Inside your head
Musk first 3 weeks at twitter have been characterized by chaos and cruelty all around. But why? What purpose does the senseless abuse serve?
In this video I argue that the only way it makes sense, is if Musk is trying to turn twitter into a compliant organization that will go along with anything Musk orders, no matter how shady or illegal.
Some people want you to believe that quitting is weak and for losers. They’re lying and we need to normalize leaving jobs that are not good for us.
In this video we take a deep look at what happens when you’re unhappy at work, how you can know it’s time to quit and how you can support others who need to get away from a bad job.
Content:
(00:00) 1: Frogs aren’t idiots
(01:01) 2: Introduction to quitting
(03:45) 3: How hating your job hurts you
(06:56) 4: Exposing the anti-quitting propaganda
(18:05) 5: The excuses people make for not quitting
(27:23) 6: Should you quit?
(32:47) 7: 21 perfectly valid reasons for quitting
(40:21) 8: What if you can’t quit
(46:24) 9: How to quit
(47:39) 10: Should you always find a new job first before you quit?
(49:42) 11: We should celebrate quitters
(59:22) 12: I quit!
Relationship between a bad job and poor health
A bad job makes you gain weight
Unhappy workers are less productive
Effective propaganda exploits existing biases
How Herbalife and other MLMs scam people
The No Asshole Rule – excellent book by Bob Sutton
Turing pharmaceuticals raised prices
Stories from people who quit without first finding a new jobs
Apprentice car mechanic commits suicide after being bullied
The most basic freedom is the freedom to quit
The true cost of employee turnover
Bosses try to predict who will quit
Most managers have realized by now that happy workplaces are more productive, more creative, attract better talent and make more money.
So if you were a well-meaning manager or HR person looking to capitalize on this and create a happier workplace, you might be tempted to start by asking your employees some version of this question:
“What would make you happier at work?”
It seems like a great place to start. To make people happier, ask them what they want and them give them that. Right?
Wrong.
Here’s why: We know from the research that people are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy.
Stop random people on the street and ask them what would make their lives happier and a lot of them will reply “Winning the lottery.” But studies of lottery winners show that they are actually only marginally happier than all of us non-lottery millionaires.
Similarly if you ask employees what will make them happier at work you will most likely get responses like:
But while all of this sounds perfectly reasonable (indeed, you might give some of the same answers if asked the same question), we know from the research that these factors don’t make employees any happier at work. Just to be clear: We cannot ignore them when making workplaces better, because these factors can absolutely make people unhappy when they’re unfair. But once they are fair, increasing them further does not increase happiness at all.
This explains why many organizations spend a ton of time and money on every perk imaginable and employees are still not happy.
Quite simply: giving employees what they ask for is doomed to fail, if they don’t know what to ask for. And they don’t.
What we need to do instead, is help people discover for themselves what really makes them happy at work and there’s a much better question for that:
Tell me about a recent good experience at work that made you happy.
This may look like essentially the same question as the one above so why is this one better? With the previous question (What would make you happy at work) we only get at the things people think will make them happy.
With the latter question, we ask about specific previous experiences that caused happiness. This means that we get directly at what really works.
I have used this question in hundreds of speeches all over the world and never once has anyone told a story of getting a raise, a promotion or a perk. Never once has anyone said “I was really happy last Thursday because I got a free apple.”
The one exception was when I did a workshop at Lego and an employee shared this example:
Every week our team gets a new box of fruit and there’s always only one banana in it. If I get there in time to get that one banana, it makes me really happy!
I’m 98% sure he was kidding!
Invariably, when people reflect on this question their stories fall into two categories.
They either talk about doing good work, achieving great results or making a positive difference for others. This includes things like:
I had a complicated problem on a project and found a really creative solution for it.
A customer liked my work so much they sent me an email with tons of positive feedback.
I helped a coworker by sharing advice and knowledge.
Or they talk about moments of personal connection at work, like:
I came back to the office from parental leave last week and so many people on my team welcomed me back with smiles and hugs.
I had a bad day and my manager noticed and did her best to help me.
We celebrated a team member’s birthday last week with cake and coffee and had a great time together.
Very often their stories contain both elements. That’s why we talk about results and relationships being the two main sources of happiness at work.
Don’t ask your employees what will make them happy – because they probably have completely the wrong idea and giving them what they ask for won’t work. Instead, help them connect to past positive experiences because those are a much more reliable predictor of future happiness. And then work on doing simple daily actions that promote a feeling of results and relationships.
Forget about trying to enforce positive emotions all the time. It requires extra effort and ends up being counter productive.
Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., is the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley and a leading expert on the neuroscience and psychology of compassion, kindness, gratitude, and other “pro-social” skills.
Watch her full speech from our 2018 Happiness at Work Conference 2018 here.
A BRILLIANT study found that:
When given a choice between cooperating or competing, chimpanzees choose to cooperate five times more frequently.
And also that:
The chimpanzees used a variety of enforcement strategies to overcome competition, displacement and freeloading, which the researchers measured by attempted thefts of rewards.
These strategies included the chimpanzees directly protesting against others, refusing to work in the presence of a freeloader, which supports avoidance as an important component in managing competitive tendencies, and more dominant chimpanzees intervening to help others against freeloaders.
This indicates that cooperation is hardwired into humans on a biological level by evolution.
Which makes you wonder why so many workplaces heavily emphasize competition over cooperation.
Yesterday I participated in the Copenhagen March for Science – part of a global movement to celebrate science and the role it plays in our live.
It was tremendously cool to march through the streets of Copenhagen along with hundreds of other science enthusiasts and it’s easy to see that it has never been more important to encourage the use of science in public policy given the challenges we’re facing (especially climate change) and the current unscientific and populist tendencies we’re seeing in some countries.
And the same goes in business. Many of the most widespread practices in business and leadership have been repeatedly proven wrong in studies and yet they persist. Here are some of my favorite examples of scientific findings that are being soundly ignored by many companies:
Don’t take my word for it – click each link above to see the research behind it.
Leaders and businesses need to know the science AND apply it. Ignoring this research is hurting employees and the bottom line.
Work has moved from cow to computer, but workplaces still favour early risers and an industrial-age view of productivity.
Camilla Kring has a PhD in Work-Life Balance and as owner of Super Navigators, makes workplaces happier by increasing the Work-Life Balance of their employees. She is specialized in creating flexible work cultures that support our differences in family forms, work forms and biological rhythms.
This is her talk from the International Conference on Happiness at Work 2017 in Copenhagen. Flexibility is among the keys to well-being, and management must have the courage to address the flexibility of their company’s work culture because culture determines whether employees have the courage to make use of flexibility.
The first step is to set people free from 9-5 and that work is something that only can take place at the office. Work is not a place – it’s an ongoing activity. Second, focus more on results and less on visibility. Third, give people the tools to improve their individual Work-Life Balance.
This is a fascinating experiment in how different types of feedback affect people’s persistence and success in a creative task.
Unsurprisingly, positive feedback that doesn’t punish mistakes is much more effective. People who lost points for wrong attempts and were given negative messages gave up sooner and succeeded much less often.
I’m convinced that the exact same thing goes on in many workplaces. We need to change that and encourage much more positive feedback.
Here are some tips on how:
This experiment is absolutely fascinating – not to mention devastatingly cute :)
Given that humans have an innate preference for those who are nice and helpful, we should definitely value and celebrate those people in the workplace too – and get rid of the jerks.
Happy workplaces are more profitable and innovative, attract the best employees and have lower absenteeism and employee turnover rates. Simply put, happy companies make more money.
But how do you create a happy workplace? We believe some of the answers are found in positive psychology - a fascinating field and one of the main inspirations for the work we do with our clients around the world.
Traditional psychology looks at everything that can go wrong with our minds – psychosis, neurosis, phobias, depression etc – and asks how it can be treated/cured. It’s an incredibly important field but positive psychology asks the opposite question: When are we happy? What does it take for people to live good lives and thrive psychologically? The field has been especially active for the last 30 years and we are learning some really interesting and surprising things about happiness.
Here are the five findings from positive psychology that we believe are the most relevant in the workplace.
We tend to trivialize emotions in the workplace. It doesn’t matter what you feel, the prevailing thinking goes - it matters what you think.
You should never show emotions at work and the true professional has no emotions at work. You should be like Spock from Star Trek who once said “Emotions are alien to me. I’m a scientist.”
But this turns out to be impossible. Not only do we have emotions, those emotions affect our physical and mental well-being in many ways and, in general, positive emotions have some strong positive effects on our work performance.
Here’s one example:
… a number of the participants were either shown a comedy movie clip or treated to free chocolate, drinks and fruit. Others were questioned about recent family tragedies, such as bereavements, to assess whether lower levels of happiness were later associated with lower levels of productivity.
… they found happiness made people around 12% more productive.
So far, studies have shown that experiencing positive emotions makes us:
Simply put, happy people not only feel better and thrive more, they also do better work. This helps explain why happy companies are more profitable and hence why no workplace can afford to ignore how people feel at work.
One study in emotional contagion at work brought test subjects together for a simulated negotiation. They didn’t know that one member of the group was an actor extensively trained by the researchers to exhibit certain emotions during the meeting.
Would the emotions of one person affect the rest of the group? The answer is yes – and when the emotions transmitted by the actor were positive, the whole group became more effective:
There was a significant influence of emotional contagion on individual-level attitudes and group processes. As predicted, the positive emotional contagion group members experienced improved cooperation, decreased conflict, and increased perceived task performance.
It turns out that how people around you feel rubs off on you and vice versa. Being around others involves taking on some of their emotions and transferring some of yours to them. We have all experienced this. Being around happy people makes us a little happier. Being around miserable bastards has the opposite effect.
This is highly relevant in the workplace because it shows we don’t exist in isolation. Happiness is a social phenomenon and each of us influence, and are in turn influenced by, the people around us.
One of the coolest things about positive psychology is that it is highly research-based and the various interventions are tested in numerous studies.
You may think that in order to become happier in life, you have to win the lottery or achieve massive amounts of success. But what they have consistently found is that simple interventions are surprisingly effective. Here are some examples of proven happiness interventions:
In the workplace, this means that while organizational factors like strategies, vision, values and processes do matter, it also matters how we work together and interact in our teams on a day-to-day basis. Do managers treat their employees with respect and kindness? Do coworkers trust each other, help each other and maintain good relationships? Do people take the time to treat each other well in the workplace?
However, the research also shows that happiness interventions only work under 2 conditions:
According to research, we become a happier when good things happen to us (duh!) but the effect is even bigger when good things happen to us unexpectedly:
Emory University and Baylor College of Medicine researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans to measure changes in human brain activity in response to a sequence of pleasurable stimuli.
They used a computer-controlled device to squirt fruit juice or water into the mouths of 25 research participants. The patterns of the squirting were either predictable or unpredictable.
The researchers found that the MRI scans showed a brain area called the nucleus accumbens to be much more active when the subjects received unpredictable patterns of juice and water.
So:
This is interesting in the context of happiness at work because many of the things companies do to make their employees happier are utterly predictable: Summer parties, Christmas parties, Bonuses, team events, and so on happen on an almost completely fixed schedule, which serves to diminish their effectiveness.
This is why we advocate also doing random acts of workplace kindness. According to this research, a small well-meant surprising gesture towards an employee or a team may make them much happier.
So what could you do, to surprise a co-worker today? Here are some examples:
5: Making others happy, makes us happy
It’s been shown consistently that doing things to make yourself happier has a small effect on your happiness but doing things for others, elevates their happiness AND yours much more.
In one study, participants received a small amount of money that they could spend either on themselves or on others. Their happiness was measured before and after, and subjects who spent the money on others experiences a much larger boost to their happiness.
This means that one of the most reliable paths to happiness at work is to focus less on your own happiness and more on making others – be it coworkers or customers – happier.
This is not to say that you should sacrifice yourself for others, to the point where you neglect your own happiness. It just means that focusing only on your own happiness is likely to be a shallow, meaningless and ultimately unsuccessful.
Happy employees are healthier and more productive and happy companies make more money.
That’s why every company and every manager need to make happiness at work their most important strategic priority. These findings from positive psychology help point the way on how to do it.
The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. Get an in-depth background in happiness at work, hear about the latest research in the field and learn how to use this in your own business.