Five Tips to be Happier at Work (Dr Laurie at SXSW)

Work is a worry. Are we paid enough? Should we be getting promoted quicker? Is artificial intelligence about to replace us all? 

Speaking at SXSW 2024, Dr Laurie Santos argues that because of all our career woes we often neglect our happiness. She walks through her top five tips for improving our workplace wellbeing - which will not only make us feel better, but might even cause our salaries to rise!  

Suggested reading from this episode:

Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN by Tara Brach

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport

Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff

The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It by Christina Maslach

The Business of Friendship by Shasta Nelson

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. As fans of this show probably know, I've thought
a whole lot about happiness and academic settings, about how
teens and young adults can be happier at school or
in college. But when I attended the twenty twenty three
south By Southwest conference, I had a chance to take

(00:35):
part in a great panel which talked about the challenges
of maintaining our well being at work. So at this
year's south By Southwest I returned to give a special
talk about what science says we should do to thrive
and are rapidly changing workplaces. The audience in Austin really
seemed to enjoy it, so I wanted to share that
talk with you today. I hope you enjoy it. Hello,

(00:57):
Hello south By folks. Today we're going to be talking
about the future of work, because the landscape of work
is changing. You know, take the fact that we're kind
of dealing with technology changes, right, We're all trying to
figure out how these new tools like chat, GBT and
AI are going to change the landscape of how we
do our creative work, how we do knowledge work generally, right,

(01:17):
this is something that's kind of on our mind about
the future of work. On our mind about the future
of work is also the question of where we work,
you know, like the fact that we're no longer in
these big office buildings that so many companies have paid for,
Like the fact that we wind up working at home
with a lot of you know, destructions around us all
the time. But beyond that, we also have questions about
how the economy is shaping the future of work and

(01:39):
the fact that you know, some of us might not
be working in the same place that we were working,
you know, a couple of years ago. What does that
mean that these things are changing around, especially for the
folks who might have been laid off or had some
career changes, but also for the folks that are in
the same career that they were in before. If your
mindset is on your worries about leaving work, if your
mindset is on quiet quitting, what is that doing to

(02:00):
the nature of work and how we focus on it.
But this is a session on happiness and well being,
and so we're going to be focused on the question
of what the future of work says about happiness and
how our own mental health and our well being might
be involved in the future of work in ways that
we actually don't expect and I think it's fair to
say it's been basically a dumpster fire for the last

(02:22):
couple of years when it comes to our collective well being.
You know, for a variety of reasons, we have just
gotten through a global pandemic, We are facing a climate
crisis that is unprecedented. We have all these technologies that
are coming in that are spooking us about how we're
going to change work around, Like we're coming up on
a really terrifying election that is going to be taking

(02:43):
up all of our bandwidth. Right, twenty twenty four has
been a mess, But I also think twenty twenty four
has been a mess when it comes to thinking about work.
So many of us are feeling much more burned out,
much more overwhelmed, much more anxious about the certainty of
our work and the certainty of our workplaces than ever before.
And as an expert on the science of happiness, this

(03:05):
is actually something that worries me about the future of work,
because we know a lot about what happens to people's
work when their well being takes a dive, when they're
feeling a little bit burned out, when they're feeling a
little bit overwhelmed, and the answer is that it's not good.
And so when I got invited to kind of come
out to south By to have a conversation with you
about the science of happiness, I really wanted to focus

(03:26):
on work in particular, because when I do the thing
that most south By presenters do, we kind of put
on our south By glasses and we look to the future.
And my goal as a speaker is to give you, Okay,
what are we going to know? What do we know
right now that's going to change the future of the
workplace in five years from now? What do you want
to hear today that you're going to take with you
when you leave this place that's going to prepare you

(03:47):
for the next five years, the next decade and so on.
When I hear that question, I actually don't want to
talk about AI. I don't want to talk about layoffs.
What I want to talk about is happiness and mental health.
And the reason I want to talk about that is
that if you look at what the science suggests what
the biggest priority should be in the workplace of tomorrow,
how we want to think about the workplace of the future.

(04:08):
I think science gives us a clear answer, and it's
not that we need to focus on technologies or some
new kind of industry movement, whatever. The thing we need
to focus on is happiness. And that's because so much
data in the last few years have started showing the
importance of happiness for our workplace performance. In fact, what
science shows right now is that our happiness seems to

(04:30):
really matter for our productivity, for our flourishing in the office,
for what we do. How do we know this well,
we know this from some older studies. These are studies
from the nineties and the early two thousands that looked
at the kinds of things that predict your performance bottom line, right,
how you do in the workplace, Things like what are
the kinds of things you can do to make sure
you're going to get a job. We all think of

(04:52):
the normal LinkedIn things, Right, you got to boost your resume,
and you got to get certain skill sets and so on.
We don't tend to think that the thing that you
should prioritize is your happiness and your mental health. But
the data seems to suggest that's actually an important thing
to prioritize. One study by the University of Virginia psychologist
Ed Deaner actually looked at the kinds of things that

(05:13):
predict people's job obtainment, not necessarily right now, but at
times in the future. And the thing that ed Deener
decided to study was people's level of cheerfulness. He measured
cheerfulness in his undergrads at age eighteen and used that
level of cheerfulness to predict whether or not those undergrads
got a job, not when they were age eighteen, but

(05:34):
when they were aged twenty seven and later at age
thirty seven. And what he found, remarkably in a very
famous paper, is that your cheerfulness at age eighteen is predictive.
It's predictive of whether or not you get a job,
whether you get a job that you like, but also
whether or not you get a job where you're making
a decent amount of money. We often think that money

(05:55):
matters for happiness, but we don't think that the causal
arrow goes the other way, Like if I was happier,
I would be making more money. But the data actually
seemed to suggest that that seems to be the case. Now,
you might worry about the statistic. Some of you might
be in the HR field, and you might be saying
to yourself, are we paying the happy people more? Money.
That seems really sketchy. We got to get on top
of that, like, no, no, that's not actually what's happening.

(06:17):
What's happening is that happy people are performing better pretty
much by every metric of innovative performance. It seems like
happy people are actually doing better in their jobs. One
of my favorite studies that looked at this looked in
a particular industry profession. They brought doctors into the lab,
medical doctors, and gave doctors a sort of tough medical diagnosis.

(06:38):
If you're a fan of these like TV shows where
doctors do these weird things, like House or way back
in the day QUINCYMD, where they have these like weird
medical things. I watch these a lot in a bit
of a hypochondriac, so I'm familiar with these. These are
the problems that they gave doctors in this study. These
kind of hard like hard to figure out problems. But
half of the doctors in this study get to be
in a put in a good mood. First, they just

(06:58):
got to watch a couple of silly cat videos on YouTube.
What happens to people's performance? What the researchers find is
that the doctors who are in the good mood wind
up statistically coming up with better solutions, the more innovative solutions.
Just being in a good mood winds up, allowing us
to think a little bit more creatively. Now I'm telling

(07:19):
you the study on this, but in some ways I
didn't need to tell you that study. Right. Think to
the last time that you were feeling the opposite of
that cat video mood where you were just kind of
super overwhelmed and kind of you know, just really depressed
or anxious. You weren't thinking creatively, you were triaging. You're
taking all your ideas in the like tiniest form possible. Right,
Our minds narrow in when we're not feeling good, and

(07:40):
the data suggests that if we're not feeling good at work,
our minds are going to narrow in in ways that
might negatively affect our performance, and that finding a path
to positive emotion might be one of the best ways
to increase our productivity at work. And so that's all
the science showing that happiness matters for our performance. We've
kind of known about that and little fits and starts
over the past few years, but in just the last

(08:03):
year or so, we've been getting a different metric of
how happiness affects our performance, which is the but it
doesn't just affect the performance of individuals. A happiness at
work seems to be affecting a company's profits. And this
is the time when I think people start paying attention,
because as soon as it starts affecting the real bottom line,
like how much money a company is making, all of
a sudden, now people are starting to pay attention. And

(08:26):
I think this data is best shown in a really
cool recent working paper. This is my favorite working paper
of the last year in twenty twenty three, and it
was a paper that was put together by researchers at
the University of Oxford and a company that's of high
prominence here in Austin. Indeed, some of you might know, indeed,
some of you might have been on indeed, if you
haven't been on indeed, indeed is this job website where

(08:48):
you can look for jobs, but also you can rank
everything about your current job, or you can bring your
salary and your compensation, your work life balance, but also
your happiness. And so these researchers that indeed had this idea,
they said, hang on, there are fifteen million hosts plus
on indeed about people's happiness at work. Has anybody ever
actually looked at what that happiness at work predicts? For example,

(09:12):
does it predict how well companies are doing in terms
of their profits? Is there a correlation between people's happiness
at work or average happiness at work in an individual
company and the profits that that company is making. And
so they took these fifteen million plus data points over
thousands of different companies, and they looked and it turns
out these things are correlated. I'm showing you right now

(09:34):
the graph from their working paper, and what you're seeing
is the gross profits on one axis, and these indeed
well being score, which is kind of a metric of
people's happiness at work, their sense of purpose and so on.
But basically, what you see is this lovely correlation where
the companies who have the happiest workers are making the
most money. Now, all of a sudden, the c suite
folks are paying attention because this is mattering for their profits.

(09:56):
But these researchers didn't just do that. They actually did
one other thing that I love. I can't help again,
but kind of nerdily share with you the graph. They said, well,
if this is true that the happier companies are making
the most money. Maybe we need a different econom index.
Some of you might have heard about, like the SNP
five hundred, right, which is like, you know, these top
five hundred companies where if you invest you'll probably make
some money. They said, what if we make a kind

(10:19):
of SMP one hundred of the top one hundred happiest
companies in the INDEED data set, and we plot how
the stocks of that company did against maybe the SMP
five hundred and all these other indicators of economic success.
And that's the graph I'm going to show you. Now.
You'll see on the bottom are these orange, purple, and
green lines. That's the SMP five hundred, the Dow Jones,

(10:40):
the Nasdaq. Those are the normal things we see in
the Wall Street Journal that are the indicators of economic success.
And I'm looking across time as though you'd invested one
thousand bucks back in January twenty twenty in these companies,
how would your money be doing over time? But you'll
notice there's that blue bar that tends to be at
the top of this graph. That's this INDEED top one

(11:00):
hundred kind of SMP one hundred of the happiest companies
and what they're finding is that pretty much at every
point in the economic cycle over the last couple of years,
these top one hundred companies we're beating out in terms
of how much money they're stock, We're breaking all these
other kind of indicators. What does this mean. This means
that what the research is showing is that happier companies

(11:21):
make more money. If your employees are happy, that might
be a critical factor. And whether your startup is going
to succeed, or whether your country, whether your company gets
out of the economic slump that we're all in right now,
these things matter. And so that's why I think, with
my kind of south By glasses on, we need to
be paying attention to well being. Yeah, AI and worries

(11:42):
about the economics and all this stuff that's important. But
I think that over the next five to ten years,
smart businesses are going to start paying attention to their
employee well being. Hopefully partly out of kind of doing
the moral thing for a company, because you want your
employees to feel good and succeed, but I think partly
out of a like fully purely capitalistic move of like,
how are we going to make the most company, how

(12:03):
are we going to make the most money. We make
the most money by having the happiest workers. But there's
a question of like how do we do that? And
that's what I'm going to talk to you about. In
the rest of this talk. We're going to kind of
dig into like, Okay, how do you make a happy workplace?
And how can we as individuals improve our own happiness
in the workplace so our individual performance can flourish and
thrive and so on. And so we're going to walk

(12:24):
through the five tips that science shows us about how
we can do that, how we can improve our well
being in the workplace. And each of these tips, I
should say, each of these tips have this feature where
we're going to walk through a misconception we have about
this right, We're going to see where our mind gets
it wrong about happiness in the workplace and what we
can do to do better, starting with tip number one,

(12:45):
which is, if we want to be happier in the workplace,
we need to find ways to acknowledge and use our
negative emotions a little bit more wisely. Right, Like, we're
all feeling a little overwhelmed, we're all feeling a little anxious,
we're all feeling a little bit upset, frustrated by what's
going on. That's kind of the general state of these things.
That's why, in this a conference where there's so many
other cool sessions this morning, y'all are filling the seats

(13:07):
in this one because we all want to deal with
these negative emotions. The problem, though, is that we have
this misconception about how we should do that. I think
we all think negative emotions not good at work, not
good in general, don't feel good. I'm gonna squish him down,
you know, stiff upper lip, hustle culture. I'll just pretend
I'm not feeling that overwhelmed or that sadness or that
frustration or whatever. Turns out, scientists have gone out and

(13:29):
studied what happens when we suppress our emotions. Does that
positively affect our performance? Turns out no, We know this
from some cleverest studies. One of my favorite it comes
from the neuroscientist James Gross at Stanford. He does these
studies where he brings subjects into the lab and has
them do the opposite of watching that funny cat video.
He has them watch really sad videos. But he tells subjects,

(13:50):
whatever you do, make it so that no one knows
you're feeling sad, so trying to suppress their emotions. Question is,
what's the consequences of doing this? And he tests a
few consequences, what happens to subjects performance on a memory task,
on a decision making task. The what he finds is
that subjects do really bad. Right if you're going to
using all your energy to hold down those emotions, you
can't remember stuff, you can't perform well. Our performance tanks

(14:13):
when we're suppressing our emotions, but we also have negative
consequences for our bodies. It turns out gross measures people's
cardiac stress and this short little laboratory task and he
finds that even suppressing your emotions, after this really tiny
negative video, you can actually see evidence that these subjects
are going through cardiac stress. Point is, our theory about

(14:35):
how we deal with negative emotions is kind of wrong.
We think, squish them down, pretend they're not there, We're
going to be fine, And the data suggests that doesn't work.
The data suggests we need a new way to think
about negative emotions, both at work and kind of in general.
And the way I think we need to think about
negative emotions is not to avoid them, but to use
them as the signal they are evolutionarily speaking, you know,

(14:57):
natural selection doesn't build in extraneous stuff to our psychological
systems that we don't need. Our negative emotions are kind
of like the alert system on our car. You know,
if your brake light goes on, your gas light goes on,
that's kind of a pain in the butt. It means
you have to deal with something, but it's an important
alert because if you don't deal with that thing, worse
things are going to happen. You're going to run out

(15:17):
of gas, so your engine's going to blow up on
the highway. That's what negative emotions are doing. They're trying
to be an alert signal that we need to pay
attention to so we can ask ourselves, how can we
nurture ourselves? What can we do to take care of ourselves.
That's how we need to reframe emotions, both in general
and at work. Our signals of overwhelm are telling us
something important. They're telling us we need to take something

(15:39):
off our plate. Our signals of anxiety or sadness are
telling us something important. They're telling us that something is
a miss that we need to take action and change.
And if we ignore that it's kind of like ignoring
the gaslight, you're going to run out of gas. And
so the question though, is, well, how can we do that?
What are some practical strategies we can use to kind
of notice those emotional signals, acknowledge them, and kind of

(16:00):
use them more wisely. And one of my favorite super
practical strategies comes from the meditation teacher Tara Brack, a
psychologist and meditation teacher. I'm going to flash up some
of these books and I think these are like essential
reading if you want to learn more about your well being.
But Tara Brack actually has a meditation practice she uses
to kind of allow and non judgmentally and kind of

(16:22):
allow your emotions. And it's a method that she calls RAIN,
which is an acronym for recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture.
And so, let's say you're at work and you receive
some email that makes you feel really frustrated, or you
look at the news and you read I don't know
literally anything, and you start to feel sad and anxious
and so on. Right, you remember, oh, yeah, south By

(16:44):
that Yale lady said I could use RAIN, and you've
already achieved the first step which is the R to recognize.
You just recognize what's happening. I'm experiencing a negative emotion
right now, and you get really curious. You categorize it.
You say, is this frustration with a side of anxiety? Well,
maybe it's pissed off with a little spirit in there
of loneliness, right Like, get really creative and use your

(17:06):
adjectives about how you're feeling. You can really describe it carefully.
That's the R step. But then you follow that with
the hard step. Allow. You say, all right, I'm gonna
take five minutes. I'm just gonna sit here non judgmentally,
allow these feelings to be there just as there. I
don't have to love them, but I'm gonna sit with them.
The famous poet Roomy once talked about negative emotions. Is

(17:28):
this visitor who knocks on your door that you didn't
want to show up, kind of the annoying neighbor. Right,
But you don't kick them out. You sit them down.
You know, you invite them in. They're gonna eventually do
their thing and go. That's the allow step for your emotions.
You just commit to hanging out with your emotions for
a bit. But you kind of want to give your
mind something to do. When you're doing that allow step,
and that's the next step. Investigate, You say, all right,

(17:50):
how does it feel in my body when I'm feeling,
you know, pissed off with a side of lonely. Maybe
my chest is getting tight, maybe my brow is furrowing.
Maybe I have this enormous craving right, I want to
eat something, or I want to have a drink or
check my email. Don't do act on those just like, huh.
That is where my brain, my brain and my mind
goes when I'm feeling this stuff. And the beauty of
the investigate step is that so much evidence suggests that

(18:13):
emotions are kind of like a wave. This is in
clinical practice what's often called urge surfing, where if you
pay attention to an emotion, you'll feel it a little
bit more. It'll kind of go up like a wave,
but then it'll just kind of crash down and do
its thing. The problem is we never hang out with
our emotions, non judgmentally long enough for them to do that.
That's the investigate step, But the key is that you

(18:33):
don't stop there. There's one more letter in this rain
practice and for nurture and that's to do something nice
for yourself. Negative emotions don't feel good. What can you
take off your plate? What can you do to help
yourself take care of yourself? Right? Practice is like rain,
I love because they've actually been studied in laboratory settings. Rain,
but also a whole host of practice is like rain,

(18:54):
where you allow your emotions and non judgmentally say I'm
having a tough time, but I'm going to sit with it.
And research has shown that they can reduce burnout in
domains like palliative care workers and in industry is like
for first responders. Right, These are who are dealing with
negative emotions really on a daily basis, and practices like
these can help. So there are practices that can also

(19:16):
help us in all the industries that I'm seeing in
this room right. Finding ways to acknowledge our negative emotions
and use them wisely. That's tip number one. Now we
get to tip number two, which is a mindset shift.
We have to overcome misconceptions we have about our own productivity.
And that is the tip that we need to rethink
not just productivity, but how much we're protecting what social

(19:39):
scientists call our time affluence. What is time affluence. It's
kind of a strange term. Well, it's a term that
social scientists like the researcher Ashley Willin's at Harvard Business School,
have gotten really obsessed with lately. It's defined as the
subjective sense that you feel wealthy in time. You've got
lots of time on your hands. Right, some of you

(20:00):
are already furrowing. I can see. It's the opposite of
what many of you probably experience, which is time famine,
where you're literally starving for time. And the research shows
that time famine works a lot like hunger famine. It
puts our bodies into flight or flight mode. It's also
really terrible for our well being. In fact, Ashley Willens's
research suggests that if you self report being time famished

(20:20):
a lot of the time, that's as bad for your
well being as if you self report being unemployed. You know,
you lost your job tomorrow, that would suck. Just not
having any time, or feeling that you don't have any
time is as bad for your well being, which is bad.
Some of you are watching your faces like, you know
that's me. I feel so time famished. What can I do? Well?

(20:41):
I think to figure out what we can do? We
need to understand the misconceptions that drove us here. Why
are we feeling so strapped for time? And I think
it's not because we're massa kiss. I think we feel
strapped for time because we think that working as much
as we work all the time is essential for kind
of achieving the things we want to achieve in life.
We want to get to eleven in our careers and
our kind of creativity and so on, and we think, push, push, push,

(21:04):
and I'll just keep working all the time and then
I'll be quote unquote productive. But does that really work
or is this a misconception? My favorite recent articulation of
how much this is a misconception comes from this fabulous
book by Cal Newport called Slow Productivity. I just interviewed
Cal from my podcast The Happiness Lab, and I think

(21:24):
this book is also essential reading for everyone. But Cal
kind of walks through this idea that, like, you know,
these days, we don't really have a great sense of
what productivity is. We used to do, right, if you
think back to the industries that humans used to engage in,
like think like agriculture, we had a good way to
determine productivity. It was like amount of time and resources

(21:44):
per like corn, Like it was really easy thing you
measure like big bushel of corn that dude's doing good, right,
Or fast forward to industries like the assembly line and
kind of making stuff. That was another domain where we
had some pretty good ideas of productivity. Right, amount of
time per numbers of card top parts getting put on
these you know, chevies. That was a good measure of productivity.

(22:07):
We had those back then. But now how fast forward
to the kind of knowledge work that most of you
in the room do, and our definition of productivity gets
a little bit trickier. Like, you know, I'm a knowledge
worker in the podcast space, I'm a podcast host, So
like what counts as productivity for me? Is it number
of episodes I make per time? Is it the ratings?
Is it the amount of ad revenue I make? Right? Like,

(22:29):
we don't have these good measures of productivity. It's not
as easy as with corn or when we're producing cars
and so on. And Newport suggests that what we've done
as knowledge workers is that we've developed a sort of
proxy for our own productivity. It's what he calls pseudo
productivity or just extreme visual busyness. We feel like if
our gcals are filled with all these meetings and all

(22:51):
this stuff to do that must be productive. You know,
we even pick a particular time to do it, you know,
kind of nine to five where we fill that time
even if that's not our best, most productive time, because
that's like what you do. And Newport argues that this
is problematic because it means that what we're going to
reward ourselves with, or we're going to kind of make
kind of see really feel like we're being productive, is
whenever we're just like doing stuff that looks visually active.

(23:14):
He argues that this is why we load our days
filled with like email and slack messages and meetings at
work and team meetings, because it feels like we're doing
something the company can see us we're actually doing something. See.
But he's like, that's not the real knowledge work you
want to get done. We don't even know if this
stuff is actually contributing to the big projects you want
to get through. But it looks really visually busy, so
you feel kind of good about it. His argument is

(23:35):
that these kinds of things can be what he calls
productivity termites, where they kind of all those emails and
slack messages go into your calendar, and just like a
termite eating away at the house, they eat away at
the foundation of the free time you have, such that
when you kind of go back and say, all right,
I'm going to do the big project and that big
deep knowledge work I want to work on, you can't
do that because, like the whole structure of your calendar

(23:57):
is broken down by all these slack message answering and
these tiny meetings and these things. And that means that
we're not being as productive as we could be. Why.
Because we've made ourselves so tight I'm famished in an
effort to kind of feel productive, We've killed our own
time affluence. And so the answer is that we need
a new way to think about our time and our productivity.

(24:18):
But how do we do that well? I argue that
the way we do that is that we try to
embrace a little bit more time affluence, as uncomfortable as
that might be, and as many things as that means.
We need to take off our plate to feel like
we're a little bit less time famished. Strategies for doing
this involve kind of thinking about whether you can kind
of get rid of some of those productivity termites. What

(24:41):
can it look like to kind of push email or
push slack messages only to sometimes in the day, so
you can feel like you have these big stretches that
feel quite productive when you can work on things. Another
one of my favorite suggestions comes from the psychologist Gal Zuberman,
who talks a lot about what he calls the yes
damn effect. So the yes dam effect is like, you know,

(25:02):
months and months ago, somebody's like, hey, can you do
this project report? Or Hey can we set up this
meeting for a couple hours, or hey can you go
to this conference? And it seems like it's so far away,
you're like yes, But then time goes on and that
date shows up and you look in your calendar and
that stupid thing is there, and you're like, damn. That's
the yes damn effect. Zuberman suggests we should embrace a

(25:22):
different effect, which he calls the no yay effect. And
the way the no ye effect works, as you might guess,
is that person's like, hey can use project report? Can
you do this thing? You commit to saying no. You
literally put on your calendar how many no things you
want to have, and you have to tick them off
the list. But you don't just say no. You say,
and when was that project supposed to be due? The
one I said, no too, when was it due? Then

(25:44):
you go in your calendar and you put that on
that date, you know, Monday, three weeks from now. You're
supposed to have that thing that you had to do.
And you look and you're like, I don't have to
do that thing, and you say yay. That's the no
yay effect. The point is that what we're doing is
we are aggressively protecting our time. We are thinking about
our time and the same way we think about our

(26:04):
money where we want to prioritize it. And in fact,
research for Ashley Willand's and her coll suggest that the
more you focus on time and put your investment into
time rather than money, the happier you'll be. Most of
you are at south By because you have at least
some discretionary income to come to events like this. Willins's
work suggests that the more you spend your discretionary income

(26:24):
to get back time that you give up money to
get time, the happier you will be. And we can
do this in really silly ways that we often don't
even think about. I'm sure at some point some of
you in the working day, have gotten takeout or something
like that. We don't think of it as a savings
in time, but the research suggests we should. Right. You know,
say you go out and get pad tie or whatever,
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 the peanut sauce. You probably saved what
hour and a half hour, forty five minutes? What'd you
do with that hour and forty five minutes? So that's
spending our money to get back more time, but also
making sure we're framing things like that. A final way
we can protect our time affluence is to make good
use of the time we do have. Our time. As

(27:06):
you heard in these top productivity termites, sometimes breaks our
time up into these little tiny chunks. This is what
journalists Bridget Schultz calls time confetti. It was little pieces
for you five minutes when that Zoom meeting ends, or
ten minutes if your kid falls asleep. We think those
are just such tiny periods we don't do anything with them.
But Schultz suggests that we might want to invest in

(27:27):
that time confetti because when you add it up, it's
a huge sheet of paper that is like kind of
broken into these tiny pieces, and so she recommends making
what she calls a time confetti wish list. This isn't
like work to dos, but like for you to do.
So maybe that's when you do your rain meditation or
some other self care practice. The key is that instead
of blowing that little piece of time confetti scrolling on

(27:47):
Reddit or Instagram or something like that, you actually do
something useful with it. It makes you feel a little
bit more time affluent. So that's top tip number two.
We need to rethink our idea that productivity is about
visible busyness. It's a filled calendar, it's all that stuff.
No to feel better, we need to embrace a slower
form of productivity, one that says no to a lot

(28:09):
of this stuff so that we can have a yes
for when we really need it. But it's worth noting
that as folks in the current culture that we're in,
where you know, busyness and lessl culture and girl boss
and eternalized capitalism rein zubream, that's hard, right. The act
of doing that, saying no more, is hard, and that's
why we need tip number three, which is another mindset

(28:30):
shift that can help us with this, which is that
if we really want to protect our time, if we
really want to work better, we need to motivate ourselves
in the way that science suggests work best, and that's
by motivating ourselves with what we're going to call self compassion.
As we mentioned, we all want to push ourselves. We
all want to get to eleven, right. I think that's
always been true, but lately, in the past five to

(28:50):
ten years, we've developed some mindset notions about how we
do that best, and I think those are best summed
up in the idea of hustle culture, right, keep pushing yourself,
sleep when you're dead. All these things, these are the
mantras that we pick up because we assume that's the
best way to motivate ourselves. But the research is starting
to show that that just doesn't work. That all these

(29:11):
kind of mantras that we have in our head is
kind of instagram like, you know, latching onto our brain
of how much we need to work more and keep grinding.
It actually doesn't work. It causes us to procrastinate, It
causes us to engage in a lot more self criticism
because we feel like our work is our worth, and
it's sort of never enough, right, you kind of just
keep pushing yourself and pushing ourselves. And so this is

(29:35):
the misconception that the way to motivate ourselves is to
kind of scream at ourselves like a drill instructor and
like some like hustle culture warrior. It kind of doesn't
work in the way we think. So how do we
fix this misconception. We need to develop a better way
to motivate ourselves, a better way to think about how
we motivate ourself and the way that we get from
a lot of recent science is that we need to

(29:56):
motivate ourselves better through self compassion. Another fabulous book if
you're interested in this, is book by Kristin Neff, who's
a professor here in Austin. She's at ut She has
this book about self compassion, and a lot of her
work suggest that if we want to engage in self
compassion to motivate ourselves, we need to remember that self
compassion has three parts. The first is something that should

(30:17):
be really familiar from Tip one, recognizing your negative emotions.
It's the practice of mindfulness. You gotta know what's going on.
This sucks right now, I'm having a really tired time,
I'm feeling really anxious, I'm feeling really ashamed. That's mindfulness.
You're recognizing what's happened, first step of self compassion. But
the second step is you do something with that mindfulness.

(30:37):
You then say, but that makes sense because I'm only human.
This is something that everybody goes through. It's normal to fail,
it's normal to screw up, it's normal to feel overwhelmed.
This is normal. It's a common human experience. That's step
number two, common humanity. But you don't end there. You
ask yourself what you can do to be kind to yourself.
You say, what can I take off my plate? How

(30:59):
can I help myself right now? What do I need
right now? You talk to yourself as though you were
a friend who'd showed up at your house having the
same problem, and you talk to yourself like you would
talk to that friend. And I love this idea of
talking to yourself like you'd talk to a friend, because
sometimes when we think of practice as like self compassion,
especially from the hustle culture mindset, we sometimes worry that

(31:20):
it's like self indulgence, like I'm being too nice to myself,
I'm letting myself off the hook. But if you think
about how you'd really talk to a friend that was struggling,
if they were really screwing up, you probably wouldn't let
them off the hook. You wouldn't scream at them like
some hustle culture warrior. You'd talk to them kindly, with curiosity.
You'd be like, I don't know what's happening, but I'm
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 how
you talk to yourself, not self indulgence. It's a form
of compassion, and it's a form of compassion that the
research suggests really works. In fact, Kristin Neff has tested
all the benefits of this practice of self compassion and
it has some incredibly compelling ones. She's, for example, done
work on whether or not practices like self compassion can

(32:03):
reduce PTSD in combat veterans, and she finds that both
with Iraqi and Afghani vetts, teaching them these strategies of
self compassion ahead of time can reduce the rates of
trauma that these individuals come back with. Right, these are
really negative, nasty emotions, but being nice to yourself through
it can be incredibly powerful. Kristin Neff also finds that
being nice to yourself can make it easier to be

(32:24):
nice to your future self. She finds that people who
engage in self compassion eat healthier, they save more for retirement,
they're better able to prioritize their future selves, and that
includes a future self that has to work at something
that's a little scary. She finds that practices like self
compassion can reduce things like procrastination, so it's a way
to get more done because you're not screaming at yourself
when you don't do things the way you think. She

(32:45):
also finds that self compassion is a great way to
practice compassion for other people. So people with more self
compassion show more self compassion and their romantic relationships with
their kids, with their teammates on the job. It's just
a powerful way of feeling better and so sounds great,
But what are some practical strategies we can use to
find more self compassion, especially if we're kind of infused

(33:06):
in that hustle culture. And one way that Christian RECs
amends that looks cheesy but it works, is to engage
in compassionate self touch. So think about the last time
you had a bad day. You know, if your parents
are still around, you might have called your mom, maybe
saw her for coffee, she gave you a hug or something,
or you saw a friend, your spouse. We tend to
comfort each other with a certain kind of touch. Kristin

(33:28):
Neff says, just do that to yourself. Look stupid, but
it works. Turns out your brains are dumb. They don't
know who's touching you. Right. It worked useful in other
context too, as we know. Right, but you just do
this to yourself. And because we need practice, I'm going
to ask all of you in the room now to
kind of do a little self hug, a little kind
of stroke on the arm. But then that is a

(33:50):
signal to you to engage in new self talk. This
is why I like this touch practice. It like reminds
you I got to talk to myself differently, and you
talk using those strategies mindfulness. This is really hard right now.
I am struggling. This sucks. I'm not doing well common humanity,
But that's normal, it's just human. Stress is a part
of life. Everyone struggles. And then self kindness. What can

(34:11):
I take off my plate. What do I need right now?
Just asking that question to yourself when you're struggling can
be so powerful, what do I need right now? Again,
the research shows that, even though we don't think it,
this kind of self kindness and self compassion is a
much better way to motivate ourselves than all that hustle
culture self criticism. So that's top insight number three. We

(34:31):
got to motivate ourself with self compassion. The question is,
of course, what is it we're motivating ourselves to do?
What things should we be doing more of it work
to increase our flourishing and reduce our risk of burnout.
You'll hear my best two tips on happiness at work
after the short break. So far in my south By

(34:53):
Southwest talk on happiness at work, I've covered the importance
of recognizing when we're feeling sad, why we should differentiate
between actual productivity and stressful busyness, and how we should
occasionally give ourselves a comforting hug. In the second half
of my talk to the topic of tackling burnout, and
that gets us to tip number four, which is that

(35:14):
if we really want to fight burnout, the research shows
we need to craft our job a bit so that
it becomes a calling. Burnout is something else that everybody's
talking about at south By because it's a thing. I
think this is also something we have a lot of
misconceptions about. We think it's just about emotional exhaustion, but
the research shows that burnout can be more like an
occupational problem. It's kind of an interaction between you and

(35:36):
your job that we need to understand. And we know
this from the lovely work of Christina Maslak. She is
the scientific expert on burnout, and she's walked through the
kind of steps that lead to burnout in an organization,
the kind of factors that wind up letting us feel
more burned out, and she's identified six. I think of
the six, there's ones that we often think of, so
things like workload, if your workload is too much, or

(35:58):
maybe the rewards aren't too much, you're not getting paid
enough for the work you're doing. But there's one on
this list that the science has really narrowed in on.
It's particularly important. It's this last one, values mismad. What's
that we get burned out when the values that we
signed up for to do a job don't match the
ones that we're experiencing in practice. I think this is
something that's really problematic. For example, and lots of industries,

(36:20):
but I'll just pick one the healthcare industry. You're a
nurse and you're a doctor. You got into it because
your value is helping people. But on the ground, it
feels like you're saving money for the insurance companies or
the hospital and you're getting patients in it, and it's
just like there's a mismatch there, and that's the one
that insidiously leads us to feel that yucky sense of burnout.
And so what that means is that we got to

(36:40):
get our values right right, that's the thing we might
need to focus on more than some of the other stuff,
but we often don't know how to do that. But
the good news is there's lots of research that's focused
on how we can, and a lot of it comes
from the work of Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman at
the University of Pennsylvania who focused on what they call
finding your signature Strengths. Their research has basically looked at like, well,

(37:01):
what are the values that people engage in, you know,
to do good in the world and their work and
their volunteerism and whatever. And they've looked cross culturally and
identified about twenty four different what they call character strengths,
basically this list of values. You look at the list,
you're like, oh yeah, like, you know, hope and persistence
or self restraining, zest for life, an appreciation of beauty, bravery.

(37:23):
They're kind of set of values that like, we can
all get behind. But as you scroll through that list,
there might be some of the things on the list
that you're like, you know, yeah, citizenship is good, but
I'm really into creativity or I'm really into humor, or
I'm really into zest for life. There might be one
that's like the particular one that you resonate with that

(37:44):
is what researchers would call your signature strength. But the
question is like, okay, well, what if my signature strength
is humor or bravery or citizenship or whatever, Like, how
do I engage that and the knowledge work that I'm
doing at work? Right? How do I do that a
little bit more? And here we have the lovely work
of Amy Resininski, who's another faculty member at the University
of Pennsylvania who studies what she calls job crafting. Her

(38:07):
idea is that in any job, you can look your
job description and figure out with flexibility ways that you
can infuse these values in no matter what your job
description is. And I love Amy's work because she doesn't
do studies with people doing creative knowledge work in the
industries that I'm probably mostly seeing in the room. Most
of her work on job crafting is with hospital janitorial

(38:29):
staff workers, where you might think these folks don't actually
have a lot of creativity about how they can move
their job description around. These are people are like washing
linen in a hospital ward. But what she finds interestingly
is that a third of these hospital workers a third,
it's actually a pretty high number, say that they experience
their job as a calling. They love their job, they
wouldn't leave their job for something else. And the reason

(38:50):
she finds as she digs into what they're doing is
that they're constantly engaging in one of their signature strengths.
She tells these lovely stories of hospital janitorial staff workers who,
for example, one who engages in kind of helping others
and humor every day he worked in a chemotherapy ward. So,
if you've ever been unlucky enough to have to chemotherapy
or know someone who did you know that people often

(39:11):
get very sick, and so a lot of his job
was cleaning up vomit. And she doesn't sound like a
job where you could get a lot of these strengths in.
But he's like, no, no, no, My strength is really humor. Yeah,
I have to clean that up, but my real job
is I make the patient laugh. I'm like a comedian
and I'm going to get them to laugh even though
their day has been really crappy. And he had his
whole stick that he used to do where he'd say,
you know, we'd come into cleaning'd be like you keep vomiting,
I'm gonna get over time and like well, like you

(39:33):
know the secret handshit, you know, just like you laugh
the patient laugh and he's like, see, that's that's my
real job. Or another janitorial staff worker who worked in
a coma ward. So this staff member couldn't interact with patients,
but every day he would move the paintings around in
the room and like the plants, like switch them, and
that was strength of creativity. He just thought maybe it

(39:53):
would help. I don't know, these are nothing managers are
telling people to do. It's just they're infusing their strengths
into their job, and they wind up loving their job,
loving a job that many of us would think would
be a tough job to love in the ways that
they love it. But what's most important about job craft
thing is that the evidence suggests it can protect you
from burnout. It's a way to get your values lined up.

(40:14):
Even if they went askew before, you can bring them
back to an alignment in a way that will protect you.
And that is top tip number four. We need to
find ways to craft our job. That's how we turn
it into a calling. But there's one other scientific way
that we can turn our job into a calling, into
a job that we really love, and that gets us
to top tip number five, which is that the science

(40:35):
really shows that if we want to feel better at work,
we need to find ways to seek out more belonging,
and we do that by getting a little bit more
social than we're comfortable with. I started with that lovely
study from Indeed. I talked about how companies with happier
workers are making the most money. But what I didn't
tell you was the key feature, which is what makes
the workers happy? What are the factors that lead to

(40:58):
more happiness at work. In this big, huge data set
where we have people's spontaneous ratings, researcher yan Emmanuel Denev,
he's the Oxford researcher who led this study, said well,
let's let economists guess. We have the data from the
Indeed surveys, but let's let economists guess what do you
think makes people happy at work? And economists came up
with their usual top three. They said money, people who
get paid more are probably happier at work. That was

(41:19):
idea number one. Idea Number two was good management. We
pay all these people to go to business school, probably
they're learning something to make people happy at work. And
number three was some sense of like work life balance
or work life flexibility. That's what people want. That's what
people assumed made people happy at work. And these factors
did matter, but in the list of things that mattered,

(41:40):
they were kind of in the middle of the list.
Kind of think like number five, number six, number seven,
that kind of thing. The thing that mattered the most,
the thing that no economists predicted was people's sense of belonging.
And with the Indeed data, yan Emanuel Denv could kind
of dig into what this belonging measure included, and it
included three factors. The first is that you say people

(42:02):
care about you at work. You're not a cog in
the machine. You're someone who matters, right, People actually acknowledge
you you matter. The second thing is that the work
you do matters, right, so you're doing something that matters
to the company. You can sort of see your impact.
And the third factor, which kind of nobody predicted, is
that you answer yes to the question do you have
a best friend at work? If you have a best

(42:24):
friend at work, you're more likely to say you belong
and that the stuff you do matters there. This all
surprises the economists, but it made total sense to someone
who studies the science of happiness, because we've seen for
years that social connection and our social relationships are one
of the most important things that matter for our well being.
So of course it would make sense that these kinds
of social relationships matter at work. I think the problem

(42:45):
is that, yet again, here, like those economists, most of
us lay people have a particular misconception. We think, Okay, yeah,
friends matter outside the work, but in the office, it's
me working all the time. It's just like me kind
of you know, junking my head in the heck with
those like trust falls or like the silly office socials
like I'm just gonna get my work done. And one
of my favorite kind of versions of this claim came

(43:07):
from this viral Blots and Globe article that made the
claim gen Z, my generation is not looking to make
friends at work. Offices aren't social hubs anymore, and it's
better this way. And this article was really particularly painful
for me because the author, Catherine, who was a student
in my Yale Happiness class, like she should have know.
I was like, what have I taught you? Nothing? Have
I taught you nothing? I have a lovely interview with

(43:29):
her for my podcast, which I'll kind of sum up
in a second. But this is I think this is
a misconception that all of us have, right, It's a
nice to have, not a need to have. But these
data from the Indeed study suggests it's a need to have.
Maybe one of the reasons we're all so disengaged at work,
Maybe one of the reasons quiet quitting seems so appealing
is that we're actively not investing in the thing that
might matter the most for our happiness at work, which

(43:51):
is our connection with other people. And so the question is,
how can we overcome this misconception, how can we develop
a new way to think about connection at work? And
here I love the advice that comes from the kind
of business professional Shasta Nelson, who's this lovely book on
the Business of Friendship where she walks through the ways
we can actually make friends at work. Another great podcast
guest on my podcast, The Happiness Lab, and she talks

(44:14):
about three things we need to do to promote friendship.
It's not what we think. It's not like oversharing, you know,
over the water cooler. It's first positivity. Friends are made
at work when we have more positive interactions than negative ones.
This isn't toxic positivity. This isn't be nice all the time.
It's just like, in the ratio of emotions that you
generate for other people at work, make more positive ones

(44:34):
than negative ones. That's kind of data point number one.
The second thing she recommends is that friendships at work
come from consistency. You see the same people over time,
You know that those interactions are going to go a
particular way. It makes it easy to form the habit
of friendship. And I think this is a tricky one
because many of us aren't forming that consistent pattern in
the office. I think some people are going back to work,
but a lot of people are stuck trying to develop

(44:56):
their social connection and from remote work or hybrid work.
What can we do to make that consistent friendship like
interaction in these times? I think if we answer that
question by kind of putting more effort into talking to people,
not just in the norm meeting at teams, but other
ways of actually making that consistent connection, all the better.
So that's number one and number two more positivity, more consistency,

(45:18):
and interaction. But the third thing that Shasta suggests is
that we need to get a little bit more vulnerable,
not in the way we think, but just showing up
as a real human who has opinions, who has frailties,
all that self compassion stuff I talked about. Engaging with
that and recognizing that you're a normal human is powerful.
I think we sometimes think at work we need to
be this like AI robot who doesn't experience emotions, who

(45:41):
never has failures, who never asks for help, and so on.
And that's what vulnerability is about. It's avoiding that stuff.
It's really taking time to talk to your neighbors to
ask questions to get feedback. These are the moments of
vulnerability that seem to really matter when you gauge in them.
The data really suggests that you make more friends at
work and you wind up not just happier, but also,

(46:02):
as we've been mentioning, performing better. And so that's top
tip number five. I think we really want to experience
our work as a can. We need to overcome this
idea that well, you know, friendships happen outside the work,
and my work is just my work. We really need
to engage in belonging. It's the factor that seems to
matter for our sense of happiness at work, but also
for our performance at work, and also for companies happiness.

(46:24):
So I think this is a tip not just for individuals,
but for smart companies that are using the data too. Okay,
so you got through the five tips from Happiness. If
you're like, oh my gosh, I want tips six through ten,
you can do that. You can sign up for my
online course for free Coursera dot org. Just show of
hands anybody taken the course already. Oh my students, Hello students,
thank you for coming. And if you're like, oh my, gosh,
I'm burned out and overwhelmed. I don't want to take

(46:46):
another whole Yale class. We also have my lovely podcast,
The Happiness Lab, which you should check out. And all
the folks I mentioned and that you wanted to hear
more about, they're all in the podcast. You can just
google their name and find it there. But what I
hope I've done is to convince you that in their
quest to kind of put the south By goggles on
and say, what's the future of work? What's going to matter?
What really actually matters isn't the stuff we normally think about.

(47:06):
What might actually matter more is our mental health. And
so if we promote that, and we get companies to
promote that while be achieving in all the ways we
want to succeed, and with that, I'll thank you. And
I think we have a couple of minutes for questions,
So thank you all, And if you haven't give me
my slideo questions, do that now. Yeah. So I'm seeing

(47:29):
the questions pop up. This is awesome. So first question,
thoughts on the recent New York Times article that workplace
wellness programs have little benefit. It seems contradictory. I think
it isn't contradictory, because I would raise the question of
whether or not any of the workplace wellness programs I
mentioned talked about this stuff. A lot of workplace wellness
programs focus on these kind of individual strategies that we

(47:52):
can use to get better. So things like meditation, things
like exercise, and so on. It's not that those things
are bad, it's that those things might not be achieving
the stuff that really matters. What's the stuff that really matters.
It's you finding your own values and finding ways to
engage with them. It's you try trying to figure out
your vulnerability at work and really connecting with people. Most

(48:12):
workplace well being programs don't have that. It's you navigating
and acknowledging your negative emotions. I haven't seen any workplace
well being program that's like, well, we need to bring
to the force everyone's negative emotions, right, those are the
things that matter, right, That's just not what these programs
are doing. And so I think it's not so much
a contradiction. It's that these well being programs are trying
to do the best they could, but they might be

(48:34):
missing what some of the latest science is showing. And
that's why I think a more academic, scientific approach. If
you could bring this stuff into these programs, if workplaces
could make this stuff a priority all of a sudden,
I think we would be seeing some real effects. Oh
that was question number one, So next question. Generative AI
promises a lot of productive wins, but employees are scared

(48:54):
feel pressure to adopt it. What tips do you have
for leaders who are managing this transition. I think the
biggest tip is just don't pretend those emotions aren't happening.
I think what happens as a leaders you say, everybody
is freaked out, scared, feels pressured by this stuff, but
we won't admit that. We'll just roll it out and
pretend everybody's fine. We're just gonna squish the beach ball
of all art at negative emotions about chat, GBT under

(49:15):
the ground, and everybody would be cool. Right. You just
saw that it'd be better to admit that. So I
think as individuals you need to kind of sit with
some of these emotions. It's normative to feel a little
freaked out in the creative industry that we have these
tools that can like write podcasts and screenplays and make
amazing art. It's normal to be spooked by that. It's normative.
So I think we need to sit with that and
allow those negative emotions. I think as a leader, you

(49:38):
do well by admitting this stuff, just coming out and
saying it, like, I know this is probably freaking you out.
It makes sense that this is freaking you out. We're
gonna work through those kinds of negative emotions together. I
feel like there's some benefits of going through it. Even
though it feels a little scary. There are lots of
things that are beneficial to us that feel a little
scary at first. How can we acknowledge these negative emotions

(49:59):
and get through it. I think the biggest problem was,
like we're just pretending nobody's freaked out. It's just fine.
No singularity here, like you know, rosy glasses. But I
think once you acknowledge that stuff, recognize those emotions, you
can use it, right. You can use that kind of engage,
like the light on your engine, to tell us how
we should deal with these emerging technologies in a way
that's honest, right, that recognizes maybe this is a problem

(50:21):
for my engine, and I had to think about it differently.
So acknowledge the negative emotions. There next question anonymous. I
love this person put it anonymous. I am that person
who believes I don't want to make friends at work
because the office gossip and pettiness. How do you move
through that? First of all, you're not alone, right. That
article of my students who went viral had like tens
of thousands of comments, most of whom were like, you know,

(50:44):
rallying behind her, right. And I think it's it's important
to acknowledge, like the office gossip and the pettiness, that
stuff feels kind of annoying. And it's true that it
is annoying. It can contribute to negative emotions. But that
might not be everybody in your office, right. There might
be other people you can connect with that aren't participating
as much in that stuff. Right. The idea that you

(51:06):
have to make friends at work doesn't mean that you
have to participate in that stuff. It just means you
have to ask people, Hey, how is your weekend? I
went to south By? Can I just tell you about
this cool panel that I went to on well being
at work? And let me tell you about it. It's
asking for help, it's getting curious about their ideas. Right,
That's what this friendship is about. I think we get wrong.
We think friendship has to look like this terrible middle

(51:28):
school click and that we have to go mean girls
and that's the only way we can make friends. But
if you really dig into what the science suggests about
friendship at work, those are all our misconceptions. It's about positivity,
just having normal, positive interactions with another human, just like
you might with your friend or your spouse or a
family member. It's about doing that relatively consistently and kind
of vulnerably, sort of asking for help, getting curious and

(51:51):
so on. So doesn't mean that you're embracing the mean
girls'ness at work. And I guess another piece of advice
I would have for folks who feel that way, and
there's a lot of you out there, not just here,
but again in the world, is to like try it
in baby steps. If it feels uncomfortable, pick one person
who feels safe, and try to have like one normal
human conversation with that person, whether it's on zoom or not,

(52:13):
and then work from there. Right, this is not dive
into the like friendship at work deepen, It's like try
it out a little bit and see how it feels.
So that would be my advice. Next question, how can
you communicate some of these elements upward to senior management
to create more time for play and belonging, especially when
they're resistant. But I think if you show them data
from fifteen million workers and thousands of companies across literally

(52:35):
every industry shows if you invest in happiness at time
one that investment will show is correlated with higher stock
prices down the line. I think that's the kind of
thing that's going to change the minds of senior management.
They're not going to move when it just is like
a nice to do thing. But if it's a need
to have for the bottom line, if it's the thing
that's going to make us money, now, all of a sudden,

(52:57):
it's gonna matter. I feel like I'm like, you know,
some south By panel and like the early nineties, where
I'm like, the Internet it's gonna be a thing, and
all the cool south By people are like, but my
senior management doesn't believe in the Internet. I'm like, well, well,
it's going to be a thing whether they believe in
it or not. I feel like the twenty twenty four
version of that is on like mental health, super matters
for productivity and you're like, my senior, I'm like, they're

(53:18):
going to have to pay attention to it, because if
the science is showing what the science is showing, they're
kind of not going to have a choice. It's like
lose money or pay attention to this. But share the graph.
Go online, you can google just Indeed, well Being workplace study.
You'll get it. You can share it, and I think
slowly the c suite folks are going to get on board.
Last quick question, So much of the research in this

(53:39):
area is correlational or based on small laboratory studies. How
can we get more data on these causal relationships? Well,
I think that's a great question, and I think one
of the reasons I love the Indeed study is that
this is a huge data set, right, fifteen million workers,
and it's not even people who necessarily thought they were
going to be in a study. These are just people
who were doing their normal ratings on Indeed. They're just
data kind of taken from that. And I think this

(54:01):
is a spot where collaborations between academics and companies can
be so powerful. Right if you work for a small
startup or even a big tech company, especially if you
have some infiltration in HR folks like that partner up
with one of these researchers, you engage in a belonging
intervention where you can do a randomized control trial in
the workplace, and these things are starting to happen. There's

(54:23):
a work there's a working paper now that just came
out on remote work. What are the best practices for it?
This is a research team at NYU that partnered up
with a large company that was naturally rolling out like
they're remote practices, and they said, hey, can we study this?
Can we look at happiness? Would you mind if we
gave workers a choice so we can kind of RCT

(54:44):
this like randomized controlled trial to test this. And so
I think the way that we overcome some of these
kind of small sample sizes and these things that are
more in the Ivory Tower and less in the real
world is to partner with the folks who are in
the real world who have access to these big data sets,
and then you can contribute not just to practices that
we think will make your company better, you can also

(55:04):
learn something that you can share with other companies too.
And I think indeed did this honestly in a nice way.
I've seen this making the rounds. I think people are
talking positively about indeed, given that they were kind of
able to share these data, and so I think the
more companies that do that, the better. But I am
at time unfortunately. I hope I've given you some strategies
you can all use to promote your mental health at

(55:26):
work that you can share with your companies and your teams,
and I hope made you all a little happier. Thank
you all so much. I hope you enjoyed that roundup
of advice on workplace happiness. It's definitely a subject we'll
be returning to very soon, but for now, the Happiness
Lab will be taking a short break. We'll be back
to celebrate the summer Olympics with some shows exploring mental

(55:48):
health in sports, and we'll soon share a very special
season that I've put my heart and soul into.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
So this is for a whole podcast season that we're
doing on stuff that I'm bad at. Okay, this is
a whole episode about boredom because I feel like I'm
pretty bad at boredom. You are, but I feel like
I'm bad at boredom because you're bad at boredom.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Yeah. No, I didn't do well with doing up all that.
Coming very soon on the Happiness Lab would meet doctor
Laurie Santos,