September 19, 2025 • 50 mins
Tonight on The Brian Crombie Hour, Brian interviews Nic Marks about his new book:
HAPPINESS IS A SERIOUS BUSINESS. Nic is a statistician, speaker, and author who shows that happiness isn’t a feel-good extra—it’s a powerful performance multiplier. His research reveals that happier employees are more engaged, more innovative, and 20–30% more productive. They also stay longer, with unhappy teams facing turnover rates up to three times higher.
The combined effect of higher output and lower attrition means happier employees deliver over twice the value of those who are merely “OK”.
HAPPINESS IS A SERIOUS BUSINESS. Nic is a statistician, speaker, and author who shows that happiness isn’t a feel-good extra—it’s a powerful performance multiplier. His research reveals that happier employees are more engaged, more innovative, and 20–30% more productive. They also stay longer, with unhappy teams facing turnover rates up to three times higher.
The combined effect of higher output and lower attrition means happier employees deliver over twice the value of those who are merely “OK”.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views expressed in the following program are those of
the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Saga nine sixty AM or its management.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good Eating everyone, and welcome to the Brian Crombie Radio
ar kind of really interesting gentleman, Nick Marks, to introduce
you to today. He's an author, he's a speaker. He's
an author of a book that I found really intriguing
called Happiness Is Serious Business. Happiness is Serious Business. And
he's been inspiring audiences and organizations with evidence of why
(00:39):
happy teams perform better. And I got to read you
as something that was about this. He's long champion the
radical idea the happiness is a metric worth measuring. His
latest book shows it's more than that. It's the secret
sauce behind every thriving team. There's something wrong in the
world of work. Turnovers, high burnout is rising, under performance
(01:00):
is everywhere even well run organizations. Too many people are
stuck in okay, not unhappy enough to sound alarms, but
not energized enough to thrive. It's a quiet dream on morale, momentum,
and results. What if the missing piece isn't just strategy,
structure or skills, but happiness. Fantastic, fantastic, Nick, Tell me
(01:23):
how did you get into the world of measuring happiness,
but not happiness in life, but happiness in organizations and teams.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
It's like lots of things. It's a long journey and
sometimes slightly random. But I'm a statistician by trade, and
I was always interested in what quality of life is.
I also trained as a therapist when I was young.
My mother was a family therapist, And in the end
I somehow blended these two things together and started thinking
about how you measure firstly well being and then happiness
(01:52):
and latterly in organizations. So I've been doing this for
twenty five thirty years.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
And your book, how is it done? So?
Speaker 3 (02:01):
The books got launched ten days ago. It's an Amazon
bestseller in the UK in certain categories and many other
countries as well. So it's a good start. You know,
a book is a milestone to being able to communicate
what I'm passionate about, which is about creating a better
world of work.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Really, and you said you've been into this for you know,
quite a while. How like have you been doing statistical work,
doing surveys, doing analysis, making speeches? Like what have you
been doing to talk about happiness.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
So in two thousand and one I founded well. I
started work at a think tank in London on well being.
It was started off as a one day a week
volunteer job and quickly became a research center applied research center,
which won awards and was very influential from the UK
policy scene about how government should measure well being. So so, yes,
(02:56):
I've been doing well. And the concentration of work came
because I had a very an idea about how organizations
measured employee experience and I thought it was really poor
and I could do something about that. And the book
is really reflecting on the last ten years of my
work with organizations and teams about how to build happier
teams that are successful.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
And so you're you say you're a statistician, what are
some of the stats around it?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Then? So some of the stats are that happier teams
are twenty to thirty percent more productive than okay teams,
That people who are unhappy at work are three times
more likely to leave next quarter, so very related to
staff turnout to turnover, and four times more likely to
experience burnout. So there's some really really important things around underperformance,
(03:40):
staff retention, and burnout that come out of happiness data.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
So it's not how you pay them.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Pay is important up to the stage that people feel
fairly paid, and so it's really about so taking pay
off the table is important so people feel they're treated unfairly.
Then yeah, absolutely pay matters, and pay can often be
the focus of what goes on around unfairness. But on
fairness is much broader than pay. It's about respect. It's
(04:07):
about valuing people appreciating their work too.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
I've always heard you don't quit companies, you quit bosses.
So are bosses key for happiness or are your peers
key for happiness?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
So teams are really really important for happiness. In my data,
I show that they're three times more important than the
organizational culture the team culture, so it's very local. But
I always feel it's a little unfair on the team
leader to blame them for it, because the team leader
is normally really undersupported. And actually, if an organization is
appointing team leaders who haven't got good people skills, aren't
(04:40):
training them in that, then that is an organizational failure.
And so most team leaders and managers are don't have
any training in people skills, they've got a lot of
pressure on above them to deliver results and not really
supported to look after their teams.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So what do you do. Do you just tell people
that they've got to be happier or do you actually
have a re for how they can be happier and
get their teams to be happier.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah, you can't just tell people to be happier. It's
a very facilitative space. So probably the biggest thing that
is a cause of unhappiness is what I call friction
at work, frustrations, things that hold you back. People like
to progress their work, they like to do a good job,
and often the embedded in systems that don't support them.
They could be it systems, admin systems, they can be
(05:27):
you know, team leaders that don't support them, that haven't
got the training. So really eliminating those frustrations and the
most important thing, and then it comes down to culture,
and culture is really about relationships at work, what people do,
but it's also about challenge and stretch and meaning so people,
you know, it's a sort of misunderstanding to think that
people just want to have a stress free work. Actually
(05:49):
they don't want to be too stressed, but they don't
want to be bored. Boredom is really really bad for
happiness at work, So you need a bit of challenge too.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
I had a gentleman the other day that you know,
he wasn't being listened to, or that people were disagreeing
with his strategy and picking a different strategy. You wanted
to quit, But then you know, I've had other people
that they love a little bit of challenge and not friction,
but you know, discussion about strategies going forward. So does
happiness equate with good discussions or no? Everyone does everything
(06:21):
you want.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
So good discussions are really really important. In fact, one
of the things I always recommend to teams is to
have a fifteen to twenty minute meeting every week talking
about how they work together and what they work you're
working on, So that is really to eliminate frustrations. But
actually much more than that is to stop and celebrate
what's been achieved. Too often at work we just move
(06:43):
from one challenge to the next one and don't just
stop and think about it for a second. And so
I think teams are really really important for that. Discussions
are important. Involving people in decisions is really really important.
And yeah, so all of the above.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
So getting together and just you know, naval gaze and
asking how we're getting along. Is there something you should
do once a week?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Not naval glazing. I think it's about being focused and
being starting with like everyone going around and saying this
is what I've achieved this week, and also thanking each other,
saying actually, thank you, you know, thank you, Brian for
the support you give me this week. That's really really important.
It sounds like really fluffy, but you know, humans, we
like to be appreciated and we like to be acknowledged.
(07:25):
This is what valuing and appreciation is about. This is
about what fairness is about in some ways. So starting
with that and getting a positive mood and then going
to any frustrations. But there's no naval glazing because you
can meet and just chat and that's nice and that's
good for relationships, but actually you've got to focus in
on what's going well, how to build on it, what
isn't going well, how to fix it.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
This is fascinating, Nick, I really appreciate you joining us.
We're going to take a break for some messages and
come back in two minutes. Maybe Nickel reads something from
his book for us, and we'll talk about maybe remote
work and can you be happy working remotely? And we'll
chat a little bit more about some of the things
that you got to do to create happiness in your workplace,
in your team and your organization. Stay with us, everybody
back in just two minutes with Nick Marx on the
(08:09):
science of happiness in workplaces. Stay with us, Everybody back into.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
No Radio, No Problem. Stream is live on Sagay nine
sixty am dot C.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
A welcome back everyone to the Brankrome, your radio R.
We've got just a fascinating gentleman to night. His name
is Nick Marx, and he has just published a book
called Happiness is a Serious Business, Why happy teams are
(08:45):
more successful and how to build them. And he's given
us a little bit of an overview of the book.
But I want to take a step back and tell
you a little bit about Nick because he's got really
just an absolutely fascinating background, which I think says that
this guy is somewhere we probably should be listening to.
So he's got a postgraduate diploma in Change Agent Skills
(09:05):
from the University of Surrey. He's got a Master of
Science and Operations Research and Applied statistic decision making, modeling
and systems therapy from Lancaster University. Then he's got something
I've never heard of before. He's got a credit to
diploma in psychothinsesis therapy from the psycho Synthesis Synthesis. Trust,
(09:29):
you got to come back and tell me what psychothsicis is.
And then he's got Masters in Maths and Management Studies
from the University of Cambridge. And in regards to what
he's done with all that, as you mentioned, in two
thousand and one, he was the founder of something called
the Center for well Being and he's been doing that
for eleven years. He became a TED speaker in twenty ten.
He became the CEO and founder of Happiness Works in
(09:51):
twenty twelve, and the founder and chief statistician for Friday
a Pulse and now he's an author. So pretty interesting background.
You know what is psychothyntisis? Please, I got to understand.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
That psychosynthesis like total synthesis, so it is a type
of psychotherapy approach. It's and what is lovely about psychosymthasis
is that it has in its heart the idea that
there's a quality in every distress disorder at the core
(10:25):
of it is a quality and that's trying to come out,
and so it's a very optimistic form of therapy and
in some ways it has really guided my work on
happiness and well being. So let's let's say that you
you have a dilemma that you don't know where you
want to live in the town or the city. The
quality of the living in the town might be about
(10:46):
business and connection, and in the country it might be
about tranquility. And those can be a odds and they
can get the problem, can get down to like where
you live. But at the core of it is how
do you hold the qualities of both one in tranquility
and connection. And so it's a very beautiful approach and
I really really enjoyed it. Studied for three years. I
(11:09):
did qualify, but I didn't really practice as an individual
therapist because I found it a little lonely. I was
quite young and I wanted to be in a team.
But the big thing I learned from therapy was that
what a therapist does a counselor does is they listen
to their client and they reflect back to them what
they're hearing. And I think my statistics, I think exactly
(11:29):
the same I listen to a population by doing a survey,
and then I reflect back the results, challenge them, maybe
help them. It's a coming into awareness process. So that's
what the work I do with teams. Although I use statistics,
I'm trying to help the team understand itself more so.
My therapy training has been very, very influential on my
statistical work.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
How do you keep connection and tranquility both in front
of you at the same time.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
You probably do some what we call time sharing, You
do some in each You possibly do something things where
you are big silent with other people. I mean, if
we go to the sort of thing. But there are
ways of both time sharing of integrating. And then the
reason it was called psycho synthesis was the idea that
you could synthesize the two things that you were holding.
Maybe that's not the best example of it, but you know,
(12:15):
one way is to hot between things. So some of
us buy in that. We almost inhabit different personalities in
different settings, and then when it becomes a bit more integrated,
we're holding both of those things at once, and synthesis
is when they really get blended. But that's the sort
of ideal process.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Your book is on the Amazon bestseller right now it is. Yeah, congratulations,
thank you.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
It's very pleasing.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And where are you coming. You're from England chatting from
England right now?
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Yeah, I am. I am my businesses in London, but
I actually live in Salisbury, quite close to Stonehenge. I
kind of have the druid hair, but I'm in the
West Country. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
So you've got the tranquility and the connectiveness when you
go to London. Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
I do. I do a bit of time sharing. I
go up to London for some days and then I
come back. Yeah, that is absolutely true.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Well, it's a real honor to meet you in a
real pleasure. So you said you've got your book handy.
Can you read something from the book.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
This is the cover of the book, and the cover
I really like it is a bit above and below.
It's a bit like happiness is a serious business. So
actually I'd like to read a poem. It's a poem
that I quote because it really captures something around both
the sort of trickiness and the magic of teams at work.
(13:34):
And it's a poem by a guy called David White.
I don't know if you've heard of him. He is
he's a great poet, and it's called working Together. He
wrote it for Boeing when they were launching a new airplane.
I'm just going to read the first few lines, but
it goes, we shape ourselves to fit the world, and
by the world are shaped again. We shape ourselves to
(13:55):
fit the world, and by the world are shaped again,
the visible and the invisible working together in common cause
to produce the miraculous. And what I love about that
poem is that if we think about our experience in teams,
we have to shape ourselves to fit in the team,
and then the team influences us. And then when things
(14:16):
go well, we and the team and the sort of
team culture work together in common cause we need a
business goal, we need to know where we're going, and
we produce, if not quite the miraculous, then at least
the business goals. You know, and we all know that
when a team comes together, there is a synthesis to
use that word again, you know, one plus one equals
three suddenly, And that's really what organizations are looking for,
(14:38):
and actually it's.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
What we want.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Most people want from their work too. They want to
feel good at work. So this is real alignment between
personal happiness and organizational success.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Okay, so let's say I'm convinced in what you've said,
how do you actually do it? So you've talked about
this meeting once a week where you chat about how
the teams are working all together. What else do you do?
Like what do you have a recipe or a you
have a top ten things to do? Like? How do
you actually how do you achieve happiness at work? A
lot of people drug work as drudgery. Work is what
(15:08):
they got to do to pay the pay the bills,
and then they're happy when it's Friday. Thank goodness, it's Friday. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
I think there's I think there's an awful lot of
people like that, and and you know there's a reality there.
We do need to pay the rule and pay the bills. Sorry,
and you know getting paid is an important part of work.
It is much more than that. Though. We know that
people who are unemployed then their happiness mental health suffers
(15:35):
three to four times more than just explained by loss
of income because people lose a sense of meaning and
means of purpose, a sense of structure. So work actually
is really healthy for us. I know that we don't
necessarily like the time there but the lack of work
is really unhealthy for us. So there's something good about work,
and I think it's it's we spend a lot of
time there, so it's good, definitely good for us to
feel better at work than to feel rubbish, that's for sure.
(15:59):
So so the recipe I have I'm a statistician, so
I have a measurement led recipe. I call it measure
meat repeat, which is that every week I have a
company called Friday Pulse. On on Friday, you send a little
pulse about asking how people's week was. So my measurement
is how happy are people at work? Each week? When
you ask people that question, they can answer it because
(16:20):
they say, yeah, I was happy this week. I wasn't.
And it's quite a low stakes question because if you
have a bad week, you can have a good one
next week, whereas to say I'm totally unhappy at work
is a big thing. Was When you narrow it down
to a week, it's really really tight and good, and
then organize a team's meet every week they talk about
how happy they were last week, and as I said,
talk about what went well what didn't. So that's the
meat part and the repeat is critical. We have to
(16:42):
commit to this process. It can't be one off. One
offs have a little impact, but they don't. Things don't last.
It's actually repeated habits. So James Clear wrote Atomic habits
and he talks about it being the compound interest of
growth if you do things regularly, and I think doing
a little weekly meeting with or without the measurement. I mean,
(17:02):
you know your listeners, some of them won't be able
to use a measurement tool. But just start the weekly
meeting and do it. But if you're an organization, you're
a group of teams, measure it. Then you would see
what's going on and meet and repeat. That's my formula.
I do have surveys to do more diagnostic, which is
getting into why teams are unhappy or what could be better.
(17:25):
And I call those the five ways to happiness at
work and they are connect, be, fair, empower, challenge, inspire.
You know, you can see Maslow in that there's a
sort of you. There's a link to that, or you
can see Daniel Pink's drive. And it's not new theory
that the difference I make really is I just make
them into positive actions that teams and team leaders can
(17:47):
relate to. So connections, building them being treating people fairly,
empowering them, not just you know, not micromanaging them, challenging them.
That's the surprising one. But it's really really important and inspiring.
Is about me feeling people doing something worthwhile. They're getting
a sense of accomplishment. So if you look after those things,
team happiness is going to look after itself.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
So let's review these again. So connect So connect is
what just you know, talking to people and going for
walks or having lunches or something like that. Is that
what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
It's relationships. You know, Teams are a network of relationships,
and relationships are the foundation of happiness and well being
in our personal lives and at work. You know, we're
relational beings. Relationships are both the joy and the most
difficult thing. They're not easy relationships often and of course
(18:38):
most people their most painful experience in life has been relational. Okay,
we can have health issues and we can do that,
but relationships are difficult. Of course, that's where the joy
is too, so that always needs building. And it's why
team leadership is difficult because team leaders are often when
I say to them, what you need to think about
the happiness your team. They go, oh my god, not
another thing to think about, you know, and they're worried
(18:59):
about a Pandora's box of nastiness. Actually, there's probably an
awful lot of goodness there and if there is anything difficult,
it's better to be dealt with. So relationships are the
absolute starting point connect Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
So you know, I've heard stories about you know, Steve
Jobs going for walks with people and that was how
he connected with people. I've read a book called Never
Read Alone that talks about how you you got to
go out and have lunches and dinners with people and
never read alone. But then you got the other side
of things, saying that the worst thing you can have
is a dating relationships or sexual relationships and people get
(19:34):
too close and if you have, you know, a work
wife or a work husband, it ends up creating friction
in your in your own marriage and problems. So like,
how do you how do you think about connection and
how do you how do you drive this connection or
instill this connection without it going too far.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I think there obviously can be situations where things go
too far, and I think readly it's about fairness. When
we're talking about if you say about work, wife, work, husband,
and it starts feeling like someone's being favored over someone
else rather than for their efforts and for their performance
than that is. And that's an issue of fairness rather
than relationship because suddenly someone's a favorite or like that.
(20:12):
So you know, I know lots of husband and wife
teams that run small. You know creative agencies perfectly well,
and so it's not always that relationships are wrong. It
be comes down to fairness then, and people being judged
on their performance rather than who they are.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
I'm surprised that your second one. I think your second
one was fairness. Is that correct? It is?
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Yeah, be fair.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
So you didn't say, you know, pay them well, you
didn't say advancement. You didn't say growth. You said fairness.
Why why fairness not? You know, growth? Why not high pay?
Speaker 3 (20:45):
So growth pay comes into my equations when I'm a statistician,
fair pay comes into my equations as an important driver
of happiness and well being. It's not an indicator I
use very regularly with teams because it's normally outside of
their country role and I'm trying to empower the teams.
But if I'm doing a survey with an organization, and
fair pay is absolutely important. Work life balance is also
(21:08):
really important for fairness. So the growth comes later. The
growth comes under the challenge and inspire and empower and
if you want it to be you know, connection and
fairness is sort of about stability that the other three empowered,
Challenge Inspire are about change and growth, and we need
both a sense of stability and a platform for growth.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Empower is kind of an interesting one because you know,
there's some bosses that are micromanagers that want to make
all the decisions, and there's others that know they want
to give you the sense that you're sort of in
control of your own destiny and you have a role
to play in the making the decisions of the company
or the organization of the team. How do you how
do you empower people without taking too much risk?
Speaker 3 (21:56):
It's a difficult balance, I think. I think these things
are always about optimizing rather than maximizing. If you sort
of just go, oh, you know, do whatever you want,
that's not going to work, that might be empowering, but
clearly you need the business goals too, So everything is
a sort of dance between it, and really it comes
back to what i'd call feedback is listening to your
team and then you know acting. That's why weekly meeting
(22:18):
is really good because if things start going offline for
the business goals or for personal happiness and well being,
you pick them up very quickly. So you're trying to
create a situation where you can. If you're a sailor,
you're navigating, you're always trying to hold the sale to
the wind, whatever it is. You're trying to keep in
that moment and get there. So it is a difficult balance.
(22:40):
You know, being a team leader is not easy, that's
for certain.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I've worked for some interesting different bosses in my career.
One of them Jim Patterson, who is a nine billion billionaire,
very successful entrepreneur on the Canadian West coast, and he
would never speak first, and part of you know, his
ration that he would say is, you know, I hire
a whole bunch of smart people. Want to hear what
you've got to say, because if I say what I think,
(23:05):
then some of you are going to be intimidated, if
some of you're going to want to just repeat what
the boss said. And frankly, I pay you all because
I want the benefit of what you're thinking is and
what you got to say, and so I want you
to speak first, and then I get to, oh my god,
I'm going to use your word again, synthesize. I get
to synthesize, you know what everyone has to say. I
had a different boss who never sat at the head
(23:25):
of the table, and he said the problem if I
said at the head of table, that signifies something. Maybe
it's sort of like who was it with the round table?
King Arthur that you know, always wanted to he would
always sit at the side of a table because he
didn't want to be the head of the table, even
though he was clear to the boss with all the votes.
Are there things that you've seen that bosses can do
(23:47):
or leaders can do that are secrets to empowerment? Cool?
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Well, those are two very good ones that you've just said.
I mean, I like them both. And obviously those two
leaders were acutely aware of the power they had held.
And one does need to be aware if you are leading,
managing teams of your own power. And I think you
need to be aware of your own mood. Actually, because
(24:15):
you are more influential, I call team leaders internal influencers,
you know, to use a sort of social media term.
But they are influences because moods are contagious. And if
team leaders come in and they might well be angry
about something, quite justifiably angry about something that's just happened.
But if they come in and bring their anger to
their team or that, they're going to disrupt the team.
(24:38):
So actually managing your own mood as a leader is
really really important. That's not easy, but it's very very important.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Your number four is challenge, and that is kind of interesting. So,
you know, I read this one book. I was in
an organization behavior course and I was asked to read
a book called The Mathematics of Marriage, and it was
there a couple of Stanford she professors that had done analyses,
and they said that you have to have seven times
as much positive reinforcement as negative reinforcement, but you had
(25:09):
to have some negative reinforcement because if you didn't have
negative reinforcement, it was like being a doormat and people
would be sort of Pollyanna and thinking everything was perfect,
and so that therefore some amount of they called it
negative reinforcement. But challenge, you know, constructive criticism was critically important.
And then you know, I think a lot of us
(25:30):
have seen this chart about how you know, you need
not too much stress, but you do need a little
bit of stress every once in a while, and that's
how you end up being successful. So is that what
you're talking about in regards to challenge.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Yeah, it is broadly. I mean, I think that feedback
needs to be constructive and helpful, you know, if you're
giving it. But a lack of feedback, a lack of direction,
a lack of challenges, is really unhelpful. So it's about
getting the right balance. There's been quite a lot of
research on the relate relationship between positive and negative feedback,
(26:04):
and you see estimates from three to ten to one
on what they need to be. But what's for certain
is that under one heard, I have heard it up
to ten to one. There was a piece of work
by Professor bel Frederickson and someone called Losado, and there's
a little bit of statistical challenge to some of their work,
but that was their range, and I think the interesting
(26:25):
thing is they had a top of the range too,
was that you can't just be Pollyanna. And actually people
sometimes talk about toxic positivity. It really annoys me because
toxic negativity is really toxic, really really toxic. Most over,
positivity is just a bit annoying. But where you probably
could get into toxic positivity, there was never any any
(26:49):
negative as in challenging stuff and that you lose track
there and that probably would suffocate in some ways.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, your last one is inspired. I don't know whether
this TV show has been popular in the UK, but
Ted Lasso is one of my favorite shows about a
American football coach that goes to the UK to coach
a soccer team, your football, our soccer and and he's
got this sign believe that he puts up on the wall,
(27:19):
and he really talks about inspiration and being being inspired.
Is that what you got to talk about is just
putting a sign on the wall. Believe.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
I think that there can be positive reinforcement from slogans
and things like that. But of course he was much
more than just a sign on the wall. He did
it with them in person, at personal risk, and he
so it is you know, it is it is a
it is a show not to tell world. It is
behavior that matters. And we can have slogans and we
(27:54):
can have values and organizations, but if they stay on
the wall and they don't come into the teams, they're
not worth anything. So INSPA needs to be about, you know,
setting a vision. It needs to be understanding the impact
of our work, because sometimes people are very remote from
the end of us with their work. But bringing those
stories into it. You must love it with your radio show,
when you get people come back to you talk you
(28:16):
and you understand you're influencing people's lives. So sometimes people's
product or service or whatever they're involved in, it is
very distant from people and they need that bringing in.
And you can actually get the other thing too, which
is that people's work is very meaningful. So let's think
of healthcare, education. They almost sacrifice too much and they
(28:36):
can get burnt out because the meaning becomes so important,
and so everything is about dynamic and balance. Yeah, I've
lost you.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
I was at this real estate conference recently about housing
for seniors, and you know, some of it was just
to how to make money and what you needed to
do to prove good seniors homes. But then there were
two conversations that were really inspiring to people. And the
one was about dementia and how you can care for
people far better in that later stage of life. Uh,
(29:11):
when when they may have dementia UH. And then the
other one was the challenge of having housing made available
for people that couldn't afford it and uh and and
and the speaker talked about, you know how, at the
same time as we want to build a lot of
these uh these buildings and house people and make money,
we've got to think about the challenge of of those
people that we can't currently house and uh and how
(29:34):
we're going to positively impact that in the future. And
it was it was very inspiring, and people really got
excited about, you know, dealing with something that we haven't
actually solved well yet.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
There's quite a lot of things we haven't so well yet.
And uh and I think that good work and a
good life is certainly for me, is is you know,
using one's skills and strengths in service of something bigger
than you, which you know, and that's it doesn't have
to be a huge campaign about something, but something that
(30:07):
feels meaningful to you, I think does make for better
work and for better life.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
So I've heard on numerous occasions that culture Trump's strategy.
Are you saying that happiness Trump's culture?
Speaker 3 (30:20):
I think that culture is a little mysterious what it is.
And my statistical measure of a good culture would be
our people happy and successful in that work. And I
so so I think of a great culture as one
that empowers people and teams to be happy and successful.
And as a statistician, I like to measure outcomes, So
(30:44):
I can measure or I can create measures of strictly speaking,
people's happiness at work, and organizations make measures of performance.
And so for me, that is that is the aim.
Does does culture Trump's strategy? That's a quote attributed to
Peter Drucker, And I think they go hand in hand, don't.
I think you need good strategy, but you need a
(31:05):
great culture to to actually operationalize that strategy.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
That's interesting. So what you're saying is you can't measure culture,
but you can measure happiness.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
I think that people do measure culture, but they tend
to measure it by what I would call statistically, the
drivers of good culture. So my five ways connect, be fair,
and power, challenge inspire our drivers of team happiness. They're
not team happiness itself. So most measures of culture I
see are saying this is what a good culture is.
These are the things, but they're actually measuring drivers. So statistically,
(31:34):
sorry to be nerdy, But I prefer to measure the outcomes,
like is the team happy and successful? It needs to
be both of those things. If it's if it's if
it's happy and not successful, I mean that's slacking, that's
not that's not work. If it's successful or not happy,
they're going to get burnout. You're going to get real
problems of staff attention. You need both of those things.
So a good, great culture is one that you know,
(31:57):
you know creates, satisfies the business goal and satisfies the
team members.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
But if you're seeing that, you've got to measure out comes.
Why an't you just not measuring profit or sales growth
or productivity.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
If you measure staff retention and you measure productivity, you're
doing good. But they are both what we call lagging indicators.
They're basically looking back to see what happened. The great
thing about measuring happiness in real time is that it
will predict underperformance, it will predict staff at retention. So
actually you create an indicator which is forward leaning. So
(32:33):
I'm not against measuring retention and productivity. I think happiness
gives you new data, and it gives you data that
predicts what's going to happen, Nick.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Marks, this has been a fasting conversation. I really appreciate it.
What's the name of the book please?
Speaker 3 (32:45):
The name of the book is Happiness is a Serious Business.
And it's available on Amazon, and I am Nick Mars.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
We're going to take a final break and come back
with a couple of fire around questions for Nick. I'm
going to ask them about remote work. I can ask
them about I am going to ask him about you know,
bad bosses. Stay with us that one back in two minutes.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Stream us Live at SAGA nine six am dot C.
Speaker 4 (33:12):
A welcome back everyone to the Bran Crowney Radio Hour.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
I got Nick Marx. He's an author from the UK
on tonight and he's written a book. Tell us Nick,
what's the name of the book.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
It's called Happiness is a Serious Business.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
And he's just published it about ten days ago. It's
already on Amazon bestseller in the UK and you can
get it. And he's got five ways that what do
you call the tests or methods?
Speaker 3 (33:46):
What five ways to happiness at work is what I
call him?
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Five Ways to happiness at work? Connect, fairness, empower, challenge
and inspire. Nick. You know, remote work lots of us
are being forced to go back to work, and some
of you know the comments that you can't build build
culture remotely, you and can't build good organizations and teams remotely.
(34:09):
But then other people, you know, back to your sort
of your issue about connectivity versus tranquility. A lot of
us liked working at home and not having to put
our pants on. Well we put some of the pants on,
but maybe not, you know, our suit pants on and
and and having a coffee at home and relaxing while
we were doing the work. What's your sense is remote
work positive to organizational happiness or negative to organizational connectiveness
(34:33):
and culture.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Actually, I've got a chapter on the book on this,
which is I called a flexibility conundrum because you can
see that there were there were actually many angles on it.
And actually thinking about connect be fair, empower challenge inspire
is a useful way of approaching what will suit your team,
your organization because what I think is a huge variety
of options.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Here.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
We see organizations which are fully remote that are really successful.
We see that fully in person which are really successful
and work. And we'll have different cultures, like we have
different personalities. So I think there's room for a lot
of things. What's happened in some ways at a whole
societal level as there has been a reset. You know,
we had a certain amount of working from home. It
(35:18):
absolutely shot up obviously during the pandemic, and it's balancing,
but it's no way is it going back to what
it was before. That's absolutely gone. So we're getting a
new balance being reset. And there were positives from working
from home. You know, people can really get down and
do their work. Obviously, only fifty percent of jobs can
even be worked from home, so fifty percent can't be
(35:39):
so that's immediately out. But then there are negatives. There
are challenges, which is do you build teams, how do
you learn in those environments? How do people not get
left behind? How do people not get isolated? Actually, you know,
people's mental health can struggle from just being at home
at time. So quite a lot of tech companies went
fully remote. And you've got guys and girls who they're
(36:01):
they're in their basement on a computer rule day, not
seeing any sunlight. They may be gaming at night. They
maybe introverts. They're missing out on actually quite a lot
of social connectivity. So there are real problems from it too,
and I think it is about organizations and teams intelligently
finding their own balance and a balance is settling down,
(36:22):
and there's no magic in my data, there is no
magic balance with The only thing I find as if
the perse the individual's preference for what they work, their
balance meets what they're doing, then there's a positive. If
they're working too much remotely or too much in the office,
then that could be no days to five days, so
it's a week result. It's a difficult, difficult issue, and
(36:45):
I think we just have to have sensible discussions around it.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
I find the biggest negative of not going to the
office isn't sort of the plan connectiveness. It is the unplanned.
It's the sort of the coincidental collisions with people. And
it's not just going to the office, it's going downtown where.
You know, if I'm walking around downtown Toronto and concourse,
I inevitably run into someone that I haven't seen in
(37:11):
a while, or I wanted to see, or I get
introduced to someone and I end up striking up an
interesting conversation and you know, often it runs into it
leads to business, or it leads to a new idea
or some information and the same thing at work is
that you know, I get interrupted way too often, but
sometimes those interruptions are critically important. And if I hadn't
had that presence in the office, I wouldn't have heard
(37:32):
about it now, you know. The opposite is that, frankly,
I go into the office and I get on the
computer and a zoom or teams or something like this,
and I'm speaking on a computer to people that are
in my office and remote from the office, and so
I didn't need to be in the office to actually
have that planned connectiveness. So it's the planned connectiveness I
can do remotely. The unplanned connectiveness I can't.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Yeah, it's those water cooler moments over the coffee. It's
actually I have a little thing in my book called
What we Can Learn from Smokers about Dealing with Stress,
because smokers used to sort of go outside and they'd
have these accidental conversations. But the little joke I'm makers
that they stop what they're doing, they m move their body,
(38:16):
they go oh outside, they kickstart conversations, and then they
do something they're not aware, which is the exhale for
longer than they inhale, and they do mindful breathing and
it spells smoke. But the idea of it is this
idea that people, these informal, random conversations are important to
both connections and creativity and innovation. So how you organize that,
And particularly for younger people, you know, they've got to
(38:39):
learn from their mentors and they've got to find someone
they do. So showing up for work is important. That
doesn't mean say it has to be five days commuting
into the office. It could be three. But there has
to be a new balance fan where that happens.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, so s we should all start taking small bricks.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
I think we should not smoke cigarettes because that obviously
turns the k into killing ourselves. But going outside once
in an hour, getting up from our desks and stretching
really really good. So so don't smoke, but think what
a smoker would do AI.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
What do you think is going to be the impact
of AI? Some people think that is going to take
away a horde of jobs and we're going to lose
sort of our sense of identity, our sense of meaning.
What are you worried about that?
Speaker 3 (39:23):
I think AI is going to transform work just like
the Internet did, and I think no one really knows
what's going to happen with it. However, I think it
the human to human contact I think, in my opinion,
will become more important because you know, we see it
already with like posts obviously generated by air. They lack
(39:45):
some spirit. And I think that work and creativity, particularly innovation,
you know, becomes really really important in a human and
human contact. So I really don't know what's going to
happen to the job market. You know, I'm not an
expert in but I do think that connection, human to
human relationships are going to become more and more important.
(40:06):
I think, you know, hospitality will become really important, customer
service will do because we don't want to just go
in AI stuff. I think we like speaking to people.
So we're seeing how that settles down, and I imagine
it's going to be a bumpy ride. But I think
humanness creativity will always be very, very valuable.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
ADI diversity, equity inclusion was sort of like the big
thing during the Biden administration in the United States, but
now it's sort of become something negative. Some people think
that diversity in the workforce is critically important to sort
of having different points of view and good decision making
and sort of your challenge you know, way of achieving happiness,
(40:50):
and other people think that all it was was affirmative
action and a way of getting people that didn't deserve
a job a job. What do you think about diversity,
equity inclusion?
Speaker 3 (41:00):
You know, I haven't really looked at very much data
on it. I do know that some of the studies
that were trying to show that boards that were diversive
had high share press growth have been slightly undermined statistically,
purely statistically, nothing about anything else. I think as a
general thing in life, having diverse friends, some diverse friends,
(41:23):
that it's that same thing I talked about the need
for stability and change. We need some mix and we
need some things. And I think where things have got
difficult is people haven't felt there's too much change, there's
not enough stability, and that is always a tension that
runs through all of life. And I think it's probably
a tension that's run through this topic. In the UK.
It was never probably you know it was. I mean,
(41:46):
the big diversity is gender and having a gender balance
I think is really really good. So it's a difficult topic.
I think measuring outcomes is a really good way to
think about it. Do things get better at and fairness
is important too.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
If people are intrigued by this conversation, what should they do?
Should they run out and buy your book? Should they
do a Friday Pulse? What? What? What? What's the next step? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (42:12):
So obviously by my book, Happiness is serious business out
now on Amazon. If you want to understand more about
your happiness at work, you in the book. There's a
QR code that takes you to questionnaire, but you can
go straight there by going Friday one dot com and
one is Ohne and my business is called Friday Pulse
dot com, which is measuring the happiness of teams in organizations. Yeah,
(42:36):
it's a it's a it's a platform that does that
and it's very easy to use them, very powerful.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Nick Marx, thank you so much for joining us. I
really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
Thanks very much, Brian.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
I am a firm believer in what Nick has been
chatting about. I think that there's something about about happiness.
I think that his five ways that he's talked about
connect fairness and power, challenge and inspire are inspiring and
uh a great sort of a way to think about
motivating your employee base your team. As some of you know,
(43:08):
I did doctoral work on social capital, and I had
my ten powers of co which was my sort of way,
and some of them are pretty similar to what Nick
has talked about. And I think this is critically important.
And you know that mathematics of marriage that I mentioned
where people could predict, based on fifteen minutes of videotaping
of the interaction between either couples or people in a workplace,
(43:29):
whether they'd be successful together or not successful together, based
on whether there was more positive interaction than negative interaction,
and that there had to be some what they called
negative but what Nick is called constructive criticism. There had
to be some constructive criticism, so it couldn't all be Pollyanna,
but that you had to have dramatically more positive than
(43:49):
the negative. And you know, they said seven to one,
and Nick has said it can go up as high
as ten to one, maybe as low as three to one,
but there's got to be that. And that's in marriages,
that's in relationships, that's in teams. So I think this
is going to be a great book, and Nick, I'm
sure it's going to be a bestseller in Canada as
well after this interview. So thank you so much for
joining us and stay with us. Everybody back in just
(44:09):
two minutes.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
No Radio, No Problem stream is live on Sagay nine
sixty am dot C.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
We'll come back, everyone to the Brian Crowndry Radio R.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
I really enjoyed the conversation we just had about happiness
and this idea that it's critically important to the well
functioning organization, team company. I think it's the same for families.
I think it's the same for friend groups. I think
it's the same in life, and so I think that
there's a lot to be said for this conversation. I
(44:54):
wanted to underline accentuate a couple of issues if I could,
which I think are probably pretty obvious, but we don't
talk to them talk about it often enough. I think
happiness has and lots of people have talked about This
is actually a term for about headonomic versus economic, which
the headonomic is sort of the sense of pleasure and
(45:18):
positive feelings. But more importantly, this endonomic, which I'm pronouncing wrong,
I apologize, is really about purpose, about meaning in life,
and I think that you need both. I think people
want to feel good, but they also want to feel
like they're doing good. They want to have purpose. They
want to have meaning, They want to think they're contributing
to something better in society and or their community and
(45:40):
or their family and or whatever. And so I think
that too often we've only focused on the you know,
how happiness impacts me, rather than how I'm going to
impact happiness in other people. And that impacting happiness in
other people, I think is critically important, which leads to
my second point about how critically important social connectedness is
to happiness. It's very hot, very hard to be happy
(46:03):
when you're alone, and I fear that too many people
are trying to get happiness through social media, through video games,
through internet, through movies on their own. And I think
that so much research has been done that says that
social interaction and social connectiveness is positively related with happiness,
(46:24):
with longevity of life, with getting through dementia, through getting
through health scares, et cetera. So I think that that's
critically important in regards to happiness. It's interesting that studies
of happiness have showed that genetics ends up being one
of the key determinants of happiness, and so I think
that if you're happy, your kids are going to tend
(46:45):
to be happy and your grandkids are going to tend
to be happy. And so therefore, when you think about
whether you're happy or you're morose, you know it's not
just you, but it's going to impact you know, your offspring.
And so another reason why it's good to be happy.
But then another one is socialization. And so therefore ensuring
that you've got a happy childhood, a happy family, a
happy family for your child childs in their childhood I
(47:08):
think is critically important. And then thinking about those habits
that that you can ensure that you've got in your
life that bring you happiness, whether it's a walk after dinner,
whether it's a walking your dog, whether it's exercise, whether
it's watching movies, music, et cetera. But thinking about those
habits that you have that make you happy and making
(47:28):
sure that you do them on a fairly regular basis,
I think one of the other key things, and this
sort of goes against potentially the social connectiveness standpoint, but
I think it's critically important is some alone time, and
in that alone time, giving thought to your life and
practicing gratitude. I do this through through prayer. I pray
(47:50):
every morning, every night. It's my own personal way of
thinking about my day, my life, and being showing gratitude
if all I'm doing really is frankly thanking God for
what happened and uh and and I think that's critically important.
Some people do it through meditation, some people do it
(48:11):
through zennying uh uh And sometimes I do that where
I just look like Jason Kelsey in a concert and
zen out for a while and try to relax and
uh and think about how happy I am. So I
think when you think about happiness, think about some of
these other things that happiness is sometimes things that happen
(48:33):
to you that other people can make you happy. But
a lot of happiness comes from making other people happy
and uh and from having meaning and purpose in life,
contributing to society. A lot of happiness comes through connectivity
connectivity and uh and and connecting with other people through
social interaction, through through doing things, through family, through friends.
(48:55):
That some happiness comes through genetics and and and and
socialized and so therefore being happy and exuding happiness is
beneficial to you, yes, but it's also going to be
beneficial to other people around you, and particularly to your offspring,
to your kids and your grandchildren. And then this idea
that showing gratitude and having gratitude, and maybe having that
(49:18):
gratitude in quiet moments, whether it's while you're walking your
dog late at night or praying or meditating or however
you do, it is happiness. And so I guess what
I'm trying to say is too often we think happiness
happens to us and it's an external something. Rather that
happens and we get therefore happy, and there is some
(49:42):
truth to that, But I think a lot of happiness
is internal and it comes from us being happy and
giving happiness, giving gratitude, giving social connectiveness to other people,
having meaning, having purpose, trying to make the world a
better place. Anyway, a couple of my thoughts on happiness.
Thanks for joining me. I really appreci the opportunity to
speak to you on a nightly basis. I remind you
(50:02):
I'm on every Monday through Friday at six o'clock on
nine sixty am. You can stream me online at Triple
W Saga nine sixty am, dot CA on My podcast
and videos goalup on my website brain comby dot com
ascews my radio show goes to air.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
Thanks kidding fine stream us live at SAGA nine sixty
am dot CA
The views expressed in the following program are those of
the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Saga nine sixty AM or its management.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good Eating everyone, and welcome to the Brian Crombie Radio
ar kind of really interesting gentleman, Nick Marks, to introduce
you to today. He's an author, he's a speaker. He's
an author of a book that I found really intriguing
called Happiness Is Serious Business. Happiness is Serious Business. And
he's been inspiring audiences and organizations with evidence of why
(00:39):
happy teams perform better. And I got to read you
as something that was about this. He's long champion the
radical idea the happiness is a metric worth measuring. His
latest book shows it's more than that. It's the secret
sauce behind every thriving team. There's something wrong in the
world of work. Turnovers, high burnout is rising, under performance
(01:00):
is everywhere even well run organizations. Too many people are
stuck in okay, not unhappy enough to sound alarms, but
not energized enough to thrive. It's a quiet dream on morale, momentum,
and results. What if the missing piece isn't just strategy,
structure or skills, but happiness. Fantastic, fantastic, Nick, Tell me
(01:23):
how did you get into the world of measuring happiness,
but not happiness in life, but happiness in organizations and teams.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
It's like lots of things. It's a long journey and
sometimes slightly random. But I'm a statistician by trade, and
I was always interested in what quality of life is.
I also trained as a therapist when I was young.
My mother was a family therapist, And in the end
I somehow blended these two things together and started thinking
about how you measure firstly well being and then happiness
(01:52):
and latterly in organizations. So I've been doing this for
twenty five thirty years.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
And your book, how is it done? So?
Speaker 3 (02:01):
The books got launched ten days ago. It's an Amazon
bestseller in the UK in certain categories and many other
countries as well. So it's a good start. You know,
a book is a milestone to being able to communicate
what I'm passionate about, which is about creating a better
world of work.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Really, and you said you've been into this for you know,
quite a while. How like have you been doing statistical work,
doing surveys, doing analysis, making speeches? Like what have you
been doing to talk about happiness.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
So in two thousand and one I founded well. I
started work at a think tank in London on well being.
It was started off as a one day a week
volunteer job and quickly became a research center applied research center,
which won awards and was very influential from the UK
policy scene about how government should measure well being. So so, yes,
(02:56):
I've been doing well. And the concentration of work came
because I had a very an idea about how organizations
measured employee experience and I thought it was really poor
and I could do something about that. And the book
is really reflecting on the last ten years of my
work with organizations and teams about how to build happier
teams that are successful.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
And so you're you say you're a statistician, what are
some of the stats around it?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Then? So some of the stats are that happier teams
are twenty to thirty percent more productive than okay teams,
That people who are unhappy at work are three times
more likely to leave next quarter, so very related to
staff turnout to turnover, and four times more likely to
experience burnout. So there's some really really important things around underperformance,
(03:40):
staff retention, and burnout that come out of happiness data.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
So it's not how you pay them.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Pay is important up to the stage that people feel
fairly paid, and so it's really about so taking pay
off the table is important so people feel they're treated unfairly.
Then yeah, absolutely pay matters, and pay can often be
the focus of what goes on around unfairness. But on
fairness is much broader than pay. It's about respect. It's
(04:07):
about valuing people appreciating their work too.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
I've always heard you don't quit companies, you quit bosses.
So are bosses key for happiness or are your peers
key for happiness?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
So teams are really really important for happiness. In my data,
I show that they're three times more important than the
organizational culture the team culture, so it's very local. But
I always feel it's a little unfair on the team
leader to blame them for it, because the team leader
is normally really undersupported. And actually, if an organization is
appointing team leaders who haven't got good people skills, aren't
(04:40):
training them in that, then that is an organizational failure.
And so most team leaders and managers are don't have
any training in people skills, they've got a lot of
pressure on above them to deliver results and not really
supported to look after their teams.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So what do you do. Do you just tell people
that they've got to be happier or do you actually
have a re for how they can be happier and
get their teams to be happier.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah, you can't just tell people to be happier. It's
a very facilitative space. So probably the biggest thing that
is a cause of unhappiness is what I call friction
at work, frustrations, things that hold you back. People like
to progress their work, they like to do a good job,
and often the embedded in systems that don't support them.
They could be it systems, admin systems, they can be
(05:27):
you know, team leaders that don't support them, that haven't
got the training. So really eliminating those frustrations and the
most important thing, and then it comes down to culture,
and culture is really about relationships at work, what people do,
but it's also about challenge and stretch and meaning so people,
you know, it's a sort of misunderstanding to think that
people just want to have a stress free work. Actually
(05:49):
they don't want to be too stressed, but they don't
want to be bored. Boredom is really really bad for
happiness at work, So you need a bit of challenge too.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
I had a gentleman the other day that you know,
he wasn't being listened to, or that people were disagreeing
with his strategy and picking a different strategy. You wanted
to quit, But then you know, I've had other people
that they love a little bit of challenge and not friction,
but you know, discussion about strategies going forward. So does
happiness equate with good discussions or no? Everyone does everything
(06:21):
you want.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
So good discussions are really really important. In fact, one
of the things I always recommend to teams is to
have a fifteen to twenty minute meeting every week talking
about how they work together and what they work you're
working on, So that is really to eliminate frustrations. But
actually much more than that is to stop and celebrate
what's been achieved. Too often at work we just move
(06:43):
from one challenge to the next one and don't just
stop and think about it for a second. And so
I think teams are really really important for that. Discussions
are important. Involving people in decisions is really really important.
And yeah, so all of the above.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
So getting together and just you know, naval gaze and
asking how we're getting along. Is there something you should
do once a week?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Not naval glazing. I think it's about being focused and
being starting with like everyone going around and saying this
is what I've achieved this week, and also thanking each other,
saying actually, thank you, you know, thank you, Brian for
the support you give me this week. That's really really important.
It sounds like really fluffy, but you know, humans, we
like to be appreciated and we like to be acknowledged.
(07:25):
This is what valuing and appreciation is about. This is
about what fairness is about in some ways. So starting
with that and getting a positive mood and then going
to any frustrations. But there's no naval glazing because you
can meet and just chat and that's nice and that's
good for relationships, but actually you've got to focus in
on what's going well, how to build on it, what
isn't going well, how to fix it.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
This is fascinating, Nick, I really appreciate you joining us.
We're going to take a break for some messages and
come back in two minutes. Maybe Nickel reads something from
his book for us, and we'll talk about maybe remote
work and can you be happy working remotely? And we'll
chat a little bit more about some of the things
that you got to do to create happiness in your workplace,
in your team and your organization. Stay with us, everybody
back in just two minutes with Nick Marx on the
(08:09):
science of happiness in workplaces. Stay with us, Everybody back into.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
No Radio, No Problem. Stream is live on Sagay nine
sixty am dot C.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
A welcome back everyone to the Brankrome, your radio R.
We've got just a fascinating gentleman to night. His name
is Nick Marx, and he has just published a book
called Happiness is a Serious Business, Why happy teams are
(08:45):
more successful and how to build them. And he's given
us a little bit of an overview of the book.
But I want to take a step back and tell
you a little bit about Nick because he's got really
just an absolutely fascinating background, which I think says that
this guy is somewhere we probably should be listening to.
So he's got a postgraduate diploma in Change Agent Skills
(09:05):
from the University of Surrey. He's got a Master of
Science and Operations Research and Applied statistic decision making, modeling
and systems therapy from Lancaster University. Then he's got something
I've never heard of before. He's got a credit to
diploma in psychothinsesis therapy from the psycho Synthesis Synthesis. Trust,
(09:29):
you got to come back and tell me what psychothsicis is.
And then he's got Masters in Maths and Management Studies
from the University of Cambridge. And in regards to what
he's done with all that, as you mentioned, in two
thousand and one, he was the founder of something called
the Center for well Being and he's been doing that
for eleven years. He became a TED speaker in twenty ten.
He became the CEO and founder of Happiness Works in
(09:51):
twenty twelve, and the founder and chief statistician for Friday
a Pulse and now he's an author. So pretty interesting background.
You know what is psychothyntisis? Please, I got to understand.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
That psychosynthesis like total synthesis, so it is a type
of psychotherapy approach. It's and what is lovely about psychosymthasis
is that it has in its heart the idea that
there's a quality in every distress disorder at the core
(10:25):
of it is a quality and that's trying to come out,
and so it's a very optimistic form of therapy and
in some ways it has really guided my work on
happiness and well being. So let's let's say that you
you have a dilemma that you don't know where you
want to live in the town or the city. The
quality of the living in the town might be about
(10:46):
business and connection, and in the country it might be
about tranquility. And those can be a odds and they
can get the problem, can get down to like where
you live. But at the core of it is how
do you hold the qualities of both one in tranquility
and connection. And so it's a very beautiful approach and
I really really enjoyed it. Studied for three years. I
(11:09):
did qualify, but I didn't really practice as an individual
therapist because I found it a little lonely. I was
quite young and I wanted to be in a team.
But the big thing I learned from therapy was that
what a therapist does a counselor does is they listen
to their client and they reflect back to them what
they're hearing. And I think my statistics, I think exactly
(11:29):
the same I listen to a population by doing a survey,
and then I reflect back the results, challenge them, maybe
help them. It's a coming into awareness process. So that's
what the work I do with teams. Although I use statistics,
I'm trying to help the team understand itself more so.
My therapy training has been very, very influential on my
statistical work.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
How do you keep connection and tranquility both in front
of you at the same time.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
You probably do some what we call time sharing, You
do some in each You possibly do something things where
you are big silent with other people. I mean, if
we go to the sort of thing. But there are
ways of both time sharing of integrating. And then the
reason it was called psycho synthesis was the idea that
you could synthesize the two things that you were holding.
Maybe that's not the best example of it, but you know,
(12:15):
one way is to hot between things. So some of
us buy in that. We almost inhabit different personalities in
different settings, and then when it becomes a bit more integrated,
we're holding both of those things at once, and synthesis
is when they really get blended. But that's the sort
of ideal process.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Your book is on the Amazon bestseller right now it is. Yeah, congratulations,
thank you.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
It's very pleasing.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And where are you coming. You're from England chatting from
England right now?
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Yeah, I am. I am my businesses in London, but
I actually live in Salisbury, quite close to Stonehenge. I
kind of have the druid hair, but I'm in the
West Country. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
So you've got the tranquility and the connectiveness when you
go to London. Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
I do. I do a bit of time sharing. I
go up to London for some days and then I
come back. Yeah, that is absolutely true.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Well, it's a real honor to meet you in a
real pleasure. So you said you've got your book handy.
Can you read something from the book.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
This is the cover of the book, and the cover
I really like it is a bit above and below.
It's a bit like happiness is a serious business. So
actually I'd like to read a poem. It's a poem
that I quote because it really captures something around both
the sort of trickiness and the magic of teams at work.
(13:34):
And it's a poem by a guy called David White.
I don't know if you've heard of him. He is
he's a great poet, and it's called working Together. He
wrote it for Boeing when they were launching a new airplane.
I'm just going to read the first few lines, but
it goes, we shape ourselves to fit the world, and
by the world are shaped again. We shape ourselves to
(13:55):
fit the world, and by the world are shaped again,
the visible and the invisible working together in common cause
to produce the miraculous. And what I love about that
poem is that if we think about our experience in teams,
we have to shape ourselves to fit in the team,
and then the team influences us. And then when things
(14:16):
go well, we and the team and the sort of
team culture work together in common cause we need a
business goal, we need to know where we're going, and
we produce, if not quite the miraculous, then at least
the business goals. You know, and we all know that
when a team comes together, there is a synthesis to
use that word again, you know, one plus one equals
three suddenly, And that's really what organizations are looking for,
(14:38):
and actually it's.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
What we want.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Most people want from their work too. They want to
feel good at work. So this is real alignment between
personal happiness and organizational success.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Okay, so let's say I'm convinced in what you've said,
how do you actually do it? So you've talked about
this meeting once a week where you chat about how
the teams are working all together. What else do you do?
Like what do you have a recipe or a you
have a top ten things to do? Like? How do
you actually how do you achieve happiness at work? A
lot of people drug work as drudgery. Work is what
(15:08):
they got to do to pay the pay the bills,
and then they're happy when it's Friday. Thank goodness, it's Friday. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
I think there's I think there's an awful lot of
people like that, and and you know there's a reality there.
We do need to pay the rule and pay the bills. Sorry,
and you know getting paid is an important part of work.
It is much more than that. Though. We know that
people who are unemployed then their happiness mental health suffers
(15:35):
three to four times more than just explained by loss
of income because people lose a sense of meaning and
means of purpose, a sense of structure. So work actually
is really healthy for us. I know that we don't
necessarily like the time there but the lack of work
is really unhealthy for us. So there's something good about work,
and I think it's it's we spend a lot of
time there, so it's good, definitely good for us to
feel better at work than to feel rubbish, that's for sure.
(15:59):
So so the recipe I have I'm a statistician, so
I have a measurement led recipe. I call it measure
meat repeat, which is that every week I have a
company called Friday Pulse. On on Friday, you send a little
pulse about asking how people's week was. So my measurement
is how happy are people at work? Each week? When
you ask people that question, they can answer it because
(16:20):
they say, yeah, I was happy this week. I wasn't.
And it's quite a low stakes question because if you
have a bad week, you can have a good one
next week, whereas to say I'm totally unhappy at work
is a big thing. Was When you narrow it down
to a week, it's really really tight and good, and
then organize a team's meet every week they talk about
how happy they were last week, and as I said,
talk about what went well what didn't. So that's the
meat part and the repeat is critical. We have to
(16:42):
commit to this process. It can't be one off. One
offs have a little impact, but they don't. Things don't last.
It's actually repeated habits. So James Clear wrote Atomic habits
and he talks about it being the compound interest of
growth if you do things regularly, and I think doing
a little weekly meeting with or without the measurement. I mean,
(17:02):
you know your listeners, some of them won't be able
to use a measurement tool. But just start the weekly
meeting and do it. But if you're an organization, you're
a group of teams, measure it. Then you would see
what's going on and meet and repeat. That's my formula.
I do have surveys to do more diagnostic, which is
getting into why teams are unhappy or what could be better.
(17:25):
And I call those the five ways to happiness at
work and they are connect, be, fair, empower, challenge, inspire.
You know, you can see Maslow in that there's a
sort of you. There's a link to that, or you
can see Daniel Pink's drive. And it's not new theory
that the difference I make really is I just make
them into positive actions that teams and team leaders can
(17:47):
relate to. So connections, building them being treating people fairly,
empowering them, not just you know, not micromanaging them, challenging them.
That's the surprising one. But it's really really important and inspiring.
Is about me feeling people doing something worthwhile. They're getting
a sense of accomplishment. So if you look after those things,
team happiness is going to look after itself.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
So let's review these again. So connect So connect is
what just you know, talking to people and going for
walks or having lunches or something like that. Is that
what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
It's relationships. You know, Teams are a network of relationships,
and relationships are the foundation of happiness and well being
in our personal lives and at work. You know, we're
relational beings. Relationships are both the joy and the most
difficult thing. They're not easy relationships often and of course
(18:38):
most people their most painful experience in life has been relational. Okay,
we can have health issues and we can do that,
but relationships are difficult. Of course, that's where the joy
is too, so that always needs building. And it's why
team leadership is difficult because team leaders are often when
I say to them, what you need to think about
the happiness your team. They go, oh my god, not
another thing to think about, you know, and they're worried
(18:59):
about a Pandora's box of nastiness. Actually, there's probably an
awful lot of goodness there and if there is anything difficult,
it's better to be dealt with. So relationships are the
absolute starting point connect Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
So you know, I've heard stories about you know, Steve
Jobs going for walks with people and that was how
he connected with people. I've read a book called Never
Read Alone that talks about how you you got to
go out and have lunches and dinners with people and
never read alone. But then you got the other side
of things, saying that the worst thing you can have
is a dating relationships or sexual relationships and people get
(19:34):
too close and if you have, you know, a work
wife or a work husband, it ends up creating friction
in your in your own marriage and problems. So like,
how do you how do you think about connection and
how do you how do you drive this connection or
instill this connection without it going too far.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I think there obviously can be situations where things go
too far, and I think readly it's about fairness. When
we're talking about if you say about work, wife, work, husband,
and it starts feeling like someone's being favored over someone
else rather than for their efforts and for their performance
than that is. And that's an issue of fairness rather
than relationship because suddenly someone's a favorite or like that.
(20:12):
So you know, I know lots of husband and wife
teams that run small. You know creative agencies perfectly well,
and so it's not always that relationships are wrong. It
be comes down to fairness then, and people being judged
on their performance rather than who they are.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
I'm surprised that your second one. I think your second
one was fairness. Is that correct? It is?
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Yeah, be fair.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
So you didn't say, you know, pay them well, you
didn't say advancement. You didn't say growth. You said fairness.
Why why fairness not? You know, growth? Why not high pay?
Speaker 3 (20:45):
So growth pay comes into my equations when I'm a statistician,
fair pay comes into my equations as an important driver
of happiness and well being. It's not an indicator I
use very regularly with teams because it's normally outside of
their country role and I'm trying to empower the teams.
But if I'm doing a survey with an organization, and
fair pay is absolutely important. Work life balance is also
(21:08):
really important for fairness. So the growth comes later. The
growth comes under the challenge and inspire and empower and
if you want it to be you know, connection and
fairness is sort of about stability that the other three empowered,
Challenge Inspire are about change and growth, and we need
both a sense of stability and a platform for growth.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Empower is kind of an interesting one because you know,
there's some bosses that are micromanagers that want to make
all the decisions, and there's others that know they want
to give you the sense that you're sort of in
control of your own destiny and you have a role
to play in the making the decisions of the company
or the organization of the team. How do you how
do you empower people without taking too much risk?
Speaker 3 (21:56):
It's a difficult balance, I think. I think these things
are always about optimizing rather than maximizing. If you sort
of just go, oh, you know, do whatever you want,
that's not going to work, that might be empowering, but
clearly you need the business goals too, So everything is
a sort of dance between it, and really it comes
back to what i'd call feedback is listening to your
team and then you know acting. That's why weekly meeting
(22:18):
is really good because if things start going offline for
the business goals or for personal happiness and well being,
you pick them up very quickly. So you're trying to
create a situation where you can. If you're a sailor,
you're navigating, you're always trying to hold the sale to
the wind, whatever it is. You're trying to keep in
that moment and get there. So it is a difficult balance.
(22:40):
You know, being a team leader is not easy, that's
for certain.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I've worked for some interesting different bosses in my career.
One of them Jim Patterson, who is a nine billion billionaire,
very successful entrepreneur on the Canadian West coast, and he
would never speak first, and part of you know, his
ration that he would say is, you know, I hire
a whole bunch of smart people. Want to hear what
you've got to say, because if I say what I think,
(23:05):
then some of you are going to be intimidated, if
some of you're going to want to just repeat what
the boss said. And frankly, I pay you all because
I want the benefit of what you're thinking is and
what you got to say, and so I want you
to speak first, and then I get to, oh my god,
I'm going to use your word again, synthesize. I get
to synthesize, you know what everyone has to say. I
had a different boss who never sat at the head
(23:25):
of the table, and he said the problem if I
said at the head of table, that signifies something. Maybe
it's sort of like who was it with the round table?
King Arthur that you know, always wanted to he would
always sit at the side of a table because he
didn't want to be the head of the table, even
though he was clear to the boss with all the votes.
Are there things that you've seen that bosses can do
(23:47):
or leaders can do that are secrets to empowerment? Cool?
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Well, those are two very good ones that you've just said.
I mean, I like them both. And obviously those two
leaders were acutely aware of the power they had held.
And one does need to be aware if you are leading,
managing teams of your own power. And I think you
need to be aware of your own mood. Actually, because
(24:15):
you are more influential, I call team leaders internal influencers,
you know, to use a sort of social media term.
But they are influences because moods are contagious. And if
team leaders come in and they might well be angry
about something, quite justifiably angry about something that's just happened.
But if they come in and bring their anger to
their team or that, they're going to disrupt the team.
(24:38):
So actually managing your own mood as a leader is
really really important. That's not easy, but it's very very important.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Your number four is challenge, and that is kind of interesting. So,
you know, I read this one book. I was in
an organization behavior course and I was asked to read
a book called The Mathematics of Marriage, and it was
there a couple of Stanford she professors that had done analyses,
and they said that you have to have seven times
as much positive reinforcement as negative reinforcement, but you had
(25:09):
to have some negative reinforcement because if you didn't have
negative reinforcement, it was like being a doormat and people
would be sort of Pollyanna and thinking everything was perfect,
and so that therefore some amount of they called it
negative reinforcement. But challenge, you know, constructive criticism was critically important.
And then you know, I think a lot of us
(25:30):
have seen this chart about how you know, you need
not too much stress, but you do need a little
bit of stress every once in a while, and that's
how you end up being successful. So is that what
you're talking about in regards to challenge.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Yeah, it is broadly. I mean, I think that feedback
needs to be constructive and helpful, you know, if you're
giving it. But a lack of feedback, a lack of direction,
a lack of challenges, is really unhelpful. So it's about
getting the right balance. There's been quite a lot of
research on the relate relationship between positive and negative feedback,
(26:04):
and you see estimates from three to ten to one
on what they need to be. But what's for certain
is that under one heard, I have heard it up
to ten to one. There was a piece of work
by Professor bel Frederickson and someone called Losado, and there's
a little bit of statistical challenge to some of their work,
but that was their range, and I think the interesting
(26:25):
thing is they had a top of the range too,
was that you can't just be Pollyanna. And actually people
sometimes talk about toxic positivity. It really annoys me because
toxic negativity is really toxic, really really toxic. Most over,
positivity is just a bit annoying. But where you probably
could get into toxic positivity, there was never any any
(26:49):
negative as in challenging stuff and that you lose track
there and that probably would suffocate in some ways.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, your last one is inspired. I don't know whether
this TV show has been popular in the UK, but
Ted Lasso is one of my favorite shows about a
American football coach that goes to the UK to coach
a soccer team, your football, our soccer and and he's
got this sign believe that he puts up on the wall,
(27:19):
and he really talks about inspiration and being being inspired.
Is that what you got to talk about is just
putting a sign on the wall. Believe.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
I think that there can be positive reinforcement from slogans
and things like that. But of course he was much
more than just a sign on the wall. He did
it with them in person, at personal risk, and he
so it is you know, it is it is a
it is a show not to tell world. It is
behavior that matters. And we can have slogans and we
(27:54):
can have values and organizations, but if they stay on
the wall and they don't come into the teams, they're
not worth anything. So INSPA needs to be about, you know,
setting a vision. It needs to be understanding the impact
of our work, because sometimes people are very remote from
the end of us with their work. But bringing those
stories into it. You must love it with your radio show,
when you get people come back to you talk you
(28:16):
and you understand you're influencing people's lives. So sometimes people's
product or service or whatever they're involved in, it is
very distant from people and they need that bringing in.
And you can actually get the other thing too, which
is that people's work is very meaningful. So let's think
of healthcare, education. They almost sacrifice too much and they
(28:36):
can get burnt out because the meaning becomes so important,
and so everything is about dynamic and balance. Yeah, I've
lost you.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
I was at this real estate conference recently about housing
for seniors, and you know, some of it was just
to how to make money and what you needed to
do to prove good seniors homes. But then there were
two conversations that were really inspiring to people. And the
one was about dementia and how you can care for
people far better in that later stage of life. Uh,
(29:11):
when when they may have dementia UH. And then the
other one was the challenge of having housing made available
for people that couldn't afford it and uh and and
and the speaker talked about, you know how, at the
same time as we want to build a lot of
these uh these buildings and house people and make money,
we've got to think about the challenge of of those
people that we can't currently house and uh and how
(29:34):
we're going to positively impact that in the future. And
it was it was very inspiring, and people really got
excited about, you know, dealing with something that we haven't
actually solved well yet.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
There's quite a lot of things we haven't so well yet.
And uh and I think that good work and a
good life is certainly for me, is is you know,
using one's skills and strengths in service of something bigger
than you, which you know, and that's it doesn't have
to be a huge campaign about something, but something that
(30:07):
feels meaningful to you, I think does make for better
work and for better life.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
So I've heard on numerous occasions that culture Trump's strategy.
Are you saying that happiness Trump's culture?
Speaker 3 (30:20):
I think that culture is a little mysterious what it is.
And my statistical measure of a good culture would be
our people happy and successful in that work. And I
so so I think of a great culture as one
that empowers people and teams to be happy and successful.
And as a statistician, I like to measure outcomes, So
(30:44):
I can measure or I can create measures of strictly speaking,
people's happiness at work, and organizations make measures of performance.
And so for me, that is that is the aim.
Does does culture Trump's strategy? That's a quote attributed to
Peter Drucker, And I think they go hand in hand, don't.
I think you need good strategy, but you need a
(31:05):
great culture to to actually operationalize that strategy.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
That's interesting. So what you're saying is you can't measure culture,
but you can measure happiness.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
I think that people do measure culture, but they tend
to measure it by what I would call statistically, the
drivers of good culture. So my five ways connect, be fair,
and power, challenge inspire our drivers of team happiness. They're
not team happiness itself. So most measures of culture I
see are saying this is what a good culture is.
These are the things, but they're actually measuring drivers. So statistically,
(31:34):
sorry to be nerdy, But I prefer to measure the outcomes,
like is the team happy and successful? It needs to
be both of those things. If it's if it's if
it's happy and not successful, I mean that's slacking, that's
not that's not work. If it's successful or not happy,
they're going to get burnout. You're going to get real
problems of staff attention. You need both of those things.
So a good, great culture is one that you know,
(31:57):
you know creates, satisfies the business goal and satisfies the
team members.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
But if you're seeing that, you've got to measure out comes.
Why an't you just not measuring profit or sales growth
or productivity.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
If you measure staff retention and you measure productivity, you're
doing good. But they are both what we call lagging indicators.
They're basically looking back to see what happened. The great
thing about measuring happiness in real time is that it
will predict underperformance, it will predict staff at retention. So
actually you create an indicator which is forward leaning. So
(32:33):
I'm not against measuring retention and productivity. I think happiness
gives you new data, and it gives you data that
predicts what's going to happen, Nick.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Marks, this has been a fasting conversation. I really appreciate it.
What's the name of the book please?
Speaker 3 (32:45):
The name of the book is Happiness is a Serious Business.
And it's available on Amazon, and I am Nick Mars.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
We're going to take a final break and come back
with a couple of fire around questions for Nick. I'm
going to ask them about remote work. I can ask
them about I am going to ask him about you know,
bad bosses. Stay with us that one back in two minutes.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Stream us Live at SAGA nine six am dot C.
Speaker 4 (33:12):
A welcome back everyone to the Bran Crowney Radio Hour.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
I got Nick Marx. He's an author from the UK
on tonight and he's written a book. Tell us Nick,
what's the name of the book.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
It's called Happiness is a Serious Business.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
And he's just published it about ten days ago. It's
already on Amazon bestseller in the UK and you can
get it. And he's got five ways that what do
you call the tests or methods?
Speaker 3 (33:46):
What five ways to happiness at work is what I
call him?
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Five Ways to happiness at work? Connect, fairness, empower, challenge
and inspire. Nick. You know, remote work lots of us
are being forced to go back to work, and some
of you know the comments that you can't build build
culture remotely, you and can't build good organizations and teams remotely.
(34:09):
But then other people, you know, back to your sort
of your issue about connectivity versus tranquility. A lot of
us liked working at home and not having to put
our pants on. Well we put some of the pants on,
but maybe not, you know, our suit pants on and
and and having a coffee at home and relaxing while
we were doing the work. What's your sense is remote
work positive to organizational happiness or negative to organizational connectiveness
(34:33):
and culture.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Actually, I've got a chapter on the book on this,
which is I called a flexibility conundrum because you can
see that there were there were actually many angles on it.
And actually thinking about connect be fair, empower challenge inspire
is a useful way of approaching what will suit your team,
your organization because what I think is a huge variety
of options.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Here.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
We see organizations which are fully remote that are really successful.
We see that fully in person which are really successful
and work. And we'll have different cultures, like we have
different personalities. So I think there's room for a lot
of things. What's happened in some ways at a whole
societal level as there has been a reset. You know,
we had a certain amount of working from home. It
(35:18):
absolutely shot up obviously during the pandemic, and it's balancing,
but it's no way is it going back to what
it was before. That's absolutely gone. So we're getting a
new balance being reset. And there were positives from working
from home. You know, people can really get down and
do their work. Obviously, only fifty percent of jobs can
even be worked from home, so fifty percent can't be
(35:39):
so that's immediately out. But then there are negatives. There
are challenges, which is do you build teams, how do
you learn in those environments? How do people not get
left behind? How do people not get isolated? Actually, you know,
people's mental health can struggle from just being at home
at time. So quite a lot of tech companies went
fully remote. And you've got guys and girls who they're
(36:01):
they're in their basement on a computer rule day, not
seeing any sunlight. They may be gaming at night. They
maybe introverts. They're missing out on actually quite a lot
of social connectivity. So there are real problems from it too,
and I think it is about organizations and teams intelligently
finding their own balance and a balance is settling down,
(36:22):
and there's no magic in my data, there is no
magic balance with The only thing I find as if
the perse the individual's preference for what they work, their
balance meets what they're doing, then there's a positive. If
they're working too much remotely or too much in the office,
then that could be no days to five days, so
it's a week result. It's a difficult, difficult issue, and
(36:45):
I think we just have to have sensible discussions around it.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
I find the biggest negative of not going to the
office isn't sort of the plan connectiveness. It is the unplanned.
It's the sort of the coincidental collisions with people. And
it's not just going to the office, it's going downtown where.
You know, if I'm walking around downtown Toronto and concourse,
I inevitably run into someone that I haven't seen in
(37:11):
a while, or I wanted to see, or I get
introduced to someone and I end up striking up an
interesting conversation and you know, often it runs into it
leads to business, or it leads to a new idea
or some information and the same thing at work is
that you know, I get interrupted way too often, but
sometimes those interruptions are critically important. And if I hadn't
had that presence in the office, I wouldn't have heard
(37:32):
about it now, you know. The opposite is that, frankly,
I go into the office and I get on the
computer and a zoom or teams or something like this,
and I'm speaking on a computer to people that are
in my office and remote from the office, and so
I didn't need to be in the office to actually
have that planned connectiveness. So it's the planned connectiveness I
can do remotely. The unplanned connectiveness I can't.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Yeah, it's those water cooler moments over the coffee. It's
actually I have a little thing in my book called
What we Can Learn from Smokers about Dealing with Stress,
because smokers used to sort of go outside and they'd
have these accidental conversations. But the little joke I'm makers
that they stop what they're doing, they m move their body,
(38:16):
they go oh outside, they kickstart conversations, and then they
do something they're not aware, which is the exhale for
longer than they inhale, and they do mindful breathing and
it spells smoke. But the idea of it is this
idea that people, these informal, random conversations are important to
both connections and creativity and innovation. So how you organize that,
And particularly for younger people, you know, they've got to
(38:39):
learn from their mentors and they've got to find someone
they do. So showing up for work is important. That
doesn't mean say it has to be five days commuting
into the office. It could be three. But there has
to be a new balance fan where that happens.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, so s we should all start taking small bricks.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
I think we should not smoke cigarettes because that obviously
turns the k into killing ourselves. But going outside once
in an hour, getting up from our desks and stretching
really really good. So so don't smoke, but think what
a smoker would do AI.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
What do you think is going to be the impact
of AI? Some people think that is going to take
away a horde of jobs and we're going to lose
sort of our sense of identity, our sense of meaning.
What are you worried about that?
Speaker 3 (39:23):
I think AI is going to transform work just like
the Internet did, and I think no one really knows
what's going to happen with it. However, I think it
the human to human contact I think, in my opinion,
will become more important because you know, we see it
already with like posts obviously generated by air. They lack
(39:45):
some spirit. And I think that work and creativity, particularly innovation,
you know, becomes really really important in a human and
human contact. So I really don't know what's going to
happen to the job market. You know, I'm not an
expert in but I do think that connection, human to
human relationships are going to become more and more important.
(40:06):
I think, you know, hospitality will become really important, customer
service will do because we don't want to just go
in AI stuff. I think we like speaking to people.
So we're seeing how that settles down, and I imagine
it's going to be a bumpy ride. But I think
humanness creativity will always be very, very valuable.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
ADI diversity, equity inclusion was sort of like the big
thing during the Biden administration in the United States, but
now it's sort of become something negative. Some people think
that diversity in the workforce is critically important to sort
of having different points of view and good decision making
and sort of your challenge you know, way of achieving happiness,
(40:50):
and other people think that all it was was affirmative
action and a way of getting people that didn't deserve
a job a job. What do you think about diversity,
equity inclusion?
Speaker 3 (41:00):
You know, I haven't really looked at very much data
on it. I do know that some of the studies
that were trying to show that boards that were diversive
had high share press growth have been slightly undermined statistically,
purely statistically, nothing about anything else. I think as a
general thing in life, having diverse friends, some diverse friends,
(41:23):
that it's that same thing I talked about the need
for stability and change. We need some mix and we
need some things. And I think where things have got
difficult is people haven't felt there's too much change, there's
not enough stability, and that is always a tension that
runs through all of life. And I think it's probably
a tension that's run through this topic. In the UK.
It was never probably you know it was. I mean,
(41:46):
the big diversity is gender and having a gender balance
I think is really really good. So it's a difficult topic.
I think measuring outcomes is a really good way to
think about it. Do things get better at and fairness
is important too.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
If people are intrigued by this conversation, what should they do?
Should they run out and buy your book? Should they
do a Friday Pulse? What? What? What? What's the next step? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (42:12):
So obviously by my book, Happiness is serious business out
now on Amazon. If you want to understand more about
your happiness at work, you in the book. There's a
QR code that takes you to questionnaire, but you can
go straight there by going Friday one dot com and
one is Ohne and my business is called Friday Pulse
dot com, which is measuring the happiness of teams in organizations. Yeah,
(42:36):
it's a it's a it's a platform that does that
and it's very easy to use them, very powerful.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Nick Marx, thank you so much for joining us. I
really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
Thanks very much, Brian.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
I am a firm believer in what Nick has been
chatting about. I think that there's something about about happiness.
I think that his five ways that he's talked about
connect fairness and power, challenge and inspire are inspiring and
uh a great sort of a way to think about
motivating your employee base your team. As some of you know,
(43:08):
I did doctoral work on social capital, and I had
my ten powers of co which was my sort of way,
and some of them are pretty similar to what Nick
has talked about. And I think this is critically important.
And you know that mathematics of marriage that I mentioned
where people could predict, based on fifteen minutes of videotaping
of the interaction between either couples or people in a workplace,
(43:29):
whether they'd be successful together or not successful together, based
on whether there was more positive interaction than negative interaction,
and that there had to be some what they called
negative but what Nick is called constructive criticism. There had
to be some constructive criticism, so it couldn't all be Pollyanna,
but that you had to have dramatically more positive than
(43:49):
the negative. And you know, they said seven to one,
and Nick has said it can go up as high
as ten to one, maybe as low as three to one,
but there's got to be that. And that's in marriages,
that's in relationships, that's in teams. So I think this
is going to be a great book, and Nick, I'm
sure it's going to be a bestseller in Canada as
well after this interview. So thank you so much for
joining us and stay with us. Everybody back in just
(44:09):
two minutes.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
No Radio, No Problem stream is live on Sagay nine
sixty am dot C.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
We'll come back, everyone to the Brian Crowndry Radio R.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
I really enjoyed the conversation we just had about happiness
and this idea that it's critically important to the well
functioning organization, team company. I think it's the same for families.
I think it's the same for friend groups. I think
it's the same in life, and so I think that
there's a lot to be said for this conversation. I
(44:54):
wanted to underline accentuate a couple of issues if I could,
which I think are probably pretty obvious, but we don't
talk to them talk about it often enough. I think
happiness has and lots of people have talked about This
is actually a term for about headonomic versus economic, which
the headonomic is sort of the sense of pleasure and
(45:18):
positive feelings. But more importantly, this endonomic, which I'm pronouncing wrong,
I apologize, is really about purpose, about meaning in life,
and I think that you need both. I think people
want to feel good, but they also want to feel
like they're doing good. They want to have purpose. They
want to have meaning, They want to think they're contributing
to something better in society and or their community and
(45:40):
or their family and or whatever. And so I think
that too often we've only focused on the you know,
how happiness impacts me, rather than how I'm going to
impact happiness in other people. And that impacting happiness in
other people, I think is critically important, which leads to
my second point about how critically important social connectedness is
to happiness. It's very hot, very hard to be happy
(46:03):
when you're alone, and I fear that too many people
are trying to get happiness through social media, through video games,
through internet, through movies on their own. And I think
that so much research has been done that says that
social interaction and social connectiveness is positively related with happiness,
(46:24):
with longevity of life, with getting through dementia, through getting
through health scares, et cetera. So I think that that's
critically important in regards to happiness. It's interesting that studies
of happiness have showed that genetics ends up being one
of the key determinants of happiness, and so I think
that if you're happy, your kids are going to tend
(46:45):
to be happy and your grandkids are going to tend
to be happy. And so therefore, when you think about
whether you're happy or you're morose, you know it's not
just you, but it's going to impact you know, your offspring.
And so another reason why it's good to be happy.
But then another one is socialization. And so therefore ensuring
that you've got a happy childhood, a happy family, a
happy family for your child childs in their childhood I
(47:08):
think is critically important. And then thinking about those habits
that that you can ensure that you've got in your
life that bring you happiness, whether it's a walk after dinner,
whether it's a walking your dog, whether it's exercise, whether
it's watching movies, music, et cetera. But thinking about those
habits that you have that make you happy and making
(47:28):
sure that you do them on a fairly regular basis,
I think one of the other key things, and this
sort of goes against potentially the social connectiveness standpoint, but
I think it's critically important is some alone time, and
in that alone time, giving thought to your life and
practicing gratitude. I do this through through prayer. I pray
(47:50):
every morning, every night. It's my own personal way of
thinking about my day, my life, and being showing gratitude
if all I'm doing really is frankly thanking God for
what happened and uh and and I think that's critically important.
Some people do it through meditation, some people do it
(48:11):
through zennying uh uh And sometimes I do that where
I just look like Jason Kelsey in a concert and
zen out for a while and try to relax and
uh and think about how happy I am. So I
think when you think about happiness, think about some of
these other things that happiness is sometimes things that happen
(48:33):
to you that other people can make you happy. But
a lot of happiness comes from making other people happy
and uh and from having meaning and purpose in life,
contributing to society. A lot of happiness comes through connectivity
connectivity and uh and and connecting with other people through
social interaction, through through doing things, through family, through friends.
(48:55):
That some happiness comes through genetics and and and and
socialized and so therefore being happy and exuding happiness is
beneficial to you, yes, but it's also going to be
beneficial to other people around you, and particularly to your offspring,
to your kids and your grandchildren. And then this idea
that showing gratitude and having gratitude, and maybe having that
(49:18):
gratitude in quiet moments, whether it's while you're walking your
dog late at night or praying or meditating or however
you do, it is happiness. And so I guess what
I'm trying to say is too often we think happiness
happens to us and it's an external something. Rather that
happens and we get therefore happy, and there is some
(49:42):
truth to that, But I think a lot of happiness
is internal and it comes from us being happy and
giving happiness, giving gratitude, giving social connectiveness to other people,
having meaning, having purpose, trying to make the world a
better place. Anyway, a couple of my thoughts on happiness.
Thanks for joining me. I really appreci the opportunity to
speak to you on a nightly basis. I remind you
(50:02):
I'm on every Monday through Friday at six o'clock on
nine sixty am. You can stream me online at Triple
W Saga nine sixty am, dot CA on My podcast
and videos goalup on my website brain comby dot com
ascews my radio show goes to air.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
Thanks kidding fine stream us live at SAGA nine sixty
am dot CA
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