0:15

Pushkin. As

0:22

fans of this show probably know, I've thought

0:24

a whole lot about happiness and academic

0:26

settings, about how teens and young adults

0:29

can be happier at school or in college.

0:31

But when I attended the twenty twenty three south

0:33

By Southwest conference, I had a chance to

0:35

take part in a great panel which talked about

0:37

the challenges of maintaining our well being

0:40

at work. So at this year's south By

0:42

Southwest I returned to give a special

0:44

talk about what science says we should do to

0:46

thrive and are rapidly changing workplaces.

0:49

The audience in Austin really seemed to enjoy

0:51

it, so I wanted to share that talk with you

0:54

today. I hope you enjoy it. Hello,

0:57

Hello south By folks. Today

0:59

we're going to be talking about the future

1:02

of work, because the landscape of work is changing.

1:04

You know, take the fact that we're kind of dealing with technology

1:07

changes, right, We're all trying to figure out how these

1:10

new tools like chat, GBT

1:12

and AI are going to change the landscape

1:14

of how we do our creative work, how we do

1:16

knowledge work generally, right, this is something that's

1:18

kind of on our mind about the future of work.

1:21

On our mind about the future of work is also the question

1:23

of where we work, you know, like the fact

1:25

that we're no longer in these big office buildings

1:27

that so many companies have paid for, Like

1:29

the fact that we wind up working at home with

1:31

a lot of you know, destructions around us all

1:34

the time. But beyond that, we also have questions

1:36

about how the economy is shaping the future

1:38

of work and the fact that you know, some

1:40

of us might not be working in the same place that we

1:43

were working, you know, a couple of years ago. What

1:45

does that mean that these things are changing around,

1:47

especially for the folks who might have been laid off or

1:49

had some career changes, but also for the

1:51

folks that are in the same career that they were in before.

1:54

If your mindset is on your worries about

1:56

leaving work, if your mindset is on quiet

1:58

quitting, what is that doing to the nature

2:00

of work and how we focus on it. But this

2:03

is a session on happiness and

2:05

well being, and so we're going to be focused

2:07

on the question of what the future

2:09

of work says about happiness

2:12

and how our own mental health and our well being

2:15

might be involved in the future of work in

2:17

ways that we actually don't expect and I think it's

2:19

fair to say it's been basically a dumpster

2:22

fire for the last couple of years when it comes

2:24

to our collective well being. You know, for a

2:26

variety of reasons, we have just gotten through

2:28

a global pandemic, We are facing

2:31

a climate crisis that is unprecedented.

2:33

We have all these technologies that are coming in that

2:36

are spooking us about how we're going to change work

2:38

around, Like we're coming up on

2:40

a really terrifying election that

2:42

is going to be taking up all of our bandwidth. Right,

2:45

twenty twenty four has been a mess, But

2:47

I also think twenty twenty four has been a mess

2:49

when it comes to thinking about work.

2:52

So many of us are feeling much more burned

2:54

out, much more overwhelmed, much

2:56

more anxious about the certainty

2:58

of our work and the certainty of our workplaces

3:01

than ever before. And as an expert

3:03

on the science of happiness, this is actually

3:05

something that worries me about the future of work,

3:08

because we know a lot about what happens to people's

3:10

work when their well being takes a dive,

3:13

when they're feeling a little bit burned out, when they're

3:15

feeling a little bit overwhelmed, and the

3:17

answer is that it's not good. And

3:19

so when I got invited to kind of come out to south

3:21

By to have a conversation with you about the science

3:23

of happiness, I really wanted to focus

3:26

on work in particular, because

3:28

when I do the thing that most south By presenters

3:30

do, we kind of put on our south By glasses

3:32

and we look to the future. And my goal

3:34

as a speaker is to give you, Okay, what are we going

3:37

to know? What do we know right now that's going

3:39

to change the future of the workplace in five

3:41

years from now? What do you want to hear today that

3:43

you're going to take with you when you leave this place

3:45

that's going to prepare you for the next five

3:47

years, the next decade and so on. When

3:50

I hear that question, I actually don't want to talk about

3:52

AI. I don't want to talk about layoffs. What

3:54

I want to talk about is happiness

3:56

and mental health. And the reason I want

3:58

to talk about that is that if you look at what the science

4:01

suggests what the biggest priority

4:03

should be in the workplace of tomorrow, how

4:06

we want to think about the workplace of the future.

4:08

I think science gives us a clear answer,

4:11

and it's not that we need to focus on technologies

4:13

or some new kind of industry movement, whatever.

4:16

The thing we need to focus on is happiness.

4:19

And that's because so much data in the last

4:21

few years have started showing the

4:23

importance of happiness for our

4:25

workplace performance. In fact, what

4:27

science shows right now is that our happiness

4:29

seems to really matter for our

4:32

productivity, for our flourishing in the office,

4:34

for what we do. How do we know

4:36

this well, we know this from some older studies.

4:38

These are studies from the nineties and the early two

4:40

thousands that looked at the kinds of

4:42

things that predict your performance

4:45

bottom line, right, how you do in the workplace,

4:48

Things like what are the kinds of things you can do to make

4:50

sure you're going to get a job. We all

4:52

think of the normal LinkedIn things, Right,

4:54

you got to boost your resume, and you got to get certain

4:56

skill sets and so on. We don't

4:58

tend to think that the thing that you should prioritize

5:01

is your happiness and your mental health. But

5:03

the data seems to suggest that's actually an important

5:06

thing to prioritize. One study

5:08

by the University of Virginia psychologist Ed

5:10

Deaner actually looked at the kinds

5:12

of things that predict people's job obtainment,

5:15

not necessarily right now, but at times

5:18

in the future. And the thing that ed Deener

5:20

decided to study was people's level

5:22

of cheerfulness. He measured cheerfulness

5:25

in his undergrads at age eighteen and

5:27

used that level of cheerfulness to predict

5:30

whether or not those undergrads got a job,

5:32

not when they were age eighteen, but when they

5:34

were aged twenty seven and later at age

5:36

thirty seven. And what he found,

5:38

remarkably in a very famous paper, is

5:40

that your cheerfulness at age eighteen

5:43

is predictive. It's predictive of whether

5:45

or not you get a job, whether you get a

5:47

job that you like, but also whether or

5:49

not you get a job where you're making a decent

5:51

amount of money. We often

5:53

think that money matters for happiness,

5:56

but we don't think that the causal arrow goes the

5:58

other way, Like if I was happier, I would be making

6:00

more money. But the data actually seemed

6:02

to suggest that that seems to be the case.

6:05

Now, you might worry about the statistic. Some

6:07

of you might be in the HR field, and you might be saying

6:09

to yourself, are we paying the happy people more? Money.

6:12

That seems really sketchy. We got to get on top of

6:14

that, like, no, no, that's not actually

6:16

what's happening. What's happening is that

6:18

happy people are performing better pretty

6:21

much by every metric of innovative performance.

6:24

It seems like happy people are actually

6:26

doing better in their jobs. One of

6:28

my favorite studies that looked at this looked in a particular

6:30

industry profession. They brought doctors

6:32

into the lab, medical doctors, and

6:35

gave doctors a sort of tough medical

6:37

diagnosis. If you're a fan of these

6:39

like TV shows where doctors do these weird

6:41

things, like House or way back in

6:43

the day QUINCYMD, where they have these like weird

6:45

medical things. I watch these a lot in a bit of a hypochondriac,

6:48

so I'm familiar with these. These are the problems

6:50

that they gave doctors in this study. These kind of hard

6:52

like hard to figure out problems. But

6:54

half of the doctors in this study get to be in a

6:57

put in a good mood. First, they just got to watch

6:59

a couple of silly cat videos on YouTube.

7:01

What happens to people's performance? What

7:03

the researchers find is that the doctors who are

7:06

in the good mood wind up statistically

7:08

coming up with better solutions,

7:10

the more innovative solutions. Just

7:13

being in a good mood winds up, allowing

7:15

us to think a little bit more creatively.

7:18

Now I'm telling you the study on this, but in some ways

7:20

I didn't need to tell you that study. Right.

7:23

Think to the last time that you were feeling the

7:25

opposite of that cat video mood where

7:27

you were just kind of super overwhelmed and kind

7:29

of you know, just really depressed or anxious. You

7:32

weren't thinking creatively, you were triaging. You're

7:34

taking all your ideas in the like tiniest form

7:36

possible. Right, Our minds narrow in when we're

7:39

not feeling good, and the data suggests

7:41

that if we're not feeling good at work, our minds

7:43

are going to narrow in in ways that might negatively

7:45

affect our performance, and that finding

7:48

a path to positive emotion might

7:50

be one of the best ways to increase our productivity

7:53

at work. And so that's all

7:55

the science showing that happiness matters for our

7:57

performance. We've kind of known about that and

7:59

little fits and starts over the past few

8:01

years, but in just the last

8:03

year or so, we've been getting a different

8:05

metric of how happiness affects our performance,

8:08

which is the but it doesn't just affect the performance of

8:10

individuals. A happiness at

8:12

work seems to be affecting a company's

8:15

profits. And this is the time when I think

8:17

people start paying attention, because as soon as it starts

8:19

affecting the real bottom line, like how

8:21

much money a company is making, all of a

8:23

sudden, now people are starting to pay attention. And

8:26

I think this data is best shown

8:28

in a really cool recent working paper.

8:30

This is my favorite working paper of the

8:32

last year in twenty twenty three, and

8:35

it was a paper that was put together by researchers

8:37

at the University of Oxford and a company

8:39

that's of high prominence here in Austin. Indeed,

8:42

some of you might know, indeed, some of you might have been

8:44

on indeed, if you haven't been on

8:46

indeed, indeed is this job website where you can

8:49

look for jobs, but also you can rank everything

8:51

about your current job, or you can bring

8:54

your salary and your compensation, your work

8:56

life balance, but also your happiness.

8:58

And so these researchers that indeed had this idea,

9:00

they said, hang on, there are fifteen million

9:03

hosts plus on indeed about

9:05

people's happiness at work. Has anybody

9:08

ever actually looked at what that happiness at

9:10

work predicts? For example, does

9:12

it predict how well companies are doing in

9:14

terms of their profits? Is there a correlation

9:16

between people's happiness at work or average

9:19

happiness at work in an individual company

9:21

and the profits that that company is making. And

9:24

so they took these fifteen million

9:26

plus data points over thousands

9:28

of different companies, and they looked

9:30

and it turns out these things are correlated.

9:33

I'm showing you right now the graph from their working

9:35

paper, and what you're seeing is the gross profits

9:37

on one axis, and these indeed

9:39

well being score, which is kind of a metric of people's

9:41

happiness at work, their sense of purpose

9:44

and so on. But basically, what you see is

9:46

this lovely correlation where the companies who

9:48

have the happiest workers are making

9:50

the most money. Now, all of a sudden,

9:52

the c suite folks are paying attention because this is

9:55

mattering for their profits. But these

9:57

researchers didn't just do that. They actually did one other

9:59

thing that I love. I can't help again, but kind

10:01

of nerdily share with you the graph. They said, well,

10:03

if this is true that the happier companies are

10:05

making the most money. Maybe we need

10:08

a different econom index. Some

10:10

of you might have heard about, like the SNP five

10:12

hundred, right, which is like, you know, these top five hundred

10:15

companies where if you invest you'll probably make some money.

10:17

They said, what if we make a kind of SMP

10:19

one hundred of the top one hundred

10:22

happiest companies in the INDEED data

10:24

set, and we plot how the stocks of

10:26

that company did against maybe the SMP

10:28

five hundred and all these other indicators

10:30

of economic success. And that's

10:32

the graph I'm going to show you. Now. You'll see

10:34

on the bottom are these orange, purple, and

10:37

green lines. That's the SMP five hundred,

10:39

the Dow Jones, the Nasdaq. Those are the normal

10:41

things we see in the Wall Street Journal that are the

10:43

indicators of economic success.

10:45

And I'm looking across time as though

10:48

you'd invested one thousand bucks back

10:50

in January twenty twenty in these companies,

10:52

how would your money be doing over time? But

10:54

you'll notice there's that blue bar that tends to

10:57

be at the top of this graph. That's

10:59

this INDEED top one hundred kind

11:01

of SMP one hundred of the happiest companies

11:04

and what they're finding is that pretty much at every

11:06

point in the economic cycle over the last couple

11:08

of years, these top one hundred companies

11:11

we're beating out in terms of how much money

11:13

they're stock, We're breaking all these other

11:15

kind of indicators. What does this mean.

11:17

This means that what the research is showing

11:20

is that happier companies make more money.

11:22

If your employees are happy, that

11:25

might be a critical factor. And whether your

11:27

startup is going to succeed, or whether your

11:29

country, whether your company gets out of the economic

11:31

slump that we're all in right now, these

11:34

things matter. And so that's

11:36

why I think, with my kind of south By glasses on,

11:38

we need to be paying attention to well being. Yeah,

11:41

AI and worries about the economics and all this stuff

11:43

that's important. But I think that over

11:45

the next five to ten years, smart

11:47

businesses are going to start paying attention

11:50

to their employee well being. Hopefully

11:52

partly out of kind of doing the moral thing for

11:54

a company, because you want your employees to feel good and

11:56

succeed, but I think partly out of a like

11:58

fully purely capitalistic

12:00

move of like, how are we going to make the most company,

12:03

how are we going to make the most money. We make

12:05

the most money by having the happiest workers.

12:07

But there's a question of like how do we do that? And

12:10

that's what I'm going to talk to you about. In the rest of this

12:12

talk. We're going to kind of dig into like, Okay,

12:14

how do you make a happy workplace? And

12:16

how can we as individuals improve our own

12:18

happiness in the workplace so our individual performance

12:21

can flourish and thrive and so on. And

12:24

so we're going to walk through the five tips that science

12:26

shows us about how we can do that, how we can

12:28

improve our well being in the workplace.

12:31

And each of these tips, I should say, each of these

12:33

tips have this feature where we're going to

12:35

walk through a misconception we have about

12:38

this right, We're going to see where our mind gets

12:40

it wrong about happiness in the workplace

12:42

and what we can do to do better, starting

12:44

with tip number one, which is, if we want to be happier

12:47

in the workplace, we need to find

12:49

ways to acknowledge and use our negative

12:51

emotions a little bit more wisely. Right,

12:54

Like, we're all feeling a little overwhelmed, we're

12:56

all feeling a little anxious, we're all feeling a little

12:58

bit upset, frustrated by what's going

13:00

on. That's kind of the general state

13:02

of these things. That's why, in this a conference where

13:04

there's so many other cool sessions this morning, y'all

13:06

are filling the seats in this one because we all want

13:08

to deal with these negative emotions. The

13:11

problem, though, is that we have this misconception about

13:13

how we should do that. I think we all think

13:15

negative emotions not good at

13:17

work, not good in general, don't feel good.

13:19

I'm gonna squish him down, you know, stiff upper

13:22

lip, hustle culture. I'll just pretend I'm

13:24

not feeling that overwhelmed or that sadness

13:26

or that frustration or whatever. Turns

13:28

out, scientists have gone out and studied what happens

13:30

when we suppress our emotions. Does that positively

13:33

affect our performance? Turns out no,

13:36

We know this from some cleverest studies. One of my

13:38

favorite it comes from the neuroscientist

13:40

James Gross at Stanford. He does these

13:42

studies where he brings subjects into the lab and

13:44

has them do the opposite of watching that funny

13:46

cat video. He has them watch really sad videos.

13:49

But he tells subjects, whatever you do,

13:51

make it so that no one knows you're feeling sad,

13:53

so trying to suppress their emotions. Question

13:56

is, what's the consequences of doing this? And

13:58

he tests a few consequences, what happens to subjects

14:01

performance on a memory task, on a decision

14:03

making task. The what he finds is that subjects

14:05

do really bad. Right if you're going to using

14:08

all your energy to hold down those emotions,

14:10

you can't remember stuff, you can't perform well.

14:12

Our performance tanks when we're suppressing

14:14

our emotions, but we also have negative

14:16

consequences for our bodies. It turns

14:19

out gross measures people's cardiac stress

14:21

and this short little laboratory task and

14:24

he finds that even suppressing your emotions,

14:26

after this really tiny negative

14:28

video, you can actually see evidence

14:30

that these subjects are going through cardiac stress.

14:33

Point is, our theory about how

14:35

we deal with negative emotions is kind of wrong.

14:37

We think, squish them down, pretend they're not there,

14:40

We're going to be fine, And the data suggests

14:42

that doesn't work. The data suggests we need a new

14:44

way to think about negative emotions, both at

14:46

work and kind of in general. And

14:49

the way I think we need to think about negative emotions

14:51

is not to avoid them, but to use

14:53

them as the signal they are evolutionarily

14:56

speaking, you know, natural selection doesn't

14:58

build in extraneous stuff

15:00

to our psychological systems that we

15:03

don't need. Our negative emotions

15:05

are kind of like the alert system on our car.

15:07

You know, if your brake light goes on, your gas

15:09

light goes on, that's kind of a pain in the butt. It means

15:11

you have to deal with something, but it's an important

15:14

alert because if you don't deal with that thing, worse

15:16

things are going to happen. You're going to run out of gas, so your

15:18

engine's going to blow up on the highway.

15:21

That's what negative emotions are doing. They're trying

15:23

to be an alert signal that we need to pay

15:25

attention to so we can ask ourselves,

15:27

how can we nurture ourselves? What can we do to

15:29

take care of ourselves. That's how we

15:31

need to reframe emotions, both in general

15:33

and at work. Our signals of overwhelm

15:35

are telling us something important. They're telling us

15:38

we need to take something off our plate. Our

15:40

signals of anxiety or sadness are telling

15:42

us something important. They're telling us that something

15:44

is a miss that we need to take action

15:46

and change. And if we ignore that it's

15:48

kind of like ignoring the gaslight, you're

15:51

going to run out of gas. And so the question

15:53

though, is, well, how can we do that? What are some practical

15:55

strategies we can use to kind of

15:57

notice those emotional signals, acknowledge

16:00

them, and kind of use them more wisely. And

16:02

one of my favorite super practical strategies

16:05

comes from the meditation teacher Tara Brack,

16:07

a psychologist and meditation teacher. I'm going

16:09

to flash up some of these books and I think these are

16:11

like essential reading if you want to learn more

16:13

about your well being. But Tara Brack

16:15

actually has a meditation practice

16:18

she uses to kind of allow and

16:20

non judgmentally and kind of

16:22

allow your emotions. And it's a method

16:25

that she calls RAIN, which is an

16:27

acronym for recognize, allow,

16:29

investigate, and nurture. And so,

16:31

let's say you're at work and you receive

16:34

some email that makes you feel really frustrated,

16:37

or you look at the news and you read I don't

16:39

know literally anything, and you start to feel sad

16:41

and anxious and so on. Right, you remember,

16:43

oh, yeah, south By that Yale lady said

16:45

I could use RAIN, and you've already achieved

16:48

the first step which is the R to recognize.

16:50

You just recognize what's happening. I'm experiencing

16:53

a negative emotion right now, and you get

16:55

really curious. You categorize it. You say,

16:58

is this frustration with a side of

17:00

anxiety? Well, maybe it's pissed off

17:02

with a little spirit in there of loneliness, right

17:04

Like, get really creative and use

17:06

your adjectives about how you're feeling. You

17:09

can really describe it carefully. That's the R

17:11

step. But then you follow that with the

17:13

hard step. Allow. You say,

17:15

all right, I'm gonna take five minutes. I'm just gonna

17:18

sit here non judgmentally, allow

17:20

these feelings to be there just as there. I don't have

17:22

to love them, but I'm gonna sit with them.

17:25

The famous poet Roomy once talked about

17:27

negative emotions. Is this visitor who knocks

17:29

on your door that you didn't want to show up,

17:31

kind of the annoying neighbor. Right, But you don't kick them

17:33

out. You sit them down. You know, you invite

17:35

them in. They're gonna eventually do their thing and go.

17:38

That's the allow step for your emotions. You just

17:40

commit to hanging out with your emotions for a bit.

17:43

But you kind of want to give your mind something to do.

17:45

When you're doing that allow step, and

17:47

that's the next step. Investigate, You

17:49

say, all right, how does it feel

17:51

in my body when I'm feeling, you know, pissed

17:54

off with a side of lonely. Maybe my chest

17:56

is getting tight, maybe my brow is furrowing.

17:58

Maybe I have this enormous craving right, I

18:00

want to eat something, or I want to have a drink or check

18:02

my email. Don't do act on those just like, huh.

18:05

That is where my brain, my brain and my mind

18:07

goes when I'm feeling this stuff. And

18:09

the beauty of the investigate step is that so much

18:11

evidence suggests that emotions are

18:14

kind of like a wave. This is in clinical

18:16

practice what's often called urge surfing, where

18:18

if you pay attention to an emotion, you'll feel it a

18:20

little bit more. It'll kind of go up like a wave, but

18:23

then it'll just kind of crash down and do its thing.

18:25

The problem is we never hang out with our emotions,

18:28

non judgmentally long enough for them to do

18:30

that. That's the investigate step, But

18:32

the key is that you don't stop there. There's

18:34

one more letter in this rain practice and

18:37

for nurture and that's to

18:39

do something nice for yourself. Negative emotions don't

18:41

feel good. What can you take off your plate? What

18:44

can you do to help yourself take care of yourself?

18:46

Right? Practice is like rain,

18:48

I love because they've actually been studied in laboratory

18:51

settings. Rain, but also a whole host of practice

18:53

is like rain, where you allow your emotions

18:56

and non judgmentally say I'm having

18:58

a tough time, but I'm going to sit with it. And

19:00

research has shown that they can reduce burnout

19:03

in domains like palliative

19:05

care workers and in industry is like

19:07

for first responders. Right, These are who are

19:09

dealing with negative emotions really on

19:11

a daily basis, and practices like

19:13

these can help. So there are practices

19:15

that can also help us in all the industries

19:18

that I'm seeing in this room right. Finding

19:20

ways to acknowledge our negative emotions

19:22

and use them wisely. That's tip number one.

19:25

Now we get to tip number two, which is a mindset

19:27

shift. We have to overcome misconceptions

19:30

we have about our own productivity. And

19:33

that is the tip that we need to rethink not

19:35

just productivity, but how much we're

19:37

protecting what social scientists call

19:40

our time affluence. What

19:42

is time affluence. It's kind of a strange

19:44

term. Well, it's a term that social scientists

19:46

like the researcher Ashley Willin's at Harvard

19:49

Business School, have gotten really obsessed

19:51

with lately. It's defined as the

19:53

subjective sense that you feel wealthy

19:56

in time. You've got lots of time on

19:58

your hands. Right, some of you

20:00

are already furrowing. I can see. It's the opposite

20:02

of what many of you probably experience, which

20:04

is time famine, where you're literally

20:06

starving for time. And the research

20:08

shows that time famine works a lot like hunger

20:11

famine. It puts our bodies into flight or

20:13

flight mode. It's also really terrible

20:15

for our well being. In fact, Ashley

20:17

Willens's research suggests that if you self

20:19

report being time famished a lot of the

20:21

time, that's as bad for your

20:23

well being as if you self report being unemployed.

20:26

You know, you lost your job tomorrow, that would

20:28

suck. Just not having any time, or

20:30

feeling that you don't have any time is

20:32

as bad for your well being, which

20:35

is bad. Some of you are watching your

20:37

faces like, you know that's me. I feel so time

20:39

famished. What can I do? Well? I think

20:41

to figure out what we can do? We need to understand

20:43

the misconceptions that drove us here. Why are

20:46

we feeling so strapped for time? And

20:48

I think it's not because we're massa kiss. I

20:50

think we feel strapped for time because we think

20:53

that working as much as we work all the time

20:55

is essential for kind of achieving the things

20:57

we want to achieve in life. We want to get to eleven in

20:59

our careers and our kind of creativity

21:02

and so on, and we think, push, push, push,

21:04

and I'll just keep working all the time and

21:06

then I'll be quote unquote productive.

21:09

But does that really work or is this a misconception?

21:12

My favorite recent articulation of

21:15

how much this is a misconception comes

21:17

from this fabulous book by Cal Newport

21:19

called Slow Productivity. I just

21:21

interviewed Cal from my podcast The Happiness

21:24

Lab, and I think this book is also essential reading

21:26

for everyone. But Cal kind of walks

21:28

through this idea that, like, you know, these

21:30

days, we don't really have a great sense

21:32

of what productivity is. We

21:34

used to do, right, if you think back to the industries

21:37

that humans used to engage in, like think

21:39

like agriculture, we had a good way

21:41

to determine productivity. It was like amount

21:43

of time and resources per like corn,

21:45

Like it was really easy thing you measure like big bushel

21:48

of corn that dude's doing good, right, Or fast

21:50

forward to industries like the

21:52

assembly line and kind of making

21:55

stuff. That was another domain where we had

21:57

some pretty good ideas of productivity.

21:59

Right, amount of time per numbers

22:01

of card top parts getting put on these

22:03

you know, chevies. That was a good measure

22:05

of productivity. We had those back

22:08

then. But now how fast forward to the kind

22:10

of knowledge work that most of you in the room

22:12

do, and our definition of productivity gets

22:14

a little bit trickier. Like,

22:16

you know, I'm a knowledge worker in the podcast space,

22:18

I'm a podcast host, So like what counts

22:21

as productivity for me? Is it number

22:23

of episodes I make per time? Is

22:26

it the ratings? Is it the amount of ad revenue

22:28

I make? Right? Like, we don't have these good measures of productivity.

22:30

It's not as easy as with corn or when

22:33

we're producing cars and so on. And

22:35

Newport suggests that what we've done as

22:37

knowledge workers is that we've developed

22:39

a sort of proxy for our own productivity.

22:42

It's what he calls pseudo productivity

22:44

or just extreme visual

22:46

busyness. We feel like if our gcals

22:49

are filled with all these meetings and all this stuff

22:51

to do that must be productive. You

22:53

know, we even pick a particular time to do it,

22:55

you know, kind of nine to five where we fill that time

22:58

even if that's not our best, most productive time, because

23:00

that's like what you do. And Newport

23:03

argues that this is problematic because it means

23:05

that what we're going to reward ourselves with, or

23:07

we're going to kind of make kind of see really

23:09

feel like we're being productive, is whenever we're

23:11

just like doing stuff that looks visually

23:13

active. He argues that this is why we load

23:15

our days filled with like email and slack messages

23:18

and meetings at work and team meetings, because it feels

23:20

like we're doing something the company can see us we're actually

23:22

doing something. See. But he's like, that's

23:24

not the real knowledge work you want to get done.

23:26

We don't even know if this stuff is actually contributing

23:29

to the big projects you want to get through. But

23:31

it looks really visually busy, so you feel

23:33

kind of good about it. His argument is

23:35

that these kinds of things can be what he calls

23:37

productivity termites, where they

23:40

kind of all those emails and slack messages

23:42

go into your calendar, and just like a termite

23:44

eating away at the house, they eat away at the foundation

23:47

of the free time you have, such that when

23:49

you kind of go back and say, all right, I'm going to do the

23:51

big project and that big deep knowledge

23:53

work I want to work on, you can't do that

23:55

because, like the whole structure of your calendar is

23:58

broken down by all these slack

24:00

message answering and these tiny meetings and

24:02

these things. And that means that we're not being

24:04

as productive as we could be. Why.

24:07

Because we've made ourselves so tight I'm

24:09

famished in an effort to kind of feel

24:11

productive, We've killed our own time

24:13

affluence. And so the answer is that we

24:15

need a new way to think about our time and our

24:17

productivity. But how do we do that

24:20

well? I argue that the way we do that is

24:22

that we try to embrace a little bit more

24:24

time affluence, as uncomfortable

24:27

as that might be, and as many things as that

24:29

means. We need to take off our plate to

24:31

feel like we're a little bit less time famished.

24:34

Strategies for doing this involve kind

24:36

of thinking about whether you can kind of get rid

24:38

of some of those productivity termites. What

24:41

can it look like to kind of push email

24:43

or push slack messages only to sometimes

24:45

in the day, so you can feel like you

24:47

have these big stretches that feel quite

24:49

productive when you can work on things. Another

24:52

one of my favorite suggestions comes from

24:54

the psychologist Gal Zuberman, who

24:56

talks a lot about what he calls the yes

24:59

damn effect. So the yes dam effect

25:01

is like, you know, months and months ago, somebody's

25:04

like, hey, can you do this project report? Or Hey

25:06

can we set up this meeting for a couple hours, or hey

25:08

can you go to this conference? And it seems like it's

25:10

so far away, you're like yes, But then

25:12

time goes on and that date shows up and

25:14

you look in your calendar and that stupid thing is there, and you're

25:16

like, damn. That's the yes damn

25:19

effect. Zuberman

25:21

suggests we should embrace a different effect,

25:23

which he calls the no yay effect.

25:26

And the way the no ye effect works,

25:28

as you might guess, is that person's like, hey can use project

25:30

report? Can you do this thing? You commit

25:32

to saying no. You literally put on your calendar

25:34

how many no things you want to have, and you have to tick them

25:37

off the list. But you don't just say

25:39

no. You say, and when was that project supposed

25:41

to be due? The one I said, no too, when was it due?

25:43

Then you go in your calendar and you put

25:46

that on that date, you know, Monday, three weeks from now.

25:48

You're supposed to have that thing that you had to

25:50

do. And you look and you're like, I don't have to do that thing, and

25:52

you say yay. That's the no

25:54

yay effect. The point is that what we're

25:57

doing is we are aggressively

25:59

protecting our time. We are thinking

26:01

about our time and the same way we think about

26:03

our money where we want to prioritize

26:06

it. And in fact, research for Ashley Willand's

26:08

and her coll suggest that the more you focus

26:11

on time and put your investment into

26:13

time rather than money, the happier you'll be. Most

26:15

of you are at south By because you have at least some discretionary

26:18

income to come to events like this. Willins's

26:21

work suggests that the more you spend your discretionary

26:23

income to get back time that you give up

26:26

money to get time, the happier you will

26:28

be. And we can do this in really silly

26:30

ways that we often don't even think about.

26:32

I'm sure at some point some of you in the working

26:34

day, have gotten takeout or something like that. We

26:37

don't think of it as a savings in time, but

26:39

the research suggests we should. Right.

26:41

You know, say you go out and get pad tie or whatever,

26:43

that's noodles. You didn't have to cook, You didn't have

26:46

to look up the recipe and go to the grocery store to get

26:48

the peanut sauce. You probably saved what

26:50

hour and a half hour, forty five minutes?

26:52

What'd you do with that hour and forty five minutes? So

26:55

that's spending our money to get back more

26:57

time, but also making sure we're framing things

26:59

like that. A final way we can protect

27:02

our time affluence is to make good use

27:04

of the time we do have. Our time.

27:06

As you heard in these top productivity termites,

27:09

sometimes breaks our time up into these

27:11

little tiny chunks. This is what journalists

27:13

Bridget Schultz calls time confetti. It

27:15

was little pieces for you five minutes when that

27:17

Zoom meeting ends, or ten minutes if your kid falls

27:19

asleep. We think those are just such tiny

27:22

periods we don't do anything with them. But

27:24

Schultz suggests that we might want to invest

27:27

in that time confetti because when you add it up, it's

27:29

a huge sheet of paper that is like kind of

27:31

broken into these tiny pieces, and

27:33

so she recommends making what she calls a time

27:35

confetti wish list. This isn't

27:38

like work to dos, but like for you to do.

27:40

So maybe that's when you do your rain meditation or

27:42

some other self care practice. The key is

27:44

that instead of blowing that little piece of time confetti

27:47

scrolling on Reddit or Instagram or something

27:49

like that, you actually do something useful

27:51

with it. It makes you feel a little

27:53

bit more time affluent. So that's top

27:56

tip number two. We need to rethink

27:58

our idea that productivity is about

28:00

visible busyness. It's a filled calendar, it's

28:02

all that stuff. No to feel better,

28:04

we need to embrace a slower form

28:07

of productivity, one that says no to a

28:09

lot of this stuff so that we can have a yes

28:11

for when we really need it. But it's

28:13

worth noting that as folks in

28:15

the current culture that we're in, where you

28:17

know, busyness and lessl culture and girl

28:20

boss and eternalized capitalism rein zubream,

28:23

that's hard, right. The act of doing

28:25

that, saying no more, is hard, and

28:27

that's why we need tip number three, which is

28:29

another mindset shift that can help us with this,

28:32

which is that if we really want to protect our time, if

28:34

we really want to work better, we need to motivate

28:36

ourselves in the way that science suggests work

28:39

best, and that's by motivating ourselves

28:41

with what we're going to call self compassion.

28:44

As we mentioned, we all want to push ourselves. We all

28:46

want to get to eleven, right. I think that's always

28:48

been true, but lately, in the past five

28:50

to ten years, we've developed some mindset

28:53

notions about how we do that best,

28:56

and I think those are best summed up in the idea

28:58

of hustle culture, right, keep pushing yourself,

29:00

sleep when you're dead. All these things, these are the mantras

29:03

that we pick up because we assume

29:06

that's the best way to motivate ourselves. But

29:08

the research is starting to show that that just doesn't

29:10

work. That all these kind of mantras that

29:12

we have in our head is kind of instagram

29:15

like, you know, latching onto our brain

29:17

of how much we need to work more and keep grinding.

29:20

It actually doesn't work. It causes us to procrastinate,

29:23

It causes us to engage in a lot more self

29:25

criticism because we feel like our

29:28

work is our worth, and it's sort of never enough,

29:30

right, you kind of just keep pushing yourself

29:32

and pushing ourselves. And so this

29:35

is the misconception that the way to motivate

29:37

ourselves is to kind of scream at ourselves like a

29:39

drill instructor and like some like hustle

29:41

culture warrior. It kind of doesn't work

29:43

in the way we think. So how do we fix

29:45

this misconception. We need to develop

29:47

a better way to motivate ourselves,

29:50

a better way to think about how we motivate ourself

29:53

and the way that we get from a lot of recent science

29:55

is that we need to motivate ourselves better through

29:58

self compassion. Another fabulous

30:00

book if you're interested in this, is book by Kristin

30:03

Neff, who's a professor here in Austin. She's at ut

30:06

She has this book about self compassion, and

30:08

a lot of her work suggest that if we want to engage

30:10

in self compassion to motivate ourselves,

30:12

we need to remember that self compassion has

30:14

three parts. The first is something

30:16

that should be really familiar from Tip one,

30:19

recognizing your negative emotions. It's

30:21

the practice of mindfulness. You gotta

30:23

know what's going on. This sucks right now, I'm

30:26

having a really tired time, I'm feeling really

30:28

anxious, I'm feeling really ashamed. That's

30:30

mindfulness. You're recognizing what's happened,

30:32

first step of self compassion. But the

30:34

second step is you do something with that mindfulness.

30:37

You then say, but that makes sense

30:39

because I'm only human. This is something that

30:41

everybody goes through. It's normal

30:44

to fail, it's normal to screw up, it's normal

30:46

to feel overwhelmed. This is normal. It's a

30:48

common human experience. That's step number

30:50

two, common humanity. But you don't

30:52

end there. You ask yourself

30:55

what you can do to be kind to yourself. You

30:57

say, what can I take off my plate? How

30:59

can I help myself right now? What do I need

31:01

right now? You talk to yourself

31:03

as though you were a friend who'd showed up

31:05

at your house having the same problem, and

31:07

you talk to yourself like you would talk to that friend.

31:10

And I love this idea of talking to yourself

31:12

like you'd talk to a friend, because sometimes

31:15

when we think of practice as like self compassion,

31:17

especially from the hustle culture mindset, we

31:19

sometimes worry that it's like self indulgence,

31:21

like I'm being too nice to myself, I'm letting

31:23

myself off the hook. But if you think about

31:26

how you'd really talk to a friend that was

31:28

struggling, if they were really screwing

31:30

up, you probably wouldn't let them off the hook. You wouldn't

31:32

scream at them like some hustle culture warrior.

31:35

You'd talk to them kindly, with curiosity.

31:37

You'd be like, I don't know what's happening, but I'm

31:39

really worried about you. What can we do to fix this?

31:42

You'd be curious and you'd be problem solving. That's

31:44

how you talk to yourself, not self indulgence.

31:46

It's a form of compassion, and it's a

31:48

form of compassion that the research suggests

31:51

really works. In fact, Kristin Neff has

31:53

tested all the benefits of this practice

31:55

of self compassion and it has some incredibly

31:58

compelling ones. She's, for example,

32:00

done work on whether or not practices like self

32:02

compassion can reduce PTSD in

32:04

combat veterans, and she finds that

32:06

both with Iraqi and Afghani vetts, teaching

32:08

them these strategies of self compassion ahead

32:11

of time can reduce the rates of trauma

32:13

that these individuals come back with. Right, these are

32:15

really negative, nasty emotions, but

32:17

being nice to yourself through it can be incredibly

32:19

powerful. Kristin Neff also finds that being

32:22

nice to yourself can make it easier to be nice

32:24

to your future self. She finds that people who

32:26

engage in self compassion eat healthier, they

32:28

save more for retirement, they're better able

32:30

to prioritize their future selves, and

32:32

that includes a future self that has to work at

32:34

something that's a little scary. She finds

32:37

that practices like self compassion can reduce

32:39

things like procrastination, so it's a way

32:41

to get more done because you're not screaming at yourself

32:43

when you don't do things the way you think. She

32:45

also finds that self compassion is a great way

32:48

to practice compassion for other people.

32:50

So people with more self compassion show more self

32:52

compassion and their romantic relationships

32:54

with their kids, with their teammates on the job.

32:57

It's just a powerful way of feeling better

32:59

and so sounds great, But what are some practical

33:02

strategies we can use to find more self

33:04

compassion, especially if we're kind of infused

33:06

in that hustle culture. And one way that Christian

33:08

RECs amends that looks cheesy but it

33:11

works, is to engage in

33:13

compassionate self touch. So

33:15

think about the last time you had a bad day.

33:18

You know, if your parents are still around, you might have called

33:20

your mom, maybe saw her for coffee, she

33:22

gave you a hug or something, or you saw a friend,

33:24

your spouse. We tend to comfort each other with

33:26

a certain kind of touch. Kristin Neff says,

33:29

just do that to yourself. Look stupid,

33:31

but it works. Turns out your brains are dumb.

33:34

They don't know who's touching you. Right. It worked

33:36

useful in other context too, as we know. Right,

33:39

but you just do this to yourself. And because

33:41

we need practice, I'm going to ask all of you in the room

33:44

now to kind of do a little self

33:46

hug, a little kind of stroke on the arm. But

33:48

then that is a signal to you to

33:51

engage in new self talk. This is why I like this

33:53

touch practice. It like reminds you I got to talk

33:55

to myself differently, and you talk using

33:57

those strategies mindfulness. This is really

33:59

hard right now. I am struggling. This sucks.

34:02

I'm not doing well common humanity,

34:04

But that's normal, it's just human.

34:06

Stress is a part of life. Everyone struggles.

34:09

And then self kindness. What can I take

34:11

off my plate. What do I need right now?

34:14

Just asking that question to yourself when you're struggling can

34:16

be so powerful, what do I need right now? Again,

34:18

the research shows that, even though we don't

34:20

think it, this kind of self kindness

34:23

and self compassion is a much better way to

34:25

motivate ourselves than all that hustle

34:27

culture self criticism. So that's top

34:29

insight number three. We got to motivate

34:32

ourself with self compassion. The

34:35

question is, of course, what is it we're motivating

34:37

ourselves to do? What things should

34:39

we be doing more of it work to increase our flourishing

34:42

and reduce our risk of burnout. You'll

34:44

hear my best two tips on happiness at work

34:47

after the short break. So

34:53

far in my south By Southwest talk on happiness

34:55

at work, I've covered the importance of recognizing

34:58

when we're feeling sad, why we should

35:00

differentiate between actual productivity

35:02

and stressful busyness, and how we should

35:04

occasionally give ourselves a comforting hug.

35:07

In the second half of my talk to

35:09

the topic of tackling burnout, and

35:12

that gets us to tip number four, which is that if

35:14

we really want to fight burnout, the

35:16

research shows we need to craft our job

35:18

a bit so that it becomes a calling. Burnout

35:21

is something else that everybody's talking about at south

35:23

By because it's a thing. I think this

35:25

is also something we have a lot of misconceptions

35:27

about. We think it's just about emotional exhaustion,

35:30

but the research shows that burnout can be

35:32

more like an occupational problem. It's

35:34

kind of an interaction between you and your

35:37

job that we need to understand. And we know

35:39

this from the lovely work of Christina Maslak.

35:41

She is the scientific expert on burnout,

35:43

and she's walked through the kind of steps

35:45

that lead to burnout in an organization, the kind

35:48

of factors that wind up letting us feel

35:50

more burned out, and she's identified six.

35:52

I think of the six, there's ones that we often

35:55

think of, so things like workload, if your workload

35:57

is too much, or maybe the rewards aren't

35:59

too much, you're not getting paid enough for the work you're

36:01

doing. But there's one on this list that

36:03

the science has really narrowed in on. It's

36:05

particularly important. It's this last one,

36:08

values mismad. What's that we

36:10

get burned out when the values that we signed

36:12

up for to do a job don't match the

36:15

ones that we're experiencing in practice.

36:17

I think this is something that's really problematic.

36:19

For example, and lots of industries, but I'll just pick

36:21

one the healthcare industry. You're a nurse and you're

36:23

a doctor. You got into it because your value is helping

36:25

people. But on the ground, it feels like you're saving

36:27

money for the insurance companies or the hospital

36:29

and you're getting patients in it, and it's just like there's

36:32

a mismatch there, and that's the one

36:34

that insidiously leads us to feel

36:36

that yucky sense of burnout. And

36:39

so what that means is that we got to get our values

36:41

right right, that's the thing we might need to focus

36:43

on more than some of the other stuff, but

36:46

we often don't know how to do that. But the good

36:48

news is there's lots of research that's focused on

36:50

how we can, and a lot of it comes from the

36:52

work of Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman at

36:54

the University of Pennsylvania who focused

36:56

on what they call finding your signature

36:59

Strengths. Their research has basically looked

37:01

at like, well, what are the values that people engage

37:03

in, you know, to do good in the world and their work

37:05

and their volunteerism and whatever. And

37:07

they've looked cross culturally and identified

37:10

about twenty four different what

37:12

they call character strengths, basically this

37:14

list of values. You look at the list, you're like, oh yeah,

37:16

like, you know, hope and persistence

37:19

or self restraining, zest for life,

37:21

an appreciation of beauty, bravery. They're

37:23

kind of set of values that like, we can all

37:25

get behind. But as you scroll through

37:28

that list, there might be some of the things on the

37:30

list that you're like, you know, yeah,

37:33

citizenship is good, but I'm really into creativity

37:36

or I'm really into humor, or I'm really

37:38

into zest for life. There might be one that's

37:40

like the particular one that you resonate

37:43

with that is what researchers

37:45

would call your signature strength. But the question

37:47

is like, okay, well, what if my signature strength

37:49

is humor or bravery or citizenship

37:51

or whatever, Like, how do I engage that and

37:54

the knowledge work that I'm doing at work?

37:56

Right? How do I do that a little bit more? And

37:58

here we have the lovely work of

38:00

Amy Resininski, who's another faculty member

38:03

at the University of Pennsylvania who studies

38:05

what she calls job crafting. Her idea

38:07

is that in any job, you can look your job description

38:10

and figure out with flexibility ways

38:13

that you can infuse these values in no

38:15

matter what your job description is. And

38:17

I love Amy's work because she doesn't do

38:19

studies with people doing creative

38:22

knowledge work in the industries that I'm probably

38:24

mostly seeing in the room. Most

38:26

of her work on job crafting is with hospital

38:28

janitorial staff workers, where you might think

38:30

these folks don't actually have a lot of creativity

38:32

about how they can move their job description around.

38:35

These are people are like washing linen in

38:37

a hospital ward. But what she finds interestingly

38:39

is that a third of these hospital workers a third,

38:41

it's actually a pretty high number, say

38:44

that they experience their job as a calling. They love

38:46

their job, they wouldn't leave their job for something else.

38:48

And the reason she finds as she digs

38:51

into what they're doing is that they're constantly

38:53

engaging in one of their signature strengths.

38:56

She tells these lovely stories of hospital janitorial

38:58

staff workers who, for example, one

39:00

who engages in kind of helping

39:02

others and humor every day

39:05

he worked in a chemotherapy ward. So,

39:07

if you've ever been unlucky enough to have to chemotherapy

39:09

or know someone who did you know that people often get very

39:11

sick, and so a lot of his job was cleaning up vomit.

39:14

And she doesn't sound like a job where you could get a lot of these strengths

39:16

in. But he's like, no, no, no, My strength is really humor.

39:19

Yeah, I have to clean that up, but my real job is I

39:21

make the patient laugh. I'm like a comedian

39:23

and I'm going to get them to laugh even though their day has been

39:25

really crappy. And he had his whole stick that he used

39:27

to do where he'd say, you know, we'd come into

39:29

cleaning'd be like you keep vomiting, I'm gonna get

39:31

over time and like well, like you know the secret handshit,

39:34

you know, just like you laugh the patient

39:36

laugh and he's like, see, that's that's my real

39:38

job. Or another janitorial staff

39:40

worker who worked in a coma ward.

39:42

So this staff member couldn't

39:44

interact with patients, but every day

39:47

he would move the paintings around

39:49

in the room and like the plants, like switch them,

39:51

and that was strength of creativity. He just thought maybe

39:53

it would help. I don't know, these are nothing managers

39:56

are telling people to do. It's just they're infusing

39:58

their strengths into their job, and they wind

40:01

up loving their job, loving a job that many

40:03

of us would think would be a tough job to love

40:05

in the ways that they love it. But what's most

40:07

important about job craft thing is that the evidence

40:10

suggests it can protect you from burnout.

40:12

It's a way to get your values lined up.

40:14

Even if they went askew before, you can bring

40:17

them back to an alignment in a way that will protect

40:19

you. And that is top tip number four. We

40:22

need to find ways to craft our job. That's

40:24

how we turn it into a calling. But

40:26

there's one other scientific way that we can turn

40:29

our job into a calling, into a job that

40:31

we really love, and that gets us to

40:33

top tip number five, which is that the science

40:35

really shows that if we want to feel better at

40:37

work, we need to find ways to

40:39

seek out more belonging, and we

40:42

do that by getting a little bit more social than

40:44

we're comfortable with. I started with that

40:46

lovely study from Indeed. I talked about

40:48

how companies with happier workers

40:51

are making the most money. But what I didn't tell

40:53

you was the key feature, which is what

40:55

makes the workers happy? What are the factors

40:57

that lead to more happiness at work. In this big,

40:59

huge data set where we have people's

41:01

spontaneous ratings, researcher yan

41:03

Emmanuel Denev, he's the Oxford researcher who

41:05

led this study, said well, let's let economists

41:08

guess. We have the data from the Indeed surveys,

41:10

but let's let economists guess what do you think

41:12

makes people happy at work? And economists

41:14

came up with their usual top three. They said money,

41:17

people who get paid more are probably happier at work.

41:19

That was idea number one. Idea Number

41:21

two was good management. We pay all these

41:23

people to go to business school, probably they're learning

41:25

something to make people happy at work. And

41:28

number three was some sense of like work life

41:30

balance or work life flexibility. That's what people

41:32

want. That's what people assumed made

41:34

people happy at work. And these factors

41:37

did matter, but in the list of

41:39

things that mattered, they were kind of in the middle of the list.

41:41

Kind of think like number five, number six, number

41:43

seven, that kind of thing. The thing

41:45

that mattered the most, the thing that no economists

41:48

predicted was people's sense of belonging.

41:51

And with the Indeed data, yan Emanuel

41:53

Denv could kind of dig into what this belonging

41:55

measure included, and it included

41:57

three factors. The first

42:00

is that you say people care

42:02

about you at work. You're not a cog in the machine.

42:05

You're someone who matters, right, People

42:07

actually acknowledge you you matter. The

42:09

second thing is that the work you do matters,

42:12

right, so you're doing something that matters to the company.

42:14

You can sort of see your impact. And

42:17

the third factor, which kind of nobody predicted,

42:19

is that you answer yes to the question do

42:21

you have a best friend at work? If you have

42:23

a best friend at work, you're more likely to say you belong

42:26

and that the stuff you do matters there. This all

42:28

surprises the economists, but it made total sense

42:30

to someone who studies the science of happiness, because

42:33

we've seen for years that social connection

42:35

and our social relationships are one of the most

42:37

important things that matter for our well being.

42:40

So of course it would make sense that these kinds

42:42

of social relationships matter at work.

42:44

I think the problem is that, yet again, here, like

42:46

those economists, most of us lay people

42:48

have a particular misconception. We

42:51

think, Okay, yeah, friends matter outside

42:53

the work, but in the office, it's me working

42:56

all the time. It's just like me kind of

42:58

you know, junking my head in the heck with those like trust

43:00

falls or like the silly office socials like

43:03

I'm just gonna get my work done. And one

43:05

of my favorite kind of versions of this claim

43:07

came from this viral Blots and Globe article

43:09

that made the claim gen Z, my generation

43:12

is not looking to make friends at work. Offices

43:14

aren't social hubs anymore, and it's better this way.

43:17

And this article was really particularly

43:19

painful for me because the author, Catherine, who

43:22

was a student in my Yale Happiness class, like

43:24

she should have know. I was like, what have I taught you? Nothing?

43:26

Have I taught you nothing? I have a lovely interview

43:28

with her for my podcast, which I'll

43:30

kind of sum up in a second. But this is I think this is

43:32

a misconception that all of us have, right, It's a nice

43:35

to have, not a need to have. But these data

43:37

from the Indeed study suggests it's a need to have. Maybe

43:39

one of the reasons we're all so disengaged at

43:42

work, Maybe one of the reasons quiet quitting seems

43:44

so appealing is that we're actively

43:46

not investing in the thing that might

43:49

matter the most for our happiness at work,

43:51

which is our connection with other people. And

43:53

so the question is, how can we overcome this misconception,

43:56

how can we develop a new way to think about connection

43:58

at work? And here I love the

44:00

advice that comes from the kind

44:03

of business professional Shasta Nelson, who's this

44:05

lovely book on the Business of Friendship where

44:07

she walks through the ways we can actually make friends

44:09

at work. Another great podcast guest on my

44:11

podcast, The Happiness Lab, and she talks

44:14

about three things we need to do to promote friendship.

44:16

It's not what we think. It's not like oversharing, you

44:18

know, over the water cooler. It's first

44:21

positivity. Friends are made

44:23

at work when we have more positive interactions

44:25

than negative ones. This isn't toxic positivity.

44:27

This isn't be nice all the time. It's just like, in

44:30

the ratio of emotions that you generate for

44:32

other people at work, make more positive

44:34

ones than negative ones. That's kind of data point

44:36

number one. The second thing she recommends is that

44:38

friendships at work come from consistency.

44:41

You see the same people over time, You know

44:43

that those interactions are going to go a particular way.

44:45

It makes it easy to form the habit of friendship.

44:48

And I think this is a tricky one because many

44:50

of us aren't forming that consistent pattern

44:52

in the office. I think some people are going back to

44:54

work, but a lot of people are stuck trying to

44:56

develop their social connection and from remote

44:58

work or hybrid work. What can we do to make

45:00

that consistent friendship like interaction

45:03

in these times? I think if we answer that

45:05

question by kind of putting more effort into

45:07

talking to people, not just in the norm meeting

45:09

at teams, but other ways of actually

45:11

making that consistent connection, all

45:13

the better. So that's number

45:15

one and number two more positivity, more

45:18

consistency, and interaction. But the

45:20

third thing that Shasta suggests is that we need

45:22

to get a little bit more vulnerable, not in the

45:24

way we think, but just showing up as

45:26

a real human who has opinions,

45:28

who has frailties, all that self compassion

45:30

stuff I talked about. Engaging with that

45:32

and recognizing that you're a normal human is

45:35

powerful. I think we sometimes think at

45:37

work we need to be this like AI robot

45:39

who doesn't experience emotions, who never has

45:42

failures, who never asks for help, and so on.

45:44

And that's what vulnerability is about. It's avoiding

45:46

that stuff. It's really taking time

45:49

to talk to your neighbors to ask questions

45:51

to get feedback. These are the moments

45:53

of vulnerability that seem to really matter

45:56

when you gauge in them. The data really suggests

45:58

that you make more friends at work and you

46:00

wind up not just happier, but also,

46:02

as we've been mentioning, performing better. And

46:05

so that's top tip number five. I think

46:07

we really want to experience our work as a can. We

46:09

need to overcome this idea that well,

46:11

you know, friendships happen outside the work, and

46:14

my work is just my work. We really need to

46:16

engage in belonging. It's the factor that seems

46:18

to matter for our sense of happiness

46:20

at work, but also for our performance at

46:22

work, and also for companies happiness.

46:24

So I think this is a tip not just for individuals,

46:26

but for smart companies that are using the data too.

46:29

Okay, so you got through the five tips from Happiness.

46:31

If you're like, oh my gosh, I want tips six

46:33

through ten, you can do that. You can sign up

46:35

for my online course for free Coursera dot

46:37

org. Just show of hands anybody taken the course already.

46:40

Oh my students, Hello students, thank you

46:42

for coming. And if you're like, oh my, gosh,

46:44

I'm burned out and overwhelmed. I don't want to take another whole

46:46

Yale class. We also have my lovely podcast,

46:48

The Happiness Lab, which you should check out. And all the

46:50

folks I mentioned and that you wanted to

46:52

hear more about, they're all in the podcast. You can

46:54

just google their name and find it there. But what

46:57

I hope I've done is to convince you that in their quest

46:59

to kind of put the south By goggles on and say, what's

47:01

the future of work? What's going to matter? What

47:03

really actually matters isn't the stuff

47:05

we normally think about. What might actually

47:07

matter more is our mental health. And

47:09

so if we promote that, and we get companies

47:11

to promote that while be achieving in

47:13

all the ways we want to succeed, and with that, I'll thank you.

47:16

And I think we have a couple of minutes for questions,

47:18

So thank you all, And if you haven't give

47:20

me my slideo questions, do that now. Yeah.

47:28

So I'm seeing the questions pop up. This is

47:30

awesome. So first question, thoughts

47:33

on the recent New York Times article that workplace

47:35

wellness programs have little benefit. It

47:37

seems contradictory. I think

47:39

it isn't contradictory, because

47:41

I would raise the question of whether or not any

47:44

of the workplace wellness programs I

47:46

mentioned talked about this stuff. A

47:48

lot of workplace wellness programs focus

47:50

on these kind of individual strategies

47:52

that we can use to get better. So things like meditation,

47:55

things like exercise, and so on. It's not that those

47:57

things are bad, it's that those things

47:59

might not be achieving the stuff that really matters.

48:02

What's the stuff that really matters. It's you

48:04

finding your own values and finding ways

48:06

to engage with them. It's you try

48:09

trying to figure out your vulnerability at work

48:11

and really connecting with people. Most workplace

48:13

well being programs don't have that. It's

48:15

you navigating and acknowledging

48:17

your negative emotions. I haven't seen any workplace

48:20

well being program that's like, well, we need to bring to the

48:22

force everyone's negative emotions, right, those are the

48:24

things that matter, right, That's just not what these

48:26

programs are doing. And so I think it's not so

48:28

much a contradiction. It's that these

48:30

well being programs are trying to do the best they

48:32

could, but they might be missing what some

48:34

of the latest science is showing. And that's why I think

48:37

a more academic, scientific approach. If you could

48:39

bring this stuff into these programs,

48:41

if workplaces could make this stuff a

48:43

priority all of a sudden, I think we would

48:45

be seeing some real effects. Oh that was

48:47

question number one, So next

48:49

question. Generative AI promises a lot of

48:52

productive wins, but employees are scared

48:54

feel pressure to adopt it. What tips

48:56

do you have for leaders who are managing this

48:58

transition. I think the biggest tip is

49:00

just don't pretend those emotions aren't

49:02

happening. I think what happens as a leaders you say,

49:05

everybody is freaked out, scared,

49:07

feels pressured by this stuff, but we won't admit

49:09

that. We'll just roll it out and pretend everybody's

49:11

fine. We're just gonna squish the beach ball of all

49:13

art at negative emotions about chat, GBT under

49:15

the ground, and everybody would be cool. Right. You

49:18

just saw that it'd be better to admit that. So I

49:20

think as individuals you need to kind

49:22

of sit with some of these emotions. It's normative

49:24

to feel a little freaked out in the creative industry

49:26

that we have these tools that can like write

49:28

podcasts and screenplays and make amazing

49:31

art. It's normal to be spooked by that. It's

49:33

normative. So I think we need to sit with that

49:35

and allow those negative emotions. I think

49:37

as a leader, you do well by

49:39

admitting this stuff, just coming out

49:41

and saying it, like, I know this is probably

49:44

freaking you out. It makes sense that this is freaking

49:46

you out. We're gonna work through those kinds

49:48

of negative emotions together. I feel like there's some

49:50

benefits of going through it. Even though it feels a

49:52

little scary. There are lots of things that are beneficial

49:55

to us that feel a little scary at first. How

49:57

can we acknowledge these negative emotions and get through

49:59

it. I think the biggest problem was, like we're just pretending

50:02

nobody's freaked out. It's just fine.

50:04

No singularity here, like you know, rosy

50:06

glasses. But I think once you acknowledge

50:08

that stuff, recognize those emotions, you

50:11

can use it, right. You can use that kind

50:13

of engage, like the light on your engine, to

50:15

tell us how we should deal with these emerging

50:17

technologies in a way that's honest, right, that

50:20

recognizes maybe this is a problem for my

50:22

engine, and I had to think about it differently.

50:24

So acknowledge the negative emotions. There

50:27

next question anonymous. I love this person put it

50:29

anonymous. I am that person who believes

50:31

I don't want to make friends at work because the office

50:33

gossip and pettiness. How do you move

50:36

through that? First of all, you're not alone, right. That

50:38

article of my students who went viral had like

50:41

tens of thousands of comments, most of

50:43

whom were like, you know, rallying behind

50:45

her, right. And I think it's

50:47

it's important to acknowledge, like the

50:49

office gossip and the pettiness, that

50:52

stuff feels kind of annoying. And it's true

50:54

that it is annoying. It can contribute to negative

50:56

emotions. But that might not be

50:58

everybody in your office, right.

51:01

There might be other people you can connect with that aren't

51:03

participating as much in that stuff. Right.

51:05

The idea that you have to make friends at work doesn't mean

51:07

that you have to participate in that stuff. It

51:10

just means you have to ask people, Hey, how

51:12

is your weekend? I went to south By? Can I just

51:14

tell you about this cool panel that I went to

51:16

on well being at work? And let me tell you about it.

51:18

It's asking for help, it's getting

51:20

curious about their ideas. Right, That's

51:23

what this friendship is about. I think we get

51:25

wrong. We think friendship has to look like

51:27

this terrible middle school click and

51:29

that we have to go mean girls and that's the only way

51:31

we can make friends. But if you really dig

51:33

into what the science suggests about friendship at work,

51:36

those are all our misconceptions. It's

51:38

about positivity, just having

51:40

normal, positive interactions with another human, just

51:42

like you might with your friend or your spouse or a family

51:44

member. It's about doing that relatively

51:47

consistently and kind of vulnerably,

51:49

sort of asking for help, getting curious

51:51

and so on. So doesn't mean that you're embracing

51:53

the mean girls'ness at work. And I

51:55

guess another piece of advice I would have for folks who

51:57

feel that way, and there's a lot of you out there,

51:59

not just here, but again in the world, is to like try

52:02

it in baby steps. If it feels

52:04

uncomfortable, pick one person who feels safe,

52:07

and try to have like one normal

52:09

human conversation with that person, whether it's

52:11

on zoom or not, and then work from there.

52:14

Right, this is not dive into the like friendship at

52:16

work deepen, It's like try it out a little

52:18

bit and see how it feels. So that would

52:20

be my advice. Next question, how

52:22

can you communicate some of these elements upward

52:25

to senior management to create more time for play

52:27

and belonging, especially when they're resistant.

52:29

But I think if you show them data

52:31

from fifteen million workers and thousands

52:34

of companies across literally every industry

52:37

shows if you invest in happiness at time one

52:39

that investment will show is correlated

52:42

with higher stock prices down the line.

52:44

I think that's the kind of thing that's going to change the

52:46

minds of senior management. They're not going to move

52:49

when it just is like a nice to do thing. But

52:51

if it's a need to have for the bottom

52:53

line, if it's the thing that's going to make us money,

52:56

now, all of a sudden, it's gonna matter. I

52:58

feel like I'm like, you know, some south By panel

53:00

and like the early nineties, where I'm like, the Internet

53:03

it's gonna be a thing, and all the cool south

53:05

By people are like, but my senior management doesn't

53:07

believe in the Internet. I'm like, well, well, it's going to be a thing

53:10

whether they believe in it or not. I feel

53:12

like the twenty twenty four version of that is

53:14

on like mental health, super matters

53:16

for productivity and you're like, my senior, I'm like,

53:18

they're going to have to pay attention to it, because

53:21

if the science is showing what the science is showing,

53:23

they're kind of not going to have a choice. It's like lose money

53:25

or pay attention to this. But share the graph.

53:28

Go online, you can google just Indeed, well

53:30

Being workplace study. You'll get it. You can share

53:32

it, and I think slowly the c suite

53:34

folks are going to get on board. Last

53:37

quick question, So much of the research in this area

53:40

is correlational or based on small laboratory

53:42

studies. How can we get more data on these causal

53:44

relationships? Well, I think that's a great

53:46

question, and I think one of the reasons I love the

53:49

Indeed study is that this is a

53:51

huge data set, right, fifteen million workers,

53:53

and it's not even people who necessarily thought they

53:55

were going to be in a study. These are just people who were doing

53:57

their normal ratings on Indeed. They're just data

53:59

kind of taken from that. And I think this is a spot

54:02

where collaborations between academics

54:04

and companies can be so powerful. Right

54:06

if you work for a small startup or even

54:08

a big tech company, especially if

54:10

you have some infiltration in HR folks

54:13

like that partner up with one of these

54:15

researchers, you engage in a belonging

54:17

intervention where you can do a randomized control

54:19

trial in the workplace, and

54:22

these things are starting to happen. There's a work

54:24

there's a working paper now that just came out

54:26

on remote work. What are the best practices

54:29

for it? This is a research team at

54:31

NYU that partnered up with a

54:33

large company that was naturally rolling out

54:36

like they're remote practices, and they

54:38

said, hey, can we study this? Can we look at happiness?

54:40

Would you mind if we gave workers a choice so

54:42

we can kind of RCT this like randomized

54:44

controlled trial to test this. And so

54:46

I think the way that we overcome some

54:49

of these kind of small sample sizes

54:51

and these things that are more in the Ivory Tower

54:53

and less in the real world is to partner

54:56

with the folks who are in the real world who

54:58

have access to these big data sets, and

55:00

then you can contribute not just to practices

55:02

that we think will make your company better, you

55:04

can also learn something that you can share with

55:06

other companies too. And I think indeed

55:08

did this honestly in a nice way. I've seen this making

55:10

the rounds. I think people are talking

55:13

positively about indeed, given that

55:15

they were kind of able to share these data, and so I think

55:17

the more companies that do that,

55:19

the better. But I am at

55:21

time unfortunately. I hope I've given

55:23

you some strategies you can all use to promote

55:25

your mental health at work that you can share

55:27

with your companies and your teams, and I hope made

55:29

you all a little happier. Thank you all so much. I

55:35

hope you enjoyed that roundup of advice on workplace

55:37

happiness. It's definitely a subject we'll

55:39

be returning to very soon, but for now,

55:42

the Happiness Lab will be taking a short break.

55:44

We'll be back to celebrate the summer Olympics

55:47

with some shows exploring mental health in sports,

55:50

and we'll soon share a very special season

55:52

that I've put my heart and soul into.

55:54

So this is for a whole podcast season that we're

55:56

doing on stuff that I'm bad at. Okay,

55:59

this is a whole episode about boredom because

56:01

I feel like I'm pretty bad at boredom. You are,

56:03

but I feel like I'm bad at boredom because you're

56:06

bad at boredom.

56:07

Yeah. No, I didn't do well with doing up all

56:09

that. Coming very soon on the Happiness

56:12

Lab would meet doctor Laurie Santos,