Speaker 1: Pushkin. As fans of this show probably know, I've thought
Speaker 1: a whole lot about happiness and academic settings, about how
Speaker 1: teens and young adults can be happier at school or
Speaker 1: in college. But when I attended the twenty twenty three
Speaker 1: south By Southwest conference, I had a chance to take
Speaker 1: part in a great panel which talked about the challenges
Speaker 1: of maintaining our well being at work. So at this
Speaker 1: year's south By Southwest I returned to give a special
Speaker 1: talk about what science says we should do to thrive
Speaker 1: and are rapidly changing workplaces. The audience in Austin really
Speaker 1: seemed to enjoy it, so I wanted to share that
Speaker 1: talk with you today. I hope you enjoy it. Hello,
Speaker 1: Hello south By folks. Today we're going to be talking
Speaker 1: about the future of work, because the landscape of work
Speaker 1: is changing. You know, take the fact that we're kind
Speaker 1: of dealing with technology changes, right, We're all trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how these new tools like chat, GBT and
Speaker 1: AI are going to change the landscape of how we
Speaker 1: do our creative work, how we do knowledge work generally, right,
Speaker 1: this is something that's kind of on our mind about
Speaker 1: the future of work. On our mind about the future
Speaker 1: of work is also the question of where we work,
Speaker 1: you know, like the fact that we're no longer in
Speaker 1: these big office buildings that so many companies have paid for,
Speaker 1: Like the fact that we wind up working at home
Speaker 1: with a lot of you know, destructions around us all
Speaker 1: the time. But beyond that, we also have questions about
Speaker 1: how the economy is shaping the future of work and
Speaker 1: the fact that you know, some of us might not
Speaker 1: be working in the same place that we were working,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of years ago. What does that
Speaker 1: mean that these things are changing around, especially for the
Speaker 1: folks who might have been laid off or had some
Speaker 1: career changes, but also for the folks that are in
Speaker 1: the same career that they were in before. If your
Speaker 1: mindset is on your worries about leaving work, if your
Speaker 1: mindset is on quiet quitting, what is that doing to
Speaker 1: the nature of work and how we focus on it.
Speaker 1: But this is a session on happiness and well being,
Speaker 1: and so we're going to be focused on the question
Speaker 1: of what the future of work says about happiness and
Speaker 1: how our own mental health and our well being might
Speaker 1: be involved in the future of work in ways that
Speaker 1: we actually don't expect and I think it's fair to
Speaker 1: say it's been basically a dumpster fire for the last
Speaker 1: couple of years when it comes to our collective well being.
Speaker 1: You know, for a variety of reasons, we have just
Speaker 1: gotten through a global pandemic, We are facing a climate
Speaker 1: crisis that is unprecedented. We have all these technologies that
Speaker 1: are coming in that are spooking us about how we're
Speaker 1: going to change work around, Like we're coming up on
Speaker 1: a really terrifying election that is going to be taking
Speaker 1: up all of our bandwidth. Right, twenty twenty four has
Speaker 1: been a mess, But I also think twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: has been a mess when it comes to thinking about work.
Speaker 1: So many of us are feeling much more burned out,
Speaker 1: much more overwhelmed, much more anxious about the certainty of
Speaker 1: our work and the certainty of our workplaces than ever before.
Speaker 1: And as an expert on the science of happiness, this
Speaker 1: is actually something that worries me about the future of work,
Speaker 1: because we know a lot about what happens to people's
Speaker 1: work when their well being takes a dive, when they're
Speaker 1: feeling a little bit burned out, when they're feeling a
Speaker 1: little bit overwhelmed, and the answer is that it's not good.
Speaker 1: And so when I got invited to kind of come
Speaker 1: out to south By to have a conversation with you
Speaker 1: about the science of happiness, I really wanted to focus
Speaker 1: on work in particular, because when I do the thing
Speaker 1: that most south By presenters do, we kind of put
Speaker 1: on our south By glasses and we look to the future.
Speaker 1: And my goal as a speaker is to give you, Okay,
Speaker 1: what are we going to know? What do we know
Speaker 1: right now that's going to change the future of the
Speaker 1: workplace in five years from now? What do you want
Speaker 1: to hear today that you're going to take with you
Speaker 1: when you leave this place that's going to prepare you
Speaker 1: for the next five years, the next decade and so on.
Speaker 1: When I hear that question, I actually don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about AI. I don't want to talk about layoffs.
Speaker 1: What I want to talk about is happiness and mental health.
Speaker 1: And the reason I want to talk about that is
Speaker 1: that if you look at what the science suggests what
Speaker 1: the biggest priority should be in the workplace of tomorrow,
Speaker 1: how we want to think about the workplace of the future.
Speaker 1: I think science gives us a clear answer, and it's
Speaker 1: not that we need to focus on technologies or some
Speaker 1: new kind of industry movement, whatever. The thing we need
Speaker 1: to focus on is happiness. And that's because so much
Speaker 1: data in the last few years have started showing the
Speaker 1: importance of happiness for our workplace performance. In fact, what
Speaker 1: science shows right now is that our happiness seems to
Speaker 1: really matter for our productivity, for our flourishing in the office,
Speaker 1: for what we do. How do we know this well,
Speaker 1: we know this from some older studies. These are studies
Speaker 1: from the nineties and the early two thousands that looked
Speaker 1: at the kinds of things that predict your performance bottom line, right,
Speaker 1: how you do in the workplace, Things like what are
Speaker 1: the kinds of things you can do to make sure
Speaker 1: you're going to get a job. We all think of
Speaker 1: the normal LinkedIn things, Right, you got to boost your resume,
Speaker 1: and you got to get certain skill sets and so on.
Speaker 1: We don't tend to think that the thing that you
Speaker 1: should prioritize is your happiness and your mental health. But
Speaker 1: the data seems to suggest that's actually an important thing
Speaker 1: to prioritize. One study by the University of Virginia psychologist
Speaker 1: Ed Deaner actually looked at the kinds of things that
Speaker 1: predict people's job obtainment, not necessarily right now, but at
Speaker 1: times in the future. And the thing that ed Deener
Speaker 1: decided to study was people's level of cheerfulness. He measured
Speaker 1: cheerfulness in his undergrads at age eighteen and used that
Speaker 1: level of cheerfulness to predict whether or not those undergrads
Speaker 1: got a job, not when they were age eighteen, but
Speaker 1: when they were aged twenty seven and later at age
Speaker 1: thirty seven. And what he found, remarkably in a very
Speaker 1: famous paper, is that your cheerfulness at age eighteen is predictive.
Speaker 1: It's predictive of whether or not you get a job,
Speaker 1: whether you get a job that you like, but also
Speaker 1: whether or not you get a job where you're making
Speaker 1: a decent amount of money. We often think that money
Speaker 1: matters for happiness, but we don't think that the causal
Speaker 1: arrow goes the other way, Like if I was happier,
Speaker 1: I would be making more money. But the data actually
Speaker 1: seemed to suggest that that seems to be the case. Now,
Speaker 1: you might worry about the statistic. Some of you might
Speaker 1: be in the HR field, and you might be saying
Speaker 1: to yourself, are we paying the happy people more? Money.
Speaker 1: That seems really sketchy. We got to get on top
Speaker 1: of that, like, no, no, that's not actually what's happening.
Speaker 1: What's happening is that happy people are performing better pretty
Speaker 1: much by every metric of innovative performance. It seems like
Speaker 1: happy people are actually doing better in their jobs. One
Speaker 1: of my favorite studies that looked at this looked in
Speaker 1: a particular industry profession. They brought doctors into the lab,
Speaker 1: medical doctors, and gave doctors a sort of tough medical diagnosis.
Speaker 1: If you're a fan of these like TV shows where
Speaker 1: doctors do these weird things, like House or way back
Speaker 1: in the day QUINCYMD, where they have these like weird
Speaker 1: medical things. I watch these a lot in a bit
Speaker 1: of a hypochondriac, so I'm familiar with these. These are
Speaker 1: the problems that they gave doctors in this study. These
Speaker 1: kind of hard like hard to figure out problems. But
Speaker 1: half of the doctors in this study get to be
Speaker 1: in a put in a good mood. First, they just
Speaker 1: got to watch a couple of silly cat videos on YouTube.
Speaker 1: What happens to people's performance? What the researchers find is
Speaker 1: that the doctors who are in the good mood wind
Speaker 1: up statistically coming up with better solutions, the more innovative solutions.
Speaker 1: Just being in a good mood winds up, allowing us
Speaker 1: to think a little bit more creatively. Now I'm telling
Speaker 1: you the study on this, but in some ways I
Speaker 1: didn't need to tell you that study. Right. Think to
Speaker 1: the last time that you were feeling the opposite of
Speaker 1: that cat video mood where you were just kind of
Speaker 1: super overwhelmed and kind of you know, just really depressed
Speaker 1: or anxious. You weren't thinking creatively, you were triaging. You're
Speaker 1: taking all your ideas in the like tiniest form possible. Right,
Speaker 1: Our minds narrow in when we're not feeling good, and
Speaker 1: the data suggests that if we're not feeling good at work,
Speaker 1: our minds are going to narrow in in ways that
Speaker 1: might negatively affect our performance, and that finding a path
Speaker 1: to positive emotion might be one of the best ways
Speaker 1: to increase our productivity at work. And so that's all
Speaker 1: the science showing that happiness matters for our performance. We've
Speaker 1: kind of known about that and little fits and starts
Speaker 1: over the past few years, but in just the last
Speaker 1: year or so, we've been getting a different metric of
Speaker 1: how happiness affects our performance, which is the but it
Speaker 1: doesn't just affect the performance of individuals. A happiness at
Speaker 1: work seems to be affecting a company's profits. And this
Speaker 1: is the time when I think people start paying attention,
Speaker 1: because as soon as it starts affecting the real bottom line,
Speaker 1: like how much money a company is making, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, now people are starting to pay attention. And
Speaker 1: I think this data is best shown in a really
Speaker 1: cool recent working paper. This is my favorite working paper
Speaker 1: of the last year in twenty twenty three, and it
Speaker 1: was a paper that was put together by researchers at
Speaker 1: the University of Oxford and a company that's of high
Speaker 1: prominence here in Austin. Indeed, some of you might know, indeed,
Speaker 1: some of you might have been on indeed, if you
Speaker 1: haven't been on indeed, indeed is this job website where
Speaker 1: you can look for jobs, but also you can rank
Speaker 1: everything about your current job, or you can bring your
Speaker 1: salary and your compensation, your work life balance, but also
Speaker 1: your happiness. And so these researchers that indeed had this idea,
Speaker 1: they said, hang on, there are fifteen million hosts plus
Speaker 1: on indeed about people's happiness at work. Has anybody ever
Speaker 1: actually looked at what that happiness at work predicts? For example,
Speaker 1: does it predict how well companies are doing in terms
Speaker 1: of their profits? Is there a correlation between people's happiness
Speaker 1: at work or average happiness at work in an individual
Speaker 1: company and the profits that that company is making. And
Speaker 1: so they took these fifteen million plus data points over
Speaker 1: thousands of different companies, and they looked and it turns
Speaker 1: out these things are correlated. I'm showing you right now
Speaker 1: the graph from their working paper, and what you're seeing
Speaker 1: is the gross profits on one axis, and these indeed
Speaker 1: well being score, which is kind of a metric of
Speaker 1: people's happiness at work, their sense of purpose and so on.
Speaker 1: But basically, what you see is this lovely correlation where
Speaker 1: the companies who have the happiest workers are making the
Speaker 1: most money. Now, all of a sudden, the c suite
Speaker 1: folks are paying attention because this is mattering for their profits.
Speaker 1: But these researchers didn't just do that. They actually did
Speaker 1: one other thing that I love. I can't help again,
Speaker 1: but kind of nerdily share with you the graph. They said, well,
Speaker 1: if this is true that the happier companies are making
Speaker 1: the most money. Maybe we need a different econom index.
Speaker 1: Some of you might have heard about, like the SNP
Speaker 1: five hundred, right, which is like, you know, these top
Speaker 1: five hundred companies where if you invest you'll probably make
Speaker 1: some money. They said, what if we make a kind
Speaker 1: of SMP one hundred of the top one hundred happiest
Speaker 1: companies in the INDEED data set, and we plot how
Speaker 1: the stocks of that company did against maybe the SMP
Speaker 1: five hundred and all these other indicators of economic success.
Speaker 1: And that's the graph I'm going to show you. Now.
Speaker 1: You'll see on the bottom are these orange, purple, and
Speaker 1: green lines. That's the SMP five hundred, the Dow Jones,
Speaker 1: the Nasdaq. Those are the normal things we see in
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal that are the indicators of economic success.
Speaker 1: And I'm looking across time as though you'd invested one
Speaker 1: thousand bucks back in January twenty twenty in these companies,
Speaker 1: how would your money be doing over time? But you'll
Speaker 1: notice there's that blue bar that tends to be at
Speaker 1: the top of this graph. That's this INDEED top one
Speaker 1: hundred kind of SMP one hundred of the happiest companies
Speaker 1: and what they're finding is that pretty much at every
Speaker 1: point in the economic cycle over the last couple of years,
Speaker 1: these top one hundred companies we're beating out in terms
Speaker 1: of how much money they're stock, We're breaking all these
Speaker 1: other kind of indicators. What does this mean. This means
Speaker 1: that what the research is showing is that happier companies
Speaker 1: make more money. If your employees are happy, that might
Speaker 1: be a critical factor. And whether your startup is going
Speaker 1: to succeed, or whether your country, whether your company gets
Speaker 1: out of the economic slump that we're all in right now,
Speaker 1: these things matter. And so that's why I think, with
Speaker 1: my kind of south By glasses on, we need to
Speaker 1: be paying attention to well being. Yeah, AI and worries
Speaker 1: about the economics and all this stuff that's important. But
Speaker 1: I think that over the next five to ten years,
Speaker 1: smart businesses are going to start paying attention to their
Speaker 1: employee well being. Hopefully partly out of kind of doing
Speaker 1: the moral thing for a company, because you want your
Speaker 1: employees to feel good and succeed, but I think partly
Speaker 1: out of a like fully purely capitalistic move of like,
Speaker 1: how are we going to make the most company, how
Speaker 1: are we going to make the most money. We make
Speaker 1: the most money by having the happiest workers. But there's
Speaker 1: a question of like how do we do that? And
Speaker 1: that's what I'm going to talk to you about. In
Speaker 1: the rest of this talk. We're going to kind of
Speaker 1: dig into like, Okay, how do you make a happy workplace?
Speaker 1: And how can we as individuals improve our own happiness
Speaker 1: in the workplace so our individual performance can flourish and
Speaker 1: thrive and so on. And so we're going to walk
Speaker 1: through the five tips that science shows us about how
Speaker 1: we can do that, how we can improve our well
Speaker 1: being in the workplace. And each of these tips, I
Speaker 1: should say, each of these tips have this feature where
Speaker 1: we're going to walk through a misconception we have about
Speaker 1: this right, We're going to see where our mind gets
Speaker 1: it wrong about happiness in the workplace and what we
Speaker 1: can do to do better, starting with tip number one,
Speaker 1: which is, if we want to be happier in the workplace,
Speaker 1: we need to find ways to acknowledge and use our
Speaker 1: negative emotions a little bit more wisely. Right, Like, we're
Speaker 1: all feeling a little overwhelmed, we're all feeling a little anxious,
Speaker 1: we're all feeling a little bit upset, frustrated by what's
Speaker 1: going on. That's kind of the general state of these things.
Speaker 1: That's why, in this a conference where there's so many
Speaker 1: other cool sessions this morning, y'all are filling the seats
Speaker 1: in this one because we all want to deal with
Speaker 1: these negative emotions. The problem, though, is that we have
Speaker 1: this misconception about how we should do that. I think
Speaker 1: we all think negative emotions not good at work, not
Speaker 1: good in general, don't feel good. I'm gonna squish him down,
Speaker 1: you know, stiff upper lip, hustle culture. I'll just pretend
Speaker 1: I'm not feeling that overwhelmed or that sadness or that
Speaker 1: frustration or whatever. Turns out, scientists have gone out and
Speaker 1: studied what happens when we suppress our emotions. Does that
Speaker 1: positively affect our performance? Turns out no, We know this
Speaker 1: from some cleverest studies. One of my favorite it comes
Speaker 1: from the neuroscientist James Gross at Stanford. He does these
Speaker 1: studies where he brings subjects into the lab and has
Speaker 1: them do the opposite of watching that funny cat video.
Speaker 1: He has them watch really sad videos. But he tells subjects,
Speaker 1: whatever you do, make it so that no one knows
Speaker 1: you're feeling sad, so trying to suppress their emotions. Question is,
Speaker 1: what's the consequences of doing this? And he tests a
Speaker 1: few consequences, what happens to subjects performance on a memory task,
Speaker 1: on a decision making task. The what he finds is
Speaker 1: that subjects do really bad. Right if you're going to
Speaker 1: using all your energy to hold down those emotions, you
Speaker 1: can't remember stuff, you can't perform well. Our performance tanks
Speaker 1: when we're suppressing our emotions, but we also have negative
Speaker 1: consequences for our bodies. It turns out gross measures people's
Speaker 1: cardiac stress and this short little laboratory task and he
Speaker 1: finds that even suppressing your emotions, after this really tiny
Speaker 1: negative video, you can actually see evidence that these subjects
Speaker 1: are going through cardiac stress. Point is, our theory about
Speaker 1: how we deal with negative emotions is kind of wrong.
Speaker 1: We think, squish them down, pretend they're not there, We're
Speaker 1: going to be fine, And the data suggests that doesn't work.
Speaker 1: The data suggests we need a new way to think
Speaker 1: about negative emotions, both at work and kind of in general.
Speaker 1: And the way I think we need to think about
Speaker 1: negative emotions is not to avoid them, but to use
Speaker 1: them as the signal they are evolutionarily speaking, you know,
Speaker 1: natural selection doesn't build in extraneous stuff to our psychological
Speaker 1: systems that we don't need. Our negative emotions are kind
Speaker 1: of like the alert system on our car. You know,
Speaker 1: if your brake light goes on, your gas light goes on,
Speaker 1: that's kind of a pain in the butt. It means
Speaker 1: you have to deal with something, but it's an important
Speaker 1: alert because if you don't deal with that thing, worse
Speaker 1: things are going to happen. You're going to run out
Speaker 1: of gas, so your engine's going to blow up on
Speaker 1: the highway. That's what negative emotions are doing. They're trying
Speaker 1: to be an alert signal that we need to pay
Speaker 1: attention to so we can ask ourselves, how can we
Speaker 1: nurture ourselves? What can we do to take care of ourselves.
Speaker 1: That's how we need to reframe emotions, both in general
Speaker 1: and at work. Our signals of overwhelm are telling us
Speaker 1: something important. They're telling us we need to take something
Speaker 1: off our plate. Our signals of anxiety or sadness are
Speaker 1: telling us something important. They're telling us that something is
Speaker 1: a miss that we need to take action and change.
Speaker 1: And if we ignore that it's kind of like ignoring
Speaker 1: the gaslight, you're going to run out of gas. And
Speaker 1: so the question though, is, well, how can we do that?
Speaker 1: What are some practical strategies we can use to kind
Speaker 1: of notice those emotional signals, acknowledge them, and kind of
Speaker 1: use them more wisely. And one of my favorite super
Speaker 1: practical strategies comes from the meditation teacher Tara Brack, a
Speaker 1: psychologist and meditation teacher. I'm going to flash up some
Speaker 1: of these books and I think these are like essential
Speaker 1: reading if you want to learn more about your well being.
Speaker 1: But Tara Brack actually has a meditation practice she uses
Speaker 1: to kind of allow and non judgmentally and kind of
Speaker 1: allow your emotions. And it's a method that she calls RAIN,
Speaker 1: which is an acronym for recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture.
Speaker 1: And so, let's say you're at work and you receive
Speaker 1: some email that makes you feel really frustrated, or you
Speaker 1: look at the news and you read I don't know
Speaker 1: literally anything, and you start to feel sad and anxious
Speaker 1: and so on. Right, you remember, oh, yeah, south By
Speaker 1: that Yale lady said I could use RAIN, and you've
Speaker 1: already achieved the first step which is the R to recognize.
Speaker 1: You just recognize what's happening. I'm experiencing a negative emotion
Speaker 1: right now, and you get really curious. You categorize it.
Speaker 1: You say, is this frustration with a side of anxiety? Well,
Speaker 1: maybe it's pissed off with a little spirit in there
Speaker 1: of loneliness, right Like, get really creative and use your
Speaker 1: adjectives about how you're feeling. You can really describe it carefully.
Speaker 1: That's the R step. But then you follow that with
Speaker 1: the hard step. Allow. You say, all right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take five minutes. I'm just gonna sit here non judgmentally,
Speaker 1: allow these feelings to be there just as there. I
Speaker 1: don't have to love them, but I'm gonna sit with them.
Speaker 1: The famous poet Roomy once talked about negative emotions. Is
Speaker 1: this visitor who knocks on your door that you didn't
Speaker 1: want to show up, kind of the annoying neighbor. Right,
Speaker 1: But you don't kick them out. You sit them down.
Speaker 1: You know, you invite them in. They're gonna eventually do
Speaker 1: their thing and go. That's the allow step for your emotions.
Speaker 1: You just commit to hanging out with your emotions for
Speaker 1: a bit. But you kind of want to give your
Speaker 1: mind something to do. When you're doing that allow step,
Speaker 1: and that's the next step. Investigate, You say, all right,
Speaker 1: how does it feel in my body when I'm feeling,
Speaker 1: you know, pissed off with a side of lonely. Maybe
Speaker 1: my chest is getting tight, maybe my brow is furrowing.
Speaker 1: Maybe I have this enormous craving right, I want to
Speaker 1: eat something, or I want to have a drink or
Speaker 1: check my email. Don't do act on those just like, huh.
Speaker 1: That is where my brain, my brain and my mind
Speaker 1: goes when I'm feeling this stuff. And the beauty of
Speaker 1: the investigate step is that so much evidence suggests that
Speaker 1: emotions are kind of like a wave. This is in
Speaker 1: clinical practice what's often called urge surfing, where if you
Speaker 1: pay attention to an emotion, you'll feel it a little
Speaker 1: bit more. It'll kind of go up like a wave,
Speaker 1: but then it'll just kind of crash down and do
Speaker 1: its thing. The problem is we never hang out with
Speaker 1: our emotions, non judgmentally long enough for them to do that.
Speaker 1: That's the investigate step, But the key is that you
Speaker 1: don't stop there. There's one more letter in this rain
Speaker 1: practice and for nurture and that's to do something nice
Speaker 1: for yourself. Negative emotions don't feel good. What can you
Speaker 1: take off your plate? What can you do to help
Speaker 1: yourself take care of yourself? Right? Practice is like rain,
Speaker 1: I love because they've actually been studied in laboratory settings. Rain,
Speaker 1: but also a whole host of practice is like rain,
Speaker 1: where you allow your emotions and non judgmentally say I'm
Speaker 1: having a tough time, but I'm going to sit with it.
Speaker 1: And research has shown that they can reduce burnout in
Speaker 1: domains like palliative care workers and in industry is like
Speaker 1: for first responders. Right, These are who are dealing with
Speaker 1: negative emotions really on a daily basis, and practices like
Speaker 1: these can help. So there are practices that can also
Speaker 1: help us in all the industries that I'm seeing in
Speaker 1: this room right. Finding ways to acknowledge our negative emotions
Speaker 1: and use them wisely. That's tip number one. Now we
Speaker 1: get to tip number two, which is a mindset shift.
Speaker 1: We have to overcome misconceptions we have about our own productivity.
Speaker 1: And that is the tip that we need to rethink
Speaker 1: not just productivity, but how much we're protecting what social
Speaker 1: scientists call our time affluence. What is time affluence. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a strange term. Well, it's a term that
Speaker 1: social scientists like the researcher Ashley Willin's at Harvard Business School,
Speaker 1: have gotten really obsessed with lately. It's defined as the
Speaker 1: subjective sense that you feel wealthy in time. You've got
Speaker 1: lots of time on your hands. Right, some of you
Speaker 1: are already furrowing. I can see. It's the opposite of
Speaker 1: what many of you probably experience, which is time famine,
Speaker 1: where you're literally starving for time. And the research shows
Speaker 1: that time famine works a lot like hunger famine. It
Speaker 1: puts our bodies into flight or flight mode. It's also
Speaker 1: really terrible for our well being. In fact, Ashley Willens's
Speaker 1: research suggests that if you self report being time famished
Speaker 1: a lot of the time, that's as bad for your
Speaker 1: well being as if you self report being unemployed. You know,
Speaker 1: you lost your job tomorrow, that would suck. Just not
Speaker 1: having any time, or feeling that you don't have any
Speaker 1: time is as bad for your well being, which is bad.
Speaker 1: Some of you are watching your faces like, you know
Speaker 1: that's me. I feel so time famished. What can I do? Well?
Speaker 1: I think to figure out what we can do? We
Speaker 1: need to understand the misconceptions that drove us here. Why
Speaker 1: are we feeling so strapped for time? And I think
Speaker 1: it's not because we're massa kiss. I think we feel
Speaker 1: strapped for time because we think that working as much
Speaker 1: as we work all the time is essential for kind
Speaker 1: of achieving the things we want to achieve in life.
Speaker 1: We want to get to eleven in our careers and
Speaker 1: our kind of creativity and so on, and we think, push, push, push,
Speaker 1: and I'll just keep working all the time and then
Speaker 1: I'll be quote unquote productive. But does that really work
Speaker 1: or is this a misconception? My favorite recent articulation of
Speaker 1: how much this is a misconception comes from this fabulous
Speaker 1: book by Cal Newport called Slow Productivity. I just interviewed
Speaker 1: Cal from my podcast The Happiness Lab, and I think
Speaker 1: this book is also essential reading for everyone. But Cal
Speaker 1: kind of walks through this idea that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: these days, we don't really have a great sense of
Speaker 1: what productivity is. We used to do, right, if you
Speaker 1: think back to the industries that humans used to engage in,
Speaker 1: like think like agriculture, we had a good way to
Speaker 1: determine productivity. It was like amount of time and resources
Speaker 1: per like corn, Like it was really easy thing you
Speaker 1: measure like big bushel of corn that dude's doing good, right,
Speaker 1: Or fast forward to industries like the assembly line and
Speaker 1: kind of making stuff. That was another domain where we
Speaker 1: had some pretty good ideas of productivity. Right, amount of
Speaker 1: time per numbers of card top parts getting put on
Speaker 1: these you know, chevies. That was a good measure of productivity.
Speaker 1: We had those back then. But now how fast forward
Speaker 1: to the kind of knowledge work that most of you
Speaker 1: in the room do, and our definition of productivity gets
Speaker 1: a little bit trickier. Like, you know, I'm a knowledge
Speaker 1: worker in the podcast space, I'm a podcast host, So
Speaker 1: like what counts as productivity for me? Is it number
Speaker 1: of episodes I make per time? Is it the ratings?
Speaker 1: Is it the amount of ad revenue I make? Right? Like,
Speaker 1: we don't have these good measures of productivity. It's not
Speaker 1: as easy as with corn or when we're producing cars
Speaker 1: and so on. And Newport suggests that what we've done
Speaker 1: as knowledge workers is that we've developed a sort of
Speaker 1: proxy for our own productivity. It's what he calls pseudo
Speaker 1: productivity or just extreme visual busyness. We feel like if
Speaker 1: our gcals are filled with all these meetings and all
Speaker 1: this stuff to do that must be productive. You know,
Speaker 1: we even pick a particular time to do it, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of nine to five where we fill that time
Speaker 1: even if that's not our best, most productive time, because
Speaker 1: that's like what you do. And Newport argues that this
Speaker 1: is problematic because it means that what we're going to
Speaker 1: reward ourselves with, or we're going to kind of make
Speaker 1: kind of see really feel like we're being productive, is
Speaker 1: whenever we're just like doing stuff that looks visually active.
Speaker 1: He argues that this is why we load our days
Speaker 1: filled with like email and slack messages and meetings at
Speaker 1: work and team meetings, because it feels like we're doing
Speaker 1: something the company can see us we're actually doing something. See.
Speaker 1: But he's like, that's not the real knowledge work you
Speaker 1: want to get done. We don't even know if this
Speaker 1: stuff is actually contributing to the big projects you want
Speaker 1: to get through. But it looks really visually busy, so
Speaker 1: you feel kind of good about it. His argument is
Speaker 1: that these kinds of things can be what he calls
Speaker 1: productivity termites, where they kind of all those emails and
Speaker 1: slack messages go into your calendar, and just like a
Speaker 1: termite eating away at the house, they eat away at
Speaker 1: the foundation of the free time you have, such that
Speaker 1: when you kind of go back and say, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do the big project and that big
Speaker 1: deep knowledge work I want to work on, you can't
Speaker 1: do that because, like the whole structure of your calendar
Speaker 1: is broken down by all these slack message answering and
Speaker 1: these tiny meetings and these things. And that means that
Speaker 1: we're not being as productive as we could be. Why.
Speaker 1: Because we've made ourselves so tight I'm famished in an
Speaker 1: effort to kind of feel productive, We've killed our own
Speaker 1: time affluence. And so the answer is that we need
Speaker 1: a new way to think about our time and our productivity.
Speaker 1: But how do we do that well? I argue that
Speaker 1: the way we do that is that we try to
Speaker 1: embrace a little bit more time affluence, as uncomfortable as
Speaker 1: that might be, and as many things as that means.
Speaker 1: We need to take off our plate to feel like
Speaker 1: we're a little bit less time famished. Strategies for doing
Speaker 1: this involve kind of thinking about whether you can kind
Speaker 1: of get rid of some of those productivity termites. What
Speaker 1: can it look like to kind of push email or
Speaker 1: push slack messages only to sometimes in the day, so
Speaker 1: you can feel like you have these big stretches that
Speaker 1: feel quite productive when you can work on things. Another
Speaker 1: one of my favorite suggestions comes from the psychologist Gal Zuberman,
Speaker 1: who talks a lot about what he calls the yes
Speaker 1: damn effect. So the yes dam effect is like, you know,
Speaker 1: months and months ago, somebody's like, hey, can you do
Speaker 1: this project report? Or Hey can we set up this
Speaker 1: meeting for a couple hours, or hey can you go
Speaker 1: to this conference? And it seems like it's so far away,
Speaker 1: you're like yes, But then time goes on and that
Speaker 1: date shows up and you look in your calendar and
Speaker 1: that stupid thing is there, and you're like, damn. That's
Speaker 1: the yes damn effect. Zuberman suggests we should embrace a
Speaker 1: different effect, which he calls the no yay effect. And
Speaker 1: the way the no ye effect works, as you might guess,
Speaker 1: is that person's like, hey can use project report? Can
Speaker 1: you do this thing? You commit to saying no. You
Speaker 1: literally put on your calendar how many no things you
Speaker 1: want to have, and you have to tick them off
Speaker 1: the list. But you don't just say no. You say,
Speaker 1: and when was that project supposed to be due? The
Speaker 1: one I said, no too, when was it due? Then
Speaker 1: you go in your calendar and you put that on
Speaker 1: that date, you know, Monday, three weeks from now. You're
Speaker 1: supposed to have that thing that you had to do.
Speaker 1: And you look and you're like, I don't have to
Speaker 1: do that thing, and you say yay. That's the no
Speaker 1: yay effect. The point is that what we're doing is
Speaker 1: we are aggressively protecting our time. We are thinking about
Speaker 1: our time and the same way we think about our
Speaker 1: money where we want to prioritize it. And in fact,
Speaker 1: research for Ashley Willand's and her coll suggest that the
Speaker 1: more you focus on time and put your investment into
Speaker 1: time rather than money, the happier you'll be. Most of
Speaker 1: you are at south By because you have at least
Speaker 1: some discretionary income to come to events like this. Willins's
Speaker 1: work suggests that the more you spend your discretionary income
Speaker 1: to get back time that you give up money to
Speaker 1: get time, the happier you will be. And we can
Speaker 1: do this in really silly ways that we often don't
Speaker 1: even think about. I'm sure at some point some of
Speaker 1: you in the working day, have gotten takeout or something
Speaker 1: like that. We don't think of it as a savings
Speaker 1: in time, but the research suggests we should. Right. You know,
Speaker 1: say you go out and get pad tie or whatever,
Speaker 1: that's noodles. You didn't have to cook, You didn't have
Speaker 1: to look up the recipe and go to the grocery
Speaker 1: store to get the peanut sauce. You probably saved what
Speaker 1: hour and a half hour, forty five minutes? What'd you
Speaker 1: do with that hour and forty five minutes? So that's
Speaker 1: spending our money to get back more time, but also
Speaker 1: making sure we're framing things like that. A final way
Speaker 1: we can protect our time affluence is to make good
Speaker 1: use of the time we do have. Our time. As
Speaker 1: you heard in these top productivity termites, sometimes breaks our
Speaker 1: time up into these little tiny chunks. This is what
Speaker 1: journalists Bridget Schultz calls time confetti. It was little pieces
Speaker 1: for you five minutes when that Zoom meeting ends, or
Speaker 1: ten minutes if your kid falls asleep. We think those
Speaker 1: are just such tiny periods we don't do anything with them.
Speaker 1: But Schultz suggests that we might want to invest in
Speaker 1: that time confetti because when you add it up, it's
Speaker 1: a huge sheet of paper that is like kind of
Speaker 1: broken into these tiny pieces, and so she recommends making
Speaker 1: what she calls a time confetti wish list. This isn't
Speaker 1: like work to dos, but like for you to do.
Speaker 1: So maybe that's when you do your rain meditation or
Speaker 1: some other self care practice. The key is that instead
Speaker 1: of blowing that little piece of time confetti scrolling on
Speaker 1: Reddit or Instagram or something like that, you actually do
Speaker 1: something useful with it. It makes you feel a little
Speaker 1: bit more time affluent. So that's top tip number two.
Speaker 1: We need to rethink our idea that productivity is about
Speaker 1: visible busyness. It's a filled calendar, it's all that stuff.
Speaker 1: No to feel better, we need to embrace a slower
Speaker 1: form of productivity, one that says no to a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff so that we can have a yes
Speaker 1: for when we really need it. But it's worth noting
Speaker 1: that as folks in the current culture that we're in,
Speaker 1: where you know, busyness and lessl culture and girl boss
Speaker 1: and eternalized capitalism rein zubream, that's hard, right. The act
Speaker 1: of doing that, saying no more, is hard, and that's
Speaker 1: why we need tip number three, which is another mindset
Speaker 1: shift that can help us with this, which is that
Speaker 1: if we really want to protect our time, if we
Speaker 1: really want to work better, we need to motivate ourselves
Speaker 1: in the way that science suggests work best, and that's
Speaker 1: by motivating ourselves with what we're going to call self compassion.
Speaker 1: As we mentioned, we all want to push ourselves. We
Speaker 1: all want to get to eleven, right. I think that's
Speaker 1: always been true, but lately, in the past five to
Speaker 1: ten years, we've developed some mindset notions about how we
Speaker 1: do that best, and I think those are best summed
Speaker 1: up in the idea of hustle culture, right, keep pushing yourself,
Speaker 1: sleep when you're dead. All these things, these are the
Speaker 1: mantras that we pick up because we assume that's the
Speaker 1: best way to motivate ourselves. But the research is starting
Speaker 1: to show that that just doesn't work. That all these
Speaker 1: kind of mantras that we have in our head is
Speaker 1: kind of instagram like, you know, latching onto our brain
Speaker 1: of how much we need to work more and keep grinding.
Speaker 1: It actually doesn't work. It causes us to procrastinate, It
Speaker 1: causes us to engage in a lot more self criticism
Speaker 1: because we feel like our work is our worth, and
Speaker 1: it's sort of never enough, right, you kind of just
Speaker 1: keep pushing yourself and pushing ourselves. And so this is
Speaker 1: the misconception that the way to motivate ourselves is to
Speaker 1: kind of scream at ourselves like a drill instructor and
Speaker 1: like some like hustle culture warrior. It kind of doesn't
Speaker 1: work in the way we think. So how do we
Speaker 1: fix this misconception. We need to develop a better way
Speaker 1: to motivate ourselves, a better way to think about how
Speaker 1: we motivate ourself and the way that we get from
Speaker 1: a lot of recent science is that we need to
Speaker 1: motivate ourselves better through self compassion. Another fabulous book if
Speaker 1: you're interested in this, is book by Kristin Neff, who's
Speaker 1: a professor here in Austin. She's at ut She has
Speaker 1: this book about self compassion, and a lot of her
Speaker 1: work suggest that if we want to engage in self
Speaker 1: compassion to motivate ourselves, we need to remember that self
Speaker 1: compassion has three parts. The first is something that should
Speaker 1: be really familiar from Tip one, recognizing your negative emotions.
Speaker 1: It's the practice of mindfulness. You gotta know what's going on.
Speaker 1: This sucks right now, I'm having a really tired time,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling really anxious, I'm feeling really ashamed. That's mindfulness.
Speaker 1: You're recognizing what's happened, first step of self compassion. But
Speaker 1: the second step is you do something with that mindfulness.
Speaker 1: You then say, but that makes sense because I'm only human.
Speaker 1: This is something that everybody goes through. It's normal to fail,
Speaker 1: it's normal to screw up, it's normal to feel overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: This is normal. It's a common human experience. That's step
Speaker 1: number two, common humanity. But you don't end there. You
Speaker 1: ask yourself what you can do to be kind to yourself.
Speaker 1: You say, what can I take off my plate? How
Speaker 1: can I help myself right now? What do I need
Speaker 1: right now? You talk to yourself as though you were
Speaker 1: a friend who'd showed up at your house having the
Speaker 1: same problem, and you talk to yourself like you would
Speaker 1: talk to that friend. And I love this idea of
Speaker 1: talking to yourself like you'd talk to a friend, because
Speaker 1: sometimes when we think of practice as like self compassion,
Speaker 1: especially from the hustle culture mindset, we sometimes worry that
Speaker 1: it's like self indulgence, like I'm being too nice to myself,
Speaker 1: I'm letting myself off the hook. But if you think
Speaker 1: about how you'd really talk to a friend that was struggling,
Speaker 1: if they were really screwing up, you probably wouldn't let
Speaker 1: them off the hook. You wouldn't scream at them like
Speaker 1: some hustle culture warrior. You'd talk to them kindly, with curiosity.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, I don't know what's happening, but I'm
Speaker 1: really worried about you. What can we do to fix this?
Speaker 1: You'd be curious and you'd be problem solving. That's how
Speaker 1: you talk to yourself, not self indulgence. It's a form
Speaker 1: of compassion, and it's a form of compassion that the
Speaker 1: research suggests really works. In fact, Kristin Neff has tested
Speaker 1: all the benefits of this practice of self compassion and
Speaker 1: it has some incredibly compelling ones. She's, for example, done
Speaker 1: work on whether or not practices like self compassion can
Speaker 1: reduce PTSD in combat veterans, and she finds that both
Speaker 1: with Iraqi and Afghani vetts, teaching them these strategies of
Speaker 1: self compassion ahead of time can reduce the rates of
Speaker 1: trauma that these individuals come back with. Right, these are
Speaker 1: really negative, nasty emotions, but being nice to yourself through
Speaker 1: it can be incredibly powerful. Kristin Neff also finds that
Speaker 1: being nice to yourself can make it easier to be
Speaker 1: nice to your future self. She finds that people who
Speaker 1: engage in self compassion eat healthier, they save more for retirement,
Speaker 1: they're better able to prioritize their future selves, and that
Speaker 1: includes a future self that has to work at something
Speaker 1: that's a little scary. She finds that practices like self
Speaker 1: compassion can reduce things like procrastination, so it's a way
Speaker 1: to get more done because you're not screaming at yourself
Speaker 1: when you don't do things the way you think. She
Speaker 1: also finds that self compassion is a great way to
Speaker 1: practice compassion for other people. So people with more self
Speaker 1: compassion show more self compassion and their romantic relationships with
Speaker 1: their kids, with their teammates on the job. It's just
Speaker 1: a powerful way of feeling better and so sounds great,
Speaker 1: But what are some practical strategies we can use to
Speaker 1: find more self compassion, especially if we're kind of infused
Speaker 1: in that hustle culture. And one way that Christian RECs
Speaker 1: amends that looks cheesy but it works, is to engage
Speaker 1: in compassionate self touch. So think about the last time
Speaker 1: you had a bad day. You know, if your parents
Speaker 1: are still around, you might have called your mom, maybe
Speaker 1: saw her for coffee, she gave you a hug or something,
Speaker 1: or you saw a friend, your spouse. We tend to
Speaker 1: comfort each other with a certain kind of touch. Kristin
Speaker 1: Neff says, just do that to yourself. Look stupid, but
Speaker 1: it works. Turns out your brains are dumb. They don't
Speaker 1: know who's touching you. Right. It worked useful in other
Speaker 1: context too, as we know. Right, but you just do
Speaker 1: this to yourself. And because we need practice, I'm going
Speaker 1: to ask all of you in the room now to
Speaker 1: kind of do a little self hug, a little kind
Speaker 1: of stroke on the arm. But then that is a
Speaker 1: signal to you to engage in new self talk. This
Speaker 1: is why I like this touch practice. It like reminds
Speaker 1: you I got to talk to myself differently, and you
Speaker 1: talk using those strategies mindfulness. This is really hard right now.
Speaker 1: I am struggling. This sucks. I'm not doing well common humanity,
Speaker 1: But that's normal, it's just human. Stress is a part
Speaker 1: of life. Everyone struggles. And then self kindness. What can
Speaker 1: I take off my plate. What do I need right now?
Speaker 1: Just asking that question to yourself when you're struggling can
Speaker 1: be so powerful, what do I need right now? Again,
Speaker 1: the research shows that, even though we don't think it,
Speaker 1: this kind of self kindness and self compassion is a
Speaker 1: much better way to motivate ourselves than all that hustle
Speaker 1: culture self criticism. So that's top insight number three. We
Speaker 1: got to motivate ourself with self compassion. The question is,
Speaker 1: of course, what is it we're motivating ourselves to do?
Speaker 1: What things should we be doing more of it work
Speaker 1: to increase our flourishing and reduce our risk of burnout.
Speaker 1: You'll hear my best two tips on happiness at work
Speaker 1: after the short break. So far in my south By
Speaker 1: Southwest talk on happiness at work, I've covered the importance
Speaker 1: of recognizing when we're feeling sad, why we should differentiate
Speaker 1: between actual productivity and stressful busyness, and how we should
Speaker 1: occasionally give ourselves a comforting hug. In the second half
Speaker 1: of my talk to the topic of tackling burnout, and
Speaker 1: that gets us to tip number four, which is that
Speaker 1: if we really want to fight burnout, the research shows
Speaker 1: we need to craft our job a bit so that
Speaker 1: it becomes a calling. Burnout is something else that everybody's
Speaker 1: talking about at south By because it's a thing. I
Speaker 1: think this is also something we have a lot of
Speaker 1: misconceptions about. We think it's just about emotional exhaustion, but
Speaker 1: the research shows that burnout can be more like an
Speaker 1: occupational problem. It's kind of an interaction between you and
Speaker 1: your job that we need to understand. And we know
Speaker 1: this from the lovely work of Christina Maslak. She is
Speaker 1: the scientific expert on burnout, and she's walked through the
Speaker 1: kind of steps that lead to burnout in an organization,
Speaker 1: the kind of factors that wind up letting us feel
Speaker 1: more burned out, and she's identified six. I think of
Speaker 1: the six, there's ones that we often think of, so
Speaker 1: things like workload, if your workload is too much, or
Speaker 1: maybe the rewards aren't too much, you're not getting paid
Speaker 1: enough for the work you're doing. But there's one on
Speaker 1: this list that the science has really narrowed in on.
Speaker 1: It's particularly important. It's this last one, values mismad. What's
Speaker 1: that we get burned out when the values that we
Speaker 1: signed up for to do a job don't match the
Speaker 1: ones that we're experiencing in practice. I think this is
Speaker 1: something that's really problematic. For example, and lots of industries,
Speaker 1: but I'll just pick one the healthcare industry. You're a
Speaker 1: nurse and you're a doctor. You got into it because
Speaker 1: your value is helping people. But on the ground, it
Speaker 1: feels like you're saving money for the insurance companies or
Speaker 1: the hospital and you're getting patients in it, and it's
Speaker 1: just like there's a mismatch there, and that's the one
Speaker 1: that insidiously leads us to feel that yucky sense of burnout.
Speaker 1: And so what that means is that we got to
Speaker 1: get our values right right, that's the thing we might
Speaker 1: need to focus on more than some of the other stuff,
Speaker 1: but we often don't know how to do that. But
Speaker 1: the good news is there's lots of research that's focused
Speaker 1: on how we can, and a lot of it comes
Speaker 1: from the work of Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman at
Speaker 1: the University of Pennsylvania who focused on what they call
Speaker 1: finding your signature Strengths. Their research has basically looked at like, well,
Speaker 1: what are the values that people engage in, you know,
Speaker 1: to do good in the world and their work and
Speaker 1: their volunteerism and whatever. And they've looked cross culturally and
Speaker 1: identified about twenty four different what they call character strengths,
Speaker 1: basically this list of values. You look at the list,
Speaker 1: you're like, oh yeah, like, you know, hope and persistence
Speaker 1: or self restraining, zest for life, an appreciation of beauty, bravery.
Speaker 1: They're kind of set of values that like, we can
Speaker 1: all get behind. But as you scroll through that list,
Speaker 1: there might be some of the things on the list
Speaker 1: that you're like, you know, yeah, citizenship is good, but
Speaker 1: I'm really into creativity or I'm really into humor, or
Speaker 1: I'm really into zest for life. There might be one
Speaker 1: that's like the particular one that you resonate with that
Speaker 1: is what researchers would call your signature strength. But the
Speaker 1: question is like, okay, well, what if my signature strength
Speaker 1: is humor or bravery or citizenship or whatever, Like, how
Speaker 1: do I engage that and the knowledge work that I'm
Speaker 1: doing at work? Right? How do I do that a
Speaker 1: little bit more? And here we have the lovely work
Speaker 1: of Amy Resininski, who's another faculty member at the University
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania who studies what she calls job crafting. Her
Speaker 1: idea is that in any job, you can look your
Speaker 1: job description and figure out with flexibility ways that you
Speaker 1: can infuse these values in no matter what your job
Speaker 1: description is. And I love Amy's work because she doesn't
Speaker 1: do studies with people doing creative knowledge work in the
Speaker 1: industries that I'm probably mostly seeing in the room. Most
Speaker 1: of her work on job crafting is with hospital janitorial
Speaker 1: staff workers, where you might think these folks don't actually
Speaker 1: have a lot of creativity about how they can move
Speaker 1: their job description around. These are people are like washing
Speaker 1: linen in a hospital ward. But what she finds interestingly
Speaker 1: is that a third of these hospital workers a third,
Speaker 1: it's actually a pretty high number, say that they experience
Speaker 1: their job as a calling. They love their job, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't leave their job for something else. And the reason
Speaker 1: she finds as she digs into what they're doing is
Speaker 1: that they're constantly engaging in one of their signature strengths.
Speaker 1: She tells these lovely stories of hospital janitorial staff workers who,
Speaker 1: for example, one who engages in kind of helping others
Speaker 1: and humor every day he worked in a chemotherapy ward. So,
Speaker 1: if you've ever been unlucky enough to have to chemotherapy
Speaker 1: or know someone who did you know that people often
Speaker 1: get very sick, and so a lot of his job
Speaker 1: was cleaning up vomit. And she doesn't sound like a
Speaker 1: job where you could get a lot of these strengths in.
Speaker 1: But he's like, no, no, no, My strength is really humor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have to clean that up, but my real job
Speaker 1: is I make the patient laugh. I'm like a comedian
Speaker 1: and I'm going to get them to laugh even though
Speaker 1: their day has been really crappy. And he had his
Speaker 1: whole stick that he used to do where he'd say,
Speaker 1: you know, we'd come into cleaning'd be like you keep vomiting,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get over time and like well, like you
Speaker 1: know the secret handshit, you know, just like you laugh
Speaker 1: the patient laugh and he's like, see, that's that's my
Speaker 1: real job. Or another janitorial staff worker who worked in
Speaker 1: a coma ward. So this staff member couldn't interact with patients,
Speaker 1: but every day he would move the paintings around in
Speaker 1: the room and like the plants, like switch them, and
Speaker 1: that was strength of creativity. He just thought maybe it
Speaker 1: would help. I don't know, these are nothing managers are
Speaker 1: telling people to do. It's just they're infusing their strengths
Speaker 1: into their job, and they wind up loving their job,
Speaker 1: loving a job that many of us would think would
Speaker 1: be a tough job to love in the ways that
Speaker 1: they love it. But what's most important about job craft
Speaker 1: thing is that the evidence suggests it can protect you
Speaker 1: from burnout. It's a way to get your values lined up.
Speaker 1: Even if they went askew before, you can bring them
Speaker 1: back to an alignment in a way that will protect you.
Speaker 1: And that is top tip number four. We need to
Speaker 1: find ways to craft our job. That's how we turn
Speaker 1: it into a calling. But there's one other scientific way
Speaker 1: that we can turn our job into a calling, into
Speaker 1: a job that we really love, and that gets us
Speaker 1: to top tip number five, which is that the science
Speaker 1: really shows that if we want to feel better at work,
Speaker 1: we need to find ways to seek out more belonging,
Speaker 1: and we do that by getting a little bit more
Speaker 1: social than we're comfortable with. I started with that lovely
Speaker 1: study from Indeed. I talked about how companies with happier
Speaker 1: workers are making the most money. But what I didn't
Speaker 1: tell you was the key feature, which is what makes
Speaker 1: the workers happy? What are the factors that lead to
Speaker 1: more happiness at work. In this big, huge data set
Speaker 1: where we have people's spontaneous ratings, researcher yan Emmanuel Denev,
Speaker 1: he's the Oxford researcher who led this study, said well,
Speaker 1: let's let economists guess. We have the data from the
Speaker 1: Indeed surveys, but let's let economists guess what do you
Speaker 1: think makes people happy at work? And economists came up
Speaker 1: with their usual top three. They said money, people who
Speaker 1: get paid more are probably happier at work. That was
Speaker 1: idea number one. Idea Number two was good management. We
Speaker 1: pay all these people to go to business school, probably
Speaker 1: they're learning something to make people happy at work. And
Speaker 1: number three was some sense of like work life balance
Speaker 1: or work life flexibility. That's what people want. That's what
Speaker 1: people assumed made people happy at work. And these factors
Speaker 1: did matter, but in the list of things that mattered,
Speaker 1: they were kind of in the middle of the list.
Speaker 1: Kind of think like number five, number six, number seven,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. The thing that mattered the most,
Speaker 1: the thing that no economists predicted was people's sense of belonging.
Speaker 1: And with the Indeed data, yan Emanuel Denv could kind
Speaker 1: of dig into what this belonging measure included, and it
Speaker 1: included three factors. The first is that you say people
Speaker 1: care about you at work. You're not a cog in
Speaker 1: the machine. You're someone who matters, right, People actually acknowledge
Speaker 1: you you matter. The second thing is that the work
Speaker 1: you do matters, right, so you're doing something that matters
Speaker 1: to the company. You can sort of see your impact.
Speaker 1: And the third factor, which kind of nobody predicted, is
Speaker 1: that you answer yes to the question do you have
Speaker 1: a best friend at work? If you have a best
Speaker 1: friend at work, you're more likely to say you belong
Speaker 1: and that the stuff you do matters there. This all
Speaker 1: surprises the economists, but it made total sense to someone
Speaker 1: who studies the science of happiness, because we've seen for
Speaker 1: years that social connection and our social relationships are one
Speaker 1: of the most important things that matter for our well being.
Speaker 1: So of course it would make sense that these kinds
Speaker 1: of social relationships matter at work. I think the problem
Speaker 1: is that, yet again, here, like those economists, most of
Speaker 1: us lay people have a particular misconception. We think, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: friends matter outside the work, but in the office, it's
Speaker 1: me working all the time. It's just like me kind
Speaker 1: of you know, junking my head in the heck with
Speaker 1: those like trust falls or like the silly office socials
Speaker 1: like I'm just gonna get my work done. And one
Speaker 1: of my favorite kind of versions of this claim came
Speaker 1: from this viral Blots and Globe article that made the
Speaker 1: claim gen Z, my generation is not looking to make
Speaker 1: friends at work. Offices aren't social hubs anymore, and it's
Speaker 1: better this way. And this article was really particularly painful
Speaker 1: for me because the author, Catherine, who was a student
Speaker 1: in my Yale Happiness class, like she should have know.
Speaker 1: I was like, what have I taught you? Nothing? Have
Speaker 1: I taught you nothing? I have a lovely interview with
Speaker 1: her for my podcast, which I'll kind of sum up
Speaker 1: in a second. But this is I think this is
Speaker 1: a misconception that all of us have, right, It's a
Speaker 1: nice to have, not a need to have. But these
Speaker 1: data from the Indeed study suggests it's a need to have.
Speaker 1: Maybe one of the reasons we're all so disengaged at work,
Speaker 1: Maybe one of the reasons quiet quitting seems so appealing
Speaker 1: is that we're actively not investing in the thing that
Speaker 1: might matter the most for our happiness at work, which
Speaker 1: is our connection with other people. And so the question is,
Speaker 1: how can we overcome this misconception, how can we develop
Speaker 1: a new way to think about connection at work? And
Speaker 1: here I love the advice that comes from the kind
Speaker 1: of business professional Shasta Nelson, who's this lovely book on
Speaker 1: the Business of Friendship where she walks through the ways
Speaker 1: we can actually make friends at work. Another great podcast
Speaker 1: guest on my podcast, The Happiness Lab, and she talks
Speaker 1: about three things we need to do to promote friendship.
Speaker 1: It's not what we think. It's not like oversharing, you know,
Speaker 1: over the water cooler. It's first positivity. Friends are made
Speaker 1: at work when we have more positive interactions than negative ones.
Speaker 1: This isn't toxic positivity. This isn't be nice all the time.
Speaker 1: It's just like, in the ratio of emotions that you
Speaker 1: generate for other people at work, make more positive ones
Speaker 1: than negative ones. That's kind of data point number one.
Speaker 1: The second thing she recommends is that friendships at work
Speaker 1: come from consistency. You see the same people over time,
Speaker 1: You know that those interactions are going to go a
Speaker 1: particular way. It makes it easy to form the habit
Speaker 1: of friendship. And I think this is a tricky one
Speaker 1: because many of us aren't forming that consistent pattern in
Speaker 1: the office. I think some people are going back to work,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people are stuck trying to develop
Speaker 1: their social connection and from remote work or hybrid work.
Speaker 1: What can we do to make that consistent friendship like
Speaker 1: interaction in these times? I think if we answer that
Speaker 1: question by kind of putting more effort into talking to people,
Speaker 1: not just in the norm meeting at teams, but other
Speaker 1: ways of actually making that consistent connection, all the better.
Speaker 1: So that's number one and number two more positivity, more consistency,
Speaker 1: and interaction. But the third thing that Shasta suggests is
Speaker 1: that we need to get a little bit more vulnerable,
Speaker 1: not in the way we think, but just showing up
Speaker 1: as a real human who has opinions, who has frailties,
Speaker 1: all that self compassion stuff I talked about. Engaging with
Speaker 1: that and recognizing that you're a normal human is powerful.
Speaker 1: I think we sometimes think at work we need to
Speaker 1: be this like AI robot who doesn't experience emotions, who
Speaker 1: never has failures, who never asks for help, and so on.
Speaker 1: And that's what vulnerability is about. It's avoiding that stuff.
Speaker 1: It's really taking time to talk to your neighbors to
Speaker 1: ask questions to get feedback. These are the moments of
Speaker 1: vulnerability that seem to really matter when you gauge in them.
Speaker 1: The data really suggests that you make more friends at
Speaker 1: work and you wind up not just happier, but also,
Speaker 1: as we've been mentioning, performing better. And so that's top
Speaker 1: tip number five. I think we really want to experience
Speaker 1: our work as a can. We need to overcome this
Speaker 1: idea that well, you know, friendships happen outside the work,
Speaker 1: and my work is just my work. We really need
Speaker 1: to engage in belonging. It's the factor that seems to
Speaker 1: matter for our sense of happiness at work, but also
Speaker 1: for our performance at work, and also for companies happiness.
Speaker 1: So I think this is a tip not just for individuals,
Speaker 1: but for smart companies that are using the data too. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you got through the five tips from Happiness. If
Speaker 1: you're like, oh my gosh, I want tips six through ten,
Speaker 1: you can do that. You can sign up for my
Speaker 1: online course for free Coursera dot org. Just show of
Speaker 1: hands anybody taken the course already. Oh my students, Hello students,
Speaker 1: thank you for coming. And if you're like, oh my, gosh,
Speaker 1: I'm burned out and overwhelmed. I don't want to take
Speaker 1: another whole Yale class. We also have my lovely podcast,
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab, which you should check out. And all
Speaker 1: the folks I mentioned and that you wanted to hear
Speaker 1: more about, they're all in the podcast. You can just
Speaker 1: google their name and find it there. But what I
Speaker 1: hope I've done is to convince you that in their
Speaker 1: quest to kind of put the south By goggles on
Speaker 1: and say, what's the future of work? What's going to matter?
Speaker 1: What really actually matters isn't the stuff we normally think about.
Speaker 1: What might actually matter more is our mental health. And
Speaker 1: so if we promote that, and we get companies to
Speaker 1: promote that while be achieving in all the ways we
Speaker 1: want to succeed, and with that, I'll thank you. And
Speaker 1: I think we have a couple of minutes for questions,
Speaker 1: So thank you all, And if you haven't give me
Speaker 1: my slideo questions, do that now. Yeah. So I'm seeing
Speaker 1: the questions pop up. This is awesome. So first question,
Speaker 1: thoughts on the recent New York Times article that workplace
Speaker 1: wellness programs have little benefit. It seems contradictory. I think
Speaker 1: it isn't contradictory, because I would raise the question of
Speaker 1: whether or not any of the workplace wellness programs I
Speaker 1: mentioned talked about this stuff. A lot of workplace wellness
Speaker 1: programs focus on these kind of individual strategies that we
Speaker 1: can use to get better. So things like meditation, things
Speaker 1: like exercise, and so on. It's not that those things
Speaker 1: are bad, it's that those things might not be achieving
Speaker 1: the stuff that really matters. What's the stuff that really matters.
Speaker 1: It's you finding your own values and finding ways to
Speaker 1: engage with them. It's you try trying to figure out
Speaker 1: your vulnerability at work and really connecting with people. Most
Speaker 1: workplace well being programs don't have that. It's you navigating
Speaker 1: and acknowledging your negative emotions. I haven't seen any workplace
Speaker 1: well being program that's like, well, we need to bring
Speaker 1: to the force everyone's negative emotions, right, those are the
Speaker 1: things that matter, right, That's just not what these programs
Speaker 1: are doing. And so I think it's not so much
Speaker 1: a contradiction. It's that these well being programs are trying
Speaker 1: to do the best they could, but they might be
Speaker 1: missing what some of the latest science is showing. And
Speaker 1: that's why I think a more academic, scientific approach. If
Speaker 1: you could bring this stuff into these programs, if workplaces
Speaker 1: could make this stuff a priority all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I think we would be seeing some real effects. Oh
Speaker 1: that was question number one, So next question. Generative AI
Speaker 1: promises a lot of productive wins, but employees are scared
Speaker 1: feel pressure to adopt it. What tips do you have
Speaker 1: for leaders who are managing this transition. I think the
Speaker 1: biggest tip is just don't pretend those emotions aren't happening.
Speaker 1: I think what happens as a leaders you say, everybody
Speaker 1: is freaked out, scared, feels pressured by this stuff, but
Speaker 1: we won't admit that. We'll just roll it out and
Speaker 1: pretend everybody's fine. We're just gonna squish the beach ball
Speaker 1: of all art at negative emotions about chat, GBT under
Speaker 1: the ground, and everybody would be cool. Right. You just
Speaker 1: saw that it'd be better to admit that. So I
Speaker 1: think as individuals you need to kind of sit with
Speaker 1: some of these emotions. It's normative to feel a little
Speaker 1: freaked out in the creative industry that we have these
Speaker 1: tools that can like write podcasts and screenplays and make
Speaker 1: amazing art. It's normal to be spooked by that. It's normative.
Speaker 1: So I think we need to sit with that and
Speaker 1: allow those negative emotions. I think as a leader, you
Speaker 1: do well by admitting this stuff, just coming out and
Speaker 1: saying it, like, I know this is probably freaking you out.
Speaker 1: It makes sense that this is freaking you out. We're
Speaker 1: gonna work through those kinds of negative emotions together. I
Speaker 1: feel like there's some benefits of going through it. Even
Speaker 1: though it feels a little scary. There are lots of
Speaker 1: things that are beneficial to us that feel a little
Speaker 1: scary at first. How can we acknowledge these negative emotions
Speaker 1: and get through it. I think the biggest problem was,
Speaker 1: like we're just pretending nobody's freaked out. It's just fine.
Speaker 1: No singularity here, like you know, rosy glasses. But I
Speaker 1: think once you acknowledge that stuff, recognize those emotions, you
Speaker 1: can use it, right. You can use that kind of engage,
Speaker 1: like the light on your engine, to tell us how
Speaker 1: we should deal with these emerging technologies in a way
Speaker 1: that's honest, right, that recognizes maybe this is a problem
Speaker 1: for my engine, and I had to think about it differently.
Speaker 1: So acknowledge the negative emotions. There next question anonymous. I
Speaker 1: love this person put it anonymous. I am that person
Speaker 1: who believes I don't want to make friends at work
Speaker 1: because the office gossip and pettiness. How do you move
Speaker 1: through that? First of all, you're not alone, right. That
Speaker 1: article of my students who went viral had like tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of comments, most of whom were like, you know,
Speaker 1: rallying behind her, right. And I think it's it's important
Speaker 1: to acknowledge, like the office gossip and the pettiness, that
Speaker 1: stuff feels kind of annoying. And it's true that it
Speaker 1: is annoying. It can contribute to negative emotions. But that
Speaker 1: might not be everybody in your office, right. There might
Speaker 1: be other people you can connect with that aren't participating
Speaker 1: as much in that stuff. Right. The idea that you
Speaker 1: have to make friends at work doesn't mean that you
Speaker 1: have to participate in that stuff. It just means you
Speaker 1: have to ask people, Hey, how is your weekend? I
Speaker 1: went to south By? Can I just tell you about
Speaker 1: this cool panel that I went to on well being
Speaker 1: at work? And let me tell you about it. It's
Speaker 1: asking for help, it's getting curious about their ideas. Right,
Speaker 1: That's what this friendship is about. I think we get wrong.
Speaker 1: We think friendship has to look like this terrible middle
Speaker 1: school click and that we have to go mean girls
Speaker 1: and that's the only way we can make friends. But
Speaker 1: if you really dig into what the science suggests about
Speaker 1: friendship at work, those are all our misconceptions. It's about positivity,
Speaker 1: just having normal, positive interactions with another human, just like
Speaker 1: you might with your friend or your spouse or a
Speaker 1: family member. It's about doing that relatively consistently and kind
Speaker 1: of vulnerably, sort of asking for help, getting curious and
Speaker 1: so on. So doesn't mean that you're embracing the mean
Speaker 1: girls'ness at work. And I guess another piece of advice
Speaker 1: I would have for folks who feel that way, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of you out there, not just here,
Speaker 1: but again in the world, is to like try it
Speaker 1: in baby steps. If it feels uncomfortable, pick one person
Speaker 1: who feels safe, and try to have like one normal
Speaker 1: human conversation with that person, whether it's on zoom or not,
Speaker 1: and then work from there. Right, this is not dive
Speaker 1: into the like friendship at work deepen, It's like try
Speaker 1: it out a little bit and see how it feels.
Speaker 1: So that would be my advice. Next question, how can
Speaker 1: you communicate some of these elements upward to senior management
Speaker 1: to create more time for play and belonging, especially when
Speaker 1: they're resistant. But I think if you show them data
Speaker 1: from fifteen million workers and thousands of companies across literally
Speaker 1: every industry shows if you invest in happiness at time
Speaker 1: one that investment will show is correlated with higher stock
Speaker 1: prices down the line. I think that's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that's going to change the minds of senior management.
Speaker 1: They're not going to move when it just is like
Speaker 1: a nice to do thing. But if it's a need
Speaker 1: to have for the bottom line, if it's the thing
Speaker 1: that's going to make us money, now, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's gonna matter. I feel like I'm like, you know,
Speaker 1: some south By panel and like the early nineties, where
Speaker 1: I'm like, the Internet it's gonna be a thing, and
Speaker 1: all the cool south By people are like, but my
Speaker 1: senior management doesn't believe in the Internet. I'm like, well, well,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a thing whether they believe in
Speaker 1: it or not. I feel like the twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: version of that is on like mental health, super matters
Speaker 1: for productivity and you're like, my senior, I'm like, they're
Speaker 1: going to have to pay attention to it, because if
Speaker 1: the science is showing what the science is showing, they're
Speaker 1: kind of not going to have a choice. It's like
Speaker 1: lose money or pay attention to this. But share the graph.
Speaker 1: Go online, you can google just Indeed, well Being workplace study.
Speaker 1: You'll get it. You can share it, and I think
Speaker 1: slowly the c suite folks are going to get on board.
Speaker 1: Last quick question, So much of the research in this
Speaker 1: area is correlational or based on small laboratory studies. How
Speaker 1: can we get more data on these causal relationships? Well,
Speaker 1: I think that's a great question, and I think one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I love the Indeed study is that
Speaker 1: this is a huge data set, right, fifteen million workers,
Speaker 1: and it's not even people who necessarily thought they were
Speaker 1: going to be in a study. These are just people
Speaker 1: who were doing their normal ratings on Indeed. They're just
Speaker 1: data kind of taken from that. And I think this
Speaker 1: is a spot where collaborations between academics and companies can
Speaker 1: be so powerful. Right if you work for a small
Speaker 1: startup or even a big tech company, especially if you
Speaker 1: have some infiltration in HR folks like that partner up
Speaker 1: with one of these researchers, you engage in a belonging
Speaker 1: intervention where you can do a randomized control trial in
Speaker 1: the workplace, and these things are starting to happen. There's
Speaker 1: a work there's a working paper now that just came
Speaker 1: out on remote work. What are the best practices for it?
Speaker 1: This is a research team at NYU that partnered up
Speaker 1: with a large company that was naturally rolling out like
Speaker 1: they're remote practices, and they said, hey, can we study this?
Speaker 1: Can we look at happiness? Would you mind if we
Speaker 1: gave workers a choice so we can kind of RCT
Speaker 1: this like randomized controlled trial to test this. And so
Speaker 1: I think the way that we overcome some of these
Speaker 1: kind of small sample sizes and these things that are
Speaker 1: more in the Ivory Tower and less in the real
Speaker 1: world is to partner with the folks who are in
Speaker 1: the real world who have access to these big data sets,
Speaker 1: and then you can contribute not just to practices that
Speaker 1: we think will make your company better, you can also
Speaker 1: learn something that you can share with other companies too.
Speaker 1: And I think indeed did this honestly in a nice way.
Speaker 1: I've seen this making the rounds. I think people are
Speaker 1: talking positively about indeed, given that they were kind of
Speaker 1: able to share these data, and so I think the
Speaker 1: more companies that do that, the better. But I am
Speaker 1: at time unfortunately. I hope I've given you some strategies
Speaker 1: you can all use to promote your mental health at
Speaker 1: work that you can share with your companies and your teams,
Speaker 1: and I hope made you all a little happier. Thank
Speaker 1: you all so much. I hope you enjoyed that roundup
Speaker 1: of advice on workplace happiness. It's definitely a subject we'll
Speaker 1: be returning to very soon, but for now, the Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab will be taking a short break. We'll be back
Speaker 1: to celebrate the summer Olympics with some shows exploring mental
Speaker 1: health in sports, and we'll soon share a very special
Speaker 1: season that I've put my heart and soul into.
Speaker 2: So this is for a whole podcast season that we're
Speaker 2: doing on stuff that I'm bad at. Okay, this is
Speaker 2: a whole episode about boredom because I feel like I'm
Speaker 2: pretty bad at boredom. You are, but I feel like
Speaker 2: I'm bad at boredom because you're bad at boredom.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I didn't do well with doing up all that.
Speaker 1: Coming very soon on the Happiness Lab would meet doctor
Speaker 1: Laurie Santos,