiness work all the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was going to ask you how you got
Speaker 4: from Darwin to happiness. And I'm curious as the visibility
Speaker 4: of the field of evolutionary biology has kind of grown,
Speaker 4: I feel like a whole other revolution has been sparked over.
Speaker 4: There is there anything we can learn from monkeys about
Speaker 4: what makes us happier?
Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, one of the
Speaker 5: things is that I was never happier in my life
Speaker 5: than when I was out in the field studying monkeys, right,
Speaker 5: And I think that's in part because you know, just
Speaker 5: being around them makes you feel really present. You know,
Speaker 5: they don't feel like they're kind of off ruminating about
Speaker 5: the past or sort of thinking about the future and
Speaker 5: worrying about what's going to happen. They're just there grooming
Speaker 5: or eating or staring off into the sunset. Right, They're
Speaker 5: just there, present, doing whatever they're doing. And that's a
Speaker 5: lesson that I really take with me into the happiness
Speaker 5: work is that, you know, far too often we just
Speaker 5: spend so much time worried about what's going to happen
Speaker 5: and planning for the future. If we could just kind
Speaker 5: of be and flow and whatever we're doing in the
Speaker 5: present moment, I think we'd all feel a lot better.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 4: So this is a show about work, and we want
Speaker 4: to talk about happiness on the job today, how to
Speaker 4: make ourselves happy, but also how to make other people
Speaker 4: happy and create the conditions for other people to thrive,
Speaker 4: which is really one of the core mandates of leadership.
Speaker 4: We use a lot of euphemisms for happiness at work,
Speaker 4: well being, satisfaction, sentiment. It almost feels too audacious to
Speaker 4: kind of name happiness as the goal. Are these all
Speaker 4: the same things or is there something specific about happiness
Speaker 4: that you're trying to capture in your work.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think usually when we're using these euphemisms, we
Speaker 5: kind of mean what we think we mean, right, This
Speaker 5: idea that we can be happy in our lives in
Speaker 5: a workplace, right, you know, we can kind of feel
Speaker 5: positive emotion when we're at work, We can feel a
Speaker 5: sense of belonging. Maybe we reduce all the negative emotions
Speaker 5: at work, like you know, stress and frustration and so on,
Speaker 5: so we can kind of be happy in our lives
Speaker 5: at work. But I think that term wellbeing also wants
Speaker 5: us to capture the sense that we're satisfied at work,
Speaker 5: that we believe we're doing something that has meaning and purpose.
Speaker 5: And so I think that's what the terms are trying
Speaker 5: to capture, the sense that you can kind of be
Speaker 5: happy in the moment at work. And also when you
Speaker 5: think about what you're doing, you really do get a
Speaker 5: sense of meaning and purpose. And so I think when
Speaker 5: push comes to shove, we're going to really see purpose
Speaker 5: as being a foundational element of happiness, and therefore the
Speaker 5: kind of thing that we really want to think about
Speaker 5: how we can bring into work more readily.
Speaker 4: This point feels connected to an idea you explored on
Speaker 4: the Happiness Lab, which is that more is not necessarily more.
Speaker 4: When it comes to free time, there's like a sweet
Speaker 4: spot which is not less than two hours a day,
Speaker 4: but also not more than five. So can you tell
Speaker 4: us about this counterintuitive finding.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean this is a lot of the work
Speaker 5: of Carrie Mullinger in her colleagues, which which really tries
Speaker 5: to ask the question, you know, how much time do
Speaker 5: we really need to feel good? And I think for
Speaker 5: most of us, more time will be better. You know,
Speaker 5: work by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School has really
Speaker 5: shown and that we kind of are experiencing a dearth
Speaker 5: of what she calls time affluence, this sort of subjective
Speaker 5: sense that we have some free time. Many more of
Speaker 5: us experience what you might call time famine right where
Speaker 5: we're kind of literally starving for time, and Ashley's work
Speaker 5: shows just how bad this kind of time famine can be.
Speaker 5: In fact, she has one statistic that if you self
Speaker 5: report being really time famished, there's as much of a
Speaker 5: hit on your well being as if you self report
Speaker 5: being unemployed. You know, most of your listeners would be
Speaker 5: pretty upset if they lost their job tomorrow. Just not
Speaker 5: having any free time at all is as bad as
Speaker 5: that in terms of your happiness. So for many of us,
Speaker 5: the advice is just like, get more free time. That's
Speaker 5: probably going to be good. But Cassie's work has really
Speaker 5: shown that, like, if you kind of push it too
Speaker 5: far in the other direction, then that's not really that
Speaker 5: great either.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: What we really want is sort of structured amounts of
Speaker 5: free time that we can wind up using for purposes
Speaker 5: and activities that we really enjoy. Kind of if you
Speaker 5: get too much of a good thing, then that winds
Speaker 5: up being bad too.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 4: So it's so intuitive. I think my ceiling is is
Speaker 4: my window is actually smaller. I think I think it's yeah,
Speaker 4: three hours max, and I start getting restless.
Speaker 2: I can go longer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can go look at it.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 5: I think that's I think that's an important, you know,
Speaker 5: thing that comes up a lot on the happiness lab
Speaker 5: and even in my course, right, which is, you know,
Speaker 5: we're going to make these general pronouncements of what you
Speaker 5: need to feel happier at work, whether that's more time
Speaker 5: or more belonging and so on, for everybody. There's going
Speaker 5: to be some individual differences there, right, you know. So
Speaker 5: I think when we talk about these prescriptions, they're overall
Speaker 5: good for people. But my advice is always, hey, try
Speaker 5: it out yourself, do the experiment on what this feels
Speaker 5: like for you, and then you can often come up
Speaker 5: with your own sweet spot, and so I think that
Speaker 5: that's good advice when it comes to you know, the
Speaker 5: specific amount of free time you need to kind of thrive,
Speaker 5: but also for all the different topics that we'll talk
Speaker 5: about today.
Speaker 2: That's liberating.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 4: We really want to get into some tactics with you
Speaker 4: because it's one piece of your work that's so powerful.
Speaker 2: And we're going to do this in two parts.
Speaker 4: So the the first part is how to make ourselves happier
Speaker 4: at work, and then how to enable the happiness of
Speaker 4: other people.
Speaker 2: So, first make the case.
Speaker 4: To our listeners to do some work here. What does
Speaker 4: the data say about happier workers their own experience of
Speaker 4: being on the job.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I mean the data are pretty clear here,
Speaker 5: which is that happier workers wind up like doing better
Speaker 5: at work, they wind up performing better, they wind up
Speaker 5: earning more money. It makes sense, right, If you're happier
Speaker 5: at work and showing more positive emotion, if you feel
Speaker 5: belonging at work, you're going to work harder. You're going
Speaker 5: to come up with the more innovative solutions. You know,
Speaker 5: think back to the last time you were feeling an
Speaker 5: overwhelming amount of negative emotion. You probably weren't thinking super
Speaker 5: clearly or making big innovative decisions like you were triaging, right,
Speaker 5: You're just getting stuff off your desk. And so the
Speaker 5: more we can find a way to feel happier at
Speaker 5: work ourselves, the better we're going to do at our job,
Speaker 5: and we'll reap all the usual kind of rewards that
Speaker 5: come with that, whether that's a higher level of setalary
Speaker 5: or more accolades and promotions at work. Will just wind
Speaker 5: up doing better.
Speaker 3: I imagine that people will early question. People will ask as well,
Speaker 3: if I'm doing really well, I'm happy. So how do
Speaker 3: we know about the correlation versus causality?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean what researchers tend to do is like
Speaker 5: do experiments where they force people into a good mood
Speaker 5: and look at what happens to their performance. One of
Speaker 5: my favorite studies did this with medical doctors. So you
Speaker 5: bring medical doctors into the lab and you give them
Speaker 5: a kind of tough medical problem. You all are old
Speaker 5: enough to remember the TV show House or even QUINCMD.
Speaker 5: You know these shows where like doctors get these kind
Speaker 5: of tough problems' That's what these doctors got in the study.
Speaker 5: But the key is that half of the doctors were
Speaker 5: able to be in a good mood first. In this case,
Speaker 5: they just did it very locally. They let doctors watch
Speaker 5: some like silly cat videos, so it's kind of they're
Speaker 5: laughing and sort of enjoying themselves. What happens, well, the
Speaker 5: doctors who are in the good mood wind up coming
Speaker 5: up with the most innovative solution to these tough problems. Right,
Speaker 5: and so that's just like kind of local you know,
Speaker 5: put yourself in good mood when there's a tricky task
Speaker 5: on the line. But if we can do that a
Speaker 5: little bit more chronically, right, if we can just look
Speaker 5: forward to going to work every day, the ideas that
Speaker 5: we too will be performing a little bit more innovatively
Speaker 5: and a little bit better at work. I think there's
Speaker 5: also an effect when we're in a positive mood of
Speaker 5: what happens to other individuals in our organization. You know,
Speaker 5: social psychologists have long known the emotion is contagious, right.
Speaker 5: We know this in our own work life. When you
Speaker 5: walk into a team meeting and there's that team member
Speaker 5: who's kind of down in the dumps or really pessimistic, right,
Speaker 5: you without whether you wanted to or not, that can
Speaker 5: wind up affecting how you see that meeting, how you
Speaker 5: view it. But we forget that we have the same
Speaker 5: effect on other people. Sigall Barsaid used to call this
Speaker 5: affective spirals. Right, we can kind of contagiously give our
Speaker 5: affect to other people, and that means if we put
Speaker 5: in some work to kind of increase our own mood
Speaker 5: on the job, that winds up helping our team members
Speaker 5: be a little bit more optimistic too. I often hear
Speaker 5: people ask, you know, well, what can I do to me?
Speaker 5: You know, my coworkers happier on the job. It's like, well, actually,
Speaker 5: if you focus on becoming happier yourself on the job,
Speaker 5: then that will have a huge effect on your team members.
Speaker 5: Sometimes that can give the like really type A folks
Speaker 5: and permission to take care of themselves because you recognize
Speaker 5: it as a mechanism for caring for others too.
Speaker 2: That's a beautiful reframe. I love that.
Speaker 4: So you you give a terrific talk at south By
Speaker 4: Southwest this year called five Tips to be Happier at Work,
Speaker 4: which is available on the Happiness Lab and we encourage
Speaker 4: everyone to listen to it. We want to talk about
Speaker 4: two of the tips that really struck us and are
Speaker 4: very aligned with our own work and our an experience
Speaker 4: of work. So one strategy you talked about was something
Speaker 4: you called job crafting, which, as we understand, it is
Speaker 4: using whatever agency you have in any job to increase
Speaker 4: the alignment between your superpowers and what you're actually doing
Speaker 4: during the day. So tell us about this approach.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so this is an approach that comes from Risnensky,
Speaker 5: used to be my colleague at Yale and now is
Speaker 5: at the University of Pennsylvania. Job crafting is exactly what
Speaker 5: you said it was. It's kind of taking your job
Speaker 5: description and finding ways to infuse your sort of signature strengths,
Speaker 5: the kind of values and sort of habits that you
Speaker 5: like to bring in. You know, positive psychologists have long
Speaker 5: talked about this set of character strengths that all of
Speaker 5: us have. You know, there are things like humor and bravery,
Speaker 5: and a love of learning, and a zest for life, prudence,
Speaker 5: you know, at any kind of value that you might think,
Speaker 5: you know is a good thing for humans to have.
Speaker 5: But the key is that they've recognized that we have
Speaker 5: these things in kind of different amounts. You know, some
Speaker 5: of us really resonate with an approach where we want
Speaker 5: to be brave all the time. Maybe that's our signature strength.
Speaker 5: Others of us like care about humor or sort of
Speaker 5: social connection. Right, we each have these different strengths, and
Speaker 5: Amy's work shows that if you bring those strengths to
Speaker 5: your job, whatever your job description, you wind up not
Speaker 5: even not just being happier at work, but you wind
Speaker 5: up thinking of your job as more of a calling.
Speaker 5: Your supervisors will also say you work better. And I
Speaker 5: love Amy's work because she actually studied job crafting in
Speaker 5: hospital janitorial staff workers. Right. You know these are people
Speaker 5: who are cleaning the linens on hospital beds, or you know,
Speaker 5: cleaning up bedpans when people get sick. Right, This is
Speaker 5: not the kind of job where you have a lot
Speaker 5: of flexibility. You kind of just do what your manager
Speaker 5: tells you. But even in this very kind of constrained
Speaker 5: job description, Amy finds at around a third of these
Speaker 5: janitorial staff workers wind up job crafting. They wind up
Speaker 5: building in some of their strengths. And Amy tells these
Speaker 5: really beautiful stories in her work. She talks about one
Speaker 5: staff member who worked in a chemotherapy ward, which unfortunately
Speaker 5: meant that he was dealing with lots of patients who
Speaker 5: were very sick all the time, because chemotherapy tends to
Speaker 5: make people very nauseous. But he said his job wasn't
Speaker 5: cleaning up vomit, even though that's what he spent a
Speaker 5: lot of his days doing. He said his job was
Speaker 5: social connection and humor. He wanted to connect with the
Speaker 5: patients and make them laugh. And he had this standard
Speaker 5: kind of shtick that he did where he joked about, like,
Speaker 5: oh my god, you've vomited again. Now I'm getting over time,
Speaker 5: Like we'll do a little you know, handshake behind the
Speaker 5: back to keep this going. And he would say, you know,
Speaker 5: the patient would laugh and I would laugh. And that's
Speaker 5: my job. That's why I show up to work, right.
Speaker 5: And another example that Amy talks about is a staff
Speaker 5: worker who worked in a coma ward. So this staff
Speaker 5: member couldn't interact with the patients, but every day she
Speaker 5: kind of just like moved the paintings and the plants
Speaker 5: in the hospital room around, sort of thinking that that
Speaker 5: kind of creative infusion maybe would help patients recover. Who knows,
Speaker 5: but it meant something to her that she was able
Speaker 5: to do it right. I mean, I think the key
Speaker 5: is clear here, like no manager told these employees to
Speaker 5: be doing this stuff. It was just their own way
Speaker 5: of making their job more palatable to the things that
Speaker 5: they cared about. And the reason I love Amy's work
Speaker 5: is I think if hospital janitorial staff members can do that,
Speaker 5: then pretty much all of us in our jobs can
Speaker 5: do that too.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 4: No, this one is really intuitive to me. And I'm
Speaker 4: someone who's left a lot of jobs, but when I've stayed,
Speaker 4: I've used this agency to make that alignment as tight
Speaker 4: as possible for sure. All Right. The secondful tip that
Speaker 4: really struck us that was about the power of human
Speaker 4: connection and feeling like you really belong in the workplace.
Speaker 4: We often talk about this as the responsibility of the
Speaker 4: employer or the leader in the room to create the
Speaker 4: context for other people's belongings. What can I do as
Speaker 4: an individual employee to increase my sense of belonging?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, one of the big ones is just to
Speaker 5: actively and intentionally try to connect with other people. This
Speaker 5: is I think something that we like a lot of
Speaker 5: people reject. I see this a lot in really younger workers.
Speaker 5: You know, my college students have made claims like, you know,
Speaker 5: you don't go to work, to make friends, or you know,
Speaker 5: just get in and out of there, right. I think,
Speaker 5: especially in the remote work culture in which a lot
Speaker 5: of young people have found themselves, you know, during their
Speaker 5: start of work. This is the kind of thing that
Speaker 5: we see comes up a lot. But the evidence suggests
Speaker 5: just the opposite, Right, you perform better if you feel
Speaker 5: connected at work. One of the main things that predicts
Speaker 5: happiness at work is a sense of belonging, And one
Speaker 5: of the main things that predicts a sense of belonging
Speaker 5: at work is saying as to the question do you
Speaker 5: have a best friend at work? In fact, you know,
Speaker 5: some folks have made the claim that we could make
Speaker 5: everyone in the workplace much happier if each of them
Speaker 5: could get somebody at work that they thought cared about
Speaker 5: them and felt like a really close friend. But then
Speaker 5: the key is that you have to make friends at work,
Speaker 5: and work by Nick Epley has shown that one of
Speaker 5: these biases is we assume that we have to stay
Speaker 5: on very surface topics, right. You know, we talk about
Speaker 5: the weather or you know, what happened at the Olympics
Speaker 5: and so on, but we don't go into the more
Speaker 5: personal kinds of things. How we're really feeling about work,
Speaker 5: you know, the things we really value, the hobbies and
Speaker 5: the people we care about. But research suggests that if
Speaker 5: you do that, if you dive into a little bit
Speaker 5: more of a deep conversation, it winds up making you
Speaker 5: feel closer. Another thing you can do to increase closeness
Speaker 5: is just to ask for help. This is again something
Speaker 5: that we hate to do generally, but really I fear
Speaker 5: doing in the workplace. We feel like it'll make us
Speaker 5: look kind of needy or not able to do our jobs.
Speaker 5: But overall, when you ask a coworker for help, usually
Speaker 5: it gives them the chance to do something nice for you,
Speaker 5: makes them feel needed, it increases their positive emotion, and
Speaker 5: that winds up making you feel more connected. And so
Speaker 5: those are just the kind of quick things we need
Speaker 5: to get more intentional about creating these friendships. And we
Speaker 5: do that from being a little bit more vulnerable and
Speaker 5: even asking for help when we need it.
Speaker 4: And the way you're just finding vulnerable is not, you know,
Speaker 4: open the kimono and expose all of your deepest, darkest thoughts.
Speaker 4: It's really just showing up as a as an imperfect
Speaker 4: human being in the workplace and connecting with other people
Speaker 4: on that level.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's this there's this lovely effect that social psychologists
Speaker 5: have talked about, which they call the beautiful mess effect,
Speaker 5: which is this idea that when we think, when we
Speaker 5: seem a little messy or we kind of show our vulnerabilities,
Speaker 5: that people won't like us. But it's actually just the opposite,
Speaker 5: Like you don't want to get like, you know, extreme messy.
Speaker 5: But the idea is like showing that you occasionally need
Speaker 5: help and kind of being really grateful for that help
Speaker 5: winds up making you feel more connected to people, not
Speaker 5: less so.
Speaker 3: As a as someone who has been who has had
Speaker 3: responsibility for recruiting at a business school, and we at
Speaker 3: Harvard have struggled to recruit senior women, so women that
Speaker 3: are already full professors, to recruit them over an idea
Speaker 3: I have had is recruit them and their friends. Does
Speaker 3: that fit into this? Do you have your best friend
Speaker 3: at work?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 3: Are you giving me cover for experimenting with this idea?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I think that's a really smart strategy.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 5: You know, some universities and business schools think in terms
Speaker 5: of what they call cohort hires, right where it's like
Speaker 5: I'll hire somebody that does something really in one field,
Speaker 5: and then pick a second person who's in a really
Speaker 5: similar field to them, right, and so we can kind
Speaker 5: of build up a particular area. But I love the
Speaker 5: idea of hiring people's friends because you're instantly bringing in
Speaker 5: a team that has a sense of belonging, right that
Speaker 5: maybe even are going to model the kinds of friendships
Speaker 5: that other colleagues would benefit from having too. So I'm
Speaker 5: into it. Drop the spousal hire and go for the best,
Speaker 5: the bff hire. It's great.
Speaker 4: I love it. It's radical. It's so simple, but it's radical.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 4: Well, this is a really nice pivot to looking at
Speaker 4: the employer lens on happiness here. So make the business case,
Speaker 4: why is it worth it as a company, as a
Speaker 4: leader to invest in the happiness of my people? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Well, we talked already about how as an individual you
Speaker 5: would want to be happier if you want to perform
Speaker 5: better on your job. I think for employers the logic
Speaker 5: is very similar. If you want all your workers to
Speaker 5: be doing the best job that they can, to increase retention,
Speaker 5: to have everyone think of their job as a calling
Speaker 5: so they can't wait to get to work on Monday morning.
Speaker 5: The way to do that is to make them happier
Speaker 5: at work. But there's a recent study that I love
Speaker 5: that paints an even more compelling business case for making
Speaker 5: your employees happier at work. It was a study that
Speaker 5: was done in collaboration with a group of researchers at
Speaker 5: Oxford led by Jan Emmanuel Denev and the job website Indeed.
Speaker 5: And so if listeners don't know the job website, indeed,
Speaker 5: this is a place where you can go to look
Speaker 5: for jobs, but also to rate things about your current job.
Speaker 5: Right you know, how much salary you get, and how
Speaker 5: happy you're at work, your sense of belonging and so on.
Speaker 5: And so indeed was sitting on like about fifteen million
Speaker 5: data points about how happy individual workers were at work.
Speaker 5: So they had ratings for over five thousand different companies
Speaker 5: of on average, how happy are their employers based on
Speaker 5: these indeed data. And so what the Oxford researchers did
Speaker 5: was they said, well, let's just make this sort of
Speaker 5: well being composite score. So this is kind of the
Speaker 5: on average how happy you do your workers rate being
Speaker 5: based on these indeed data, and they could make one
Speaker 5: of these scores for each individual company, and they could
Speaker 5: ask all these things about what a higher happiness at
Speaker 5: work score predicted. And in particular, they were interested in,
Speaker 5: you know, the usual metric that business school professors think about,
Speaker 5: which is, you know, shareholder value, like how how well
Speaker 5: are different stocks doing of different companies. And what they
Speaker 5: did was just to plot a correlation between the happier
Speaker 5: companies and look at what is happening with stock prices.
Speaker 5: And what they found was a strong and significant correlation
Speaker 5: showing that the happier companies wound up having better stock prices.
Speaker 5: They actually took this one step further and said, well,
Speaker 5: you know, we have these usual metrics of you know,
Speaker 5: economic success based on successful companies. We have you know,
Speaker 5: the Dow Jones or the SMP five hundred. What if
Speaker 5: we make the well being score one hundred, So these
Speaker 5: are the one hundred companies, and this indeed data set
Speaker 5: that had the highest happiness ratings. And the researcher said, well,
Speaker 5: why don't we kind of plot that against the other
Speaker 5: standard metrics, So use this well being score metric to
Speaker 5: compete against the SMP five hundred and the Nasdaq and
Speaker 5: so on. And they have this lovely graph in their
Speaker 5: paper which shows that this well being one hundred set
Speaker 5: of companies winds up beating the SMP and the Nasdaq
Speaker 5: and the Dow Jones at pretty much every point in
Speaker 5: the economic cycle of the last couple of years. What
Speaker 5: does that mean? This is a very compelling case for
Speaker 5: every CEO to take seriously that one thing that might
Speaker 5: really matter for the success of your company in terms of, like,
Speaker 5: again the basic metric of success of your company, what
Speaker 5: you tell shareholders they're going to get, you know, in
Speaker 5: terms of actual money over time, that you'll do better
Speaker 5: and that very important metric simply by making your workers happier.
Speaker 5: And and what I love about the studies, like it
Speaker 5: didn't need to go that way, Like it could have
Speaker 5: been a really compelling ethical case for making your workers happy.
Speaker 5: But maybe you know you have to take a little
Speaker 5: bit of hit in terms of the money you pull back. No,
Speaker 5: it's it's really a work life harmony that if we
Speaker 5: make our workers happier, we wind up reaping the benefits
Speaker 5: in terms of a more successful company.
Speaker 2: Okay, so say I'm the boss, I'm listening to this conversation.
Speaker 2: I buy it. Where would you coach me to begin.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, the Indeed Data had a really interesting idea
Speaker 5: on this because they also asked the question what is
Speaker 5: that happiness at work metric made of? In other words,
Speaker 5: what are the factors that lead people to be happier
Speaker 5: at work? Because as an employer, that's what you'd want
Speaker 5: to intervene on. If it's higher salary, it makes people
Speaker 5: have at work, you'd want to pay people more and
Speaker 5: so on. And what the researchers found was kind of surprising.
Speaker 5: The top thing on the list was worker's sense of
Speaker 5: belonging at work, which was made up of three different metrics.
Speaker 5: One that I've mentioned already, do you have a best
Speaker 5: friend at work? And the second two was the things
Speaker 5: that I do at the company matters, So you think
Speaker 5: the things that you're doing matter at work, people care
Speaker 5: about what you do. And also I matter to the
Speaker 5: people at work, So this is kind of reciprocal mattering. Plus
Speaker 5: your friendship at work, those three things together seem to
Speaker 5: be the biggest predictor of what makes people happy at work,
Speaker 5: and the biggest predictor then, of course, of like what's
Speaker 5: going to make your company the most money. And so
Speaker 5: if you're a C suite, you know exac Looking at
Speaker 5: these data, what you have to ask yourself is what
Speaker 5: does my belonging at work look like? Do people feel
Speaker 5: a sense of meaning that they matter and that what
Speaker 5: they're doing matters? And have I promoted situations that can
Speaker 5: increase friendship at work? Especially if you kind of moved
Speaker 5: to a more remote environment, these things become all the
Speaker 5: more important that that sense of belonging is really something
Speaker 5: that you're working on. And so that's the data pretty clear,
Speaker 5: that's the spot to intervene to get the biggest kind
Speaker 5: of happiness boost to everyone in your organization.
Speaker 3: What's really exciting about particularly two and three the reciprocity
Speaker 3: of mattering. It feels, at least in my first thinking
Speaker 3: of it, very inexpensive. It's like intentional but not costly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing is you
Speaker 5: assume like I have to pay all this money extra
Speaker 5: money to increase people's salaries or get bonuses. All these
Speaker 5: solutions are hard and they require work and intent, but
Speaker 5: they're cheap, right, They're exactly the kinds of things you
Speaker 5: can build in even during tough times. We've just finished
Speaker 5: an interview for the Happiness Lab with CEO Bob Chapman.
Speaker 5: He's the CEO of this manufacturing company called Barry Wymiller.
Speaker 5: You know, they build kind of capital equipment for places
Speaker 5: like Coca Cola and Procter and Gamble. It's like, you know,
Speaker 5: the standard kind of company where you wouldn't think building
Speaker 5: in belonging is going to matter to this kind of organization.
Speaker 5: But they had a moment where they really had to
Speaker 5: think about people's mattering at work. That came during the
Speaker 5: two thousand and eight economic downturn when they lost nearly
Speaker 5: all of their contracts and they were facing you know
Speaker 5: what many businesses were facing back then, which is the
Speaker 5: possibility of laying off a bunch of people. And Bob
Speaker 5: had this idea that, you know, if mattering at work
Speaker 5: is really important, I'm going to kick out, you know,
Speaker 5: thirty percent of my company. I'm going to leave the
Speaker 5: other seventy percent there thinking that that could have been them,
Speaker 5: and like what are they going to be next? And
Speaker 5: so on, and he said, is there any other solution?
Speaker 5: And the solution he came up with was to say
Speaker 5: that everyone in the entire company, including you know, the
Speaker 5: C suite, you know, down to the like the lowest
Speaker 5: level worker, they all had to take a month without pay.
Speaker 5: They were all going to take a little bit of
Speaker 5: a sacrifice so that the company could get through it.
Speaker 5: And everyone responded incredibly positively, like people were thrilled. You know,
Speaker 5: they were so scared that they were going to lose
Speaker 5: their and now they saw everyone pitching in together to
Speaker 5: kind of take the hit, including the people at the
Speaker 5: highest levels. And Bob said that an even more interesting
Speaker 5: thing happened, which is that people so felt the sense
Speaker 5: of meaning and belonging that a lot of them stepped
Speaker 5: up to take an extra month so that other team
Speaker 5: members wouldn't have to take theirs. You saw folks who
Speaker 5: were saying, you know, hey, I'm close to retirement already,
Speaker 5: let me take two months so that you know, young
Speaker 5: Mary or Bob who just you know, had a baby
Speaker 5: or just bought a house, they wouldn't have to take
Speaker 5: that like little, you know, short period of time off.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: This is that sense of mattering in action, right, And
Speaker 5: if the C suite winds up creating a culture where
Speaker 5: that is important, where they really embody that importance to
Speaker 5: their organization, what you find is that people step up.
Speaker 5: They not only matter, but they realize that their actions
Speaker 5: can help the company, and they're excited to do those
Speaker 5: even more often. And you know, the end result of
Speaker 5: the story is that Barry wey Miller, you know, not
Speaker 5: only survived the economic downturn, but has gone on to
Speaker 5: become a kind of juggernaut of the manufacturing industry, pulling in,
Speaker 5: you know, three billion dollars in annual sales a year
Speaker 5: in part because they created this sort of culture of
Speaker 5: belonging and care.
Speaker 2: Beautiful. What a powerful example.
Speaker 4: I heard a conversation, an interview with you years ago
Speaker 4: that inspired me to make a happy list that I
Speaker 4: put on my phone, which I revisit on a regular basis. Francis,
Speaker 4: you'll be delighted to note that you make a number
Speaker 4: of appearances on the happy list.
Speaker 2: Delighted and relieved and relieved and relieved.
Speaker 4: Do you have your own happiness list, Lorie, and can
Speaker 4: you give us a couple entries on it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean I do keep a list of delights. They're
Speaker 5: different ways to do the happiness list. It's like stuff
Speaker 5: that makes you happy, things you're grateful for. Lately, I've
Speaker 5: been into delights, which are just things that you notice
Speaker 5: in the world that almost make you like, you know,
Speaker 5: put your hands up in the air and say, oh
Speaker 5: my gosh, what a delight, And they're really silly things.
Speaker 5: Like the other day, I was walking down the street
Speaker 5: and there was just somebody who's like just jamming out
Speaker 5: to some really old cool eighties rock, you know, in
Speaker 5: his car, thinking he was alone, but you get to
Speaker 5: see the like headbanging, and I was like, you know,
Speaker 5: that is just such a delight. And and honestly, you know,
Speaker 5: the other thing on my list is just I get
Speaker 5: to with this podcast just talk to so many interesting folks,
Speaker 5: interesting folks like you all my amazing guests, from Bob
Speaker 5: Chapman to others. And that's just a delight that I
Speaker 5: have this role where I get to hear people's incredible
Speaker 5: stories and share them with others. And so the delight
Speaker 5: List includes the things from the from the tiny to
Speaker 5: the to the big. And my husband Mark is on
Speaker 5: there as well, so he's he's often featured on the
Speaker 5: Delight List too.
Speaker 2: Beautiful. Well, it's been such a privilege to host you
Speaker 2: and have this conversation fans, very big fans and fans, yeah,
Speaker 2: which I was impossible to imagine.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much.
Speaker 2: So, Francis I see your recruiting.
Speaker 4: Gears speaking of your academic job.
Speaker 3: Yes, Laurie is currently at Yale, is what I'd like
Speaker 3: to say to our listeners currently, but let's stay tuned
Speaker 3: for the future.
Speaker 2: So what surprised you during this conversation? What do you
Speaker 2: hope listeners take away from it?
Speaker 3: I feel like so many light bulbs went off on it.
Speaker 3: So what surprised me is how much belonging matters, which
Speaker 3: is something that we think about a lot, But how
Speaker 3: much mattering matters is another one. I mean that's and
Speaker 3: I watch you do this all the time, in really
Speaker 3: like zoning in on helping people come up with the
Speaker 3: essence of what they're doing that's going to matter a lot,
Speaker 3: and you really and good You often give them titles
Speaker 3: to put that structure.
Speaker 4: So stingy about the titles, My God, hand them all out,
Speaker 4: you know. The I am not the academic in this relationship,
Speaker 4: but one of my big takeaways is that is that
Speaker 4: my intuition has a lot of data behind it. And
Speaker 4: all the beautiful researchers that she referenced in that conversation,
Speaker 4: which is I'm so grateful that there are so many
Speaker 4: fantastic people doing the work to kind of back up
Speaker 4: our intuition on not our intuition, capital our intuition on
Speaker 4: this that this, you know, this is such a powerful
Speaker 4: lever for well being, not just inside organizations but society
Speaker 4: writ large. If I may invoke my favorite academic phrase, like,
Speaker 4: this is really the ballgame. I think it's really the ballgame.
Speaker 4: And it's you know, it's like everything we talk about
Speaker 4: inclusion and performance and you know the idea of like
Speaker 4: bringing your humanity into the workplace, and that also jump
Speaker 4: starting impact and performance and all of your other hopes
Speaker 4: and dreams, like all of you know, all of those
Speaker 4: hopes and dreams they run through through happiness, your own
Speaker 4: happiness and the happiness of other people. And to your point,
Speaker 4: those things are intimately connected. So I'm just thrilled that
Speaker 4: we're able to share this conversation with our listeners. All right,
Speaker 4: Fixable listeners, thank you for being part of this conversation.
Speaker 4: As always, reach out to us if there's a problem
Speaker 4: you're struggling with, or if there's someone you want to
Speaker 4: hear from, or you suggest we bring on the show.
Speaker 2: We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 4: Email us, call us, text us Fixable at ted dot com.
Speaker 4: Or two three four Fixable that's two three four three
Speaker 4: four nine two two five three Fixable is brought to
Speaker 4: you by the Ted Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's
Speaker 4: hosted by me Anne Morris.
Speaker 5: And me Francis Fry.
Speaker 4: Our team includes Izzy Carter Constanza, Guyardo band Ban Chang,
Speaker 4: Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne high Lash. This episode was mixed
Speaker 4: by Louis AT's story Yard.
Speaker 3: If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever
Speaker 3: you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check
Speaker 3: us out.