October 28, 2024 • 34 mins
We're bringing you an episode of Fixable, where Laurie joined Frances Frei and Anne Morriss to discuss whether you can make yourself happier at work. They talk about the concept of time famine, why you need a best friend at work, and where your employer is responsible for your wellbeing. Their conversation will show you how to turn your workplace into your happy place.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Today, I want to share
a special episode from our friends at Fixable, who recently
had me on their show to talk about how we
can all become happier at work. On the show, I
chat with business leaders Anne Morris and Francis Frey about
the conditions we all need to thrive on the job.
I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Francis kiss us off today? What made you happy this week?
To word Caitlin Clark.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Let me explain the WNBA is riveting and awesome and
even though I played basketball in college, I wasn't watching
it as diligently as I am now. And so what
made me happy this week?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I have a new Caitlin Clark jersey.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
It has definitely brought a new level of joy into
the house. Thank you to my dear sister in law,
Zoe Rodriguez for sending the jerseys.
Speaker 5 (01:14):
Which I wear every time I watch the game.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Sparking joy for the rest of us as well. Can
I ask the fall question?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Yeah, we just did a great episode on routines. Do
you have a game day routine for watching Caitlin play?
Speaker 6 (01:28):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I sure do so I begin every morning at breakfast
to tell the boys what time the game is on.
They don't watch the game with me, but I tell
them when the game is just so that they know
what I will be doing.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
And they're teenage boy they don't register time and plan.
But that's where it begins.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And then there is a cascade of planning that I
keep checking the clock. I keep saying every time I
see you, I say what time the game is. Anytime
I think of anything. And then I set up on
the couch so that my feet are elevated.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I'm watching.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
I have my apple juice and my pretzels as I watch, and.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I get ready to go.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
But I need a light.
Speaker 6 (02:02):
Nobody can sit right next to me. I need a
lot of space. I have a little lot of moves.
Nobody wants to sit right next to you for this experience.
I'm not sure I'm ready to dig the set of
activities by calling it a ritual. But it is what
you do every single time, every single time. Yeah, all right,
let's get into today's conversation. The secret memo to happiness
at work. Our guest is the expert on happiness. Tell
(02:27):
the people who she is.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Oh Professor Laurie Santos. She's a cognitive scientist and professor
of psychology at Yale. Super Smart. She teaches the most
popular course in the school's history, not like this year
or last year, in the whole history of the school,
and it's about the science of happiness, which is so
(02:49):
alluring to me.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
Yes, something like a full quarter of the entire student
body takes this class every year.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
That is amazing to me. I think if all courses
were voluntary, there wouldn't be another course that the quarter
of the student body would take.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
It's amazing.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
So she also teaches this course on a platform called Coursera,
where another five million people have taken it, and she
hosts a terrific podcast called The Happiness Lab. I've been
a follower for years where she keeps this conversation going
and talks with experts about the latest science on happiness.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I can't wait to get into this.
Speaker 5 (03:23):
I have so many questions and so much to learn.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Doctor Lorie Santos, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
We are very big fans of yours. Let me start here.
What parts of your own story would surprise your younger self?
Speaker 5 (03:54):
Oh, I mean, I think so many parts of my story.
You know, I got interested in psychology not because I
was interested in happiness, but because I was interested in
what makes human special. And so I spent a lot
of my time studying monkeys and how they make decisions
about the world and how they make sense of the world.
And that was just kind of what I was doing
for you know, over twenty years. I got interested in
(04:17):
the well being work in part because I saw, like
in my students, the kind of crisis that where so
many young people are experiencing today. I took on this
new role at Yale, where I became a head of
college on campus, which meant I was like living with
students and hanging out with them in the dining hall.
And that was when I really saw just how much
students were struggling these days. You know, students in my
college who were experiencing depression and anxiety, you know, having
(04:39):
panic attacks, you know, experiencing suicidality. Like it was much
rougher than I assumed things were, you know, among young
people today. And so that was when I sort of
developed this new focus and asked, Okay, what is my
field of psychology have to say about the kinds of
things we can all be doing to feel better, whether
that's in college with my students, or in the workplace,
or just in our own personal lives. And I realized
(05:01):
there's so many things that our field has to say
about what we can do to feel less burned out,
to feel less stressed, and so on, And so I
just made this like complete pivot to kind of doing
the happiness work all the time.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Yeah, I was going to ask you how you got
from Darwin to happiness. And I'm curious as the visibility
of the field of evolutionary biology has kind of grown,
I feel like a whole other revolution has been sparked over.
There is there anything we can learn from monkeys about
what makes us happier?
Speaker 5 (05:29):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, one of the
things is that I was never happier in my life
than when I was out in the field studying monkeys, right,
And I think that's in part because you know, just
being around them makes you feel really present. You know,
they don't feel like they're kind of off ruminating about
the past or sort of thinking about the future and
worrying about what's going to happen. They're just there grooming
or eating or staring off into the sunset. Right, They're
(05:52):
just there, present, doing whatever they're doing. And that's a
lesson that I really take with me into the happiness
work is that, you know, far too often we just
spend so much time worried about what's going to happen
and planning for the future. If we could just kind
of be and flow and whatever we're doing in the
present moment, I think we'd all feel a lot better.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
So this is a show about work, and we want
to talk about happiness on the job today, how to
make ourselves happy, but also how to make other people
happy and create the conditions for other people to thrive,
which is really one of the core mandates of leadership.
We use a lot of euphemisms for happiness at work,
well being, satisfaction, sentiment. It almost feels too audacious to
(06:37):
kind of name happiness as the goal. Are these all
the same things or is there something specific about happiness
that you're trying to capture in your work.
Speaker 5 (06:47):
Yeah. I think usually when we're using these euphemisms, we
kind of mean what we think we mean, right, This
idea that we can be happy in our lives in
a workplace, right, you know, we can kind of feel
positive emotion when we're at work, We can feel a
sense of belonging. Maybe we reduce all the negative emotions
at work, like you know, stress and frustration and so on,
so we can kind of be happy in our lives
(07:07):
at work. But I think that term wellbeing also wants
us to capture the sense that we're satisfied at work,
that we believe we're doing something that has meaning and purpose.
And so I think that's what the terms are trying
to capture, the sense that you can kind of be
happy in the moment at work. And also when you
think about what you're doing, you really do get a
sense of meaning and purpose. And so I think when
push comes to shove, we're going to really see purpose
(07:28):
as being a foundational element of happiness, and therefore the
kind of thing that we really want to think about
how we can bring into work more readily.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
This point feels connected to an idea you explored on
the Happiness Lab, which is that more is not necessarily more.
When it comes to free time, there's like a sweet
spot which is not less than two hours a day,
but also not more than five. So can you tell
us about this counterintuitive finding.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
Yeah, I mean this is a lot of the work
of Carrie Mullinger in her colleagues, which which really tries
to ask the question, you know, how much time do
we really need to feel good? And I think for
most of us, more time will be better. You know,
work by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School has really
shown and that we kind of are experiencing a dearth
of what she calls time affluence, this sort of subjective
(08:14):
sense that we have some free time. Many more of
us experience what you might call time famine right where
we're kind of literally starving for time, and Ashley's work
shows just how bad this kind of time famine can be.
In fact, she has one statistic that if you self
report being really time famished, there's as much of a
hit on your well being as if you self report
being unemployed. You know, most of your listeners would be
(08:35):
pretty upset if they lost their job tomorrow. Just not
having any free time at all is as bad as
that in terms of your happiness. So for many of us,
the advice is just like, get more free time. That's
probably going to be good. But Cassie's work has really
shown that, like, if you kind of push it too
far in the other direction, then that's not really that
great either.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Right.
Speaker 5 (08:56):
What we really want is sort of structured amounts of
free time that we can wind up using for purposes
and activities that we really enjoy. Kind of if you
get too much of a good thing, then that winds
up being bad too.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
So it's so intuitive. I think my ceiling is is
my window is actually smaller. I think I think it's yeah,
three hours max, and I start getting restless.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I can go longer.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
Yeah, you can go look at it.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
Well.
Speaker 5 (09:21):
I think that's I think that's an important, you know,
thing that comes up a lot on the happiness lab
and even in my course, right, which is, you know,
we're going to make these general pronouncements of what you
need to feel happier at work, whether that's more time
or more belonging and so on, for everybody. There's going
to be some individual differences there, right, you know. So
I think when we talk about these prescriptions, they're overall
(09:41):
good for people. But my advice is always, hey, try
it out yourself, do the experiment on what this feels
like for you, and then you can often come up
with your own sweet spot, and so I think that
that's good advice when it comes to you know, the
specific amount of free time you need to kind of thrive,
but also for all the different topics that we'll talk
about today.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
That's liberating.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
All right.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
We really want to get into some tactics with you
because it's one piece of your work that's so powerful.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
And we're going to do this in two parts.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
So the the first part is how to make ourselves happier
at work, and then how to enable the happiness of
other people.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
So, first make the case.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
To our listeners to do some work here. What does
the data say about happier workers their own experience of
being on the job.
Speaker 5 (10:28):
Yeah, well, I mean the data are pretty clear here,
which is that happier workers wind up like doing better
at work, they wind up performing better, they wind up
earning more money. It makes sense, right, If you're happier
at work and showing more positive emotion, if you feel
belonging at work, you're going to work harder. You're going
to come up with the more innovative solutions. You know,
think back to the last time you were feeling an
(10:49):
overwhelming amount of negative emotion. You probably weren't thinking super
clearly or making big innovative decisions like you were triaging, right,
You're just getting stuff off your desk. And so the
more we can find a way to feel happier at
work ourselves, the better we're going to do at our job,
and we'll reap all the usual kind of rewards that
come with that, whether that's a higher level of setalary
(11:09):
or more accolades and promotions at work. Will just wind
up doing better.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I imagine that people will early question. People will ask as well,
if I'm doing really well, I'm happy. So how do
we know about the correlation versus causality?
Speaker 5 (11:24):
Yeah, I mean what researchers tend to do is like
do experiments where they force people into a good mood
and look at what happens to their performance. One of
my favorite studies did this with medical doctors. So you
bring medical doctors into the lab and you give them
a kind of tough medical problem. You all are old
enough to remember the TV show House or even QUINCMD.
You know these shows where like doctors get these kind
(11:46):
of tough problems' That's what these doctors got in the study.
But the key is that half of the doctors were
able to be in a good mood first. In this case,
they just did it very locally. They let doctors watch
some like silly cat videos, so it's kind of they're
laughing and sort of enjoying themselves. What happens, well, the
doctors who are in the good mood wind up coming
up with the most innovative solution to these tough problems. Right,
(12:06):
and so that's just like kind of local you know,
put yourself in good mood when there's a tricky task
on the line. But if we can do that a
little bit more chronically, right, if we can just look
forward to going to work every day, the ideas that
we too will be performing a little bit more innovatively
and a little bit better at work. I think there's
also an effect when we're in a positive mood of
what happens to other individuals in our organization. You know,
(12:29):
social psychologists have long known the emotion is contagious, right.
We know this in our own work life. When you
walk into a team meeting and there's that team member
who's kind of down in the dumps or really pessimistic, right,
you without whether you wanted to or not, that can
wind up affecting how you see that meeting, how you
view it. But we forget that we have the same
effect on other people. Sigall Barsaid used to call this
(12:52):
affective spirals. Right, we can kind of contagiously give our
affect to other people, and that means if we put
in some work to kind of increase our own mood
on the job, that winds up helping our team members
be a little bit more optimistic too. I often hear
people ask, you know, well, what can I do to me?
You know, my coworkers happier on the job. It's like, well, actually,
if you focus on becoming happier yourself on the job,
(13:15):
then that will have a huge effect on your team members.
Sometimes that can give the like really type A folks
and permission to take care of themselves because you recognize
it as a mechanism for caring for others too.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
That's a beautiful reframe. I love that.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
So you you give a terrific talk at south By
Southwest this year called five Tips to be Happier at Work,
which is available on the Happiness Lab and we encourage
everyone to listen to it. We want to talk about
two of the tips that really struck us and are
very aligned with our own work and our an experience
of work. So one strategy you talked about was something
(13:51):
you called job crafting, which, as we understand, it is
using whatever agency you have in any job to increase
the alignment between your superpowers and what you're actually doing
during the day. So tell us about this approach.
Speaker 5 (14:07):
Yeah, so this is an approach that comes from Risnensky,
used to be my colleague at Yale and now is
at the University of Pennsylvania. Job crafting is exactly what
you said it was. It's kind of taking your job
description and finding ways to infuse your sort of signature strengths,
the kind of values and sort of habits that you
like to bring in. You know, positive psychologists have long
talked about this set of character strengths that all of
(14:29):
us have. You know, there are things like humor and bravery,
and a love of learning, and a zest for life, prudence,
you know, at any kind of value that you might think,
you know is a good thing for humans to have.
But the key is that they've recognized that we have
these things in kind of different amounts. You know, some
of us really resonate with an approach where we want
to be brave all the time. Maybe that's our signature strength.
(14:49):
Others of us like care about humor or sort of
social connection. Right, we each have these different strengths, and
Amy's work shows that if you bring those strengths to
your job, whatever your job description, you wind up not
even not just being happier at work, but you wind
up thinking of your job as more of a calling.
Your supervisors will also say you work better. And I
(15:09):
love Amy's work because she actually studied job crafting in
hospital janitorial staff workers. Right. You know these are people
who are cleaning the linens on hospital beds, or you know,
cleaning up bedpans when people get sick. Right, This is
not the kind of job where you have a lot
of flexibility. You kind of just do what your manager
tells you. But even in this very kind of constrained
job description, Amy finds at around a third of these
(15:30):
janitorial staff workers wind up job crafting. They wind up
building in some of their strengths. And Amy tells these
really beautiful stories in her work. She talks about one
staff member who worked in a chemotherapy ward, which unfortunately
meant that he was dealing with lots of patients who
were very sick all the time, because chemotherapy tends to
make people very nauseous. But he said his job wasn't
(15:51):
cleaning up vomit, even though that's what he spent a
lot of his days doing. He said his job was
social connection and humor. He wanted to connect with the
patients and make them laugh. And he had this standard
kind of shtick that he did where he joked about, like,
oh my god, you've vomited again. Now I'm getting over time,
Like we'll do a little you know, handshake behind the
back to keep this going. And he would say, you know,
the patient would laugh and I would laugh. And that's
my job. That's why I show up to work, right.
(16:14):
And another example that Amy talks about is a staff
worker who worked in a coma ward. So this staff
member couldn't interact with the patients, but every day she
kind of just like moved the paintings and the plants
in the hospital room around, sort of thinking that that
kind of creative infusion maybe would help patients recover. Who knows,
but it meant something to her that she was able
(16:34):
to do it right. I mean, I think the key
is clear here, like no manager told these employees to
be doing this stuff. It was just their own way
of making their job more palatable to the things that
they cared about. And the reason I love Amy's work
is I think if hospital janitorial staff members can do that,
then pretty much all of us in our jobs can
do that too.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
No, this one is really intuitive to me. And I'm
someone who's left a lot of jobs, but when I've stayed,
I've used this agency to make that alignment as tight
as possible for sure. All Right. The secondful tip that
really struck us that was about the power of human
connection and feeling like you really belong in the workplace.
(17:18):
We often talk about this as the responsibility of the
employer or the leader in the room to create the
context for other people's belongings. What can I do as
an individual employee to increase my sense of belonging?
Speaker 5 (17:32):
Yeah, well, one of the big ones is just to
actively and intentionally try to connect with other people. This
is I think something that we like a lot of
people reject. I see this a lot in really younger workers.
You know, my college students have made claims like, you know,
you don't go to work, to make friends, or you know,
just get in and out of there, right. I think,
especially in the remote work culture in which a lot
of young people have found themselves, you know, during their
(17:53):
start of work. This is the kind of thing that
we see comes up a lot. But the evidence suggests
just the opposite, Right, you perform better if you feel
connected at work. One of the main things that predicts
happiness at work is a sense of belonging, And one
of the main things that predicts a sense of belonging
at work is saying as to the question do you
have a best friend at work? In fact, you know,
some folks have made the claim that we could make
(18:15):
everyone in the workplace much happier if each of them
could get somebody at work that they thought cared about
them and felt like a really close friend. But then
the key is that you have to make friends at work,
and work by Nick Epley has shown that one of
these biases is we assume that we have to stay
on very surface topics, right. You know, we talk about
the weather or you know, what happened at the Olympics
and so on, but we don't go into the more
(18:37):
personal kinds of things. How we're really feeling about work,
you know, the things we really value, the hobbies and
the people we care about. But research suggests that if
you do that, if you dive into a little bit
more of a deep conversation, it winds up making you
feel closer. Another thing you can do to increase closeness
is just to ask for help. This is again something
that we hate to do generally, but really I fear
(18:58):
doing in the workplace. We feel like it'll make us
look kind of needy or not able to do our jobs.
But overall, when you ask a coworker for help, usually
it gives them the chance to do something nice for you,
makes them feel needed, it increases their positive emotion, and
that winds up making you feel more connected. And so
those are just the kind of quick things we need
to get more intentional about creating these friendships. And we
(19:19):
do that from being a little bit more vulnerable and
even asking for help when we need it.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
And the way you're just finding vulnerable is not, you know,
open the kimono and expose all of your deepest, darkest thoughts.
It's really just showing up as a as an imperfect
human being in the workplace and connecting with other people
on that level.
Speaker 5 (19:40):
Yeah, there's this there's this lovely effect that social psychologists
have talked about, which they call the beautiful mess effect,
which is this idea that when we think, when we
seem a little messy or we kind of show our vulnerabilities,
that people won't like us. But it's actually just the opposite,
Like you don't want to get like, you know, extreme messy.
But the idea is like showing that you occasionally need
help and kind of being really grateful for that help
(20:02):
winds up making you feel more connected to people, not
less so.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
As a as someone who has been who has had
responsibility for recruiting at a business school, and we at
Harvard have struggled to recruit senior women, so women that
are already full professors, to recruit them over an idea
I have had is recruit them and their friends. Does
(20:26):
that fit into this? Do you have your best friend
at work?
Speaker 5 (20:29):
Like?
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Are you giving me cover for experimenting with this idea?
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (20:35):
Yeah, I mean I think that's a really smart strategy.
Speaker 6 (20:38):
Right.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
You know, some universities and business schools think in terms
of what they call cohort hires, right where it's like
I'll hire somebody that does something really in one field,
and then pick a second person who's in a really
similar field to them, right, and so we can kind
of build up a particular area. But I love the
idea of hiring people's friends because you're instantly bringing in
a team that has a sense of belonging, right that
(21:00):
maybe even are going to model the kinds of friendships
that other colleagues would benefit from having too. So I'm
into it. Drop the spousal hire and go for the best,
the bff hire. It's great.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
I love it. It's radical. It's so simple, but it's radical.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Well, this is a really nice pivot to looking at
the employer lens on happiness here. So make the business case,
why is it worth it as a company, as a
leader to invest in the happiness of my people? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (21:29):
Well, we talked already about how as an individual you
would want to be happier if you want to perform
better on your job. I think for employers the logic
is very similar. If you want all your workers to
be doing the best job that they can, to increase retention,
to have everyone think of their job as a calling
so they can't wait to get to work on Monday morning.
The way to do that is to make them happier
(21:52):
at work. But there's a recent study that I love
that paints an even more compelling business case for making
your employees happier at work. It was a study that
was done in collaboration with a group of researchers at
Oxford led by Jan Emmanuel Denev and the job website Indeed.
And so if listeners don't know the job website, indeed,
this is a place where you can go to look
for jobs, but also to rate things about your current job.
(22:14):
Right you know, how much salary you get, and how
happy you're at work, your sense of belonging and so on.
And so indeed was sitting on like about fifteen million
data points about how happy individual workers were at work.
So they had ratings for over five thousand different companies
of on average, how happy are their employers based on
these indeed data. And so what the Oxford researchers did
(22:35):
was they said, well, let's just make this sort of
well being composite score. So this is kind of the
on average how happy you do your workers rate being
based on these indeed data, and they could make one
of these scores for each individual company, and they could
ask all these things about what a higher happiness at
work score predicted. And in particular, they were interested in,
you know, the usual metric that business school professors think about,
(22:57):
which is, you know, shareholder value, like how how well
are different stocks doing of different companies. And what they
did was just to plot a correlation between the happier
companies and look at what is happening with stock prices.
And what they found was a strong and significant correlation
showing that the happier companies wound up having better stock prices.
(23:19):
They actually took this one step further and said, well,
you know, we have these usual metrics of you know,
economic success based on successful companies. We have you know,
the Dow Jones or the SMP five hundred. What if
we make the well being score one hundred, So these
are the one hundred companies, and this indeed data set
that had the highest happiness ratings. And the researcher said, well,
(23:39):
why don't we kind of plot that against the other
standard metrics, So use this well being score metric to
compete against the SMP five hundred and the Nasdaq and
so on. And they have this lovely graph in their
paper which shows that this well being one hundred set
of companies winds up beating the SMP and the Nasdaq
and the Dow Jones at pretty much every point in
(24:01):
the economic cycle of the last couple of years. What
does that mean? This is a very compelling case for
every CEO to take seriously that one thing that might
really matter for the success of your company in terms of, like,
again the basic metric of success of your company, what
you tell shareholders they're going to get, you know, in
terms of actual money over time, that you'll do better
and that very important metric simply by making your workers happier.
(24:24):
And and what I love about the studies, like it
didn't need to go that way, Like it could have
been a really compelling ethical case for making your workers happy.
But maybe you know you have to take a little
bit of hit in terms of the money you pull back. No,
it's it's really a work life harmony that if we
make our workers happier, we wind up reaping the benefits
in terms of a more successful company.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Okay, so say I'm the boss, I'm listening to this conversation.
I buy it. Where would you coach me to begin.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
Yeah, Well, the Indeed Data had a really interesting idea
on this because they also asked the question what is
that happiness at work metric made of? In other words,
what are the factors that lead people to be happier
at work? Because as an employer, that's what you'd want
to intervene on. If it's higher salary, it makes people
have at work, you'd want to pay people more and
so on. And what the researchers found was kind of surprising.
(25:14):
The top thing on the list was worker's sense of
belonging at work, which was made up of three different metrics.
One that I've mentioned already, do you have a best
friend at work? And the second two was the things
that I do at the company matters, So you think
the things that you're doing matter at work, people care
about what you do. And also I matter to the
people at work, So this is kind of reciprocal mattering. Plus
(25:36):
your friendship at work, those three things together seem to
be the biggest predictor of what makes people happy at work,
and the biggest predictor then, of course, of like what's
going to make your company the most money. And so
if you're a C suite, you know exac Looking at
these data, what you have to ask yourself is what
does my belonging at work look like? Do people feel
a sense of meaning that they matter and that what
(25:58):
they're doing matters? And have I promoted situations that can
increase friendship at work? Especially if you kind of moved
to a more remote environment, these things become all the
more important that that sense of belonging is really something
that you're working on. And so that's the data pretty clear,
that's the spot to intervene to get the biggest kind
of happiness boost to everyone in your organization.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
What's really exciting about particularly two and three the reciprocity
of mattering. It feels, at least in my first thinking
of it, very inexpensive. It's like intentional but not costly.
Speaker 5 (26:33):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing is you
assume like I have to pay all this money extra
money to increase people's salaries or get bonuses. All these
solutions are hard and they require work and intent, but
they're cheap, right, They're exactly the kinds of things you
can build in even during tough times. We've just finished
an interview for the Happiness Lab with CEO Bob Chapman.
(26:55):
He's the CEO of this manufacturing company called Barry Wymiller.
You know, they build kind of capital equipment for places
like Coca Cola and Procter and Gamble. It's like, you know,
the standard kind of company where you wouldn't think building
in belonging is going to matter to this kind of organization.
But they had a moment where they really had to
think about people's mattering at work. That came during the
(27:17):
two thousand and eight economic downturn when they lost nearly
all of their contracts and they were facing you know
what many businesses were facing back then, which is the
possibility of laying off a bunch of people. And Bob
had this idea that, you know, if mattering at work
is really important, I'm going to kick out, you know,
thirty percent of my company. I'm going to leave the
other seventy percent there thinking that that could have been them,
(27:40):
and like what are they going to be next? And
so on, and he said, is there any other solution?
And the solution he came up with was to say
that everyone in the entire company, including you know, the
C suite, you know, down to the like the lowest
level worker, they all had to take a month without pay.
They were all going to take a little bit of
a sacrifice so that the company could get through it.
(28:00):
And everyone responded incredibly positively, like people were thrilled. You know,
they were so scared that they were going to lose
their and now they saw everyone pitching in together to
kind of take the hit, including the people at the
highest levels. And Bob said that an even more interesting
thing happened, which is that people so felt the sense
of meaning and belonging that a lot of them stepped
(28:23):
up to take an extra month so that other team
members wouldn't have to take theirs. You saw folks who
were saying, you know, hey, I'm close to retirement already,
let me take two months so that you know, young
Mary or Bob who just you know, had a baby
or just bought a house, they wouldn't have to take
that like little, you know, short period of time off.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Right.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
This is that sense of mattering in action, right, And
if the C suite winds up creating a culture where
that is important, where they really embody that importance to
their organization, what you find is that people step up.
They not only matter, but they realize that their actions
can help the company, and they're excited to do those
even more often. And you know, the end result of
(29:01):
the story is that Barry wey Miller, you know, not
only survived the economic downturn, but has gone on to
become a kind of juggernaut of the manufacturing industry, pulling in,
you know, three billion dollars in annual sales a year
in part because they created this sort of culture of
belonging and care.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Beautiful. What a powerful example.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
I heard a conversation, an interview with you years ago
that inspired me to make a happy list that I
put on my phone, which I revisit on a regular basis. Francis,
you'll be delighted to note that you make a number
of appearances on the happy list.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Delighted and relieved and relieved and relieved.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Do you have your own happiness list, Lorie, and can
you give us a couple entries on it?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (29:45):
I mean I do keep a list of delights. They're
different ways to do the happiness list. It's like stuff
that makes you happy, things you're grateful for. Lately, I've
been into delights, which are just things that you notice
in the world that almost make you like, you know,
put your hands up in the air and say, oh
my gosh, what a delight, And they're really silly things.
Like the other day, I was walking down the street
and there was just somebody who's like just jamming out
(30:08):
to some really old cool eighties rock, you know, in
his car, thinking he was alone, but you get to
see the like headbanging, and I was like, you know,
that is just such a delight. And and honestly, you know,
the other thing on my list is just I get
to with this podcast just talk to so many interesting folks,
interesting folks like you all my amazing guests, from Bob
Chapman to others. And that's just a delight that I
(30:29):
have this role where I get to hear people's incredible
stories and share them with others. And so the delight
List includes the things from the from the tiny to
the to the big. And my husband Mark is on
there as well, so he's he's often featured on the
Delight List too.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Beautiful. Well, it's been such a privilege to host you
and have this conversation fans, very big fans and fans, yeah,
which I was impossible to imagine.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
Thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
So, Francis I see your recruiting.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
Gears speaking of your academic job.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yes, Laurie is currently at Yale, is what I'd like
to say to our listeners currently, but let's stay tuned
for the future.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
So what surprised you during this conversation? What do you
hope listeners take away from it?
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I feel like so many light bulbs went off on it.
So what surprised me is how much belonging matters, which
is something that we think about a lot, But how
much mattering matters is another one. I mean that's and
I watch you do this all the time, in really
like zoning in on helping people come up with the
(32:06):
essence of what they're doing that's going to matter a lot,
and you really and good You often give them titles
to put that structure.
Speaker 4 (32:13):
So stingy about the titles, My God, hand them all out,
you know. The I am not the academic in this relationship,
but one of my big takeaways is that is that
my intuition has a lot of data behind it. And
all the beautiful researchers that she referenced in that conversation,
(32:36):
which is I'm so grateful that there are so many
fantastic people doing the work to kind of back up
our intuition on not our intuition, capital our intuition on
this that this, you know, this is such a powerful
lever for well being, not just inside organizations but society
(33:00):
writ large. If I may invoke my favorite academic phrase, like,
this is really the ballgame. I think it's really the ballgame.
And it's you know, it's like everything we talk about
inclusion and performance and you know the idea of like
bringing your humanity into the workplace, and that also jump
starting impact and performance and all of your other hopes
(33:23):
and dreams, like all of you know, all of those
hopes and dreams they run through through happiness, your own
happiness and the happiness of other people. And to your point,
those things are intimately connected. So I'm just thrilled that
we're able to share this conversation with our listeners. All right,
(33:44):
Fixable listeners, thank you for being part of this conversation.
As always, reach out to us if there's a problem
you're struggling with, or if there's someone you want to
hear from, or you suggest we bring on the show.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 4 (33:58):
Email us, call us, text us Fixable at ted dot com.
Or two three four Fixable that's two three four three
four nine two two five three Fixable is brought to
you by the Ted Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's
(34:21):
hosted by me Anne Morris.
Speaker 5 (34:22):
And me Francis Fry.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
Our team includes Izzy Carter Constanza, Guyardo band Ban Chang,
Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne high Lash. This episode was mixed
by Louis AT's story Yard.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever
you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check
us out.
Pushkin, Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Today, I want to share
a special episode from our friends at Fixable, who recently
had me on their show to talk about how we
can all become happier at work. On the show, I
chat with business leaders Anne Morris and Francis Frey about
the conditions we all need to thrive on the job.
I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Francis kiss us off today? What made you happy this week?
To word Caitlin Clark.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Let me explain the WNBA is riveting and awesome and
even though I played basketball in college, I wasn't watching
it as diligently as I am now. And so what
made me happy this week?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I have a new Caitlin Clark jersey.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
It has definitely brought a new level of joy into
the house. Thank you to my dear sister in law,
Zoe Rodriguez for sending the jerseys.
Speaker 5 (01:14):
Which I wear every time I watch the game.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Sparking joy for the rest of us as well. Can
I ask the fall question?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Yeah, we just did a great episode on routines. Do
you have a game day routine for watching Caitlin play?
Speaker 6 (01:28):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I sure do so I begin every morning at breakfast
to tell the boys what time the game is on.
They don't watch the game with me, but I tell
them when the game is just so that they know
what I will be doing.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
And they're teenage boy they don't register time and plan.
But that's where it begins.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And then there is a cascade of planning that I
keep checking the clock. I keep saying every time I
see you, I say what time the game is. Anytime
I think of anything. And then I set up on
the couch so that my feet are elevated.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I'm watching.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
I have my apple juice and my pretzels as I watch, and.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I get ready to go.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
But I need a light.
Speaker 6 (02:02):
Nobody can sit right next to me. I need a
lot of space. I have a little lot of moves.
Nobody wants to sit right next to you for this experience.
I'm not sure I'm ready to dig the set of
activities by calling it a ritual. But it is what
you do every single time, every single time. Yeah, all right,
let's get into today's conversation. The secret memo to happiness
at work. Our guest is the expert on happiness. Tell
(02:27):
the people who she is.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Oh Professor Laurie Santos. She's a cognitive scientist and professor
of psychology at Yale. Super Smart. She teaches the most
popular course in the school's history, not like this year
or last year, in the whole history of the school,
and it's about the science of happiness, which is so
(02:49):
alluring to me.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
Yes, something like a full quarter of the entire student
body takes this class every year.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
That is amazing to me. I think if all courses
were voluntary, there wouldn't be another course that the quarter
of the student body would take.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
It's amazing.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
So she also teaches this course on a platform called Coursera,
where another five million people have taken it, and she
hosts a terrific podcast called The Happiness Lab. I've been
a follower for years where she keeps this conversation going
and talks with experts about the latest science on happiness.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I can't wait to get into this.
Speaker 5 (03:23):
I have so many questions and so much to learn.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Doctor Lorie Santos, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
We are very big fans of yours. Let me start here.
What parts of your own story would surprise your younger self?
Speaker 5 (03:54):
Oh, I mean, I think so many parts of my story.
You know, I got interested in psychology not because I
was interested in happiness, but because I was interested in
what makes human special. And so I spent a lot
of my time studying monkeys and how they make decisions
about the world and how they make sense of the world.
And that was just kind of what I was doing
for you know, over twenty years. I got interested in
(04:17):
the well being work in part because I saw, like
in my students, the kind of crisis that where so
many young people are experiencing today. I took on this
new role at Yale, where I became a head of
college on campus, which meant I was like living with
students and hanging out with them in the dining hall.
And that was when I really saw just how much
students were struggling these days. You know, students in my
college who were experiencing depression and anxiety, you know, having
(04:39):
panic attacks, you know, experiencing suicidality. Like it was much
rougher than I assumed things were, you know, among young
people today. And so that was when I sort of
developed this new focus and asked, Okay, what is my
field of psychology have to say about the kinds of
things we can all be doing to feel better, whether
that's in college with my students, or in the workplace,
or just in our own personal lives. And I realized
(05:01):
there's so many things that our field has to say
about what we can do to feel less burned out,
to feel less stressed, and so on, And so I
just made this like complete pivot to kind of doing
the happiness work all the time.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Yeah, I was going to ask you how you got
from Darwin to happiness. And I'm curious as the visibility
of the field of evolutionary biology has kind of grown,
I feel like a whole other revolution has been sparked over.
There is there anything we can learn from monkeys about
what makes us happier?
Speaker 5 (05:29):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, one of the
things is that I was never happier in my life
than when I was out in the field studying monkeys, right,
And I think that's in part because you know, just
being around them makes you feel really present. You know,
they don't feel like they're kind of off ruminating about
the past or sort of thinking about the future and
worrying about what's going to happen. They're just there grooming
or eating or staring off into the sunset. Right, They're
(05:52):
just there, present, doing whatever they're doing. And that's a
lesson that I really take with me into the happiness
work is that, you know, far too often we just
spend so much time worried about what's going to happen
and planning for the future. If we could just kind
of be and flow and whatever we're doing in the
present moment, I think we'd all feel a lot better.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
So this is a show about work, and we want
to talk about happiness on the job today, how to
make ourselves happy, but also how to make other people
happy and create the conditions for other people to thrive,
which is really one of the core mandates of leadership.
We use a lot of euphemisms for happiness at work,
well being, satisfaction, sentiment. It almost feels too audacious to
(06:37):
kind of name happiness as the goal. Are these all
the same things or is there something specific about happiness
that you're trying to capture in your work.
Speaker 5 (06:47):
Yeah. I think usually when we're using these euphemisms, we
kind of mean what we think we mean, right, This
idea that we can be happy in our lives in
a workplace, right, you know, we can kind of feel
positive emotion when we're at work, We can feel a
sense of belonging. Maybe we reduce all the negative emotions
at work, like you know, stress and frustration and so on,
so we can kind of be happy in our lives
(07:07):
at work. But I think that term wellbeing also wants
us to capture the sense that we're satisfied at work,
that we believe we're doing something that has meaning and purpose.
And so I think that's what the terms are trying
to capture, the sense that you can kind of be
happy in the moment at work. And also when you
think about what you're doing, you really do get a
sense of meaning and purpose. And so I think when
push comes to shove, we're going to really see purpose
(07:28):
as being a foundational element of happiness, and therefore the
kind of thing that we really want to think about
how we can bring into work more readily.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
This point feels connected to an idea you explored on
the Happiness Lab, which is that more is not necessarily more.
When it comes to free time, there's like a sweet
spot which is not less than two hours a day,
but also not more than five. So can you tell
us about this counterintuitive finding.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
Yeah, I mean this is a lot of the work
of Carrie Mullinger in her colleagues, which which really tries
to ask the question, you know, how much time do
we really need to feel good? And I think for
most of us, more time will be better. You know,
work by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School has really
shown and that we kind of are experiencing a dearth
of what she calls time affluence, this sort of subjective
(08:14):
sense that we have some free time. Many more of
us experience what you might call time famine right where
we're kind of literally starving for time, and Ashley's work
shows just how bad this kind of time famine can be.
In fact, she has one statistic that if you self
report being really time famished, there's as much of a
hit on your well being as if you self report
being unemployed. You know, most of your listeners would be
(08:35):
pretty upset if they lost their job tomorrow. Just not
having any free time at all is as bad as
that in terms of your happiness. So for many of us,
the advice is just like, get more free time. That's
probably going to be good. But Cassie's work has really
shown that, like, if you kind of push it too
far in the other direction, then that's not really that
great either.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Right.
Speaker 5 (08:56):
What we really want is sort of structured amounts of
free time that we can wind up using for purposes
and activities that we really enjoy. Kind of if you
get too much of a good thing, then that winds
up being bad too.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
So it's so intuitive. I think my ceiling is is
my window is actually smaller. I think I think it's yeah,
three hours max, and I start getting restless.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I can go longer.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
Yeah, you can go look at it.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
Well.
Speaker 5 (09:21):
I think that's I think that's an important, you know,
thing that comes up a lot on the happiness lab
and even in my course, right, which is, you know,
we're going to make these general pronouncements of what you
need to feel happier at work, whether that's more time
or more belonging and so on, for everybody. There's going
to be some individual differences there, right, you know. So
I think when we talk about these prescriptions, they're overall
(09:41):
good for people. But my advice is always, hey, try
it out yourself, do the experiment on what this feels
like for you, and then you can often come up
with your own sweet spot, and so I think that
that's good advice when it comes to you know, the
specific amount of free time you need to kind of thrive,
but also for all the different topics that we'll talk
about today.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
That's liberating.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
All right.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
We really want to get into some tactics with you
because it's one piece of your work that's so powerful.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
And we're going to do this in two parts.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
So the the first part is how to make ourselves happier
at work, and then how to enable the happiness of
other people.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
So, first make the case.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
To our listeners to do some work here. What does
the data say about happier workers their own experience of
being on the job.
Speaker 5 (10:28):
Yeah, well, I mean the data are pretty clear here,
which is that happier workers wind up like doing better
at work, they wind up performing better, they wind up
earning more money. It makes sense, right, If you're happier
at work and showing more positive emotion, if you feel
belonging at work, you're going to work harder. You're going
to come up with the more innovative solutions. You know,
think back to the last time you were feeling an
(10:49):
overwhelming amount of negative emotion. You probably weren't thinking super
clearly or making big innovative decisions like you were triaging, right,
You're just getting stuff off your desk. And so the
more we can find a way to feel happier at
work ourselves, the better we're going to do at our job,
and we'll reap all the usual kind of rewards that
come with that, whether that's a higher level of setalary
(11:09):
or more accolades and promotions at work. Will just wind
up doing better.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
I imagine that people will early question. People will ask as well,
if I'm doing really well, I'm happy. So how do
we know about the correlation versus causality?
Speaker 5 (11:24):
Yeah, I mean what researchers tend to do is like
do experiments where they force people into a good mood
and look at what happens to their performance. One of
my favorite studies did this with medical doctors. So you
bring medical doctors into the lab and you give them
a kind of tough medical problem. You all are old
enough to remember the TV show House or even QUINCMD.
You know these shows where like doctors get these kind
(11:46):
of tough problems' That's what these doctors got in the study.
But the key is that half of the doctors were
able to be in a good mood first. In this case,
they just did it very locally. They let doctors watch
some like silly cat videos, so it's kind of they're
laughing and sort of enjoying themselves. What happens, well, the
doctors who are in the good mood wind up coming
up with the most innovative solution to these tough problems. Right,
(12:06):
and so that's just like kind of local you know,
put yourself in good mood when there's a tricky task
on the line. But if we can do that a
little bit more chronically, right, if we can just look
forward to going to work every day, the ideas that
we too will be performing a little bit more innovatively
and a little bit better at work. I think there's
also an effect when we're in a positive mood of
what happens to other individuals in our organization. You know,
(12:29):
social psychologists have long known the emotion is contagious, right.
We know this in our own work life. When you
walk into a team meeting and there's that team member
who's kind of down in the dumps or really pessimistic, right,
you without whether you wanted to or not, that can
wind up affecting how you see that meeting, how you
view it. But we forget that we have the same
effect on other people. Sigall Barsaid used to call this
(12:52):
affective spirals. Right, we can kind of contagiously give our
affect to other people, and that means if we put
in some work to kind of increase our own mood
on the job, that winds up helping our team members
be a little bit more optimistic too. I often hear
people ask, you know, well, what can I do to me?
You know, my coworkers happier on the job. It's like, well, actually,
if you focus on becoming happier yourself on the job,
(13:15):
then that will have a huge effect on your team members.
Sometimes that can give the like really type A folks
and permission to take care of themselves because you recognize
it as a mechanism for caring for others too.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
That's a beautiful reframe. I love that.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
So you you give a terrific talk at south By
Southwest this year called five Tips to be Happier at Work,
which is available on the Happiness Lab and we encourage
everyone to listen to it. We want to talk about
two of the tips that really struck us and are
very aligned with our own work and our an experience
of work. So one strategy you talked about was something
(13:51):
you called job crafting, which, as we understand, it is
using whatever agency you have in any job to increase
the alignment between your superpowers and what you're actually doing
during the day. So tell us about this approach.
Speaker 5 (14:07):
Yeah, so this is an approach that comes from Risnensky,
used to be my colleague at Yale and now is
at the University of Pennsylvania. Job crafting is exactly what
you said it was. It's kind of taking your job
description and finding ways to infuse your sort of signature strengths,
the kind of values and sort of habits that you
like to bring in. You know, positive psychologists have long
talked about this set of character strengths that all of
(14:29):
us have. You know, there are things like humor and bravery,
and a love of learning, and a zest for life, prudence,
you know, at any kind of value that you might think,
you know is a good thing for humans to have.
But the key is that they've recognized that we have
these things in kind of different amounts. You know, some
of us really resonate with an approach where we want
to be brave all the time. Maybe that's our signature strength.
(14:49):
Others of us like care about humor or sort of
social connection. Right, we each have these different strengths, and
Amy's work shows that if you bring those strengths to
your job, whatever your job description, you wind up not
even not just being happier at work, but you wind
up thinking of your job as more of a calling.
Your supervisors will also say you work better. And I
(15:09):
love Amy's work because she actually studied job crafting in
hospital janitorial staff workers. Right. You know these are people
who are cleaning the linens on hospital beds, or you know,
cleaning up bedpans when people get sick. Right, This is
not the kind of job where you have a lot
of flexibility. You kind of just do what your manager
tells you. But even in this very kind of constrained
job description, Amy finds at around a third of these
(15:30):
janitorial staff workers wind up job crafting. They wind up
building in some of their strengths. And Amy tells these
really beautiful stories in her work. She talks about one
staff member who worked in a chemotherapy ward, which unfortunately
meant that he was dealing with lots of patients who
were very sick all the time, because chemotherapy tends to
make people very nauseous. But he said his job wasn't
(15:51):
cleaning up vomit, even though that's what he spent a
lot of his days doing. He said his job was
social connection and humor. He wanted to connect with the
patients and make them laugh. And he had this standard
kind of shtick that he did where he joked about, like,
oh my god, you've vomited again. Now I'm getting over time,
Like we'll do a little you know, handshake behind the
back to keep this going. And he would say, you know,
the patient would laugh and I would laugh. And that's
my job. That's why I show up to work, right.
(16:14):
And another example that Amy talks about is a staff
worker who worked in a coma ward. So this staff
member couldn't interact with the patients, but every day she
kind of just like moved the paintings and the plants
in the hospital room around, sort of thinking that that
kind of creative infusion maybe would help patients recover. Who knows,
but it meant something to her that she was able
(16:34):
to do it right. I mean, I think the key
is clear here, like no manager told these employees to
be doing this stuff. It was just their own way
of making their job more palatable to the things that
they cared about. And the reason I love Amy's work
is I think if hospital janitorial staff members can do that,
then pretty much all of us in our jobs can
do that too.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
No, this one is really intuitive to me. And I'm
someone who's left a lot of jobs, but when I've stayed,
I've used this agency to make that alignment as tight
as possible for sure. All Right. The secondful tip that
really struck us that was about the power of human
connection and feeling like you really belong in the workplace.
(17:18):
We often talk about this as the responsibility of the
employer or the leader in the room to create the
context for other people's belongings. What can I do as
an individual employee to increase my sense of belonging?
Speaker 5 (17:32):
Yeah, well, one of the big ones is just to
actively and intentionally try to connect with other people. This
is I think something that we like a lot of
people reject. I see this a lot in really younger workers.
You know, my college students have made claims like, you know,
you don't go to work, to make friends, or you know,
just get in and out of there, right. I think,
especially in the remote work culture in which a lot
of young people have found themselves, you know, during their
(17:53):
start of work. This is the kind of thing that
we see comes up a lot. But the evidence suggests
just the opposite, Right, you perform better if you feel
connected at work. One of the main things that predicts
happiness at work is a sense of belonging, And one
of the main things that predicts a sense of belonging
at work is saying as to the question do you
have a best friend at work? In fact, you know,
some folks have made the claim that we could make
(18:15):
everyone in the workplace much happier if each of them
could get somebody at work that they thought cared about
them and felt like a really close friend. But then
the key is that you have to make friends at work,
and work by Nick Epley has shown that one of
these biases is we assume that we have to stay
on very surface topics, right. You know, we talk about
the weather or you know, what happened at the Olympics
and so on, but we don't go into the more
(18:37):
personal kinds of things. How we're really feeling about work,
you know, the things we really value, the hobbies and
the people we care about. But research suggests that if
you do that, if you dive into a little bit
more of a deep conversation, it winds up making you
feel closer. Another thing you can do to increase closeness
is just to ask for help. This is again something
that we hate to do generally, but really I fear
(18:58):
doing in the workplace. We feel like it'll make us
look kind of needy or not able to do our jobs.
But overall, when you ask a coworker for help, usually
it gives them the chance to do something nice for you,
makes them feel needed, it increases their positive emotion, and
that winds up making you feel more connected. And so
those are just the kind of quick things we need
to get more intentional about creating these friendships. And we
(19:19):
do that from being a little bit more vulnerable and
even asking for help when we need it.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
And the way you're just finding vulnerable is not, you know,
open the kimono and expose all of your deepest, darkest thoughts.
It's really just showing up as a as an imperfect
human being in the workplace and connecting with other people
on that level.
Speaker 5 (19:40):
Yeah, there's this there's this lovely effect that social psychologists
have talked about, which they call the beautiful mess effect,
which is this idea that when we think, when we
seem a little messy or we kind of show our vulnerabilities,
that people won't like us. But it's actually just the opposite,
Like you don't want to get like, you know, extreme messy.
But the idea is like showing that you occasionally need
help and kind of being really grateful for that help
(20:02):
winds up making you feel more connected to people, not
less so.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
As a as someone who has been who has had
responsibility for recruiting at a business school, and we at
Harvard have struggled to recruit senior women, so women that
are already full professors, to recruit them over an idea
I have had is recruit them and their friends. Does
(20:26):
that fit into this? Do you have your best friend
at work?
Speaker 5 (20:29):
Like?
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Are you giving me cover for experimenting with this idea?
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (20:35):
Yeah, I mean I think that's a really smart strategy.
Speaker 6 (20:38):
Right.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
You know, some universities and business schools think in terms
of what they call cohort hires, right where it's like
I'll hire somebody that does something really in one field,
and then pick a second person who's in a really
similar field to them, right, and so we can kind
of build up a particular area. But I love the
idea of hiring people's friends because you're instantly bringing in
a team that has a sense of belonging, right that
(21:00):
maybe even are going to model the kinds of friendships
that other colleagues would benefit from having too. So I'm
into it. Drop the spousal hire and go for the best,
the bff hire. It's great.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
I love it. It's radical. It's so simple, but it's radical.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Well, this is a really nice pivot to looking at
the employer lens on happiness here. So make the business case,
why is it worth it as a company, as a
leader to invest in the happiness of my people? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (21:29):
Well, we talked already about how as an individual you
would want to be happier if you want to perform
better on your job. I think for employers the logic
is very similar. If you want all your workers to
be doing the best job that they can, to increase retention,
to have everyone think of their job as a calling
so they can't wait to get to work on Monday morning.
The way to do that is to make them happier
(21:52):
at work. But there's a recent study that I love
that paints an even more compelling business case for making
your employees happier at work. It was a study that
was done in collaboration with a group of researchers at
Oxford led by Jan Emmanuel Denev and the job website Indeed.
And so if listeners don't know the job website, indeed,
this is a place where you can go to look
for jobs, but also to rate things about your current job.
(22:14):
Right you know, how much salary you get, and how
happy you're at work, your sense of belonging and so on.
And so indeed was sitting on like about fifteen million
data points about how happy individual workers were at work.
So they had ratings for over five thousand different companies
of on average, how happy are their employers based on
these indeed data. And so what the Oxford researchers did
(22:35):
was they said, well, let's just make this sort of
well being composite score. So this is kind of the
on average how happy you do your workers rate being
based on these indeed data, and they could make one
of these scores for each individual company, and they could
ask all these things about what a higher happiness at
work score predicted. And in particular, they were interested in,
you know, the usual metric that business school professors think about,
(22:57):
which is, you know, shareholder value, like how how well
are different stocks doing of different companies. And what they
did was just to plot a correlation between the happier
companies and look at what is happening with stock prices.
And what they found was a strong and significant correlation
showing that the happier companies wound up having better stock prices.
(23:19):
They actually took this one step further and said, well,
you know, we have these usual metrics of you know,
economic success based on successful companies. We have you know,
the Dow Jones or the SMP five hundred. What if
we make the well being score one hundred, So these
are the one hundred companies, and this indeed data set
that had the highest happiness ratings. And the researcher said, well,
(23:39):
why don't we kind of plot that against the other
standard metrics, So use this well being score metric to
compete against the SMP five hundred and the Nasdaq and
so on. And they have this lovely graph in their
paper which shows that this well being one hundred set
of companies winds up beating the SMP and the Nasdaq
and the Dow Jones at pretty much every point in
(24:01):
the economic cycle of the last couple of years. What
does that mean? This is a very compelling case for
every CEO to take seriously that one thing that might
really matter for the success of your company in terms of, like,
again the basic metric of success of your company, what
you tell shareholders they're going to get, you know, in
terms of actual money over time, that you'll do better
and that very important metric simply by making your workers happier.
(24:24):
And and what I love about the studies, like it
didn't need to go that way, Like it could have
been a really compelling ethical case for making your workers happy.
But maybe you know you have to take a little
bit of hit in terms of the money you pull back. No,
it's it's really a work life harmony that if we
make our workers happier, we wind up reaping the benefits
in terms of a more successful company.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Okay, so say I'm the boss, I'm listening to this conversation.
I buy it. Where would you coach me to begin.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
Yeah, Well, the Indeed Data had a really interesting idea
on this because they also asked the question what is
that happiness at work metric made of? In other words,
what are the factors that lead people to be happier
at work? Because as an employer, that's what you'd want
to intervene on. If it's higher salary, it makes people
have at work, you'd want to pay people more and
so on. And what the researchers found was kind of surprising.
(25:14):
The top thing on the list was worker's sense of
belonging at work, which was made up of three different metrics.
One that I've mentioned already, do you have a best
friend at work? And the second two was the things
that I do at the company matters, So you think
the things that you're doing matter at work, people care
about what you do. And also I matter to the
people at work, So this is kind of reciprocal mattering. Plus
(25:36):
your friendship at work, those three things together seem to
be the biggest predictor of what makes people happy at work,
and the biggest predictor then, of course, of like what's
going to make your company the most money. And so
if you're a C suite, you know exac Looking at
these data, what you have to ask yourself is what
does my belonging at work look like? Do people feel
a sense of meaning that they matter and that what
(25:58):
they're doing matters? And have I promoted situations that can
increase friendship at work? Especially if you kind of moved
to a more remote environment, these things become all the
more important that that sense of belonging is really something
that you're working on. And so that's the data pretty clear,
that's the spot to intervene to get the biggest kind
of happiness boost to everyone in your organization.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
What's really exciting about particularly two and three the reciprocity
of mattering. It feels, at least in my first thinking
of it, very inexpensive. It's like intentional but not costly.
Speaker 5 (26:33):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing is you
assume like I have to pay all this money extra
money to increase people's salaries or get bonuses. All these
solutions are hard and they require work and intent, but
they're cheap, right, They're exactly the kinds of things you
can build in even during tough times. We've just finished
an interview for the Happiness Lab with CEO Bob Chapman.
(26:55):
He's the CEO of this manufacturing company called Barry Wymiller.
You know, they build kind of capital equipment for places
like Coca Cola and Procter and Gamble. It's like, you know,
the standard kind of company where you wouldn't think building
in belonging is going to matter to this kind of organization.
But they had a moment where they really had to
think about people's mattering at work. That came during the
(27:17):
two thousand and eight economic downturn when they lost nearly
all of their contracts and they were facing you know
what many businesses were facing back then, which is the
possibility of laying off a bunch of people. And Bob
had this idea that, you know, if mattering at work
is really important, I'm going to kick out, you know,
thirty percent of my company. I'm going to leave the
other seventy percent there thinking that that could have been them,
(27:40):
and like what are they going to be next? And
so on, and he said, is there any other solution?
And the solution he came up with was to say
that everyone in the entire company, including you know, the
C suite, you know, down to the like the lowest
level worker, they all had to take a month without pay.
They were all going to take a little bit of
a sacrifice so that the company could get through it.
(28:00):
And everyone responded incredibly positively, like people were thrilled. You know,
they were so scared that they were going to lose
their and now they saw everyone pitching in together to
kind of take the hit, including the people at the
highest levels. And Bob said that an even more interesting
thing happened, which is that people so felt the sense
of meaning and belonging that a lot of them stepped
(28:23):
up to take an extra month so that other team
members wouldn't have to take theirs. You saw folks who
were saying, you know, hey, I'm close to retirement already,
let me take two months so that you know, young
Mary or Bob who just you know, had a baby
or just bought a house, they wouldn't have to take
that like little, you know, short period of time off.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Right.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
This is that sense of mattering in action, right, And
if the C suite winds up creating a culture where
that is important, where they really embody that importance to
their organization, what you find is that people step up.
They not only matter, but they realize that their actions
can help the company, and they're excited to do those
even more often. And you know, the end result of
(29:01):
the story is that Barry wey Miller, you know, not
only survived the economic downturn, but has gone on to
become a kind of juggernaut of the manufacturing industry, pulling in,
you know, three billion dollars in annual sales a year
in part because they created this sort of culture of
belonging and care.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Beautiful. What a powerful example.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
I heard a conversation, an interview with you years ago
that inspired me to make a happy list that I
put on my phone, which I revisit on a regular basis. Francis,
you'll be delighted to note that you make a number
of appearances on the happy list.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Delighted and relieved and relieved and relieved.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Do you have your own happiness list, Lorie, and can
you give us a couple entries on it?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (29:45):
I mean I do keep a list of delights. They're
different ways to do the happiness list. It's like stuff
that makes you happy, things you're grateful for. Lately, I've
been into delights, which are just things that you notice
in the world that almost make you like, you know,
put your hands up in the air and say, oh
my gosh, what a delight, And they're really silly things.
Like the other day, I was walking down the street
and there was just somebody who's like just jamming out
(30:08):
to some really old cool eighties rock, you know, in
his car, thinking he was alone, but you get to
see the like headbanging, and I was like, you know,
that is just such a delight. And and honestly, you know,
the other thing on my list is just I get
to with this podcast just talk to so many interesting folks,
interesting folks like you all my amazing guests, from Bob
Chapman to others. And that's just a delight that I
(30:29):
have this role where I get to hear people's incredible
stories and share them with others. And so the delight
List includes the things from the from the tiny to
the to the big. And my husband Mark is on
there as well, so he's he's often featured on the
Delight List too.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Beautiful. Well, it's been such a privilege to host you
and have this conversation fans, very big fans and fans, yeah,
which I was impossible to imagine.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
Thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
So, Francis I see your recruiting.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
Gears speaking of your academic job.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yes, Laurie is currently at Yale, is what I'd like
to say to our listeners currently, but let's stay tuned
for the future.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
So what surprised you during this conversation? What do you
hope listeners take away from it?
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I feel like so many light bulbs went off on it.
So what surprised me is how much belonging matters, which
is something that we think about a lot, But how
much mattering matters is another one. I mean that's and
I watch you do this all the time, in really
like zoning in on helping people come up with the
(32:06):
essence of what they're doing that's going to matter a lot,
and you really and good You often give them titles
to put that structure.
Speaker 4 (32:13):
So stingy about the titles, My God, hand them all out,
you know. The I am not the academic in this relationship,
but one of my big takeaways is that is that
my intuition has a lot of data behind it. And
all the beautiful researchers that she referenced in that conversation,
(32:36):
which is I'm so grateful that there are so many
fantastic people doing the work to kind of back up
our intuition on not our intuition, capital our intuition on
this that this, you know, this is such a powerful
lever for well being, not just inside organizations but society
(33:00):
writ large. If I may invoke my favorite academic phrase, like,
this is really the ballgame. I think it's really the ballgame.
And it's you know, it's like everything we talk about
inclusion and performance and you know the idea of like
bringing your humanity into the workplace, and that also jump
starting impact and performance and all of your other hopes
(33:23):
and dreams, like all of you know, all of those
hopes and dreams they run through through happiness, your own
happiness and the happiness of other people. And to your point,
those things are intimately connected. So I'm just thrilled that
we're able to share this conversation with our listeners. All right,
(33:44):
Fixable listeners, thank you for being part of this conversation.
As always, reach out to us if there's a problem
you're struggling with, or if there's someone you want to
hear from, or you suggest we bring on the show.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 4 (33:58):
Email us, call us, text us Fixable at ted dot com.
Or two three four Fixable that's two three four three
four nine two two five three Fixable is brought to
you by the Ted Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's
(34:21):
hosted by me Anne Morris.
Speaker 5 (34:22):
And me Francis Fry.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
Our team includes Izzy Carter Constanza, Guyardo band Ban Chang,
Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne high Lash. This episode was mixed
by Louis AT's story Yard.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever
you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check
us out.
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