May 18, 2020 • 33 mins
Marty kills rats... but if you asked him what his job is he'd say it was "solving problems" and "helping people". How we view our work can contribute greatly to our daily levels of happiness - far more than money or status.
Dr Laurie Santos examines how we all came to ignore the importance of job satisfaction and hears from Professor Amy Wrzesniewski about "job crafting" - the reframing skill that happy people like Marty use to see their careers as more than just a way to make money.
For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Yeah. No, no, no, it was much more like
terrified than that. I'm going through my sound effects library
with my friend and producer Ryan Dilly. I'm trying to
find a very specific scream, one that's forever etched into
(00:37):
my memory. No, that's like way more of a manly,
brave scream. I think we needed more high pitched and
frantic and fearful. We're trying to reenact a rather horrifying
moment that Ryan and I experienced a few months back.
We were working on our podcast scripts and Ryan needed
a cup of coffee, so he headed into the kitchen,
and that was when I heard it. I think that's
(01:04):
that's pretty close. I think that was it. Ryan emitted
the longest, loudest, and most terror filled shriek I've ever heard.
Apparently a huge, terrifying rat had run through the kitchen,
a rodent that was, at least, according to Ryan's retelling,
about the size of a large Great Dane or a
small horse. I assumed he was exaggerating and that it
(01:24):
was probably just a harmless mouse, the kind we get
on college campuses from time to time, especially when there's
construction outside. A tiny mouse that was probably now feeling
so terrorized by Ryan's scream that it had likely high
tailed it out of the house, never to be heard
from again. But just as I was explaining that we
had absolutely nothing to worry about, the creature that I
(01:48):
could now clearly see was definitely not a tiny mouse
was back. It raced from the kitchen into the study
around our feet, and then slithered into a heating duct
on the wall. But I wasn't worried, not because the
rat wasn't huge or terrifying. It was definitely both. I
just knew it wasn't going to be a problem for
long because at Yale, when these things happen and you
(02:10):
need someone to resolve the issue quickly, you just call
Marty gilorin pest control operator. Marty is like the terminator
for vermin. Within minutes, he was at my house, armed
with baits and traps galore. I like to get there
as soon as I can to help people. Yeah, I
don't like to leave, you know, call's waiting too long.
And that was kind of an emergency call because it
(02:31):
was a rat in a living space. While Ryan continued
to stand bravely on the sofa, Marty was sprawled on
the floor. He checked for the rat where we last
saw it, face pressed up against the air duct. Marty
then set his traps like a general deploying his armies.
He strategized about all aspects of the rats moves, like
what if the rat retreated here or made a break
(02:51):
for it over there. Within minutes, all the traps were down,
and almost as soon as Marty left, we heard, oh,
I got lucky on that one. Sometimes it takes a
lot longer. Marty is a vermin afficionado, one of the
most skilled professionals I've ever met, But few people want
a job like Marty's. In fact, pest control is usually
(03:13):
included in lists of the worst possible jobs in America.
Some exterminators face low wages, deal with dangerous chemicals, and
spend their working hours in the company of scary critters
that can bite, scratch, and sting. I usually get stung
about once a year. Kind of just comes with the territory.
But Marty, it turns out, is the exact kind of
person we should emulate if we want to find the
(03:35):
perfect job, or even just to be happier at work. Generally, because,
as you'll hear in this episode, science suggests that our
intuitions about good jobs and bad jobs are all wrong.
We think that pay and perks and plush offices are
what makes us happy in our careers. But as we'll see,
happiness and human motivation work much differently than our lying
(03:56):
minds realize. Our minds are constantly telling us what to
do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
away from what will really make us happy. The good
news is that understanding the science of the mind can
point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. What did
(04:24):
you want to be when you grew up? I'm going
to venture a guest that rat exterminator was pretty far
down the list. It was for Marty two. He grew
up with the standard career aspirations. I mean, like every kid,
I guess a fireman or a cop or when you're
a kid. But Marty never joined the police department or
signed on at the fire station. After graduating, he drifted
(04:46):
into a number of different jobs, just like restaurant work
and security guard and filling vending machines. Things like that.
They all paid okay, but Marty wasn't exactly filled with
joy when he clocked in every Monday morning, and he
wasn't alone. According to a recent Gallop Pole from twenty eighteen,
only about a third of American workers report feeling really
(05:07):
engaged with their jobs. Over fifty percent admit feeling actively
not engaged, they merely put up with boring work, and
nearly twenty percent report hating what they do for a living.
I've had jobs where I've had that problem before. I
have to go to work. This is not good. It's
Monday morning. It's probably not all that surprising, but hating
your job isn't that great for your happiness? Which raises
(05:29):
an important question, what actually makes for a happier job?
What could make work life better for the nearly one
hundred million Americans who feel disengaged on the job. Many
of us have a pretty strong intuition here, we'd be
happier if only we had a bigger salary. Take one
LinkedIn survey from twenty fourteen. It found that financial compensation
(05:50):
was the top value that most college students look for
when considering a new job opportunity. Compensation was chosen more
often than work life balance, having good colleagues, or even
career development. And our intuition that a bigger paycheck means
a happier career isn't just affecting our job choices, It's
also affecting how we choose to live our lives. Generally.
(06:12):
Consider the results of one study which has surveyed the
values of incoming freshmen for the last half century. In
twenty eighteen, more than eighty percent of freshmen said that
being well off financially was really important in life. It
was more important than raising a family or developing a
meaningful philosophy on life. And that's a big change compared
to the answers their parents or grandparents gave. The number
(06:35):
of students who think big salaries are key has gone
up dramatically since the nineteen sixties. But as our growing
intuition about a link between money and job satisfaction right,
can employers really improve the well being of the nearly
two thirds of people who hate their jobs simply by
paying them more. When you ask people what would make
their lives better or what would make their jobs better,
(06:57):
the first thing they point to is my life so good,
and if I only made ten percent more, it would
be perfect. This is Barry Schwartz, emeritus professor of psychology
at Swarthmore College, an author of the book Why Work
People Are Wrong. This is not the case. Money does
buy a little bit of happiness, but it doesn't buy
(07:17):
a lot of happiness. We covered this in an earlier
episode called The Unhappy Millionaire, but it's worth repeating here.
If you're not making a living wage, more money will
definitely improve your overall well being. But if you currently
earn a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, doubling
or even tripling your salary won't have any effect on
your emotions or your stress levels. Even the super rich
(07:40):
can lead sad and lonely lives. For the most part,
doing what you do in order to earn a little
bit more is putting your energy in the wrong direction,
and it can have perverse effects in that if the
amount of money you make starts to be the metric
you use to evaluate whether you're successful or not and
(08:01):
whether you're getting anything out of your work, it's the
wrong metric. I've seen so many of my Yale students
heading exactly this wrong direction. After graduation. They pick a
job based only on salary. Sometimes they even choose careers
they kind of know they're going to hate just because
it comes with a great paycheck, But they soon end
up experiencing what's come to be known as the golden handcuffs,
(08:23):
that feeling of being stuck in a high paying job
that you absolutely hate. And that's one of the reasons
that professions we often think of as good jobs, the
most prestigious ones with the highest salaries think doctor, lawyer,
Wall Street investor. The people who have these prestigious jobs
have suicide rates that are one and a half times
those of the average population. Higher paychecks are simply not
(08:47):
having the positive effect on our mental health that we think.
But why are our intuitions about money and job satisfaction
so messed up? How did we come to think of
more money as the answer to all our workwoes? And
if a huge paycheck doesn't make a job better than
what does. To get to the bottom of all these questions,
we need to turn back to the very critter we
(09:07):
started the show with, right the rat the Happiness Lab
will be back in a moment. Back in the seventeen hundreds,
a famous Scottish philosopher visited an innovative manufacturing operation a
(09:30):
pin factory. Now, you might not think pinmaking would require
that much innovation. I mean, at first glance, it doesn't
seem all that complicated to make a simple pin. And
we're not even talking about safety pins here, just the really,
really simple straight kind. But back in the eighteenth century,
creating each pin was tough. It took eighteen individual steps. First,
(09:52):
you needed to measure and clip the length of wire,
then straighten. After that, you carefully sharpened one end. Once
that point was set, you prepared the other end to
attach the head, which involved several steps like grinding the
top to make sure it was the right texture. Finally,
the pinheads needed to be affixed, and after that they
had to be placed in a perfect row onto a
(10:15):
little sheet of cardboard that holds them. Pin manufacturer was
a time consuming business. A worker on his own who
did all of those steps one after another would only
be able to make about twenty pins per day. But
the management of the factory figured out how to speed
things up. They broke the work up so that each
employee only did one or two steps over and over again.
(10:36):
It was this innovation that especially impressed that visiting philosopher,
a scholar who later became known as the father of economics.
Adam Smith. Smith began his famous book The Wealth of
Nations with a story of this humble enterprise. He realized
that the factories assembly line didn't just allow production to
go a little faster. On the day he visited, ten
(10:59):
workers were able to make twelve pounds of pins, so
forty eight thousand in total. That's a rate that's fifty
times faster than the traditional method. By splitting up the
complex task, Smith argued, management could create way, way way
more pins at a much, much, much lower cost, and
that meant that customers could buy pins more cheaply, and
(11:20):
they might even think of new ways to use pins
since they were now so cheap, which might increase the
overall market for pins, making the factory even more money.
In the end, this simple pin factory inspired Smith's principle
of the assembly line, or what he called division of labor.
It was an idea that completely changed the Industrial Revolution
(11:42):
and paved the way for modern capitalist manufacturing. But as
psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in his book Why We Work,
there was a big downside to division of labor, at
least for the pin workers. So you're just taking appliers
and straightening wire and handing off to the next guy.
Why would you show up at this job. There's only
(12:03):
one possible reason to do this work, and that's for
the paycheck. The idea that people need to get paid
in turn for their labor was central to some of
Smith's deeper ideas about human nature. His view was that
people were basically lazy, and if they didn't have to work,
they wouldn't and so the optimal life is lying on
a couch eating Doritos and watching Netflix. So how do
(12:28):
you get people off their asses? You have to make
it worth their while for them to do things, and
they will work as hard as you make them work
to get the payoff. What they do doesn't matter, since
they'd rather be doing nothing than something. As long as
you have the incentives right, you can get them to
do anything. Nobody likes working on an assembly line, but
(12:51):
Smith's point is that nobody likes doing any kind of work.
So break the work up into as efficient and meaningless
chunks as you can so that people can do the
same thing over and over and over again as fast
as possible, and as long as you pay them, they'll
do it. Smith's view of humans is lazy paychecksy pervaded
the entire Industrial Revolution, but it would take more than
(13:13):
a hundred years before Smith's concepts were tested scientifically, and
that's where we turned back tomble rat. Seventeen decades after
the publication of the Wealth of Nations, a bunch of
rats would finally give Smith's ideas of human nature the
scientific veneer they needed. My training as a psychologist began
(13:36):
in the framework developed by a guy named BF Skinner,
who at the time was probably the most famous and
most influential living psychologists. Skinner invented the famous Skinner box,
where you would take a rat and put them in
a box, and they'd be hungry and or thirsty, and
they'd run down on an alley, or they'd push on
(13:57):
a bar and they'd get food, or they'd get water.
And he thought that by understanding how payoffs influenced the
behavior of rats, would understand what governed all the voluntary
behavior of all living things. He didn't care about rats,
He cared about people. But he thought that in this
(14:21):
little simple environment, you basically were capturing why people work
hard in the workplace because they want a paycheck or
bonus or promotion. And that's the nature of human motivation
is we do things to get things. This is very
much in the spirit of Adam Smith, the father of
the Industrial Revolution. Skinner's work finally gave Smith's ideas the
(14:44):
scientific validation they needed. His rats provided proof that organisms
are in fact lazy, that they needed a reward for
getting off their butts, and that they'd probably never find
work to be inherently worth doing or fun, which means
if you want to get people to work, you got
to give him a reward. But Barry argues that there's
(15:05):
a problem with this. People are so lazy you got
to pay them. View the them is it's flat out wrong.
People won't work if they don't get paid, and they
need to make enough money to support themselves in their family.
But once that's done, that's not really what motivates people.
What motivates people is they want to be working on
something that matters, which from most of the time means
(15:29):
has an impact on the lives of other people, not
curing cancer impact, It could be a small impact. They
want work that engages them, that forces them to think,
to be active. They want work that's vary, not the
same thing over and over again. They want work that's challenging,
and all those things make jobs good. Given a constant pay,
(15:52):
these sorts of intrinsic rewards, feeling engaged, finding meaning, getting creative,
they make work worth doing and allowing workers to experience
these internal rewards, it turns out, would be a smarter
thing for employers to focus on than a paycheck, because
a growing body of research shows that if you want
good work done, you might want to try making your
(16:13):
employees jobs a little happier. You want people who show
up in the office every day because they want to
be in the office every day, and who leave every
day feeling like somebody's life has been made better because
of what they did. But if that's the case, why
do so many careers lack things like meaning or engagement.
Why do so many people hate their jobs? The reason,
(16:34):
according to Barry, is that employers bought into a self
fulfilling prophecy. They're working with the same wrong theory of
human motivation that Smith had hundreds of years ago, that
people are lazy and that money is the only way
to motivate them. So you create a world in which
Smith's vision is true. You create a world in which meaning,
(16:56):
engagement autonomy, control, and challenge have all been eliminated. And
then you look at you point to people working in
this world, and you say, see, I told you. People
just do it for the pay. And as Skinner showed,
rewards do work. People will do mind numbing jobs like
sticking heads on pins over and over and over. But
they won't do it because of the normal human motivations
(17:17):
for meaning or passion or any of the important things
that make us want to get up in the morning.
And that worries Berry. The pin factory division of labor
still reigns in lots and lots of modern jobs, from
boring data entry work to tedious telephone sales to the
workers who have to put buns on fast food hamburgers
over and over and over. Essentially, you've created a Skinner box.
(17:39):
You've created an environment in which Smith's view is correct
because you've eliminated every other factor that might influence people.
Barry has also seen this trend emerging in careers that
are often considered to be much higher status and more skilled.
They are now also filled with the sorts of carrots
and sticks you need when people's hearts and minds aren't
into what they're doing. Law firms that force attorneys to
(18:02):
clock their every second with clients, HMOs that regulate doctors
interactions with patients, Lots and lots of jobs are starting
to feel more like a rat race because they're specifically
designed to treat us like skinners rodents. The biggest irony
of this, though, is that by removing meaning from work,
you inadvertently make people more miserable, and that means you
(18:23):
get less productive, less motivated, and less conscientious workers. Removing
meaning can jeopardize a business's profits, and it makes you
wonder why it is that people who want to make
money are leaving money on the table by creating workplaces
that drive productivity out of their workforce. No effort is
(18:44):
put into creating workplaces where people want to be. The
good news, though, is that there is another path to follow.
You can make reasonably unattractive work attractive if you make
people feel trusted and important in the work that they do.
And that's why I want to turn back to Marty.
I mean, Marty's job seems to fit the definition of
(19:06):
reasonably unattractive work cause aut for just to pick up
a daddy animal or something, and some of that can
be pretty not very pleasant. In fact, when Marty first
got into exterminating, he was focused on the same external
rewards that many of us used to pick a new career.
I was doing a maintenance work at a local newspaper
and I saw an ad pest control company vehicle. Take
(19:28):
That was really cool to me. I was like, twenty
years old, they're going to give me a company vehicle
a take on. Wow. But if you ask Marty what
he loves about this career forty years later, that company
car has little to do with it. I just love
the variety. I love you never know where you're going
to be from one day to the next. Just yesterday,
I was taking a possum off of a roof. I
don't know how it got up on a roof. It's
I don't know, it's just it's fun. When Marty gets
(19:50):
talking about what he loves about his job, you're in
for a really long conversation, because pest control gives him
lots and lots of the internal rewards that science shows
us makes his job worth doing. Like variety and mental challenge,
it's about solving problems more or less. I remember chasing
a bat out of one of the libraries. Actually here
at Yale, and it was it was rather difficult. We
(20:14):
had to bring an extension ladder in and while the
way up to the top of the ladder with him
that and it flew away and it just went into
event and never never was heard from again. You just
never know what you're gonna get and one day to
the next. Marty's job also gives him a sense of
meaning beyond just working through creative solutions to problems. He
also gets to help some very scared people. I had
(20:35):
a student once that woke up and saw a cockroach
on her bedroom door, which was about six feet across
the room, totally terrified, in tears, wouldn't get out of
bed until it was solved. So going there and solving
something like that really, yeah, you know, it makes you.
It makes you feel good. I get a lot of
thank you from the kids. Marty also gets to help
his clients overcome the feelings of shame they have about
(20:57):
requiring his services in the first place. I try to
explain to him that any it can happen to anybody.
People get bugs, people get cockroaches the cleanest environments. It
calms him down a bit, calms their fares and you know,
they're less embarrassed. Do you think you do it if
they didn't pay you? I mean helping people? Yeah, because
you know a neighbor or something and it comes over,
(21:17):
Hey I have a bees and ask or something like that,
and you've had the the experience and taking care of it.
Or how do I get rid of the squirrels in
my attic? Or Yeah, I think I'd still do it.
There's really no other job like it. It's such a
unique position, meaning different people, different problems. Every day is different.
I do feel grateful and lucky that that I'm doing.
Us human beings aren't lab rats in a skinner box.
(21:38):
We're motivated not just by monetary rewards, but by variety,
challenge and having a positive impact on other people's lives.
These are the things that get workers like Marty out
of bed on a Monday morning. The problem is that
a lot of us don't experience the same joy that
Marty finds in his work. But you don't need to
quit your job to find the happiness that he enjoys.
(22:00):
There are evidence based strategies you can use to enrich
your work, no matter what your actual job description. We'll
learn about all those strategies when the happy in his
lab returns in a moment. Most teenage obsessions revolve around bands,
(22:23):
or sports or political causes. Amy Razneski found herself drawn
to something very different, a topic she turned over and
over in her young mind. It has taken me a
really long time to figure out why it's sort of
weird for a teenager to become interested in something like this.
What was the thing that had Amy so puzzled? Well,
she looked around at the people in her life, people
(22:44):
in her family, her neighborhood, in stores and offices, and
she saw a vivid and troubling divide and seeing people
who were working incredibly hard but feeling at the end
of the day kind of maybe empty, maybe not too
strong a word about what it all meant, Versus people
who felt like they bounded out of work every day
to come home feeling as though they had done something
(23:06):
that really mattered and they had done it well and
had changed people's lives. And the thing that's been for me,
the most fascinating part of this puzzle is that it's
not necessarily contingent on the kind of work people are doing.
And I think that's a very cool puzzle to trying
to unpack and think about figuring that puzzle out. Rot
Amy here to Yale, where she's now a professor at
(23:27):
the School of Management. There's a whole research literature that
analyzes kind of what's a good job and what's a
bad job, and it just looks at the job like
what is the person's doing, And as psychologists, we knew
there might be actually more going on here in terms
of how people really experience this work and think about
this work. Research back in the nineteen eighties had shown
that people tend to take one of three orientations towards
(23:50):
their work. They either think of it as a job,
a career, or a calling. So people who view their
work primarily as a job see the work as a
means to a financial end. People who've either worked with
a career orientation see the work as primarily a means
to advance within the field or the work or the
occupy they're in. It's stepping stone to the next thing
(24:11):
that's going to come. Whereas people who see the work
as a calling are not focused on financial outcomes primarily
or career advancement primarily, but instead are primarily focused on
the work itself. They see the work as an end
in itself. These are people who, again if they hit
the lottery or something like that, feel so deeply about
the work that they're doing, feel fulfilled by it, feel
(24:32):
like it's a contribution that they would be more likely
to want to stay involved in it. And interestingly, they
see the work, regardless of what the job is, as
contributing to the world in a meaningful way to make
it a better place. But the question that fascinated Amy
was how a person comes to consider their work a calling.
You might think the way to test this question would
(24:52):
be to study professionals that we technically think of as
well respected surgeons, concert pianists, podcast hosts, that kind of thing.
But Amy did something different. She studied how positive work
orientations develop and seemingly not so great jobs. We were
really interested in understanding the experience of people who clean
(25:13):
in hospital, so hospital custodial staff. The duties of a
hospital janitor are easy to sum up. Mop the floors,
sweep up wash soiled bed linens, dispose of garbage, bins
filled with hazardous waste. It's not fun stuff. These sorts
of physicians don't require much previous experience or a formal
education becoming a hospital janitor is considered neither glamorous nor
(25:36):
all that skilled. But Amy wasn't interested in what the
typical person thought of this work. She was interested in
how the cleaning staff themselves describe their rules. So she
just asked a group of hospital workers, how skilled do
you think your job? Is? Simple question, except it yielded
two really different answers. We had one set of participants
who said it's not very skilled at all, and we
(25:58):
had another set of participants who reported the work was
really quite skilled. Amy figured she must have inadvertently tested
two kinds of staff members once with different duties. Maybe
one group had more senior janitors or more specialist roles,
but that turned out not to be the case. Nothing
about the structure of their job explained this difference, so
Amy dug a little deeper. Those who considered themselves unskilled
(26:21):
were generally dissatisfied with their jobs. They were part of
that two thirds of Americans who were disengaged from their work.
But the staff members who saw their jobs requiring skill
absolutely loved what they did for a living. Many of
them even saw it as a calling and acted accordingly.
They were meant to be kind of wafting in and
out of spaces and making sure that those spaces were clean.
(26:43):
They were instructed to not interact with patients, and what
we were finding was they were engaging in enormous amounts
of patient care and attentiveness to what was happening with
patients and their families, what it was people might need.
They really engaged the job sort of quite differently and
saw and described what it was that they were doing
there as helping patients to heal. Amy calls this technique
(27:07):
job crafting, of redesigning the specific work you do to
match your personal strengths and values and thus amplify the
sense of meaning you get from your job. One of
Amy's favorite examples of job crafting came from a janitor
who worked on a unit caring for coma patients, people
who were severely ill, fully unconscious, and in need of
(27:28):
a miracle. That staff member did the usual duties mopping
and tidying, but she also did one additional task that
wasn't strictly part of her job description and that no
one had told her to do. She would take the
artwork off the walls of the hospital rooms in this
unit and swish it around to just sort of mix
things up. Even though these patients were not conscious. She
(27:50):
hoped that maybe by changing something in their environment that
even if it seemed like they weren't aware of what
was going on, maybe it would stimulate something or spark something,
as it was a change that could help promote their
healing and speed them along whatever journey they would take.
Another janitor, Amy Encountered, was assigned to a particularly depressing
set of duties. She had to clean up after patience
(28:11):
on the cancer ward. Given that chemotherapy makes people very
sick to their stomach, there was a lot of throwing
up to contend with. And so this cleaning staff member,
who again remember by the structure of the job, not
really supposed to be interacting with patients. You're just supposed
to go and clean things up. Instead, turn this into
an opportunity to really bring comfort and humor to the patients,
(28:32):
because imagine you're an adult. You've just been sick all
over yourself and all over the floor. It's embarrassing. Now
somebody has to club and clean this up. You feel awful, right,
this is not a good moment. And so this cleaning
staff member would show up and say, I want to
thank you for getting sick. I have a car, I
have car payments to make. The more you get sick,
(28:53):
the more job security I have. And so you have
someone who's now laughing in the context of this awful
situation by this transformative set of moves done by someone
who has gotten not any training and patient care or
patient interaction, but who has taken upon herself to think about,
how can I still do the cleanup, still do the
work that's required of me, but do it in a
(29:14):
way that's transformative. The relationships that she has with her patients,
getting to know happy hospital cleaners convinced Amy that jobcrafting
can have a transformative effect on people's happiness at work.
She hypothesized that the third of Americans who feel engaged
with their jobs probably feel that way in part because
they too jobcraft I think this happens all the time.
(29:36):
It happens in all kinds of jobs, but I think
it's important to recognize that it happens in jobs where
people don't have permission to do it, or they're not
encouraged to do it. They might actually be forbidden from
doing it. We can all be better off if we
just granted people more autonomy to bring their strength into
the work that they're doing, while trusting them that they
will keep in mind the things that they're responsible to
(29:57):
do for the organization. Now that Amy has answered the
question that's bugged her for decades, her research has shifted
to address a more practical question, how can we get
more people to jobcraft? Are there interventions that can be
done that can help people connect more deeply with what
it is that makes their work meaningful, not just by
thinking about it, but by encouraging people to redesign the
(30:19):
job still accomplish what it is they're responsible to the
organization for accomplishing in the work, but do it in
such a way that it's tapping the things that they
care most about, in the ways in which they most
want to contribute. It's worth mentioning here, though, that deciding
to pep up your job doesn't mean you can ignore
the task because you were hired to do. Job crafting
isn't deciding you know, I'd really love to be the
(30:40):
company guitarist, So I'm just gonna bring my guitar in
and play, and I think everybody will appreciate that because
I'm being my best my best self. The other barrier
to crafting your job might be your boss. Just like
Adam Smith watching those pinmakers, your manager might still fall
for the lie that giving a big paycheck is the
only way to get the job done. I sometimes hear
(31:00):
from managers who feel very nervous about this because it
means giving up control. We can't possibly allow our employees
to do this. It would be a mess. You know,
people would be you know, freestyling and off roading or
you know, doing things that would be really problematic in
the organization. And my response to that is, well, actually,
if this is how you see it, what I can
tell you is they're already job crafting, because this is
(31:23):
happening everywhere. It's just that they're hiding it from you.
And so you have a choice. Is this something that
you want to help facilitate and encourage and what have you,
or you want to continue to sort of drive this
underground with employees who will still take the degrees of
freedom they can find to derive more meaning and more
of the kind of identity they want to enact in
the work in any way they can and how they're
(31:44):
doing the work. While I'm certainly not praying that my
house gets infested with rats, bats, or possums, or mice, hornets, termites,
or roaches. I do enjoy Marty's and frequent visits. His
job is to set up trapped and put down poison,
but I now realize that he does all the things
that Amy studies in her job, crafting work. He genuinely
(32:06):
enjoys the puzzles that has spring he and traits on
the people who need his help, and he works quickly
and calmly to reassure his jittery clients. It's mixing metaphors,
but if exterminators had a bedside manner, Marty has perfected it.
Sure he kills bugs, but his real focus seems to
be eradicating the stress and worry of the people who
(32:26):
need his help. I asked Marty if during the forty
years in this job, he's ever daydreamed about doing something else,
becoming a cop or a firefighter. Maybe I've thought about
it in the past, honestly, but I've always come back
to this, and yeah, I do feel grateful. If you
really hate your job, if it's making you ill, or
if there's a bad workplace culture or discrimination, or if
(32:48):
you're not even making a living wage, then you should
quit as soon as you can and search for something better.
But if you're simply feeling kind of disengaged from your
daily work, then give job crafting a try, because that
dream job that you fantasize about it doesn't really exist.
The research shows that any job can turn into a
calling if you bring the right attic too, and maybe
(33:10):
a few science back tips from the Happiness Lab with me,
Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and
produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
(33:32):
Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.
Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Fridman checked our
facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon.
Special thanks to mail LaBelle, Carli Migliori, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
(33:53):
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
Pushkin. Yeah. No, no, no, it was much more like
terrified than that. I'm going through my sound effects library
with my friend and producer Ryan Dilly. I'm trying to
find a very specific scream, one that's forever etched into
(00:37):
my memory. No, that's like way more of a manly,
brave scream. I think we needed more high pitched and
frantic and fearful. We're trying to reenact a rather horrifying
moment that Ryan and I experienced a few months back.
We were working on our podcast scripts and Ryan needed
a cup of coffee, so he headed into the kitchen,
and that was when I heard it. I think that's
(01:04):
that's pretty close. I think that was it. Ryan emitted
the longest, loudest, and most terror filled shriek I've ever heard.
Apparently a huge, terrifying rat had run through the kitchen,
a rodent that was, at least, according to Ryan's retelling,
about the size of a large Great Dane or a
small horse. I assumed he was exaggerating and that it
(01:24):
was probably just a harmless mouse, the kind we get
on college campuses from time to time, especially when there's
construction outside. A tiny mouse that was probably now feeling
so terrorized by Ryan's scream that it had likely high
tailed it out of the house, never to be heard
from again. But just as I was explaining that we
had absolutely nothing to worry about, the creature that I
(01:48):
could now clearly see was definitely not a tiny mouse
was back. It raced from the kitchen into the study
around our feet, and then slithered into a heating duct
on the wall. But I wasn't worried, not because the
rat wasn't huge or terrifying. It was definitely both. I
just knew it wasn't going to be a problem for
long because at Yale, when these things happen and you
(02:10):
need someone to resolve the issue quickly, you just call
Marty gilorin pest control operator. Marty is like the terminator
for vermin. Within minutes, he was at my house, armed
with baits and traps galore. I like to get there
as soon as I can to help people. Yeah, I
don't like to leave, you know, call's waiting too long.
And that was kind of an emergency call because it
(02:31):
was a rat in a living space. While Ryan continued
to stand bravely on the sofa, Marty was sprawled on
the floor. He checked for the rat where we last
saw it, face pressed up against the air duct. Marty
then set his traps like a general deploying his armies.
He strategized about all aspects of the rats moves, like
what if the rat retreated here or made a break
(02:51):
for it over there. Within minutes, all the traps were down,
and almost as soon as Marty left, we heard, oh,
I got lucky on that one. Sometimes it takes a
lot longer. Marty is a vermin afficionado, one of the
most skilled professionals I've ever met, But few people want
a job like Marty's. In fact, pest control is usually
(03:13):
included in lists of the worst possible jobs in America.
Some exterminators face low wages, deal with dangerous chemicals, and
spend their working hours in the company of scary critters
that can bite, scratch, and sting. I usually get stung
about once a year. Kind of just comes with the territory.
But Marty, it turns out, is the exact kind of
person we should emulate if we want to find the
(03:35):
perfect job, or even just to be happier at work. Generally, because,
as you'll hear in this episode, science suggests that our
intuitions about good jobs and bad jobs are all wrong.
We think that pay and perks and plush offices are
what makes us happy in our careers. But as we'll see,
happiness and human motivation work much differently than our lying
(03:56):
minds realize. Our minds are constantly telling us what to
do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
away from what will really make us happy. The good
news is that understanding the science of the mind can
point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. What did
(04:24):
you want to be when you grew up? I'm going
to venture a guest that rat exterminator was pretty far
down the list. It was for Marty two. He grew
up with the standard career aspirations. I mean, like every kid,
I guess a fireman or a cop or when you're
a kid. But Marty never joined the police department or
signed on at the fire station. After graduating, he drifted
(04:46):
into a number of different jobs, just like restaurant work
and security guard and filling vending machines. Things like that.
They all paid okay, but Marty wasn't exactly filled with
joy when he clocked in every Monday morning, and he
wasn't alone. According to a recent Gallop Pole from twenty eighteen,
only about a third of American workers report feeling really
(05:07):
engaged with their jobs. Over fifty percent admit feeling actively
not engaged, they merely put up with boring work, and
nearly twenty percent report hating what they do for a living.
I've had jobs where I've had that problem before. I
have to go to work. This is not good. It's
Monday morning. It's probably not all that surprising, but hating
your job isn't that great for your happiness? Which raises
(05:29):
an important question, what actually makes for a happier job?
What could make work life better for the nearly one
hundred million Americans who feel disengaged on the job. Many
of us have a pretty strong intuition here, we'd be
happier if only we had a bigger salary. Take one
LinkedIn survey from twenty fourteen. It found that financial compensation
(05:50):
was the top value that most college students look for
when considering a new job opportunity. Compensation was chosen more
often than work life balance, having good colleagues, or even
career development. And our intuition that a bigger paycheck means
a happier career isn't just affecting our job choices, It's
also affecting how we choose to live our lives. Generally.
(06:12):
Consider the results of one study which has surveyed the
values of incoming freshmen for the last half century. In
twenty eighteen, more than eighty percent of freshmen said that
being well off financially was really important in life. It
was more important than raising a family or developing a
meaningful philosophy on life. And that's a big change compared
to the answers their parents or grandparents gave. The number
(06:35):
of students who think big salaries are key has gone
up dramatically since the nineteen sixties. But as our growing
intuition about a link between money and job satisfaction right,
can employers really improve the well being of the nearly
two thirds of people who hate their jobs simply by
paying them more. When you ask people what would make
their lives better or what would make their jobs better,
(06:57):
the first thing they point to is my life so good,
and if I only made ten percent more, it would
be perfect. This is Barry Schwartz, emeritus professor of psychology
at Swarthmore College, an author of the book Why Work
People Are Wrong. This is not the case. Money does
buy a little bit of happiness, but it doesn't buy
(07:17):
a lot of happiness. We covered this in an earlier
episode called The Unhappy Millionaire, but it's worth repeating here.
If you're not making a living wage, more money will
definitely improve your overall well being. But if you currently
earn a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, doubling
or even tripling your salary won't have any effect on
your emotions or your stress levels. Even the super rich
(07:40):
can lead sad and lonely lives. For the most part,
doing what you do in order to earn a little
bit more is putting your energy in the wrong direction,
and it can have perverse effects in that if the
amount of money you make starts to be the metric
you use to evaluate whether you're successful or not and
(08:01):
whether you're getting anything out of your work, it's the
wrong metric. I've seen so many of my Yale students
heading exactly this wrong direction. After graduation. They pick a
job based only on salary. Sometimes they even choose careers
they kind of know they're going to hate just because
it comes with a great paycheck, But they soon end
up experiencing what's come to be known as the golden handcuffs,
(08:23):
that feeling of being stuck in a high paying job
that you absolutely hate. And that's one of the reasons
that professions we often think of as good jobs, the
most prestigious ones with the highest salaries think doctor, lawyer,
Wall Street investor. The people who have these prestigious jobs
have suicide rates that are one and a half times
those of the average population. Higher paychecks are simply not
(08:47):
having the positive effect on our mental health that we think.
But why are our intuitions about money and job satisfaction
so messed up? How did we come to think of
more money as the answer to all our workwoes? And
if a huge paycheck doesn't make a job better than
what does. To get to the bottom of all these questions,
we need to turn back to the very critter we
(09:07):
started the show with, right the rat the Happiness Lab
will be back in a moment. Back in the seventeen hundreds,
a famous Scottish philosopher visited an innovative manufacturing operation a
(09:30):
pin factory. Now, you might not think pinmaking would require
that much innovation. I mean, at first glance, it doesn't
seem all that complicated to make a simple pin. And
we're not even talking about safety pins here, just the really,
really simple straight kind. But back in the eighteenth century,
creating each pin was tough. It took eighteen individual steps. First,
(09:52):
you needed to measure and clip the length of wire,
then straighten. After that, you carefully sharpened one end. Once
that point was set, you prepared the other end to
attach the head, which involved several steps like grinding the
top to make sure it was the right texture. Finally,
the pinheads needed to be affixed, and after that they
had to be placed in a perfect row onto a
(10:15):
little sheet of cardboard that holds them. Pin manufacturer was
a time consuming business. A worker on his own who
did all of those steps one after another would only
be able to make about twenty pins per day. But
the management of the factory figured out how to speed
things up. They broke the work up so that each
employee only did one or two steps over and over again.
(10:36):
It was this innovation that especially impressed that visiting philosopher,
a scholar who later became known as the father of economics.
Adam Smith. Smith began his famous book The Wealth of
Nations with a story of this humble enterprise. He realized
that the factories assembly line didn't just allow production to
go a little faster. On the day he visited, ten
(10:59):
workers were able to make twelve pounds of pins, so
forty eight thousand in total. That's a rate that's fifty
times faster than the traditional method. By splitting up the
complex task, Smith argued, management could create way, way way
more pins at a much, much, much lower cost, and
that meant that customers could buy pins more cheaply, and
(11:20):
they might even think of new ways to use pins
since they were now so cheap, which might increase the
overall market for pins, making the factory even more money.
In the end, this simple pin factory inspired Smith's principle
of the assembly line, or what he called division of labor.
It was an idea that completely changed the Industrial Revolution
(11:42):
and paved the way for modern capitalist manufacturing. But as
psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in his book Why We Work,
there was a big downside to division of labor, at
least for the pin workers. So you're just taking appliers
and straightening wire and handing off to the next guy.
Why would you show up at this job. There's only
(12:03):
one possible reason to do this work, and that's for
the paycheck. The idea that people need to get paid
in turn for their labor was central to some of
Smith's deeper ideas about human nature. His view was that
people were basically lazy, and if they didn't have to work,
they wouldn't and so the optimal life is lying on
a couch eating Doritos and watching Netflix. So how do
(12:28):
you get people off their asses? You have to make
it worth their while for them to do things, and
they will work as hard as you make them work
to get the payoff. What they do doesn't matter, since
they'd rather be doing nothing than something. As long as
you have the incentives right, you can get them to
do anything. Nobody likes working on an assembly line, but
(12:51):
Smith's point is that nobody likes doing any kind of work.
So break the work up into as efficient and meaningless
chunks as you can so that people can do the
same thing over and over and over again as fast
as possible, and as long as you pay them, they'll
do it. Smith's view of humans is lazy paychecksy pervaded
the entire Industrial Revolution, but it would take more than
(13:13):
a hundred years before Smith's concepts were tested scientifically, and
that's where we turned back tomble rat. Seventeen decades after
the publication of the Wealth of Nations, a bunch of
rats would finally give Smith's ideas of human nature the
scientific veneer they needed. My training as a psychologist began
(13:36):
in the framework developed by a guy named BF Skinner,
who at the time was probably the most famous and
most influential living psychologists. Skinner invented the famous Skinner box,
where you would take a rat and put them in
a box, and they'd be hungry and or thirsty, and
they'd run down on an alley, or they'd push on
(13:57):
a bar and they'd get food, or they'd get water.
And he thought that by understanding how payoffs influenced the
behavior of rats, would understand what governed all the voluntary
behavior of all living things. He didn't care about rats,
He cared about people. But he thought that in this
(14:21):
little simple environment, you basically were capturing why people work
hard in the workplace because they want a paycheck or
bonus or promotion. And that's the nature of human motivation
is we do things to get things. This is very
much in the spirit of Adam Smith, the father of
the Industrial Revolution. Skinner's work finally gave Smith's ideas the
(14:44):
scientific validation they needed. His rats provided proof that organisms
are in fact lazy, that they needed a reward for
getting off their butts, and that they'd probably never find
work to be inherently worth doing or fun, which means
if you want to get people to work, you got
to give him a reward. But Barry argues that there's
(15:05):
a problem with this. People are so lazy you got
to pay them. View the them is it's flat out wrong.
People won't work if they don't get paid, and they
need to make enough money to support themselves in their family.
But once that's done, that's not really what motivates people.
What motivates people is they want to be working on
something that matters, which from most of the time means
(15:29):
has an impact on the lives of other people, not
curing cancer impact, It could be a small impact. They
want work that engages them, that forces them to think,
to be active. They want work that's vary, not the
same thing over and over again. They want work that's challenging,
and all those things make jobs good. Given a constant pay,
(15:52):
these sorts of intrinsic rewards, feeling engaged, finding meaning, getting creative,
they make work worth doing and allowing workers to experience
these internal rewards, it turns out, would be a smarter
thing for employers to focus on than a paycheck, because
a growing body of research shows that if you want
good work done, you might want to try making your
(16:13):
employees jobs a little happier. You want people who show
up in the office every day because they want to
be in the office every day, and who leave every
day feeling like somebody's life has been made better because
of what they did. But if that's the case, why
do so many careers lack things like meaning or engagement.
Why do so many people hate their jobs? The reason,
(16:34):
according to Barry, is that employers bought into a self
fulfilling prophecy. They're working with the same wrong theory of
human motivation that Smith had hundreds of years ago, that
people are lazy and that money is the only way
to motivate them. So you create a world in which
Smith's vision is true. You create a world in which meaning,
(16:56):
engagement autonomy, control, and challenge have all been eliminated. And
then you look at you point to people working in
this world, and you say, see, I told you. People
just do it for the pay. And as Skinner showed,
rewards do work. People will do mind numbing jobs like
sticking heads on pins over and over and over. But
they won't do it because of the normal human motivations
(17:17):
for meaning or passion or any of the important things
that make us want to get up in the morning.
And that worries Berry. The pin factory division of labor
still reigns in lots and lots of modern jobs, from
boring data entry work to tedious telephone sales to the
workers who have to put buns on fast food hamburgers
over and over and over. Essentially, you've created a Skinner box.
(17:39):
You've created an environment in which Smith's view is correct
because you've eliminated every other factor that might influence people.
Barry has also seen this trend emerging in careers that
are often considered to be much higher status and more skilled.
They are now also filled with the sorts of carrots
and sticks you need when people's hearts and minds aren't
into what they're doing. Law firms that force attorneys to
(18:02):
clock their every second with clients, HMOs that regulate doctors
interactions with patients, Lots and lots of jobs are starting
to feel more like a rat race because they're specifically
designed to treat us like skinners rodents. The biggest irony
of this, though, is that by removing meaning from work,
you inadvertently make people more miserable, and that means you
(18:23):
get less productive, less motivated, and less conscientious workers. Removing
meaning can jeopardize a business's profits, and it makes you
wonder why it is that people who want to make
money are leaving money on the table by creating workplaces
that drive productivity out of their workforce. No effort is
(18:44):
put into creating workplaces where people want to be. The
good news, though, is that there is another path to follow.
You can make reasonably unattractive work attractive if you make
people feel trusted and important in the work that they do.
And that's why I want to turn back to Marty.
I mean, Marty's job seems to fit the definition of
(19:06):
reasonably unattractive work cause aut for just to pick up
a daddy animal or something, and some of that can
be pretty not very pleasant. In fact, when Marty first
got into exterminating, he was focused on the same external
rewards that many of us used to pick a new career.
I was doing a maintenance work at a local newspaper
and I saw an ad pest control company vehicle. Take
(19:28):
That was really cool to me. I was like, twenty
years old, they're going to give me a company vehicle
a take on. Wow. But if you ask Marty what
he loves about this career forty years later, that company
car has little to do with it. I just love
the variety. I love you never know where you're going
to be from one day to the next. Just yesterday,
I was taking a possum off of a roof. I
don't know how it got up on a roof. It's
I don't know, it's just it's fun. When Marty gets
(19:50):
talking about what he loves about his job, you're in
for a really long conversation, because pest control gives him
lots and lots of the internal rewards that science shows
us makes his job worth doing. Like variety and mental challenge,
it's about solving problems more or less. I remember chasing
a bat out of one of the libraries. Actually here
at Yale, and it was it was rather difficult. We
(20:14):
had to bring an extension ladder in and while the
way up to the top of the ladder with him
that and it flew away and it just went into
event and never never was heard from again. You just
never know what you're gonna get and one day to
the next. Marty's job also gives him a sense of
meaning beyond just working through creative solutions to problems. He
also gets to help some very scared people. I had
(20:35):
a student once that woke up and saw a cockroach
on her bedroom door, which was about six feet across
the room, totally terrified, in tears, wouldn't get out of
bed until it was solved. So going there and solving
something like that really, yeah, you know, it makes you.
It makes you feel good. I get a lot of
thank you from the kids. Marty also gets to help
his clients overcome the feelings of shame they have about
(20:57):
requiring his services in the first place. I try to
explain to him that any it can happen to anybody.
People get bugs, people get cockroaches the cleanest environments. It
calms him down a bit, calms their fares and you know,
they're less embarrassed. Do you think you do it if
they didn't pay you? I mean helping people? Yeah, because
you know a neighbor or something and it comes over,
(21:17):
Hey I have a bees and ask or something like that,
and you've had the the experience and taking care of it.
Or how do I get rid of the squirrels in
my attic? Or Yeah, I think I'd still do it.
There's really no other job like it. It's such a
unique position, meaning different people, different problems. Every day is different.
I do feel grateful and lucky that that I'm doing.
Us human beings aren't lab rats in a skinner box.
(21:38):
We're motivated not just by monetary rewards, but by variety,
challenge and having a positive impact on other people's lives.
These are the things that get workers like Marty out
of bed on a Monday morning. The problem is that
a lot of us don't experience the same joy that
Marty finds in his work. But you don't need to
quit your job to find the happiness that he enjoys.
(22:00):
There are evidence based strategies you can use to enrich
your work, no matter what your actual job description. We'll
learn about all those strategies when the happy in his
lab returns in a moment. Most teenage obsessions revolve around bands,
(22:23):
or sports or political causes. Amy Razneski found herself drawn
to something very different, a topic she turned over and
over in her young mind. It has taken me a
really long time to figure out why it's sort of
weird for a teenager to become interested in something like this.
What was the thing that had Amy so puzzled? Well,
she looked around at the people in her life, people
(22:44):
in her family, her neighborhood, in stores and offices, and
she saw a vivid and troubling divide and seeing people
who were working incredibly hard but feeling at the end
of the day kind of maybe empty, maybe not too
strong a word about what it all meant, Versus people
who felt like they bounded out of work every day
to come home feeling as though they had done something
(23:06):
that really mattered and they had done it well and
had changed people's lives. And the thing that's been for me,
the most fascinating part of this puzzle is that it's
not necessarily contingent on the kind of work people are doing.
And I think that's a very cool puzzle to trying
to unpack and think about figuring that puzzle out. Rot
Amy here to Yale, where she's now a professor at
(23:27):
the School of Management. There's a whole research literature that
analyzes kind of what's a good job and what's a
bad job, and it just looks at the job like
what is the person's doing, And as psychologists, we knew
there might be actually more going on here in terms
of how people really experience this work and think about
this work. Research back in the nineteen eighties had shown
that people tend to take one of three orientations towards
(23:50):
their work. They either think of it as a job,
a career, or a calling. So people who view their
work primarily as a job see the work as a
means to a financial end. People who've either worked with
a career orientation see the work as primarily a means
to advance within the field or the work or the
occupy they're in. It's stepping stone to the next thing
(24:11):
that's going to come. Whereas people who see the work
as a calling are not focused on financial outcomes primarily
or career advancement primarily, but instead are primarily focused on
the work itself. They see the work as an end
in itself. These are people who, again if they hit
the lottery or something like that, feel so deeply about
the work that they're doing, feel fulfilled by it, feel
(24:32):
like it's a contribution that they would be more likely
to want to stay involved in it. And interestingly, they
see the work, regardless of what the job is, as
contributing to the world in a meaningful way to make
it a better place. But the question that fascinated Amy
was how a person comes to consider their work a calling.
You might think the way to test this question would
(24:52):
be to study professionals that we technically think of as
well respected surgeons, concert pianists, podcast hosts, that kind of thing.
But Amy did something different. She studied how positive work
orientations develop and seemingly not so great jobs. We were
really interested in understanding the experience of people who clean
(25:13):
in hospital, so hospital custodial staff. The duties of a
hospital janitor are easy to sum up. Mop the floors,
sweep up wash soiled bed linens, dispose of garbage, bins
filled with hazardous waste. It's not fun stuff. These sorts
of physicians don't require much previous experience or a formal
education becoming a hospital janitor is considered neither glamorous nor
(25:36):
all that skilled. But Amy wasn't interested in what the
typical person thought of this work. She was interested in
how the cleaning staff themselves describe their rules. So she
just asked a group of hospital workers, how skilled do
you think your job? Is? Simple question, except it yielded
two really different answers. We had one set of participants
who said it's not very skilled at all, and we
(25:58):
had another set of participants who reported the work was
really quite skilled. Amy figured she must have inadvertently tested
two kinds of staff members once with different duties. Maybe
one group had more senior janitors or more specialist roles,
but that turned out not to be the case. Nothing
about the structure of their job explained this difference, so
Amy dug a little deeper. Those who considered themselves unskilled
(26:21):
were generally dissatisfied with their jobs. They were part of
that two thirds of Americans who were disengaged from their work.
But the staff members who saw their jobs requiring skill
absolutely loved what they did for a living. Many of
them even saw it as a calling and acted accordingly.
They were meant to be kind of wafting in and
out of spaces and making sure that those spaces were clean.
(26:43):
They were instructed to not interact with patients, and what
we were finding was they were engaging in enormous amounts
of patient care and attentiveness to what was happening with
patients and their families, what it was people might need.
They really engaged the job sort of quite differently and
saw and described what it was that they were doing
there as helping patients to heal. Amy calls this technique
(27:07):
job crafting, of redesigning the specific work you do to
match your personal strengths and values and thus amplify the
sense of meaning you get from your job. One of
Amy's favorite examples of job crafting came from a janitor
who worked on a unit caring for coma patients, people
who were severely ill, fully unconscious, and in need of
(27:28):
a miracle. That staff member did the usual duties mopping
and tidying, but she also did one additional task that
wasn't strictly part of her job description and that no
one had told her to do. She would take the
artwork off the walls of the hospital rooms in this
unit and swish it around to just sort of mix
things up. Even though these patients were not conscious. She
(27:50):
hoped that maybe by changing something in their environment that
even if it seemed like they weren't aware of what
was going on, maybe it would stimulate something or spark something,
as it was a change that could help promote their
healing and speed them along whatever journey they would take.
Another janitor, Amy Encountered, was assigned to a particularly depressing
set of duties. She had to clean up after patience
(28:11):
on the cancer ward. Given that chemotherapy makes people very
sick to their stomach, there was a lot of throwing
up to contend with. And so this cleaning staff member,
who again remember by the structure of the job, not
really supposed to be interacting with patients. You're just supposed
to go and clean things up. Instead, turn this into
an opportunity to really bring comfort and humor to the patients,
(28:32):
because imagine you're an adult. You've just been sick all
over yourself and all over the floor. It's embarrassing. Now
somebody has to club and clean this up. You feel awful, right,
this is not a good moment. And so this cleaning
staff member would show up and say, I want to
thank you for getting sick. I have a car, I
have car payments to make. The more you get sick,
(28:53):
the more job security I have. And so you have
someone who's now laughing in the context of this awful
situation by this transformative set of moves done by someone
who has gotten not any training and patient care or
patient interaction, but who has taken upon herself to think about,
how can I still do the cleanup, still do the
work that's required of me, but do it in a
(29:14):
way that's transformative. The relationships that she has with her patients,
getting to know happy hospital cleaners convinced Amy that jobcrafting
can have a transformative effect on people's happiness at work.
She hypothesized that the third of Americans who feel engaged
with their jobs probably feel that way in part because
they too jobcraft I think this happens all the time.
(29:36):
It happens in all kinds of jobs, but I think
it's important to recognize that it happens in jobs where
people don't have permission to do it, or they're not
encouraged to do it. They might actually be forbidden from
doing it. We can all be better off if we
just granted people more autonomy to bring their strength into
the work that they're doing, while trusting them that they
will keep in mind the things that they're responsible to
(29:57):
do for the organization. Now that Amy has answered the
question that's bugged her for decades, her research has shifted
to address a more practical question, how can we get
more people to jobcraft? Are there interventions that can be
done that can help people connect more deeply with what
it is that makes their work meaningful, not just by
thinking about it, but by encouraging people to redesign the
(30:19):
job still accomplish what it is they're responsible to the
organization for accomplishing in the work, but do it in
such a way that it's tapping the things that they
care most about, in the ways in which they most
want to contribute. It's worth mentioning here, though, that deciding
to pep up your job doesn't mean you can ignore
the task because you were hired to do. Job crafting
isn't deciding you know, I'd really love to be the
(30:40):
company guitarist, So I'm just gonna bring my guitar in
and play, and I think everybody will appreciate that because
I'm being my best my best self. The other barrier
to crafting your job might be your boss. Just like
Adam Smith watching those pinmakers, your manager might still fall
for the lie that giving a big paycheck is the
only way to get the job done. I sometimes hear
(31:00):
from managers who feel very nervous about this because it
means giving up control. We can't possibly allow our employees
to do this. It would be a mess. You know,
people would be you know, freestyling and off roading or
you know, doing things that would be really problematic in
the organization. And my response to that is, well, actually,
if this is how you see it, what I can
tell you is they're already job crafting, because this is
(31:23):
happening everywhere. It's just that they're hiding it from you.
And so you have a choice. Is this something that
you want to help facilitate and encourage and what have you,
or you want to continue to sort of drive this
underground with employees who will still take the degrees of
freedom they can find to derive more meaning and more
of the kind of identity they want to enact in
the work in any way they can and how they're
(31:44):
doing the work. While I'm certainly not praying that my
house gets infested with rats, bats, or possums, or mice, hornets, termites,
or roaches. I do enjoy Marty's and frequent visits. His
job is to set up trapped and put down poison,
but I now realize that he does all the things
that Amy studies in her job, crafting work. He genuinely
(32:06):
enjoys the puzzles that has spring he and traits on
the people who need his help, and he works quickly
and calmly to reassure his jittery clients. It's mixing metaphors,
but if exterminators had a bedside manner, Marty has perfected it.
Sure he kills bugs, but his real focus seems to
be eradicating the stress and worry of the people who
(32:26):
need his help. I asked Marty if during the forty
years in this job, he's ever daydreamed about doing something else,
becoming a cop or a firefighter. Maybe I've thought about
it in the past, honestly, but I've always come back
to this, and yeah, I do feel grateful. If you
really hate your job, if it's making you ill, or
if there's a bad workplace culture or discrimination, or if
(32:48):
you're not even making a living wage, then you should
quit as soon as you can and search for something better.
But if you're simply feeling kind of disengaged from your
daily work, then give job crafting a try, because that
dream job that you fantasize about it doesn't really exist.
The research shows that any job can turn into a
calling if you bring the right attic too, and maybe
(33:10):
a few science back tips from the Happiness Lab with me,
Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and
produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
(33:32):
Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.
Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Fridman checked our
facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon.
Special thanks to mail LaBelle, Carli Migliori, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
(33:53):
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
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