You can be happier at work — here's how from Fixable AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

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Episode: You can be happier at work — here's how from Fixable

Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 00:34:39

Episode Shownotes

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary

In this episode of 'The Happiness Lab,' Dr. Laurie Santos discusses workplace happiness with Frances Frei and Anne Morriss from 'Fixable.' They explore the significance of fostering positive emotions, belonging, and purpose among employees. The conversation delves into the concept of 'time famine,' highlighting the balance of free time for enhanced well-being. The hosts also emphasize the impact of human connections, job crafting, and the role of employers in creating a supportive environment. Key strategies include hiring practices that promote friendships and prioritizing an inclusive culture, ultimately leading to improved employee satisfaction and organizational success.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (You can be happier at work — here's how from Fixable) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_10
Pushkin.

00:00:31 Speaker_03
Francis, kick us off today. What made you happy this week?

00:00:35 Speaker_02
Two words, Caitlin Clark. 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 my what made me happy this week? I have a new Caitlin Clark jersey.

00:00:55 Speaker_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. Which I wear every time I watch the game. sparking joy for the rest of us as well. Can I ask a follow-up question?

00:01:12 Speaker_03
Yeah. We just did a great episode on routines. Do you have a game day routine for watching Caitlin play?

00:01:19 Speaker_02
Oh, 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.

00:01:28 Speaker_02
And they're teenage boys, they don't register. and plan ahead. But that's where it begins. And then there is a cascade of planning that I keep checking the clock.

00:01:38 Speaker_02
I keep saying, every time I see you, I say what time the game is, any time I think of anything. And then I set up on the couch so that my feet are elevated. I'm watching, I have my apple juice and my pretzels as I watch, and I get ready to go.

00:01:52 Speaker_02
But I need a light. Nobody can sit right next to me. I need a lot of space. I have a lot of movement.

00:01:56 Speaker_03
Nobody wants to sit right next to you for this experience. I'm not sure I'm ready to dignify this set of activities by calling it a ritual, but it is what you do. Every single time. Every single time. Yeah. All right.

00:02:08 Speaker_03
Let's let's get into today's conversation. The secret memo to happiness at work. Our guest is the expert on happiness.

00:02:18 Speaker_02
Tell the people who she is. Oh, Professor Lori 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.

00:02:32 Speaker_02
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 alluring to me.

00:02:41 Speaker_03
Yes, something like a full quarter of the entire student body takes this class every year.

00:02:46 Speaker_02
That is amazing to me. I think if all courses were voluntary, there wouldn't be another course that a quarter of the student body would take.

00:02:54 Speaker_03
It's amazing. 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.

00:03:06 Speaker_03
I've been a follower for years, where she keeps this conversation going and talks with experts about the latest science on happiness.

00:03:13 Speaker_02
I can't wait to get into this. I have so many questions and so much to learn.

00:03:29 Speaker_00
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00:04:57 Speaker_03
Dr. Laurie Santos, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on the show. We are very big fans of yours. Let me start here. What parts of your own story would surprise your younger self?

00:05:10 Speaker_11
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 humans special.

00:05:20 Speaker_11
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 over 20 years.

00:05:32 Speaker_11
I got interested in the wellbeing work in part because I saw in my students the kind of crisis that so many young people are experiencing today.

00:05:39 Speaker_11
I took on this new role at Yale where I became a head of college on campus, which meant I was living with students and hanging out with them in the dining hall.

00:05:47 Speaker_11
And that was when I really saw just how much students were struggling these days, students in my college who were experiencing. depression and anxiety, having panic attacks, you know, experiencing suicidality.

00:05:57 Speaker_11
Like it was much rougher than I assumed things were, you know, among young people today.

00:06:02 Speaker_11
And so that was when I developed this new focus and asked, OK, 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?

00:06:16 Speaker_11
And I realize 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.

00:06:28 Speaker_03
Yeah, I was gonna 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.

00:06:41 Speaker_03
Is there anything we can learn from monkeys about what makes us happier?

00:06:45 Speaker_11
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, one of the things is like 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.

00:06:57 Speaker_11
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.

00:07:08 Speaker_11
They're 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 far too often we just spend so much time worried about what's going to happen and planning for the future.

00:07:20 Speaker_11
If we could just kind of be in flow in whatever we're doing in the present moment, I think we'd all feel a lot better. I love that.

00:07:28 Speaker_03
So this is a show about work.

00:07:30 Speaker_03
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.

00:07:43 Speaker_03
We use a lot of euphemisms for happiness at work. Well-being, satisfaction, sentiment. It almost feels too audacious to kind of name happiness as the goal.

00:07:56 Speaker_03
Are these all the same things or is there something specific about happiness that you're trying to capture in your work?

00:08:03 Speaker_11
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.

00:08:14 Speaker_11
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 at work.

00:08:24 Speaker_11
But I think that term well-being 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.

00:08:31 Speaker_11
And so I think that's what the terms are trying to capture, this 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.

00:08:41 Speaker_11
And so I think when push comes to shove, we're going to really see purpose 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.

00:08:52 Speaker_03
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.

00:09:06 Speaker_03
So can you tell us about this counterintuitive finding?

00:09:09 Speaker_11
Yeah, I mean, this is a lot of the work of Carrie Mollinger and her colleagues, 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.

00:09:22 Speaker_11
You know, work by Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School has really shown that we kind of are experiencing a dearth of what she calls time affluence, this sort of subjective sense that we have some free time.

00:09:32 Speaker_11
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.

00:09:42 Speaker_11
In fact, she has one statistic that if you self-report being really time famished, that's as much of a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. Most of your listeners would be pretty upset if they lost their job tomorrow.

00:09:54 Speaker_11
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.

00:10:04 Speaker_11
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, right?

00:10:12 Speaker_11
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.

00:10:24 Speaker_03
I love it, it's so intuitive. I think my ceiling is, my window is actually smaller. I think it's, yeah, three hours max and I start getting restless. I can go longer.

00:10:36 Speaker_11
Yeah, you can go like that.

00:10:37 Speaker_11
Well, 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.

00:10:51 Speaker_11
For everybody, there's going to be some individual differences there. Right. You know, so I think when we talk about these prescriptions, their overall good for people. But my advice is always, hey, try it out yourself.

00:11:01 Speaker_11
Do the experiment on what this feels like for you. And then you can often come up with your own sweet spot.

00:11:07 Speaker_11
And so I think that that's good advice when it comes to 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.

00:11:16 Speaker_03
That's liberating. All right, we really wanna get into some tactics with you, because it's one piece of your work that's so powerful. And we're gonna do this in two parts.

00:11:24 Speaker_03
So the first part is how to make ourselves happier at work, and then how to enable the happiness of other people. So first, make the case to our listeners to do some work here.

00:11:38 Speaker_03
What does the data say about happier workers, their own experience of being on the job?

00:11:44 Speaker_11
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?

00:11:54 Speaker_11
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.

00:12:02 Speaker_11
You know, think back to the last time you were feeling an overwhelming amount of negative emotion. you probably weren't thinking super clearly or making big innovative decisions. Like you were triaging, right? You were just getting stuff off your desk.

00:12:14 Speaker_11
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.

00:12:20 Speaker_11
And we'll reap all the usual kind of rewards that come with that, whether that's a higher level of salary or more accolades and promotions at work. will just wind up doing better.

00:12:29 Speaker_02
I imagine that people will, an early question people will ask is, well, if I'm doing really well, I'm happy. So how do we know about the correlation versus causality?

00:12:40 Speaker_11
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.

00:12:51 Speaker_11
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 Quincy M.D. You know, these shows were like doctors get these kind of tough problems.

00:13:02 Speaker_11
That's 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.

00:13:13 Speaker_11
So it was kind of they were 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?

00:13:22 Speaker_11
And so that's just a kind of local, you know, put yourself in a good mood when there's a tricky task on the line.

00:13:27 Speaker_11
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 idea is that we, too, will be performing a little bit more innovatively and a little bit better at work.

00:13:38 Speaker_11
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, social psychologists have long known that emotion is contagious, right?

00:13:49 Speaker_11
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?

00:13:56 Speaker_11
You, 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. Seagal Barsaid used to call this affective spirals, right?

00:14:10 Speaker_11
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.

00:14:22 Speaker_11
I often hear people ask, well, what can I do to make my coworkers happier on the job? It's like, well, actually, if you focus on becoming happier yourself on the job, then that will have a huge effect on your team members.

00:14:33 Speaker_11
Sometimes that can give the really type A folks some permission to take care of themselves because you recognize it as a mechanism for caring for others too. That's a beautiful reframe.

00:14:44 Speaker_03
I love that. So you gave 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.

00:14:57 Speaker_03
We wanna talk about two of the tips that really struck us and are very aligned with our own work and our own experience of work.

00:15:05 Speaker_03
So one strategy you talked about was something 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.

00:15:21 Speaker_03
So tell us about this approach.

00:15:23 Speaker_11
Yeah, so this is an approach that comes from Amy Resnensky, who used to be my colleague at Yale and now is at the University of Pennsylvania. Job crafting is exactly what you said it was.

00:15:31 Speaker_11
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.

00:15:40 Speaker_11
You know, positive psychologists have long talked about this set of character strengths that all of us have.

00:15:45 Speaker_11
You know, there are things like humor and bravery and a love of learning and a zest for life, prudence, you know, any kind of value that you might think, you know, is a good thing for humans to have.

00:15:55 Speaker_11
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.

00:16:05 Speaker_11
Others of us like care about humor or sort of social connection, right? We each have these different strengths.

00:16:10 Speaker_11
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.

00:16:22 Speaker_11
Your supervisors will also say you work better. And I love Amy's work because she actually studied job crafting in hospital janitorial staff workers, right?

00:16:30 Speaker_11
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.

00:16:41 Speaker_11
But even in this very kind of constrained job description, Amy finds that around a third of these janitorial staff workers wind up job crafting. They wind up building in some of their strengths.

00:16:52 Speaker_11
And Amy tells these really beautiful stories in her work. She talks about one staff member who

00:16:57 Speaker_11
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.

00:17:06 Speaker_11
But he said his job wasn't 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.

00:17:16 Speaker_11
And he had this standard kind of shtick that he did where he joked about like, my God, you vomited again. Now I'm getting over time. Like, we'll do a little, you know, handshake behind the back to keep this going.

00:17:24 Speaker_11
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. And another example that Amy talks about is a staff worker who worked in a in a coma ward.

00:17:35 Speaker_11
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 and sort of thinking that that kind of creative infusion

00:17:46 Speaker_11
maybe would help patients recover, who knows. But it meant something to her that she was able to do it, right? I mean, I think the key is clear here. Like, no manager told these employees to be doing this stuff.

00:17:56 Speaker_11
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.

00:18:09 Speaker_03
Yes, no, this one is really intuitive to me. And I'm someone who has 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.

00:18:23 Speaker_03
All right, the second tip that really struck us was about the power of human connection and feeling like you really belong in the workplace.

00:18:34 Speaker_03
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?

00:18:48 Speaker_11
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 it's like a lot of people reject. I see this a lot in really younger workers.

00:18:58 Speaker_11
You know, my college students have made claims like, you know, you don't go to work to make friends or, you know, get in and out of there. Right.

00:19:04 Speaker_11
I think especially in the remote work culture in which a lot of young people have found themselves, you know, during their start of work, this is the kind of thing that we see comes up a lot. But the evidence suggests just the opposite, right?

00:19:15 Speaker_11
You perform better if you feel connected at work. One of the main things that predicts happiness at work is a sense of belonging.

00:19:21 Speaker_11
And one of the main things that predicts a sense of belonging at work is saying yes to the question, do you have a best friend at work?

00:19:28 Speaker_11
In fact, some folks have made the claim that we could make 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.

00:19:38 Speaker_11
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.

00:19:47 Speaker_11
You know, we talk about the weather or, you know, what happened at the Olympics and so on.

00:19:51 Speaker_11
But we don't go into the more 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.

00:20:00 Speaker_11
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.

00:20:11 Speaker_11
This is, again, something that we hate to do generally, but really if you're doing in the workplace, we feel like it'll make us look kind of needy or not able to do our jobs.

00:20:19 Speaker_11
But overall, when you ask a coworker for help, usually it gives them the chance to do something nice for you. It makes them feel needed. It increases their positive emotion, and that winds up making you feel more connected.

00:20:31 Speaker_11
And so those are just the kind of quick things we need to get more intentional about creating these friendships. And we do that from being a little bit more vulnerable and even asking for help when we need it.

00:20:39 Speaker_03
And the way you're defining vulnerable is not, you know, open the kimono and expose all of your deepest, darkest thoughts. It's really just showing up as an imperfect human being in the workplace and connecting with other people on that level.

00:20:56 Speaker_11
Yeah, there's this lovely effect that social psychologists have talked about, which they call the beautiful mess effect, which is this idea that 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.

00:21:11 Speaker_11
You don't want to get extreme messy, but the idea is showing that you occasionally need help and kind of being really grateful for that help winds up making you feel more connected to people, not less.

00:21:21 Speaker_02
So as someone 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.

00:21:36 Speaker_02
An idea I have had is recruit them and their friends. Does that fit into this? Do you have your best friend at work? Are you giving me cover for experimenting with this? idea. Yeah.

00:21:51 Speaker_11
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really smart strategy. Right. You know, some universities and business schools think in terms of what they call cohort hires. Right.

00:21:59 Speaker_11
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.

00:22:09 Speaker_11
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 maybe even are going to model the kinds of friendships that other colleagues would benefit from having too.

00:22:21 Speaker_11
So I'm into it. Drop the spousal hire and go for the BFF hire. It's great.

00:22:27 Speaker_03
I love it. It's radical. It's so simple, but it's radical. I love it. Well, this is a really nice pivot to looking at the employer lens on happiness here. So make the business case.

00:22:40 Speaker_03
Why is it worth it as a company, as a leader, to invest in the happiness of my people?

00:22:45 Speaker_11
Yeah, 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.

00:22:55 Speaker_11
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 at work.

00:23:09 Speaker_11
But there's a recent study that I love that paints an even more compelling business case for making your employees happier at work.

00:23:16 Speaker_11
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.

00:23:23 Speaker_11
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, right?

00:23:30 Speaker_11
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 15 million data points about how happy individual workers were at work.

00:23:42 Speaker_11
So they had ratings for over 5,000 different companies of on average, how happy are their employers based on these Indeed data. And so what the Oxford researchers did was they said, well, let's just make this sort of wellbeing composite score.

00:23:55 Speaker_11
So this is kind of the on average, how happy do your workers rate being based on these Indeed data. And they could make one of these scores for each individual company.

00:24:03 Speaker_11
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, which is, you know, shareholder value.

00:24:15 Speaker_11
Like, how well are different stocks doing of different companies? What they did was just to plot a correlation between the happier companies and look at what was happening with stock prices.

00:24:26 Speaker_11
What they found was a strong and significant correlation showing that the happier companies wound up having better stock prices.

00:24:35 Speaker_11
They actually took this one step further and said, well, you know, we have these usual metrics of economic success based on successful companies. We have, you know, the Dow Jones or the S&P 500. What if we make the well-being score 100?

00:24:49 Speaker_11
So these are the 100 companies in this Indeed data set that had the highest happiness ratings. And the researcher said, well, why don't we kind of plot that against the other standard metrics?

00:24:58 Speaker_11
So use this well-being score metric to compete against the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq and so on.

00:25:05 Speaker_11
They have this lovely graph in their paper which shows that this well-being 100 set of companies winds up beating the S&P and the Nasdaq and the Dow Jones at pretty much every point in the economic cycle of the last couple years. What does that mean?

00:25:20 Speaker_11
This is a very compelling case for every CEO to take seriously.

00:25:24 Speaker_11
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 the shareholders they're going to get, you know, in terms of the actual money over time, that you'll do better in that very important metric simply by making your workers happier.

00:25:41 Speaker_11
And what I love about this study is it didn't need to go that way. It could have been a really compelling ethical case for making your workers happy, but maybe you have to take a little bit of hit in terms of the money you pull back.

00:25:51 Speaker_11
No, 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.

00:26:00 Speaker_03
Okay, so say I'm the boss, I'm listening to this conversation, I buy it. Where would you coach me to begin?

00:26:08 Speaker_11
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?

00:26:21 Speaker_11
Because as an employer, that's what you'd want to intervene on. If it's higher salary makes people happier at work, you'd want to pay people more and so on. And what the researchers found was kind of surprising.

00:26:30 Speaker_11
The top thing on the list was workers' 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.

00:26:44 Speaker_11
So you think the things that you're doing matter at work, people care about what you do. I matter to the people at work. So there's this kind of reciprocal mattering plus your friendship at work.

00:26:53 Speaker_11
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 what's going to make your company the most money.

00:27:03 Speaker_11
And so if you're a C-suite exec 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 they're doing matters?

00:27:15 Speaker_11
And have I promoted situations that can increase friendship at work? Especially if you've 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.

00:27:28 Speaker_11
And so the data are pretty clear, that's the spot to intervene, to get the biggest kind of happiness boost to everyone in your organization.

00:27:35 Speaker_02
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.

00:27:49 Speaker_11
Yeah. I mean, I think that's the thing is you assume like I have to pay all this 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?

00:28:01 Speaker_11
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. He's the CEO of this manufacturing company called Barry Y. Miller.

00:28:15 Speaker_11
You know, they build kind of capital equipment for places like Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. It's like, you know, the standard kind of company where you wouldn't think building and belonging is going to matter to this kind of organization.

00:28:27 Speaker_11
But they had a moment where they really had to think about people's mattering at work that came during the 2008 economic downturn.

00:28:35 Speaker_11
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.

00:28:44 Speaker_11
And Bob had this idea that, you know, if mattering at work is really important, I'm going to kick out, you know, 30% of my company.

00:28:52 Speaker_11
I'm going to leave the other 70% there thinking that that could have been them 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

00:29:03 Speaker_11
everyone in the entire company, including the C-suite down to 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.

00:29:17 Speaker_11
And everyone responded incredibly positively. Like people were thrilled. You know, they were so scared that they were going to lose their job.

00:29:25 Speaker_11
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 this sense of meaning and belonging.

00:29:38 Speaker_11
that a lot of them stepped 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.

00:29:46 Speaker_11
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, right?

00:29:57 Speaker_11
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.

00:30:09 Speaker_11
They not only matter, but they realize that their actions can help the company, and they're excited to do those even more often.

00:30:16 Speaker_11
And the end result of the story is that Barry Waymiller not only survived the economic downturn, but has gone on to become a kind of juggernaut of the manufacturing industry, pulling in $3 billion in annual sales a year.

00:30:28 Speaker_11
in part because they created this sort of culture of belonging and care.

00:30:32 Speaker_03
Beautiful. What a powerful example. 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.

00:30:45 Speaker_03
Frances, you'll be delighted to know that you make a number of appearances on the happy list. Delighted and relieved. And relieved. And relieved. Do you have your own happiness list, Laurie, and can you give us a couple entries on it?

00:31:00 Speaker_11
Yeah, I mean, I do keep a list of delights. There are different ways to do the happiness list. It's like stuff that makes you happy, things you're grateful for.

00:31:08 Speaker_11
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.

00:31:18 Speaker_11
Like the other day I was walking down the street and there was just somebody who was like just jamming out to some really old school 80s rock, you know, in his car thinking he was alone, but you could just see the like head banging. And I was like,

00:31:30 Speaker_11
You know, that is just such a delight. 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.

00:31:43 Speaker_11
And that's just a delight that I 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 tiny to the to the big. And my husband, Mark, is on there as well.

00:31:57 Speaker_11
So he's often featured on the Delight List, too.

00:32:01 Speaker_03
Beautiful. Well, it's been such a privilege to host you and have this conversation. Big fans. Very big fans.

00:32:07 Speaker_02
And now bigger fans.

00:32:08 Speaker_03
Yeah, which was impossible to imagine. Thanks so much.

00:32:26 Speaker_01
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00:33:34 Speaker_10
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month is all about gratitude. And so today I wanted to give a shout out to my mom. Mom, thanks for everything you do.

00:33:43 Speaker_10
I get to give a nice shout out to my mom, but there's someone else we should all be giving a shout out to, ourselves. It's sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we're all trying our best, and in this crazy world, that's not always easy.

00:33:55 Speaker_10
So here's a reminder to send some thanks to the people in your life that you love, including yourself. And a great way to extend gratitude to yourself is through therapy. Therapy can help you learn positive coping skills and how to set boundaries.

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00:34:46 Speaker_05
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00:35:18 Speaker_03
So Frances, I see you're recruiting, speaking of your academic job. She's terrific.

00:35:29 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:40 Speaker_03
So what surprised you during this conversation? What do you hope listeners take away from it?

00:35:47 Speaker_02
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.

00:36:01 Speaker_02
I mean, that's and I watch you do this all the time and in really like zoning in on helping people come up with the essence of what they're doing, that's going to matter a lot. And you really are good. You often give them titles to put the structure.

00:36:18 Speaker_03
People are 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 my intuition has a lot of data behind it.

00:36:35 Speaker_03
And all the beautiful researchers that she referenced in that conversation. I'm so grateful that there are so many fantastic people doing the work

00:36:48 Speaker_03
to kind of back up our intuition, not our intuition, capital O, our intuition on this, that this is such a powerful lever for wellbeing, not just inside organizations, but society writ large, if I may invoke my favorite academic phrase, like this is really the ball game.

00:37:12 Speaker_03
I think it's really the ballgame.

00:37:14 Speaker_03
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 jumpstarting impact and performance and all of your other hopes and dreams, like all of, you know, all of those hopes and dreams, they run through through happiness.

00:37:35 Speaker_03
your own happiness and the happiness of other people into your point, those things are intimately connected. So I'm just thrilled that we're able to share this conversation with our listeners.

00:37:48 Speaker_03
All right, Fixable listeners, thank you for being part of this conversation.

00:37:53 Speaker_03
As always, reach out to us if there's a problem you're struggling with, or if there's someone you wanna hear from, or you suggest we bring on the show, we'd love to hear from you. Email us, call us, text us, fixable at ted.com or 234-FIXABLE.

00:38:08 Speaker_03
That's 234-349-2253. Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris. And me, Frances Fry.

00:38:29 Speaker_03
Our team includes Izzy Carter, Constanza Gallardo, Ban-Ban Chang, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Highlash.

00:38:37 Speaker_02
This episode was mixed by Louis at StoryYard. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.

00:38:53 Speaker_01
For many of us, the holiday season means more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more of your personal information in more places you can't control.

00:39:03 Speaker_01
It only takes one innocent mistake, even if it's not your mistake, to expose you to identity theft.

00:39:11 Speaker_01
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00:39:22 Speaker_01
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00:39:38 Speaker_01
Gift yourself the peace of mind that comes with LifeLock and spend more time doing more of the holiday things you love. Visit LifeLock.com slash Pushkin and save up to 40% your first year. That's 40% off at LifeLock.com slash Pushkin.

00:39:57 Speaker_01
LifeLock, for the threats you can't control.

00:40:00 Speaker_07
This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering licensed therapists you can connect with via video, phone, or chat. Here's BetterHelp Head of Clinical Operations, Hesu Jo, discussing who can benefit from therapy.

00:40:15 Speaker_09
I think a lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day.

00:40:22 Speaker_09
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There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people.

00:40:45 Speaker_09
So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody.

00:40:49 Speaker_07
Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com today. That's betterhelp.com.

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