Speaker 1: Pushkin. Yeah. No, no, no, it was much more like
Speaker 1: terrified than that. I'm going through my sound effects library
Speaker 1: with my friend and producer Ryan Dilly. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: find a very specific scream, one that's forever etched into
Speaker 1: my memory. No, that's like way more of a manly,
Speaker 1: brave scream. I think we needed more high pitched and
Speaker 1: frantic and fearful. We're trying to reenact a rather horrifying
Speaker 1: moment that Ryan and I experienced a few months back.
Speaker 1: We were working on our podcast scripts and Ryan needed
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee, so he headed into the kitchen,
Speaker 1: and that was when I heard it. I think that's
Speaker 1: that's pretty close. I think that was it. Ryan emitted
Speaker 1: the longest, loudest, and most terror filled shriek I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: Apparently a huge, terrifying rat had run through the kitchen,
Speaker 1: a rodent that was, at least, according to Ryan's retelling,
Speaker 1: about the size of a large Great Dane or a
Speaker 1: small horse. I assumed he was exaggerating and that it
Speaker 1: was probably just a harmless mouse, the kind we get
Speaker 1: on college campuses from time to time, especially when there's
Speaker 1: construction outside. A tiny mouse that was probably now feeling
Speaker 1: so terrorized by Ryan's scream that it had likely high
Speaker 1: tailed it out of the house, never to be heard
Speaker 1: from again. But just as I was explaining that we
Speaker 1: had absolutely nothing to worry about, the creature that I
Speaker 1: could now clearly see was definitely not a tiny mouse
Speaker 1: was back. It raced from the kitchen into the study
Speaker 1: around our feet, and then slithered into a heating duct
Speaker 1: on the wall. But I wasn't worried, not because the
Speaker 1: rat wasn't huge or terrifying. It was definitely both. I
Speaker 1: just knew it wasn't going to be a problem for
Speaker 1: long because at Yale, when these things happen and you
Speaker 1: need someone to resolve the issue quickly, you just call
Speaker 1: Marty gilorin pest control operator. Marty is like the terminator
Speaker 1: for vermin. Within minutes, he was at my house, armed
Speaker 1: with baits and traps galore. I like to get there
Speaker 1: as soon as I can to help people. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't like to leave, you know, call's waiting too long.
Speaker 1: And that was kind of an emergency call because it
Speaker 1: was a rat in a living space. While Ryan continued
Speaker 1: to stand bravely on the sofa, Marty was sprawled on
Speaker 1: the floor. He checked for the rat where we last
Speaker 1: saw it, face pressed up against the air duct. Marty
Speaker 1: then set his traps like a general deploying his armies.
Speaker 1: He strategized about all aspects of the rats moves, like
Speaker 1: what if the rat retreated here or made a break
Speaker 1: for it over there. Within minutes, all the traps were down,
Speaker 1: and almost as soon as Marty left, we heard, oh,
Speaker 1: I got lucky on that one. Sometimes it takes a
Speaker 1: lot longer. Marty is a vermin afficionado, one of the
Speaker 1: most skilled professionals I've ever met, But few people want
Speaker 1: a job like Marty's. In fact, pest control is usually
Speaker 1: included in lists of the worst possible jobs in America.
Speaker 1: Some exterminators face low wages, deal with dangerous chemicals, and
Speaker 1: spend their working hours in the company of scary critters
Speaker 1: that can bite, scratch, and sting. I usually get stung
Speaker 1: about once a year. Kind of just comes with the territory.
Speaker 1: But Marty, it turns out, is the exact kind of
Speaker 1: person we should emulate if we want to find the
Speaker 1: perfect job, or even just to be happier at work. Generally, because,
Speaker 1: as you'll hear in this episode, science suggests that our
Speaker 1: intuitions about good jobs and bad jobs are all wrong.
Speaker 1: We think that pay and perks and plush offices are
Speaker 1: what makes us happy in our careers. But as we'll see,
Speaker 1: happiness and human motivation work much differently than our lying
Speaker 1: minds realize. Our minds are constantly telling us what to
Speaker 1: do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?
Speaker 1: What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
Speaker 1: away from what will really make us happy. The good
Speaker 1: news is that understanding the science of the mind can
Speaker 1: point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
Speaker 1: to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. What did
Speaker 1: you want to be when you grew up? I'm going
Speaker 1: to venture a guest that rat exterminator was pretty far
Speaker 1: down the list. It was for Marty two. He grew
Speaker 1: up with the standard career aspirations. I mean, like every kid,
Speaker 1: I guess a fireman or a cop or when you're
Speaker 1: a kid. But Marty never joined the police department or
Speaker 1: signed on at the fire station. After graduating, he drifted
Speaker 1: into a number of different jobs, just like restaurant work
Speaker 1: and security guard and filling vending machines. Things like that.
Speaker 1: They all paid okay, but Marty wasn't exactly filled with
Speaker 1: joy when he clocked in every Monday morning, and he
Speaker 1: wasn't alone. According to a recent Gallop Pole from twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: only about a third of American workers report feeling really
Speaker 1: engaged with their jobs. Over fifty percent admit feeling actively
Speaker 1: not engaged, they merely put up with boring work, and
Speaker 1: nearly twenty percent report hating what they do for a living.
Speaker 1: I've had jobs where I've had that problem before. I
Speaker 1: have to go to work. This is not good. It's
Speaker 1: Monday morning. It's probably not all that surprising, but hating
Speaker 1: your job isn't that great for your happiness? Which raises
Speaker 1: an important question, what actually makes for a happier job?
Speaker 1: What could make work life better for the nearly one
Speaker 1: hundred million Americans who feel disengaged on the job. Many
Speaker 1: of us have a pretty strong intuition here, we'd be
Speaker 1: happier if only we had a bigger salary. Take one
Speaker 1: LinkedIn survey from twenty fourteen. It found that financial compensation
Speaker 1: was the top value that most college students look for
Speaker 1: when considering a new job opportunity. Compensation was chosen more
Speaker 1: often than work life balance, having good colleagues, or even
Speaker 1: career development. And our intuition that a bigger paycheck means
Speaker 1: a happier career isn't just affecting our job choices, It's
Speaker 1: also affecting how we choose to live our lives. Generally.
Speaker 1: Consider the results of one study which has surveyed the
Speaker 1: values of incoming freshmen for the last half century. In
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, more than eighty percent of freshmen said that
Speaker 1: being well off financially was really important in life. It
Speaker 1: was more important than raising a family or developing a
Speaker 1: meaningful philosophy on life. And that's a big change compared
Speaker 1: to the answers their parents or grandparents gave. The number
Speaker 1: of students who think big salaries are key has gone
Speaker 1: up dramatically since the nineteen sixties. But as our growing
Speaker 1: intuition about a link between money and job satisfaction right,
Speaker 1: can employers really improve the well being of the nearly
Speaker 1: two thirds of people who hate their jobs simply by
Speaker 1: paying them more. When you ask people what would make
Speaker 1: their lives better or what would make their jobs better,
Speaker 1: the first thing they point to is my life so good,
Speaker 1: and if I only made ten percent more, it would
Speaker 1: be perfect. This is Barry Schwartz, emeritus professor of psychology
Speaker 1: at Swarthmore College, an author of the book Why Work
Speaker 1: People Are Wrong. This is not the case. Money does
Speaker 1: buy a little bit of happiness, but it doesn't buy
Speaker 1: a lot of happiness. We covered this in an earlier
Speaker 1: episode called The Unhappy Millionaire, but it's worth repeating here.
Speaker 1: If you're not making a living wage, more money will
Speaker 1: definitely improve your overall well being. But if you currently
Speaker 1: earn a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, doubling
Speaker 1: or even tripling your salary won't have any effect on
Speaker 1: your emotions or your stress levels. Even the super rich
Speaker 1: can lead sad and lonely lives. For the most part,
Speaker 1: doing what you do in order to earn a little
Speaker 1: bit more is putting your energy in the wrong direction,
Speaker 1: and it can have perverse effects in that if the
Speaker 1: amount of money you make starts to be the metric
Speaker 1: you use to evaluate whether you're successful or not and
Speaker 1: whether you're getting anything out of your work, it's the
Speaker 1: wrong metric. I've seen so many of my Yale students
Speaker 1: heading exactly this wrong direction. After graduation. They pick a
Speaker 1: job based only on salary. Sometimes they even choose careers
Speaker 1: they kind of know they're going to hate just because
Speaker 1: it comes with a great paycheck, But they soon end
Speaker 1: up experiencing what's come to be known as the golden handcuffs,
Speaker 1: that feeling of being stuck in a high paying job
Speaker 1: that you absolutely hate. And that's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that professions we often think of as good jobs, the
Speaker 1: most prestigious ones with the highest salaries think doctor, lawyer,
Speaker 1: Wall Street investor. The people who have these prestigious jobs
Speaker 1: have suicide rates that are one and a half times
Speaker 1: those of the average population. Higher paychecks are simply not
Speaker 1: having the positive effect on our mental health that we think.
Speaker 1: But why are our intuitions about money and job satisfaction
Speaker 1: so messed up? How did we come to think of
Speaker 1: more money as the answer to all our workwoes? And
Speaker 1: if a huge paycheck doesn't make a job better than
Speaker 1: what does. To get to the bottom of all these questions,
Speaker 1: we need to turn back to the very critter we
Speaker 1: started the show with, right the rat the Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: will be back in a moment. Back in the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: a famous Scottish philosopher visited an innovative manufacturing operation a
Speaker 1: pin factory. Now, you might not think pinmaking would require
Speaker 1: that much innovation. I mean, at first glance, it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem all that complicated to make a simple pin. And
Speaker 1: we're not even talking about safety pins here, just the really,
Speaker 1: really simple straight kind. But back in the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: creating each pin was tough. It took eighteen individual steps. First,
Speaker 1: you needed to measure and clip the length of wire,
Speaker 1: then straighten. After that, you carefully sharpened one end. Once
Speaker 1: that point was set, you prepared the other end to
Speaker 1: attach the head, which involved several steps like grinding the
Speaker 1: top to make sure it was the right texture. Finally,
Speaker 1: the pinheads needed to be affixed, and after that they
Speaker 1: had to be placed in a perfect row onto a
Speaker 1: little sheet of cardboard that holds them. Pin manufacturer was
Speaker 1: a time consuming business. A worker on his own who
Speaker 1: did all of those steps one after another would only
Speaker 1: be able to make about twenty pins per day. But
Speaker 1: the management of the factory figured out how to speed
Speaker 1: things up. They broke the work up so that each
Speaker 1: employee only did one or two steps over and over again.
Speaker 1: It was this innovation that especially impressed that visiting philosopher,
Speaker 1: a scholar who later became known as the father of economics.
Speaker 1: Adam Smith. Smith began his famous book The Wealth of
Speaker 1: Nations with a story of this humble enterprise. He realized
Speaker 1: that the factories assembly line didn't just allow production to
Speaker 1: go a little faster. On the day he visited, ten
Speaker 1: workers were able to make twelve pounds of pins, so
Speaker 1: forty eight thousand in total. That's a rate that's fifty
Speaker 1: times faster than the traditional method. By splitting up the
Speaker 1: complex task, Smith argued, management could create way, way way
Speaker 1: more pins at a much, much, much lower cost, and
Speaker 1: that meant that customers could buy pins more cheaply, and
Speaker 1: they might even think of new ways to use pins
Speaker 1: since they were now so cheap, which might increase the
Speaker 1: overall market for pins, making the factory even more money.
Speaker 1: In the end, this simple pin factory inspired Smith's principle
Speaker 1: of the assembly line, or what he called division of labor.
Speaker 1: It was an idea that completely changed the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: and paved the way for modern capitalist manufacturing. But as
Speaker 1: psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in his book Why We Work,
Speaker 1: there was a big downside to division of labor, at
Speaker 1: least for the pin workers. So you're just taking appliers
Speaker 1: and straightening wire and handing off to the next guy.
Speaker 1: Why would you show up at this job. There's only
Speaker 1: one possible reason to do this work, and that's for
Speaker 1: the paycheck. The idea that people need to get paid
Speaker 1: in turn for their labor was central to some of
Speaker 1: Smith's deeper ideas about human nature. His view was that
Speaker 1: people were basically lazy, and if they didn't have to work,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't and so the optimal life is lying on
Speaker 1: a couch eating Doritos and watching Netflix. So how do
Speaker 1: you get people off their asses? You have to make
Speaker 1: it worth their while for them to do things, and
Speaker 1: they will work as hard as you make them work
Speaker 1: to get the payoff. What they do doesn't matter, since
Speaker 1: they'd rather be doing nothing than something. As long as
Speaker 1: you have the incentives right, you can get them to
Speaker 1: do anything. Nobody likes working on an assembly line, but
Speaker 1: Smith's point is that nobody likes doing any kind of work.
Speaker 1: So break the work up into as efficient and meaningless
Speaker 1: chunks as you can so that people can do the
Speaker 1: same thing over and over and over again as fast
Speaker 1: as possible, and as long as you pay them, they'll
Speaker 1: do it. Smith's view of humans is lazy paychecksy pervaded
Speaker 1: the entire Industrial Revolution, but it would take more than
Speaker 1: a hundred years before Smith's concepts were tested scientifically, and
Speaker 1: that's where we turned back tomble rat. Seventeen decades after
Speaker 1: the publication of the Wealth of Nations, a bunch of
Speaker 1: rats would finally give Smith's ideas of human nature the
Speaker 1: scientific veneer they needed. My training as a psychologist began
Speaker 1: in the framework developed by a guy named BF Skinner,
Speaker 1: who at the time was probably the most famous and
Speaker 1: most influential living psychologists. Skinner invented the famous Skinner box,
Speaker 1: where you would take a rat and put them in
Speaker 1: a box, and they'd be hungry and or thirsty, and
Speaker 1: they'd run down on an alley, or they'd push on
Speaker 1: a bar and they'd get food, or they'd get water.
Speaker 1: And he thought that by understanding how payoffs influenced the
Speaker 1: behavior of rats, would understand what governed all the voluntary
Speaker 1: behavior of all living things. He didn't care about rats,
Speaker 1: He cared about people. But he thought that in this
Speaker 1: little simple environment, you basically were capturing why people work
Speaker 1: hard in the workplace because they want a paycheck or
Speaker 1: bonus or promotion. And that's the nature of human motivation
Speaker 1: is we do things to get things. This is very
Speaker 1: much in the spirit of Adam Smith, the father of
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution. Skinner's work finally gave Smith's ideas the
Speaker 1: scientific validation they needed. His rats provided proof that organisms
Speaker 1: are in fact lazy, that they needed a reward for
Speaker 1: getting off their butts, and that they'd probably never find
Speaker 1: work to be inherently worth doing or fun, which means
Speaker 1: if you want to get people to work, you got
Speaker 1: to give him a reward. But Barry argues that there's
Speaker 1: a problem with this. People are so lazy you got
Speaker 1: to pay them. View the them is it's flat out wrong.
Speaker 1: People won't work if they don't get paid, and they
Speaker 1: need to make enough money to support themselves in their family.
Speaker 1: But once that's done, that's not really what motivates people.
Speaker 1: What motivates people is they want to be working on
Speaker 1: something that matters, which from most of the time means
Speaker 1: has an impact on the lives of other people, not
Speaker 1: curing cancer impact, It could be a small impact. They
Speaker 1: want work that engages them, that forces them to think,
Speaker 1: to be active. They want work that's vary, not the
Speaker 1: same thing over and over again. They want work that's challenging,
Speaker 1: and all those things make jobs good. Given a constant pay,
Speaker 1: these sorts of intrinsic rewards, feeling engaged, finding meaning, getting creative,
Speaker 1: they make work worth doing and allowing workers to experience
Speaker 1: these internal rewards, it turns out, would be a smarter
Speaker 1: thing for employers to focus on than a paycheck, because
Speaker 1: a growing body of research shows that if you want
Speaker 1: good work done, you might want to try making your
Speaker 1: employees jobs a little happier. You want people who show
Speaker 1: up in the office every day because they want to
Speaker 1: be in the office every day, and who leave every
Speaker 1: day feeling like somebody's life has been made better because
Speaker 1: of what they did. But if that's the case, why
Speaker 1: do so many careers lack things like meaning or engagement.
Speaker 1: Why do so many people hate their jobs? The reason,
Speaker 1: according to Barry, is that employers bought into a self
Speaker 1: fulfilling prophecy. They're working with the same wrong theory of
Speaker 1: human motivation that Smith had hundreds of years ago, that
Speaker 1: people are lazy and that money is the only way
Speaker 1: to motivate them. So you create a world in which
Speaker 1: Smith's vision is true. You create a world in which meaning,
Speaker 1: engagement autonomy, control, and challenge have all been eliminated. And
Speaker 1: then you look at you point to people working in
Speaker 1: this world, and you say, see, I told you. People
Speaker 1: just do it for the pay. And as Skinner showed,
Speaker 1: rewards do work. People will do mind numbing jobs like
Speaker 1: sticking heads on pins over and over and over. But
Speaker 1: they won't do it because of the normal human motivations
Speaker 1: for meaning or passion or any of the important things
Speaker 1: that make us want to get up in the morning.
Speaker 1: And that worries Berry. The pin factory division of labor
Speaker 1: still reigns in lots and lots of modern jobs, from
Speaker 1: boring data entry work to tedious telephone sales to the
Speaker 1: workers who have to put buns on fast food hamburgers
Speaker 1: over and over and over. Essentially, you've created a Skinner box.
Speaker 1: You've created an environment in which Smith's view is correct
Speaker 1: because you've eliminated every other factor that might influence people.
Speaker 1: Barry has also seen this trend emerging in careers that
Speaker 1: are often considered to be much higher status and more skilled.
Speaker 1: They are now also filled with the sorts of carrots
Speaker 1: and sticks you need when people's hearts and minds aren't
Speaker 1: into what they're doing. Law firms that force attorneys to
Speaker 1: clock their every second with clients, HMOs that regulate doctors
Speaker 1: interactions with patients, Lots and lots of jobs are starting
Speaker 1: to feel more like a rat race because they're specifically
Speaker 1: designed to treat us like skinners rodents. The biggest irony
Speaker 1: of this, though, is that by removing meaning from work,
Speaker 1: you inadvertently make people more miserable, and that means you
Speaker 1: get less productive, less motivated, and less conscientious workers. Removing
Speaker 1: meaning can jeopardize a business's profits, and it makes you
Speaker 1: wonder why it is that people who want to make
Speaker 1: money are leaving money on the table by creating workplaces
Speaker 1: that drive productivity out of their workforce. No effort is
Speaker 1: put into creating workplaces where people want to be. The
Speaker 1: good news, though, is that there is another path to follow.
Speaker 1: You can make reasonably unattractive work attractive if you make
Speaker 1: people feel trusted and important in the work that they do.
Speaker 1: And that's why I want to turn back to Marty.
Speaker 1: I mean, Marty's job seems to fit the definition of
Speaker 1: reasonably unattractive work cause aut for just to pick up
Speaker 1: a daddy animal or something, and some of that can
Speaker 1: be pretty not very pleasant. In fact, when Marty first
Speaker 1: got into exterminating, he was focused on the same external
Speaker 1: rewards that many of us used to pick a new career.
Speaker 1: I was doing a maintenance work at a local newspaper
Speaker 1: and I saw an ad pest control company vehicle. Take
Speaker 1: That was really cool to me. I was like, twenty
Speaker 1: years old, they're going to give me a company vehicle
Speaker 1: a take on. Wow. But if you ask Marty what
Speaker 1: he loves about this career forty years later, that company
Speaker 1: car has little to do with it. I just love
Speaker 1: the variety. I love you never know where you're going
Speaker 1: to be from one day to the next. Just yesterday,
Speaker 1: I was taking a possum off of a roof. I
Speaker 1: don't know how it got up on a roof. It's
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's just it's fun. When Marty gets
Speaker 1: talking about what he loves about his job, you're in
Speaker 1: for a really long conversation, because pest control gives him
Speaker 1: lots and lots of the internal rewards that science shows
Speaker 1: us makes his job worth doing. Like variety and mental challenge,
Speaker 1: it's about solving problems more or less. I remember chasing
Speaker 1: a bat out of one of the libraries. Actually here
Speaker 1: at Yale, and it was it was rather difficult. We
Speaker 1: had to bring an extension ladder in and while the
Speaker 1: way up to the top of the ladder with him
Speaker 1: that and it flew away and it just went into
Speaker 1: event and never never was heard from again. You just
Speaker 1: never know what you're gonna get and one day to
Speaker 1: the next. Marty's job also gives him a sense of
Speaker 1: meaning beyond just working through creative solutions to problems. He
Speaker 1: also gets to help some very scared people. I had
Speaker 1: a student once that woke up and saw a cockroach
Speaker 1: on her bedroom door, which was about six feet across
Speaker 1: the room, totally terrified, in tears, wouldn't get out of
Speaker 1: bed until it was solved. So going there and solving
Speaker 1: something like that really, yeah, you know, it makes you.
Speaker 1: It makes you feel good. I get a lot of
Speaker 1: thank you from the kids. Marty also gets to help
Speaker 1: his clients overcome the feelings of shame they have about
Speaker 1: requiring his services in the first place. I try to
Speaker 1: explain to him that any it can happen to anybody.
Speaker 1: People get bugs, people get cockroaches the cleanest environments. It
Speaker 1: calms him down a bit, calms their fares and you know,
Speaker 1: they're less embarrassed. Do you think you do it if
Speaker 1: they didn't pay you? I mean helping people? Yeah, because
Speaker 1: you know a neighbor or something and it comes over,
Speaker 1: Hey I have a bees and ask or something like that,
Speaker 1: and you've had the the experience and taking care of it.
Speaker 1: Or how do I get rid of the squirrels in
Speaker 1: my attic? Or Yeah, I think I'd still do it.
Speaker 1: There's really no other job like it. It's such a
Speaker 1: unique position, meaning different people, different problems. Every day is different.
Speaker 1: I do feel grateful and lucky that that I'm doing.
Speaker 1: Us human beings aren't lab rats in a skinner box.
Speaker 1: We're motivated not just by monetary rewards, but by variety,
Speaker 1: challenge and having a positive impact on other people's lives.
Speaker 1: These are the things that get workers like Marty out
Speaker 1: of bed on a Monday morning. The problem is that
Speaker 1: a lot of us don't experience the same joy that
Speaker 1: Marty finds in his work. But you don't need to
Speaker 1: quit your job to find the happiness that he enjoys.
Speaker 1: There are evidence based strategies you can use to enrich
Speaker 1: your work, no matter what your actual job description. We'll
Speaker 1: learn about all those strategies when the happy in his
Speaker 1: lab returns in a moment. Most teenage obsessions revolve around bands,
Speaker 1: or sports or political causes. Amy Razneski found herself drawn
Speaker 1: to something very different, a topic she turned over and
Speaker 1: over in her young mind. It has taken me a
Speaker 1: really long time to figure out why it's sort of
Speaker 1: weird for a teenager to become interested in something like this.
Speaker 1: What was the thing that had Amy so puzzled? Well,
Speaker 1: she looked around at the people in her life, people
Speaker 1: in her family, her neighborhood, in stores and offices, and
Speaker 1: she saw a vivid and troubling divide and seeing people
Speaker 1: who were working incredibly hard but feeling at the end
Speaker 1: of the day kind of maybe empty, maybe not too
Speaker 1: strong a word about what it all meant, Versus people
Speaker 1: who felt like they bounded out of work every day
Speaker 1: to come home feeling as though they had done something
Speaker 1: that really mattered and they had done it well and
Speaker 1: had changed people's lives. And the thing that's been for me,
Speaker 1: the most fascinating part of this puzzle is that it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily contingent on the kind of work people are doing.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a very cool puzzle to trying
Speaker 1: to unpack and think about figuring that puzzle out. Rot
Speaker 1: Amy here to Yale, where she's now a professor at
Speaker 1: the School of Management. There's a whole research literature that
Speaker 1: analyzes kind of what's a good job and what's a
Speaker 1: bad job, and it just looks at the job like
Speaker 1: what is the person's doing, And as psychologists, we knew
Speaker 1: there might be actually more going on here in terms
Speaker 1: of how people really experience this work and think about
Speaker 1: this work. Research back in the nineteen eighties had shown
Speaker 1: that people tend to take one of three orientations towards
Speaker 1: their work. They either think of it as a job,
Speaker 1: a career, or a calling. So people who view their
Speaker 1: work primarily as a job see the work as a
Speaker 1: means to a financial end. People who've either worked with
Speaker 1: a career orientation see the work as primarily a means
Speaker 1: to advance within the field or the work or the
Speaker 1: occupy they're in. It's stepping stone to the next thing
Speaker 1: that's going to come. Whereas people who see the work
Speaker 1: as a calling are not focused on financial outcomes primarily
Speaker 1: or career advancement primarily, but instead are primarily focused on
Speaker 1: the work itself. They see the work as an end
Speaker 1: in itself. These are people who, again if they hit
Speaker 1: the lottery or something like that, feel so deeply about
Speaker 1: the work that they're doing, feel fulfilled by it, feel
Speaker 1: like it's a contribution that they would be more likely
Speaker 1: to want to stay involved in it. And interestingly, they
Speaker 1: see the work, regardless of what the job is, as
Speaker 1: contributing to the world in a meaningful way to make
Speaker 1: it a better place. But the question that fascinated Amy
Speaker 1: was how a person comes to consider their work a calling.
Speaker 1: You might think the way to test this question would
Speaker 1: be to study professionals that we technically think of as
Speaker 1: well respected surgeons, concert pianists, podcast hosts, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But Amy did something different. She studied how positive work
Speaker 1: orientations develop and seemingly not so great jobs. We were
Speaker 1: really interested in understanding the experience of people who clean
Speaker 1: in hospital, so hospital custodial staff. The duties of a
Speaker 1: hospital janitor are easy to sum up. Mop the floors,
Speaker 1: sweep up wash soiled bed linens, dispose of garbage, bins
Speaker 1: filled with hazardous waste. It's not fun stuff. These sorts
Speaker 1: of physicians don't require much previous experience or a formal
Speaker 1: education becoming a hospital janitor is considered neither glamorous nor
Speaker 1: all that skilled. But Amy wasn't interested in what the
Speaker 1: typical person thought of this work. She was interested in
Speaker 1: how the cleaning staff themselves describe their rules. So she
Speaker 1: just asked a group of hospital workers, how skilled do
Speaker 1: you think your job? Is? Simple question, except it yielded
Speaker 1: two really different answers. We had one set of participants
Speaker 1: who said it's not very skilled at all, and we
Speaker 1: had another set of participants who reported the work was
Speaker 1: really quite skilled. Amy figured she must have inadvertently tested
Speaker 1: two kinds of staff members once with different duties. Maybe
Speaker 1: one group had more senior janitors or more specialist roles,
Speaker 1: but that turned out not to be the case. Nothing
Speaker 1: about the structure of their job explained this difference, so
Speaker 1: Amy dug a little deeper. Those who considered themselves unskilled
Speaker 1: were generally dissatisfied with their jobs. They were part of
Speaker 1: that two thirds of Americans who were disengaged from their work.
Speaker 1: But the staff members who saw their jobs requiring skill
Speaker 1: absolutely loved what they did for a living. Many of
Speaker 1: them even saw it as a calling and acted accordingly.
Speaker 1: They were meant to be kind of wafting in and
Speaker 1: out of spaces and making sure that those spaces were clean.
Speaker 1: They were instructed to not interact with patients, and what
Speaker 1: we were finding was they were engaging in enormous amounts
Speaker 1: of patient care and attentiveness to what was happening with
Speaker 1: patients and their families, what it was people might need.
Speaker 1: They really engaged the job sort of quite differently and
Speaker 1: saw and described what it was that they were doing
Speaker 1: there as helping patients to heal. Amy calls this technique
Speaker 1: job crafting, of redesigning the specific work you do to
Speaker 1: match your personal strengths and values and thus amplify the
Speaker 1: sense of meaning you get from your job. One of
Speaker 1: Amy's favorite examples of job crafting came from a janitor
Speaker 1: who worked on a unit caring for coma patients, people
Speaker 1: who were severely ill, fully unconscious, and in need of
Speaker 1: a miracle. That staff member did the usual duties mopping
Speaker 1: and tidying, but she also did one additional task that
Speaker 1: wasn't strictly part of her job description and that no
Speaker 1: one had told her to do. She would take the
Speaker 1: artwork off the walls of the hospital rooms in this
Speaker 1: unit and swish it around to just sort of mix
Speaker 1: things up. Even though these patients were not conscious. She
Speaker 1: hoped that maybe by changing something in their environment that
Speaker 1: even if it seemed like they weren't aware of what
Speaker 1: was going on, maybe it would stimulate something or spark something,
Speaker 1: as it was a change that could help promote their
Speaker 1: healing and speed them along whatever journey they would take.
Speaker 1: Another janitor, Amy Encountered, was assigned to a particularly depressing
Speaker 1: set of duties. She had to clean up after patience
Speaker 1: on the cancer ward. Given that chemotherapy makes people very
Speaker 1: sick to their stomach, there was a lot of throwing
Speaker 1: up to contend with. And so this cleaning staff member,
Speaker 1: who again remember by the structure of the job, not
Speaker 1: really supposed to be interacting with patients. You're just supposed
Speaker 1: to go and clean things up. Instead, turn this into
Speaker 1: an opportunity to really bring comfort and humor to the patients,
Speaker 1: because imagine you're an adult. You've just been sick all
Speaker 1: over yourself and all over the floor. It's embarrassing. Now
Speaker 1: somebody has to club and clean this up. You feel awful, right,
Speaker 1: this is not a good moment. And so this cleaning
Speaker 1: staff member would show up and say, I want to
Speaker 1: thank you for getting sick. I have a car, I
Speaker 1: have car payments to make. The more you get sick,
Speaker 1: the more job security I have. And so you have
Speaker 1: someone who's now laughing in the context of this awful
Speaker 1: situation by this transformative set of moves done by someone
Speaker 1: who has gotten not any training and patient care or
Speaker 1: patient interaction, but who has taken upon herself to think about,
Speaker 1: how can I still do the cleanup, still do the
Speaker 1: work that's required of me, but do it in a
Speaker 1: way that's transformative. The relationships that she has with her patients,
Speaker 1: getting to know happy hospital cleaners convinced Amy that jobcrafting
Speaker 1: can have a transformative effect on people's happiness at work.
Speaker 1: She hypothesized that the third of Americans who feel engaged
Speaker 1: with their jobs probably feel that way in part because
Speaker 1: they too jobcraft I think this happens all the time.
Speaker 1: It happens in all kinds of jobs, but I think
Speaker 1: it's important to recognize that it happens in jobs where
Speaker 1: people don't have permission to do it, or they're not
Speaker 1: encouraged to do it. They might actually be forbidden from
Speaker 1: doing it. We can all be better off if we
Speaker 1: just granted people more autonomy to bring their strength into
Speaker 1: the work that they're doing, while trusting them that they
Speaker 1: will keep in mind the things that they're responsible to
Speaker 1: do for the organization. Now that Amy has answered the
Speaker 1: question that's bugged her for decades, her research has shifted
Speaker 1: to address a more practical question, how can we get
Speaker 1: more people to jobcraft? Are there interventions that can be
Speaker 1: done that can help people connect more deeply with what
Speaker 1: it is that makes their work meaningful, not just by
Speaker 1: thinking about it, but by encouraging people to redesign the
Speaker 1: job still accomplish what it is they're responsible to the
Speaker 1: organization for accomplishing in the work, but do it in
Speaker 1: such a way that it's tapping the things that they
Speaker 1: care most about, in the ways in which they most
Speaker 1: want to contribute. It's worth mentioning here, though, that deciding
Speaker 1: to pep up your job doesn't mean you can ignore
Speaker 1: the task because you were hired to do. Job crafting
Speaker 1: isn't deciding you know, I'd really love to be the
Speaker 1: company guitarist, So I'm just gonna bring my guitar in
Speaker 1: and play, and I think everybody will appreciate that because
Speaker 1: I'm being my best my best self. The other barrier
Speaker 1: to crafting your job might be your boss. Just like
Speaker 1: Adam Smith watching those pinmakers, your manager might still fall
Speaker 1: for the lie that giving a big paycheck is the
Speaker 1: only way to get the job done. I sometimes hear
Speaker 1: from managers who feel very nervous about this because it
Speaker 1: means giving up control. We can't possibly allow our employees
Speaker 1: to do this. It would be a mess. You know,
Speaker 1: people would be you know, freestyling and off roading or
Speaker 1: you know, doing things that would be really problematic in
Speaker 1: the organization. And my response to that is, well, actually,
Speaker 1: if this is how you see it, what I can
Speaker 1: tell you is they're already job crafting, because this is
Speaker 1: happening everywhere. It's just that they're hiding it from you.
Speaker 1: And so you have a choice. Is this something that
Speaker 1: you want to help facilitate and encourage and what have you,
Speaker 1: or you want to continue to sort of drive this
Speaker 1: underground with employees who will still take the degrees of
Speaker 1: freedom they can find to derive more meaning and more
Speaker 1: of the kind of identity they want to enact in
Speaker 1: the work in any way they can and how they're
Speaker 1: doing the work. While I'm certainly not praying that my
Speaker 1: house gets infested with rats, bats, or possums, or mice, hornets, termites,
Speaker 1: or roaches. I do enjoy Marty's and frequent visits. His
Speaker 1: job is to set up trapped and put down poison,
Speaker 1: but I now realize that he does all the things
Speaker 1: that Amy studies in her job, crafting work. He genuinely
Speaker 1: enjoys the puzzles that has spring he and traits on
Speaker 1: the people who need his help, and he works quickly
Speaker 1: and calmly to reassure his jittery clients. It's mixing metaphors,
Speaker 1: but if exterminators had a bedside manner, Marty has perfected it.
Speaker 1: Sure he kills bugs, but his real focus seems to
Speaker 1: be eradicating the stress and worry of the people who
Speaker 1: need his help. I asked Marty if during the forty
Speaker 1: years in this job, he's ever daydreamed about doing something else,
Speaker 1: becoming a cop or a firefighter. Maybe I've thought about
Speaker 1: it in the past, honestly, but I've always come back
Speaker 1: to this, and yeah, I do feel grateful. If you
Speaker 1: really hate your job, if it's making you ill, or
Speaker 1: if there's a bad workplace culture or discrimination, or if
Speaker 1: you're not even making a living wage, then you should
Speaker 1: quit as soon as you can and search for something better.
Speaker 1: But if you're simply feeling kind of disengaged from your
Speaker 1: daily work, then give job crafting a try, because that
Speaker 1: dream job that you fantasize about it doesn't really exist.
Speaker 1: The research shows that any job can turn into a
Speaker 1: calling if you bring the right attic too, and maybe
Speaker 1: a few science back tips from the Happiness Lab with me,
Speaker 1: Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and
Speaker 1: produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
Speaker 1: Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.
Speaker 1: Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Fridman checked our
Speaker 1: facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to mail LaBelle, Carli Migliori, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: and me, Doctor Laurie Santos.