You can be happier at work — here’s how (w/ Master Fixer Laurie Santos) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Anne Morriss: Frances, kick us off today. What made you happy this week?

Frances Frei: Two words: Caitlyn Clark. Let me explain. The WNBA is riveting and awesome. 

Frances Frei: And even though I played basketball in college, I wasn’t watching it as diligently as I am now. And so what made me happy this week? I have a new Caitlyn Clark jersey.

Anne Morriss: It is- it has definitely brought a new level of joy into the house. Thank you to my sister in law Zoey Rodriguez for sending the jerseys.

Frances Frei: Which I wear every time I watch the game.

Anne Morriss: Sparking joy for the rests of us as well. Can I ask a follow up question as well?

Frances Frei: Yeah.

Anne Morriss: We just did a great episode on routines. Do you have a game day routine for watching Caitlyn play?

Frances Frei: Oh I sure do. I begin every morning at breakfast to tell the boys what time the game is on. They don’t watch the game with me. But I tell them when the game is, so they know what I will be doing.

Anne Morriss: And they’re teenage boys. They don’t register time and plan ahead.

Frances Frei: But that’s where it begins. And then there is a cascade of planning. I keep checking the clock. Every time I see you I say what time the game is. And then I set up on the couch so that my feet are elevated. I have my pretzels and my juice, and I need a lot of space. Nobody can sit right next to me.

Anne Morriss: Nobody wants to sit next to you for this experience. I’m not sure I’m ready to dignify this series of moves as a routine, but it is what you do every time.

Frances Frei: Every single time.

Anne Morriss: Every single time. Yeah. Alright, let’s get into today’s conversation: the secret memo on happiness at work. Our guest is the expert on happiness. Tell the people who she is.

Frances Frei: Oh, Professor Lori She's a cognitive scientist and professor psychology at Yale. Super smart. She teaches most popular in the school's history. Not like this year or last year in the whole history of school. And it's about the science of happiness, which is so alluring to me.

Anne Morriss: yeah, something like a full quarter of the entire student body takes this class every year.

Frances Frei: That is amazing me. think if all courses were voluntary, there wouldn't be another course that a quarter of the student body would take,

Anne Morriss: It's amazing. So she, she also teaches this course on a platform called Coursera, where another 5 million people have taken it. And she hosts a terrific podcast called the Happiness Lab. I've been a follower for years where she keeps this conversation going and talks with experts about the latest science on happiness.

Frances Frei: I can't wait to get into this. I have so many questions and so much to learn. 

Anne Morriss: Dr. Laurie Santos, welcome to the show

Laurie Santos: Thanks so much for having me on the show!

Anne Morriss: We are very big fans of yours. Let me start here. What, what parts of your own story would surprise your younger self?

Laurie Santos: Oh, I mean, I think so of my story. Um, you know, I got interested in psychology not I was interested in but because I was interested in makes humans special. And so, I spent a lot of my time studying monkeys and how they make decisions about the world how they make of the world. And that was just kind of what I am doing for, you know, 20 years.

Um, I got interested in the wellbeing work in part I like in my students, the kind of crisis that were so young people are experiencing today. I took on this new role at Yale where I became a head of college on campus, which meant I like students and hanging with them in the dining hall. And that was when I really saw just how much students were struggling these days. You know, I had students in my college who were experiencing depression and anxiety, you know, having panic attacks, you know, experiencing Like, it was much rougher than I assumed things were, you know, among young people today.

And so that was when I sort of develop this new focus and ask okay what does my field of psychology have to say about kinds of things we can be doing to feel better, whether that's in college with my students in the workplace or just our own personal lives and I realized there's many things our field has to about what we can do to feel less burned out to feel less stressed and on so I made like complete pivot to kind of doing the happiness work all the time.

Anne Morriss: Yeah, I was going to ask you how you got from Darwin to happiness and I'm curious as the visibility of the field of evolutionary biology has kind of grown. I feel like a whole other revolution has been sparked over there. Is there anything we can learn from monkeys about what makes us happier?

Laurie Santos: Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the things is like, I never happier in my than when I was in the field studying monkeys, right, and think because, you know, being around them makes you feel really present, you know, they feel like they're kind of off ruminating about the past or sort of thinking about the future and worrying about what's going to happen. They're just there grooming or eating or staring off into the sunset, right? They're just there present doing whatever they're doing.

And, and that's a lesson I really take with me into the happiness work is you know, too often we just spend so time worried about what's happen and planning for the future. If we could just kind of be in flow and whatever we're doing in the present moment, I think we'd all feel a lot better.

Anne Morriss: I love that. So, this is a show about work. Uh, and we want to talk about happiness on the job today, how to make ourselves happy, but also how to make other people happy and create the conditions for other people to thrive, which is really one of the core mandates of leadership.

We use a lot of euphemisms for happiness at work, wellbeing, satisfaction, sentiment. It almost feels too audacious to kind of name happiness as the goal. Are these all the same things or is there something specific about happiness that you're trying to capture in your work?

Laurie Santos: Yeah, I think usually when we're this kind of mean what we think we mean, right? this idea that we can be happy. in our workplace. in our lives in a workplace, right? know, we kind of feel positive emotion when we're at work. We can feel a sense of maybe we reduce all the negative emotions at work, like, you know, stress and frustration and so on. So, we can kind of be happy in our lives at work. 

But I think that term well-being also wants us to capture the sense that we're satisfied work, that we believe we're doing that has purpose. And so, I think that's what the terms are trying to capture, this sense that you can kind of be happy in the moment at work, and also when you think about what you're doing, you really do a of meaning and purpose. 

And so, I think when push comes we're going really purposes being a foundational element of happiness and the kind of thing that we really want to think about how we can bring into work more readily. 

Anne Morriss: this point feels connected to an idea you explored on the happiness lab, which is that more is not necessarily more when it comes to free time. There's like a sweet spot, which is not less than two hours a day, but also not more than five. So, can you tell us about this counterintuitive finding?

Laurie Santos: Yeah, I mean, this is a lot of the work Cassie Mogilner, and her which, which really tries to ask the question, you know, how much time do we really need to feel good? 

Um, and I think for most of us, more time will be better. You know, uh, work by willans Harvard Business has really shown that we kind of are experiencing a dearth of what she calls time affluence, sort sense really interesting thing. I mean, um, free time, subjective sense that we some free time. 

Many more of what you might call time famine, Where we're kind of literally starving time. And Ashley's work shows just just how bad this kind of time, famine. can be. In fact, she has one statistic self report being really famished, there's as much of a hit on your well being as you report being unemployed. You know, most of your listeners would be pretty pretty upset if they lost their job tomorrow. Um, just not any time at all is as bad as that in of your happiness. Um, so for many of us, the advice is just like, get more free time. That's going to be good.

Um, but Cassie's work has really shown that like, If you kind of push it too far in the other direction, then that's not really great either. Right? What we really want is sort of structured amounts of free that we can wind up using for purposes and activities that we really enjoy. if you get too much of a good thing, then that winds up being too. 

Anne Morriss: I love it. So it's so intuitive. I think my ceiling is is my window is actually smaller. I think I think it's yeah, three hours max and I start getting restless.

Frances Frei: I can go longer.

Laurie Santos: Yeah, you can go longer. Well, I think that's, I think that's an important, you know, thing that comes up a lot on the happiness lab even in my course, right? Which is, you know, we're, we're going to make these general pronouncements of what you need to feel at work whether that's that's more time or more belonging and so on. 

For everybody, there's going to be individual differences there, right? You know, so I think when we talk about these prescriptions, there overall for people. But my advice is always, hey, try it out yourself. Do the experiment on what this feels like for you. And then you can often up with your own sweet spot. And so I think that that's good advice to, you know, the specific amount of free time you need to of thrive, but also for all the different topics that we'll talk about today. 

Anne Morriss: That's liberating. 

 Alright, we really want to get into some tactics with you, because it's one piece of your work that's so powerful. And we're going to do this in two parts. So the first part is how to make ourselves happier at work, and then how to enable the happiness of other people. So, First, make the case to our listeners to do some work here.

 What does the data say about happier workers, their own experience of being on the job?

Laurie Santos: Yeah, well, the data pretty clear here, which is that happier workers wind like, doing better work. They wind up performing better, they up earning more money. 

 it makes sense, you're happier at work and showing positive emotion, if belonging at work, you're to work You're up with the more innovative solutions, know?

think to the you were feeling an of negative emotion. probably thinking super clearly or making big innovative decisions. Like, were right? You were just getting stuff your desk. And so more we can find a way to feel happier work ourselves, better we're going to do at our job. And we'll reap the usual of rewards that with whether that's higher level of or more accolades promotions at work. we'll wind up doing better. 

Frances Frei: I imagine that people will, an early question people will ask is, well, if I'm doing really well, I'm happy. So how do we know about the correlation versus causality?

Laurie Santos: Yeah. I mean, what, what, what tend to do is like do experiments force people into good mood and look at happens their performance.

Um, one of my favorite studies did this with medical doctors. so you bring medical doctors into the and you give a of medical problem. Um, you all are old enough to remember the TV show house or even Quincy MD, you know, these shows were like doctors get these kind of tough problems. That's, that's what these doctors got in the study.

but the is that half of the doctors were be in a good mood first. In this case, they just did it very locally. They let doctors some. like silly cat videos. So it's kind of they're laughing and sort of enjoying themselves.

What happens? Well, the doctors are in good mood wind up coming with the most innovative solution to these problems, right? And so that's just a kind of local, you know, put in a good mood when there's a tricky on the line. But if we can do a little bit more chronically, right. If we can just look forward to going to work every day, idea is that we too will be performing a little bit more innovatively and a little bit better at work.

I think there's also an effect when we're a positive mood of what happens to individuals in our organization. You know, psychologists have long known that emotion is contagious, right? We know this work life. walk into a team meeting and there's that member who's kind of down in the really pessimistic, right? You, without, without, whether you wanted to or not, that can wind affecting how you see meeting, how you view it.

But we forget we have the same effect. on other people. Um, Sigal Barsade, uh, used to call this affective spirals, right? We can kind contagiously give our affect to other people. And that means if we put in some work to kind of increase own mood, on the job, that winds up team members be a little bit more optimistic too. 

often hear people ask, you know, well, what can I to make, know, my co Happier on the job? It's like, well, Actually, if you focus on becoming happier yourself on the job, then that will have a huge on your team members. Sometimes that can give them like really type A folks and permission to take care of because you recognize it as a mechanism for caring others too.

Anne Morriss: Oh, That's a beautiful reframe. I love that. So you, um, you gave a terrific talk at South by Southwest this year, called five tips to be happier at work, which is available on the happiness lab. And we encourage everyone to listen to it. want to talk about two of the tips that really struck us and are very aligned with our own work and our own experience of work.

So one strategy you talked about was something you called job crafting, which is we. Understand it is using whatever agency you have in any job to increase the alignment between your superpowers and what you're actually doing in Uh, during the day. So tell us about this approach.

Laurie Santos: Yeah, so this approach that comes from Amy Brzezinski, who used my colleague at Yale and now is at the University of Pennsylvania. Um, job crafting is exactly what you said it was. It's kind of taking your job description and finding ways to infuse your sort of signature strengths. The of values and sort of habits Um, you know, positive psychologists have long talked about this set of character strengths that all of us have, you know, there are things humor, and bravery, and love of learning and a zest for life, you know, at any kind of value that might think, you know, is good thing for humans to have.

the key is that they've recognized that we have these in of different amounts. You know, some of us really resonate with it a So, it's kind of emotional approach where want be brave time. Maybe that's our signature strength. of us like care about humor or sort of social connection right? We each these different strengths. 

And Amy's work shows that if you bring those strengths to your job, your description, you wind up not even, not just being happier at work, but you up thinking of your as more of calling. Your supervisors will also say you work better. 

And I love Amy's work because She actually studied job crafting in hospital janitorial workers, right? You know, these are who are cleaning the on hospital beds or, you know, cleaning up bedpans when people get sick, right? this is not the kind of where you have a of flexibility. You of just do what your manager tells you. But even in this very kind of constrained job description, Amy that around a third of these janitorial workers wind up crafting. wind up building in of their strengths. 

And Amy tells these really beautiful stories in her work. She talks about one. uh, staff member who, uh, worked in a chemotherapy ward, which unfortunately meant that he was dealing with lots of patients who were very sick all time, because chemotherapy tends to make people very nauseous. But he said his job wasn't cleaning up vomit. even though that's what he spent a lot of his days doing. He his was connection and humor. wanted with the patients and make them laugh. And he had this standard kind of that he did where he joked about like, Oh my you vomited again. Now getting over Like I can't shake behind the back to keep this going. And he would say, you know, the patient would laugh and I would laugh. And that's my job. That's why I show up to work. Right.

And another example that Amy about is a. staff worker who worked in a, in a coma ward, so this staff member couldn't interact with the patients, every day she kind of just like the paintings and the plants in the hospital room around and sort of thinking that that creative infusion patients recover, who knows, but it meant something to her that she was able to do it, right?

I mean, I think key clear here. Like, no manager told these employees be this stuff. It was just own way of making their more palatable to the things that they cared about. And, and the reason I love Amy's work is I think at janitorial staff members can do that, pretty of us in our jobs can do too.

Frances Frei: Yes, no, this one is really, intuitive to me. And I'm someone who's left a lot of jobs. But when I've stayed, I've used this agency to make that alignment as tight as possible, for sure. 

Anne Morriss: All right, the second tip that really struck us was that was about the power of human connection and feeling like you really belong in the workplace. We often talk about this as the responsibility of the employer or the leader in the room to create the context for other people's belongings. What can I do as an individual employee to increase my sense of belonging?

Laurie Santos: Yeah, well, one of the big ones is just to actively and intentionally to connect with other people. and I think This is, I think, something that we, like a lot of people, reject. I see this lot in really younger workers. You know, my college students have made claims like, you know, you don't go to work to make friends or, you know, just get in and out of there, right? I think especially the remote work culture in which a of young people have found themselves, you know, during their of work, this is the kind of thing that we see comes up a lot.

Um, but the evidence suggests just the opposite, right? You perform better if you feel connected at work. One of the main things that predicts happiness at work is a of belonging. And one of the main things that predicts a of belonging at work is the question. you a friend at work? Um, in fact, you know folks have made the claim that we could make everyone in the workplace happier If them get somebody at work that they cared them and felt like a really close friend

But then the key that you have to make at work 

And work by Nick has shown that these biases is we assume that we to stay various surface topics, right? You know, we about the weather or, you know, what at the Olympics and on, but we don't go into the more personal of things, how we're really feeling about work, you know, the things we really value, hobbies and the people we care about. But research suggests that if you do that, if you into a little bit more of a deep conversation, it winds up making you feel closer.

Um, another thing you do to increase closeness is just for help. This is again, something that we hate to do generally, but really if you're doing in the workplace, we feel like it'll make look kind of needy or not able to do our jobs. But overall, when you ask a coworker help, usually it gives them the chance to do something nice for you. It makes them feel needed. It increases their positive emotion and that winds up making you feel more connected.

and so those just the of quick things we need to get more intentional about creating these friendships. we do from being a little bit more vulnerable and even asking for help when we need it.

Anne Morriss: And the way you're defining vulnerable is not, you know, open the kimono and, you know, expose all of your deepest, darkest thoughts. It's really just showing up as a, as an imperfect human being in the workplace and, and connecting with other people on that level. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. Yeah, this lovely effect um, that social psychologists have about which they call the beautiful mess effect. which is this idea that when we think when we seem a little or we of show our vulnerabilities that people won't like us. but it's actually just opposite. Like, you don't want to get like, you know, extreme messy, but the is like you occasionally need and kind of being really grateful for that help. Why is it making you feel more connected to people, not less? So as a, as someone who has been, who has had responsibility for recruiting at a business school, um, And we at Harvard have struggled to recruit senior women, so women that are already full professors, to recruit them over. An idea I have had is recruit them and their friends. Does that fit into this? Do you have best friend work? Like, are are you giving me cover for experimenting with this idea? Yeah, I

Laurie Santos: mean, I think that's a really smart strategy, right? You know, some universities and business schools think in terms of whatcall cohort hires, right? Where it's like, I'll hire somebody that does something really one field and then a second person who's in a really similar field to them, right? And can build a particular area.

But I love the idea of people's friends because you're instantly bringing in a team that has a of belonging, right? maybe even going to model the kinds of friendships that other colleagues would benefit from having too. So, so so I'm into it. Drop the spousal hire and go for the BFF BFF hire. It's great.

Anne Morriss: love it. It's, it's radical. It's so simple, but it's radical. I love it.

Well, this is a really nice pivot to looking at the employer lens on happiness here. So make the business case, Why is it worth it as a company, as a leader to invest in the happiness of my people?

Laurie Santos: Yeah, well, we talked already about how, as an individual, would to be happier if want to perform better on your job. I think for employers, the logic is very similar. If you want all your workers be doing the that they can, to increase retention, to have everyone think of their job as a so they can't wait get on Monday morning. The way to do is make them happier at work.

Um, but there's a recent study that I love that paints an even more compelling case for making your employees happier at work. Um, it was a study that was done in collaboration with a group of researchers at Oxford led by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, um, and the job website Indeed.

And if listeners don't the Indeed, this is place where you can go to look for jobs, also to rate things about your current right? You know, much salary you get and you're at work, your sense of belonging and on. And so indeed was sitting on like about 15 million data points about how happy individual workers were at work. So they had ratings for over 5, 000 different companies of, average, how happy their employers based on these Indeed data.

And so what the Oxford researchers did was they said, well, just make this sort of well being score. is of on average, how happy do your workers rate being based these Indeed data. make one of these scores for each individual company. And they could ask all these things about what a higher happiness at work score predicted. in particular, they were interested in, know, the usual that business school professors think about, which is, you know, shareholder value. Like how, how, how. How well are different stocks doing with different companies? And what they did was just to plot a correlation between happier companies and to look what was happening with prices. And what they was a strong and significant correlation showing that the happier companies having better prices.

Um, they actually took this one step further and said, Well, you know, we these usual of economic based on successful companies. We have, you know, the, dow Jones or the s and P 500. if we make the well being score 100? So these are the companies in this Indeed data set that had the highest happiness ratings. researcher said, well, why don't we kind of plot that against the other standard metrics? So use this wellbeing score metric to compete against the S& 500 and the NASDAQ and so on. they have this lovely graph in their paper which shows that this being 100 set of companies winds up the S& P and the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones at much every point in the economic cycle of the last couple of years.

Um, what does that mean?

 This is a very compelling case for every CEO to take seriously that one thing that might really matter for the success of your company in terms of like, again, the of of your what you tell the shareholders that are going to get, you know, in terms of the money over time. that you'll do better in that very important metric, making your workers happier. 

Anne Morriss: so good

Laurie Santos: And what I love about this study like, it didn't to go that way. Like it could have been compelling ethical case for making your happy, maybe, know, you have take a little bit in terms of the money you pull back

 No, it's, a really a work life harmony that if we make workers happier, wind up reaping the benefits in terms of a more successful company. 

Anne Morriss: Okay, so say I'm the boss. I'm listening to this conversation. I buy it. where would you coach me to begin?

Laurie Santos: Yeah. Well, the Indeed data had a really interesting idea on this because they also asked the question, what is that happiness at work metric made of? In other words, what are the factors that lead people to be happier at work? Cause as an employer, that's what you'd want to intervene on. If it's higher salary, it makes people happier at work, you'd people more and so on. and what the researchers found was of

 top thing on the list was workers of belonging at work. Um, which was of three different metrics. I've mentioned already. you have a friend at work? And the second two words, the things that do at the company matters. So you think the things that you're doing matter at work, people care about what you do. and also. I matter the people at work. So this kind of reciprocal mattering your friendship at work. 

Those three things together seem to be the biggest predictor of what makes people happy at work and the biggest predictor then course of like what's going to make your company the most money. And so if you're a C suite, you know, exec looking at these data, what have to ask yourself is. What does my belonging at work look like? Do people a sense of meaning that matter, that what they're doing matters? And have I promoted situations that can increase friendship at work? Um, especially if you kind of move to a more remote these things become important, that sense of belonging is really something that you're working on.

And so that's the, the data are pretty clear, that's the spot to intervene to get the of happiness boost to everyone in your organization.

Frances Frei: what's really exciting about particularly 2 and 3, the reciprocity of mattering. It feels, at least in my first thinking of it, very inexpensive. It's like intentional, but not not costly. costly Yeah,

Laurie Santos: I mean, I think that's the thing is you assume like, I have to pay all this money, extra money to increase people's salaries or get bonuses, all these solutions are hard and they require work and intent. But they're cheap, right? They're exactly the kinds of things you can build in even during tough times 

 We've just finished an interview for the happiness lab with, uh, CEO Bob Chapman. Um, he's the CEO of this manufacturing company called Barry-Wehmiller. Um, you know, they build kind of capital equipment for places like Coca Cola and Procter Gamble. Ah, know, the standard of company where you wouldn't think building and belonging is going to matter this kind of organization. Um, but a moment where they really had to think people's mattering at work, um, that came during the 2008 economic downturn. When they lost nearly of their contracts and they were facing, you know, what businesses were facing back then, which is the possibility of laying a bunch of people.

And Bob had this idea that, you know, if mattering at work is really important, going to you know, 30 percent of my company. going to leave the other 70 percent there thinking that that could have been them and like, what are they going to be And so on. he said, is there other solution?

And the solution he up with was, to say that everyone in the entire company, including, you know, the suite, you know, down to like the lowest level worker, all had to take a month without pay. They were all going to take a little bit of a sacrifice so that company get through it. and everyone responded incredibly positively.

Like people were, Thrill, you know, they were scared that they were going to lose their job. and now they everyone pitching in together to of take the hit, the people at the highest levels. And Bob said that an even more interesting thing happened, which is that people this sense of meaning and belonging a lot of them stepped up take an extra month so that other team members wouldn't to take theirs. saw folks who were saying, you know, Hey, I'm close to retirement already. Let me take two months so that, you know, young Mary or Bob who you know, had a baby or just a house, they wouldn't to take that like little, you know, short period of time off, right?

This is that sense of mattering in action, right? if the suite up creating a culture where is important, where they really embody importance to their organization, you find is that people step up. They not only matter, but they realize that their can help the company, and they're to do those even more often.

And, you know, the result of the story is that Barry w. Miller, you know, not only survived the economic downturn, but has gone on to become a kind of juggernaut of the manufacturing industry, pouring in, you know, 3 billion in annual sales a year, um, in part because they created this sort of culture of belonging care.

Anne Morriss: Beautiful. What a, what a powerful example. 

Laurie Santos: I heard a conversation, an interview with you years ago that inspired me to make a happy list. that I put on my phone, which I revisit on a regular basis. Francis, you'll be delighted to know that you, you make a number of appearances on the happy list. And relieved. And relieved. Do you have your own happiness list, Laurie?

Anne Morriss: And can you give us a couple entries on it?

Laurie Santos: Yeah. I mean, I do, I do keep a list of delights. There are different ways to do the happiness list. It's like stuff that makes you happy, things for. Um, lately I've been into delights, which are just things that you notice in the world that almost make you like, know, put your hands up in the air and say, oh my gosh, what a delight.

Um, and, and they're really silly things. Like the other day I was walking down the street and there was just somebody who was like just, you know, Jamming out to some really old school eighties rock, you know, in his car thinking he was alone, but you get to see the like head banging. And I was like, you know, that is just a delight.

Um, and, and honestly, you know, the other thing on my list is just get to, with this podcast, talk to so many interesting folks. Interesting folks like you, my amazing from Bob Chapman to others. And, that's just a delight have this role where I get to hear people's incredible stories and share them with others.

And so the delight list includes the things the, from the tiny to the, to the big, um, and my husband, mark, is on there as So, he's often featured the delight list, too. 

Anne Morriss: Beautiful. Well, it's been such a privilege to host you and have this conversation. We're big fans and now bigger fans.

Yeah, which was impossible to imagine. 

Laurie Santos: Thanks so much.

Anne Morriss: So, Frances, I see you're recruiting Gears. Speaking of your, your academic job, uh,

Frances Frei: Uh, yes. Laurie is, is currently at Yale is what I'd like to say like to say to our listeners, currently, at Yale.

Anne Morriss: Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Um, so, uh, What surprised you during this conversation? What, what do you hope listeners take away from it?

Frances Frei: I feel like so many light bulbs went off on it. So what surprised me is how much belonging matters, which is something that we think about a lot, but how much mattering matters is another one. I mean that, and I watch you do this all the time in, in really like zoning in on helping people come up with the essence of what they're doing. That's going to matter a lot and you really are good. You often give them titles to put

Anne Morriss: People are so stingy about the titles. My God, hand them all out. Yeah. You know the I am not the academic in this relationship, But one of my big takeaways is that is that my intuition has a lot of data behind it. And and all the beautiful researchers that, that she referenced in that conversation, which is, I'm so grateful that there are so many fantastic people doing the work to kind of back up our intuition on not our intuition, capital O, our intuition on this, that this, you know, this is such a powerful lever for well being, not just inside organizations. But society writ large, if I may invoke my favorite academic phrase,

like, this is really the ballgame. I think it's really the ballgame. And it's, you know, it's like everything we talk about inclusion and performance. And, you know, the idea of, like, bringing your humanity into the workplace. And that also, you know, Jumpstarting impact and performance and all of your other hopes and dreams Like, all of, you know, all of those hopes and dreams run through happiness Your own happiness and the happiness of other people, and to your point, Those things are intimately connected So, uh, I'm just thrilled that we're able to share this conversation with our listeners.

Anne Morriss: All right. Fixable listeners, thank you for being part of this conversation. As always, reach out to us if there's a problem you're struggling with, or if there's, uh, someone you want to hear from, or, uh, you suggest we bring on the show, we'd love to hear from you.

Email us, call us, text us, fixable at ted dot com or 234 FIXABLE. That's 234 349 2253.

Anne Morriss: Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei.

Anne Morriss: Our team includes Izzy Carter, Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. episode was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.

Frances Frei: If you’re enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.