October 11, 2022 • 26 mins
The most successful businesses are often the ones that can engage and motivate employees beyond compensation and benefits. It’s about feeling a sense of purpose in the work. Barry explains the need for high commitment in the workplace and how that can nurture wisdom.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome.
(00:36):
You're listening to episode seven of the Happiness Formula. I'm
your host Mike Coscarelli. In our last episode, we learned
how medical practitioners can get more satisfaction at work and
keep their patients healthier, all at the same time. Today,
Barry tackles happiness in the workplace. Yes, your boss should
(00:59):
care how satisfied you are on the job, because businesses
that prioritize happy employees are some of the most successful
in their industries. Go figure. Here's Barry in the last lecture,
(01:20):
which was about wisdom and work, it was really all
about one particular example, which is how what modern medical
practice in affluent societies demands. And although it certainly is
true that doctors need to know medicine, they also need
to know how to relate to their patients so that
(01:43):
they can be effective in influencing patients to be partners
in care by changing how they live. When doctors practice
in this way, they get much more satisfaction out of
their work than they do simply by writing orders for
lab tests and uh, you know, scans and stuff like that.
(02:06):
De impersonal depersonalized medicine is what's driving doctors out of medicine.
So why does good work matter? It clearly matters in
the case of these doctors that I described last time,
but why does it matter in general? There's a management
(02:26):
theorist named Jeffrey Feffer who wrote a book a while
ago called The Human Equation who talks about why good
work matters. And here's here's his argument. Much of the
effort people put in to their work is discretionary. In
(02:46):
other words, they can really work hard or not so hard.
And unless somebody is looking over their shoulder with a
whip or counting keystrokes, it's not going to be so
easy to tell. All the difference between really committed participation
and somewhat half hearted partis a patient And so what
you want is high commitment employees. Since most of the
(03:15):
work people do, the effort people put into work is discretionary,
people with a high commitment are more likely to put
that effort into work than people with lower commitment. What
does it mean to be high commitment? It means being
committed to the mission of the organization. In the case
(03:36):
of doctors sort of obvious treating disease, easing suffering, and
it me involves commitment to the organization that's doing the work.
You not only value the mission of the organization. You
value the organization. You value the mission of Starbucks to
(03:56):
make ridiculously expensive, good tasting coffee available to everyone, and
you also value the way in which the organisation operates,
the way people treat one another. Those produce high commitment employees.
The aim of a workplace should be to include a
(04:19):
rich program of employee training, something that will challenge employees
and enable them to develop. And what Jeffrey Feffer has
found doing research on lots of companies in lots of
different industries that the companies within an industry that engage
(04:44):
in high performance, high commitment work practices are almost without exception,
the most successful companies in that industry. If you look
at the survival rates of companies that issue initial public
offerings go public, the more commitment the work practices are,
(05:09):
the higher the percentage of those companies that survive the
i p o AT. Increase in the level of commitment
to the work practices increases the chances of survival from
s to businesses with the highest employee engagement in their
(05:33):
industry achieve more than four times the earnings per share
growth that their competitors do. In other words, if you're
running a business, even if you don't care at all
about the welfare and the satisfaction of their your employees,
(05:54):
even if the only thing you care about is making
your business as profitable as possible, the way to make
your business as profitable as possible is to create a
workplace environment where your employees want to be, want to
show up every day, want to put their best effort
forward because they think that when they do what they
(06:17):
do well, it makes a difference. And we'll see near
the end of this course. Despite this truth, how few
workplaces are creating environments where their employees want to be.
Feford gives some examples of high commitment practices versus low commitment.
(06:41):
Some years ago, there was a General Motors factory in Fremont, California.
It was uniformly regarded as the single worst automobile plant
in the United States in terms of productivity, in terms
(07:02):
of defects in the products, in terms of labor management conflict,
in terms of worker morale. It was a disaster automobile plant,
Japan was interested in building a partnership with General Motors
(07:23):
so that it would be easier for Japanese manufacturers. This
was Toyota specifically to sell Japanese cars in the United States,
and so they formed a partnership with General Motors to
produce a new car called the Saturn, and they they
would produce it in this GM plant in Fremont, California,
(07:50):
which was the worst automobile plant in the United States.
And so japan took over the running of the plant.
Amazingly enough, with the same employees who had been working
in this plant when it was a GM plant. Toyota
(08:10):
management succeeded in reducing the amount of labor hours per
car by the same low commitment, low engagement, always being
angry with management workforce. When somehow management was taken over
by Japanese management practices, they all of a sudden became
(08:34):
almost twice as productive. The reason where there were several reasons,
but one reason was that the Japanese production process is
one in which the discretion of the worker is respected,
the expertise of the worker is respected. There are ropes
(08:54):
hanging from the ceiling in Japanese automobile factories, and anyone
on the assembly line can pull the rope and stop
production if they detect the pro You don't have to
tell a supervisor, who tells another supervisor, who tells another
supervisor before the line gets stopped. Everyone is responsible for
(09:15):
quality control and quality maintenance. And this level of discretion
and autonomy on the part of the workers, reflecting a
level of trust of the workers by management, completely transforms
the moral of the workforce, and so the worst automobile
factory in the United States became the best automobile factory
(09:38):
in the United States with virtually no change in personnel,
just change in management. The tension is between a model
of control managers controlling the people they manage, so the
management is rigid. The aim is always to lower cost,
(10:01):
and the aim is always to make work more and
more automatized, versus commitment where the focuses on training, where
the kind of work that's done is flexible, not automatized,
and where effort is made to build the employee's identification
with the company and the company's goals. The practices of
(10:28):
highly effective organizations in creating work places where people want
to be include employment security, You don't have to worry
that your head is on the chopping block every day
when you show up for work. Now, because of a
commitment to employment security, it leads to more careful hiring.
(10:52):
If it's going to be hard to fire someone, or
you're not gonna want to fire someone, you're extremely careful
about who you hire. But when you have employment security,
it builds trust between the workers and the people who
manage them because they know that the workers know they're
not going to have the rug pulled out from under
(11:13):
them net tomorrow if something goes wrong. Fit of the
individual with the culture of the organization is more important
than how intelligent workers are. It's more important than what
they're grades high school or college grades are. The process
of going through this hiring is expensive and time consuming,
(11:39):
but the turnover is dramatically reduced. The people who drop
out are people who would have been on the job
market the day they were hired anyway. So there's a
kind of watchword among management consultants. It says, if people
come for the money, they'll leave for the money. You
(12:02):
don't want people coming to work for you because of
what they're getting paid, because they'll leave in a heartbeat.
If somebody offers to pay them a little bit more,
you want them to come because of what you do,
how you do it, how you treat them, how you
respect them. So these are the tools of successful workplace
(12:25):
organization and successful management, and their aim is to produce
high commitment workers who do high quality work. Right now,
we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back,
Barry speaks about the importance of having a work mission
(12:46):
that you believe in, even if it's as simple as
helping someone in need of a new shared In general,
(13:07):
you get better performance when you pay people generously and
not contingent on their own individual performance. In other words,
if you have compensation practices where if the company does well,
everyone benefits, and if the company does poorly, everyone suffers.
(13:29):
Rather than singling out the stars and paying them more,
you end up with people generally working up to the
level of their compensation and not trying to get away
with getting something for nothing. The problem with performance based
pay is that, while on the one hand, it enhances
(13:53):
feelings of equity, on the other hand, it creates a
kind of competition where workers are pitted against one another,
so that cooperative activity becomes harder and hard to achieve.
You help the person at the next in the next cubicle,
and that's going to hurt you when the time comes
(14:13):
for the next salary negotiation. In the automobile industry, Japan
on average puts hours of training into each new employee
in the United States forty two. In other words, Japan
(14:37):
devotes almost ten times as much time to training employees
as the US does. Europe is somewhere in the middle.
There's minimal hierarchy, minimal status difference, extensive sharing of information,
partly because people don't feel like they're in competition with
one another, and the result is more productive workplaces and
(15:01):
more satisfied workers. So this is what it takes to
produce an efficient workplace. And as a byproduct of producing
an efficient workplace, you produce satisfied workers. And we see
this in lots and lots of different work situations, not
just the doctors. So think about the hospital janitors that
(15:25):
I talked to you about a few lectures ago, the
ones I describe who were doing things beyond what was
in their official job description. What they did, interacting with patients,
interacting with patient families, finding ways to be helpful to nurses,
all of that requires wisdom, but it also requires thinking
(15:49):
of your job as directly connected to the mission of
your organization. You know, it's true that you could be
mopping floors in an office building just as you're mopping
floors in a hospital. But if you think that your
presence in a hospital matters, then you think that keeping
(16:09):
the place clean is an essential contribution to preventing disease,
curing disease, and easing suffering. And you, the floor mopper,
have as just as an important role to play as
the internist, who is, you know, taking vital signs and
(16:30):
making medication decisions. And the critical thing about some of
the janitors, not all of them, but some of them,
is that they thought they were in the business of
curing disease, not in the business of mopping floors. Made
all the difference. Haircutters. Research has been done on hairstylists
(16:54):
who need a lot of technical proficiency when it comes
to shaping hair and coloring hair and all of that stuff.
But what they say when you interview them is that
the most important skill they have is the skill of
managing interactions with their clients. It's the hardest thing to do,
and it's the one they find most rewarding. This woman
(17:16):
comes in with a photograph of a haircut that she
wants that looks great on a very thin face and
will look terrible on her round face. And your job
is somehow to find a way to convince her to
want something different, to manage the conversation so that she
changes her mind about what she wants and then feels
(17:39):
good about what she gets. So the technical skill is critical,
but being a successful hairdresser requires much more than technical skill.
And this is not a trivial thing. You know, the
woman walks out from the salon and her mood, how
she feels about herself for the next several weeks, maybe
(18:03):
affected by how good a job you do in partnership
with her in giving her the hair styling that that's
the right hair styling for her. Another example, many many
private universities public ones to employ students call alumni and
(18:25):
ask them to make contributions to some alumni fund, often
for scholarships. So the students will come in and get
paid to cold call alums and say would you like
to contribute to the Bloody Blas scholarship fund. Uh, this
is a low success enterprise. Most people don't even answer
(18:47):
the phone. If they do, they don't let you finish.
If they let you finish, they say no, I paid
enough to get my education. So a psychologist named Adam
Grant did a study where half of the students who
would be trying to raise money before they did their
phone calling, they saw an interview that lasted less than
(19:11):
ten minutes with somebody who had recently graduated from the institution.
And what this person said in that interview was given
my circumstances, I would never have been able to go
to the school without a scholarship, and I got the
scholarship because of the efforts of people like you soliciting
(19:33):
contributions from alumni. My education here has changed my life,
and it would not have been possible without the work
you've done. I'm very grateful. That's it. Well, alumni contributions
that were produced by the people who heard that little
(19:55):
speech tripled. They weren't given any new techniques for soliciting money.
What was happening is that they were directly connected to
the mission that their activity was serving. They were not
simply punching their clock to get paid and get hung
up on. They were there to help students in tight
(20:17):
financial circumstances, get the opportunity to study at this institution,
and all of a sudden they just couldn't do it
hard enough and well enough because it was so important.
Reminding people of the mission and that it's a mission
that's admirable. Even noble makes a huge difference. I'll give
(20:37):
you one last example. This involves a man named Ray
Anderson who was a very successful manufacturer of carpet tile.
His company manufactured the sorts of things you see when
you're in public spaces like airport terminals, these squares of
(20:58):
carpet uh that line the floors in public spaces, and
he was extremely successful. He made a huge pile of money.
But he had this awakening one day that he was
going to retire, leaving a huge a state for his
(21:21):
grandchildren and a planet they wouldn't be able to live
in because it turned out the production process that went
in that they used to make this carpetile left an
extremely large environmental footprint, and so he was enriching himself
and his family and poisoning the earth every day. And
(21:43):
he decided that from that day forward, their mission would
be to change the production process and reduce their environmental
footprint to zero. He knew that this would cost him substantially,
that profits would really take a hit. He didn't care.
He had all the money he needed. His intry was
(22:05):
in the future of the earth for his grandchildren. He
was willing to take the profit hit, and so they
embarked on a ten year, fifteen year campaign to reduce
the environmental footprints of Eero. Unfortunately, he died while this
campaign was in the middle, but it had already reduced
its environmental footprint by more than half before he died.
(22:30):
And the extraordinary thing is that with each step they
made in the production process to reduce pollution, profits went up,
knocked down. They made more money, not less money. And
the question is why, And his answer was that the
people who worked in the factory were no longer just
(22:51):
producing carpetile. Now what they were doing was saving the planet.
And this was an incredibly motivating thing for the people
who worked there. So they came in every day and
worked extremely hard. They came in every day full of
ideas about ways to change production to lower the environmental footprint.
Even more, they cared about the work they did in
(23:15):
a way they hadn't when basically they were just working
to get a paycheck. He hadn't anticipated this. He was
astonished by it, but you know, it was incredibly gratifying,
and in some ways, the most important lesson he learned
was that if you treat your employees like people who
(23:35):
care about the mission, and you create a mission that's
worth caring about, they will go through fire for you
and for the company. Mission driven autonomy, discretion for employees,
social engagement, flexibility. But I think most important is the first.
(24:00):
Mission driven. If people care about the work they do
and they think that it in some way makes somebody's
life better, they will do the work more efficiently, more accurately,
into a higher standard of quality. And this is even
true when you're thinking about ordinary retail. Think about a
(24:24):
retail store in the mall and will end with this example.
There are two ways to think about your job as
a retail salesperson. One way to think about it is
I'm here to sell as much stuff as I possibly can.
The second way to think about it is everybody who
comes into my store has a problem. I'm here to
(24:46):
solve problems, and sometimes that may mean selling less than
the people came in to buy. Sometimes it may mean
selling more sometimes it may mean selling nothing. But the
point is everybody who walks out of this store came
in with the problem that I help to solve, which
(25:06):
means that every day I make the lives of fifty
people just a little tiny bit better than their lives
were before they came in. If that's the attitude you
take towards retail sales, all of a sudden, you are
not in the business of selling junk to people. You
(25:26):
are in the business of making people's lives better. And
that creates a kind of meaning and purpose that makes
the work people do mundane, though it may be much
more satisfying, and it makes their engagement much greater, and
it makes the quality of their work much higher. The
(25:48):
aim here is to make as much work as possible
that people do, work that takes advantage of and nurtures
the wisdom people have about treating other people in the
right way. YEA, So finding the why of what you
(26:10):
do really can't make a difference. We hope that you
can take some of these lessons into your own workplace
as well. Next time on the Happiness formula how to
be a Good Friend. The Happiness formula from One Day
University is a production of I Heart Podcasts and School
of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a review
(26:30):
in your favorite podcast app, and check out the Curiosity
Audio Network for podcasts covering history, pop culture, true crime,
and more.
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome.
(00:36):
You're listening to episode seven of the Happiness Formula. I'm
your host Mike Coscarelli. In our last episode, we learned
how medical practitioners can get more satisfaction at work and
keep their patients healthier, all at the same time. Today,
Barry tackles happiness in the workplace. Yes, your boss should
(00:59):
care how satisfied you are on the job, because businesses
that prioritize happy employees are some of the most successful
in their industries. Go figure. Here's Barry in the last lecture,
(01:20):
which was about wisdom and work, it was really all
about one particular example, which is how what modern medical
practice in affluent societies demands. And although it certainly is
true that doctors need to know medicine, they also need
to know how to relate to their patients so that
(01:43):
they can be effective in influencing patients to be partners
in care by changing how they live. When doctors practice
in this way, they get much more satisfaction out of
their work than they do simply by writing orders for
lab tests and uh, you know, scans and stuff like that.
(02:06):
De impersonal depersonalized medicine is what's driving doctors out of medicine.
So why does good work matter? It clearly matters in
the case of these doctors that I described last time,
but why does it matter in general? There's a management
(02:26):
theorist named Jeffrey Feffer who wrote a book a while
ago called The Human Equation who talks about why good
work matters. And here's here's his argument. Much of the
effort people put in to their work is discretionary. In
(02:46):
other words, they can really work hard or not so hard.
And unless somebody is looking over their shoulder with a
whip or counting keystrokes, it's not going to be so
easy to tell. All the difference between really committed participation
and somewhat half hearted partis a patient And so what
you want is high commitment employees. Since most of the
(03:15):
work people do, the effort people put into work is discretionary,
people with a high commitment are more likely to put
that effort into work than people with lower commitment. What
does it mean to be high commitment? It means being
committed to the mission of the organization. In the case
(03:36):
of doctors sort of obvious treating disease, easing suffering, and
it me involves commitment to the organization that's doing the work.
You not only value the mission of the organization. You
value the organization. You value the mission of Starbucks to
(03:56):
make ridiculously expensive, good tasting coffee available to everyone, and
you also value the way in which the organisation operates,
the way people treat one another. Those produce high commitment employees.
The aim of a workplace should be to include a
(04:19):
rich program of employee training, something that will challenge employees
and enable them to develop. And what Jeffrey Feffer has
found doing research on lots of companies in lots of
different industries that the companies within an industry that engage
(04:44):
in high performance, high commitment work practices are almost without exception,
the most successful companies in that industry. If you look
at the survival rates of companies that issue initial public
offerings go public, the more commitment the work practices are,
(05:09):
the higher the percentage of those companies that survive the
i p o AT. Increase in the level of commitment
to the work practices increases the chances of survival from
s to businesses with the highest employee engagement in their
(05:33):
industry achieve more than four times the earnings per share
growth that their competitors do. In other words, if you're
running a business, even if you don't care at all
about the welfare and the satisfaction of their your employees,
(05:54):
even if the only thing you care about is making
your business as profitable as possible, the way to make
your business as profitable as possible is to create a
workplace environment where your employees want to be, want to
show up every day, want to put their best effort
forward because they think that when they do what they
(06:17):
do well, it makes a difference. And we'll see near
the end of this course. Despite this truth, how few
workplaces are creating environments where their employees want to be.
Feford gives some examples of high commitment practices versus low commitment.
(06:41):
Some years ago, there was a General Motors factory in Fremont, California.
It was uniformly regarded as the single worst automobile plant
in the United States in terms of productivity, in terms
(07:02):
of defects in the products, in terms of labor management conflict,
in terms of worker morale. It was a disaster automobile plant,
Japan was interested in building a partnership with General Motors
(07:23):
so that it would be easier for Japanese manufacturers. This
was Toyota specifically to sell Japanese cars in the United States,
and so they formed a partnership with General Motors to
produce a new car called the Saturn, and they they
would produce it in this GM plant in Fremont, California,
(07:50):
which was the worst automobile plant in the United States.
And so japan took over the running of the plant.
Amazingly enough, with the same employees who had been working
in this plant when it was a GM plant. Toyota
(08:10):
management succeeded in reducing the amount of labor hours per
car by the same low commitment, low engagement, always being
angry with management workforce. When somehow management was taken over
by Japanese management practices, they all of a sudden became
(08:34):
almost twice as productive. The reason where there were several reasons,
but one reason was that the Japanese production process is
one in which the discretion of the worker is respected,
the expertise of the worker is respected. There are ropes
(08:54):
hanging from the ceiling in Japanese automobile factories, and anyone
on the assembly line can pull the rope and stop
production if they detect the pro You don't have to
tell a supervisor, who tells another supervisor, who tells another
supervisor before the line gets stopped. Everyone is responsible for
(09:15):
quality control and quality maintenance. And this level of discretion
and autonomy on the part of the workers, reflecting a
level of trust of the workers by management, completely transforms
the moral of the workforce, and so the worst automobile
factory in the United States became the best automobile factory
(09:38):
in the United States with virtually no change in personnel,
just change in management. The tension is between a model
of control managers controlling the people they manage, so the
management is rigid. The aim is always to lower cost,
(10:01):
and the aim is always to make work more and
more automatized, versus commitment where the focuses on training, where
the kind of work that's done is flexible, not automatized,
and where effort is made to build the employee's identification
with the company and the company's goals. The practices of
(10:28):
highly effective organizations in creating work places where people want
to be include employment security, You don't have to worry
that your head is on the chopping block every day
when you show up for work. Now, because of a
commitment to employment security, it leads to more careful hiring.
(10:52):
If it's going to be hard to fire someone, or
you're not gonna want to fire someone, you're extremely careful
about who you hire. But when you have employment security,
it builds trust between the workers and the people who
manage them because they know that the workers know they're
not going to have the rug pulled out from under
(11:13):
them net tomorrow if something goes wrong. Fit of the
individual with the culture of the organization is more important
than how intelligent workers are. It's more important than what
they're grades high school or college grades are. The process
of going through this hiring is expensive and time consuming,
(11:39):
but the turnover is dramatically reduced. The people who drop
out are people who would have been on the job
market the day they were hired anyway. So there's a
kind of watchword among management consultants. It says, if people
come for the money, they'll leave for the money. You
(12:02):
don't want people coming to work for you because of
what they're getting paid, because they'll leave in a heartbeat.
If somebody offers to pay them a little bit more,
you want them to come because of what you do,
how you do it, how you treat them, how you
respect them. So these are the tools of successful workplace
(12:25):
organization and successful management, and their aim is to produce
high commitment workers who do high quality work. Right now,
we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back,
Barry speaks about the importance of having a work mission
(12:46):
that you believe in, even if it's as simple as
helping someone in need of a new shared In general,
(13:07):
you get better performance when you pay people generously and
not contingent on their own individual performance. In other words,
if you have compensation practices where if the company does well,
everyone benefits, and if the company does poorly, everyone suffers.
(13:29):
Rather than singling out the stars and paying them more,
you end up with people generally working up to the
level of their compensation and not trying to get away
with getting something for nothing. The problem with performance based
pay is that, while on the one hand, it enhances
(13:53):
feelings of equity, on the other hand, it creates a
kind of competition where workers are pitted against one another,
so that cooperative activity becomes harder and hard to achieve.
You help the person at the next in the next cubicle,
and that's going to hurt you when the time comes
(14:13):
for the next salary negotiation. In the automobile industry, Japan
on average puts hours of training into each new employee
in the United States forty two. In other words, Japan
(14:37):
devotes almost ten times as much time to training employees
as the US does. Europe is somewhere in the middle.
There's minimal hierarchy, minimal status difference, extensive sharing of information,
partly because people don't feel like they're in competition with
one another, and the result is more productive workplaces and
(15:01):
more satisfied workers. So this is what it takes to
produce an efficient workplace. And as a byproduct of producing
an efficient workplace, you produce satisfied workers. And we see
this in lots and lots of different work situations, not
just the doctors. So think about the hospital janitors that
(15:25):
I talked to you about a few lectures ago, the
ones I describe who were doing things beyond what was
in their official job description. What they did, interacting with patients,
interacting with patient families, finding ways to be helpful to nurses,
all of that requires wisdom, but it also requires thinking
(15:49):
of your job as directly connected to the mission of
your organization. You know, it's true that you could be
mopping floors in an office building just as you're mopping
floors in a hospital. But if you think that your
presence in a hospital matters, then you think that keeping
(16:09):
the place clean is an essential contribution to preventing disease,
curing disease, and easing suffering. And you, the floor mopper,
have as just as an important role to play as
the internist, who is, you know, taking vital signs and
(16:30):
making medication decisions. And the critical thing about some of
the janitors, not all of them, but some of them,
is that they thought they were in the business of
curing disease, not in the business of mopping floors. Made
all the difference. Haircutters. Research has been done on hairstylists
(16:54):
who need a lot of technical proficiency when it comes
to shaping hair and coloring hair and all of that stuff.
But what they say when you interview them is that
the most important skill they have is the skill of
managing interactions with their clients. It's the hardest thing to do,
and it's the one they find most rewarding. This woman
(17:16):
comes in with a photograph of a haircut that she
wants that looks great on a very thin face and
will look terrible on her round face. And your job
is somehow to find a way to convince her to
want something different, to manage the conversation so that she
changes her mind about what she wants and then feels
(17:39):
good about what she gets. So the technical skill is critical,
but being a successful hairdresser requires much more than technical skill.
And this is not a trivial thing. You know, the
woman walks out from the salon and her mood, how
she feels about herself for the next several weeks, maybe
(18:03):
affected by how good a job you do in partnership
with her in giving her the hair styling that that's
the right hair styling for her. Another example, many many
private universities public ones to employ students call alumni and
(18:25):
ask them to make contributions to some alumni fund, often
for scholarships. So the students will come in and get
paid to cold call alums and say would you like
to contribute to the Bloody Blas scholarship fund. Uh, this
is a low success enterprise. Most people don't even answer
(18:47):
the phone. If they do, they don't let you finish.
If they let you finish, they say no, I paid
enough to get my education. So a psychologist named Adam
Grant did a study where half of the students who
would be trying to raise money before they did their
phone calling, they saw an interview that lasted less than
(19:11):
ten minutes with somebody who had recently graduated from the institution.
And what this person said in that interview was given
my circumstances, I would never have been able to go
to the school without a scholarship, and I got the
scholarship because of the efforts of people like you soliciting
(19:33):
contributions from alumni. My education here has changed my life,
and it would not have been possible without the work
you've done. I'm very grateful. That's it. Well, alumni contributions
that were produced by the people who heard that little
(19:55):
speech tripled. They weren't given any new techniques for soliciting money.
What was happening is that they were directly connected to
the mission that their activity was serving. They were not
simply punching their clock to get paid and get hung
up on. They were there to help students in tight
(20:17):
financial circumstances, get the opportunity to study at this institution,
and all of a sudden they just couldn't do it
hard enough and well enough because it was so important.
Reminding people of the mission and that it's a mission
that's admirable. Even noble makes a huge difference. I'll give
(20:37):
you one last example. This involves a man named Ray
Anderson who was a very successful manufacturer of carpet tile.
His company manufactured the sorts of things you see when
you're in public spaces like airport terminals, these squares of
(20:58):
carpet uh that line the floors in public spaces, and
he was extremely successful. He made a huge pile of money.
But he had this awakening one day that he was
going to retire, leaving a huge a state for his
(21:21):
grandchildren and a planet they wouldn't be able to live
in because it turned out the production process that went
in that they used to make this carpetile left an
extremely large environmental footprint, and so he was enriching himself
and his family and poisoning the earth every day. And
(21:43):
he decided that from that day forward, their mission would
be to change the production process and reduce their environmental
footprint to zero. He knew that this would cost him substantially,
that profits would really take a hit. He didn't care.
He had all the money he needed. His intry was
(22:05):
in the future of the earth for his grandchildren. He
was willing to take the profit hit, and so they
embarked on a ten year, fifteen year campaign to reduce
the environmental footprints of Eero. Unfortunately, he died while this
campaign was in the middle, but it had already reduced
its environmental footprint by more than half before he died.
(22:30):
And the extraordinary thing is that with each step they
made in the production process to reduce pollution, profits went up,
knocked down. They made more money, not less money. And
the question is why, And his answer was that the
people who worked in the factory were no longer just
(22:51):
producing carpetile. Now what they were doing was saving the planet.
And this was an incredibly motivating thing for the people
who worked there. So they came in every day and
worked extremely hard. They came in every day full of
ideas about ways to change production to lower the environmental footprint.
Even more, they cared about the work they did in
(23:15):
a way they hadn't when basically they were just working
to get a paycheck. He hadn't anticipated this. He was
astonished by it, but you know, it was incredibly gratifying,
and in some ways, the most important lesson he learned
was that if you treat your employees like people who
(23:35):
care about the mission, and you create a mission that's
worth caring about, they will go through fire for you
and for the company. Mission driven autonomy, discretion for employees,
social engagement, flexibility. But I think most important is the first.
(24:00):
Mission driven. If people care about the work they do
and they think that it in some way makes somebody's
life better, they will do the work more efficiently, more accurately,
into a higher standard of quality. And this is even
true when you're thinking about ordinary retail. Think about a
(24:24):
retail store in the mall and will end with this example.
There are two ways to think about your job as
a retail salesperson. One way to think about it is
I'm here to sell as much stuff as I possibly can.
The second way to think about it is everybody who
comes into my store has a problem. I'm here to
(24:46):
solve problems, and sometimes that may mean selling less than
the people came in to buy. Sometimes it may mean
selling more sometimes it may mean selling nothing. But the
point is everybody who walks out of this store came
in with the problem that I help to solve, which
(25:06):
means that every day I make the lives of fifty
people just a little tiny bit better than their lives
were before they came in. If that's the attitude you
take towards retail sales, all of a sudden, you are
not in the business of selling junk to people. You
(25:26):
are in the business of making people's lives better. And
that creates a kind of meaning and purpose that makes
the work people do mundane, though it may be much
more satisfying, and it makes their engagement much greater, and
it makes the quality of their work much higher. The
(25:48):
aim here is to make as much work as possible
that people do, work that takes advantage of and nurtures
the wisdom people have about treating other people in the
right way. YEA, So finding the why of what you
(26:10):
do really can't make a difference. We hope that you
can take some of these lessons into your own workplace
as well. Next time on the Happiness formula how to
be a Good Friend. The Happiness formula from One Day
University is a production of I Heart Podcasts and School
of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a review
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