The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - You can be happier at work — here's how from Fixable

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

We're bringing you an episode of Fixable, where Laurie joined Frances Frei and Anne Morriss to discuss whether you can make yourself happier at work. They talk about the concept of time famine, why you need a best friend at work, and where your employer is responsible for your wellbeing. Their conversation will show you how to turn your workplace into your happy place.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. with business leaders Anne Morris and Frances Frey about the conditions we all need to thrive on the job. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Frances, kick us off today. What made you happy this week? Two words. Caitlin Clark. Let me explain. The WNBA is riveting and awesome. 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 Caitlin Clark jersey. It has definitely brought a new level of joy into the house. Thank you to my dear sister-in-law, Zoe Rodriguez,

for sending the jerseys. Which I wear every time I watch the game. Sparking joy for the rest of us as well. Can I ask a follow-up question? Yeah. We just did a great episode on routines. Do you have a game day routine for watching Caitlin play? Oh, I sure do.

So 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 just so that they know what I will be doing. And they're teenage boys. They don't register time and plan ahead. But that's where it begins. And then there is a cascade of planning that I keep checking the clock. I keep saying every time I see you, I say what time the game is, any time I think of anything. And then I set up on the couch so that my feet are elevated. I'm watching. I have my apple juice and my pretzels as I watch and I get

ready to go. But I need a light. Nobody can sit right next to me. I need a lot of space. I have a lot of movement. Nobody wants to sit right next to you for this experience. I'm not sure I'm ready to dignify this set of activities by calling it a ritual, but it is what you do every single time. Every single time. Yeah. All right. Let's get into today's conversation. The secret memo to happiness at work. Our guest is the expert on happiness. Tell the people who she is. Oh, Professor Lori Santos. She's a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale. Super smart. She teaches the most popular course in the school's history. Not like this year or last year in the whole history of the school. And it's about the science of happiness, which is so alluring to me. Yes. Something like a full quarter of the entire student body takes this class every year. That is amazing to me. I think if all courses were voluntary, there wouldn't be another course that a quarter of the student body would take. It's amazing. So 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. I can't wait to get into this. I have so many questions and so much to learn. Dr. Lori Santos, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

We are very big fans of yours. Let me start here. What parts of your own story would surprise your younger self? Oh, I mean, I think so many parts of my story. You know, I got interested in psychology not because I was interested in happiness, but because I was interested in what makes humans special. And so I spent a lot of my time studying monkeys and how they make decisions about the world and how they make sense of the world. And that was just kind of what I was doing for, you know, over 20 years. I got interested in the well-being work in part because I saw, like, in my students the kind of crisis that so many 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 was, like, living with students and hanging out 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 suicidality. Like, it was much rougher than I assumed things were, you know, among young people today. And so that was when I sort of developed this new focus and asked, okay, what does my field of psychology have to say about the kinds of things we can all be doing to feel better, whether that's in college with my students or in the workplace

or just in our own personal lives. And I realized there's so many things that our field has to say about what we can do to feel less burned out, to feel less stressed and so on. And so I just made this like complete pivot to kind of doing the happiness work all the time. Yeah, I was gonna 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? Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, one of the things is like, I was never happier in my life than when I was out in the field studying monkeys, right? And I think that's in part because, you know, just being around them makes you feel really present. You know, they don't 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 that's a lesson that I really take with me into the happiness work is that, you know, far too often we just spend so much time worried about what's going to 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. I love that. So this is a show about work. 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, well-being, 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? Yeah, I think usually when we're using these euphemisms, we kind of mean what we think we mean, right? This idea that we can be

happy in our lives, in a workplace, right? You know, we can kind of feel positive emotion when we're at work. We can feel a sense of belonging. 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 at work, that we believe we're doing something that has meaning and purpose. And so I think that's what the terms are trying to capture, the 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 get a sense of meaning and purpose. And so I think when push comes to shove, we're going to really see purpose as being a foundational

element of happiness, and therefore the kind of thing that we really want to think about how we can bring into work more readily. 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? Yeah, I mean, this is a lot of the work of Carrie Mollinger and her colleagues, which really tries to ask the question, you know, how much time do we really need to feel good? And I think for most of us,

more time will be better. You know, work by Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School has really shown that we kind of are experiencing a dearth of what she calls time affluence, this sort of subjective sense that we have some free time. Many more of us experience what you might call time famine, right, where we're kind of literally starving for time. And Ashley's work shows just how bad this kind of time famine can be. In fact, she has one statistic that if you self-report being really time famished, there's as much of a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. Most of your listeners would be pretty upset if they lost their job tomorrow. Just not having any free time at all is as bad as that in terms of your happiness. So for many of us, the advice is just like, get more free time. That's probably going to be good.

But Cassie's work has really shown that if you kind of push it too far in the other direction, then that's not really that great either, right? What we really want is sort of structured amounts of free time that we can wind up using for purposes and activities that we really enjoy. Kind of if you get too much of a good thing, then that winds up being bad too. I love it. So it's so intuitive. I think my ceiling is, my window is actually smaller. I think it's, yeah, three hours max and I start getting restless. I can go longer. Yeah, you can go longer. Well, I think that's an important, you know, thing that comes up a lot on the Happiness Lab and even in my course, right? Which is, you know, we're going to make

these general pronouncements of what you need to feel happier at work, whether that's more time or more belonging and so on. For everybody, there's going to be some individual differences there, right? You know, so I think when we talk about these prescriptions, they're overall good 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 come up with your own sweet spot. And so I think that that's good advice when it comes to, you know, the specific amount of free time you need to kind of thrive, but also for all the different topics that we'll talk about today. That's liberating. All right. 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? Yeah, well, I mean, the data are pretty clear here, which is that happier workers wind up like doing better at work. They wind up performing better. They wind up earning more money. It makes sense, right? If you're happier at work and showing more positive emotion, if you feel belonging at work, you're going to work harder.

You're going to come up with the more innovative solutions. You know, think back to the last time you were feeling an overwhelming amount of negative emotion. You probably weren't thinking super clearly or making big innovative decisions. Like you were triaging, right? You were just getting stuff off your desk. And so the more we can find a way to feel happier at work ourselves, the better we're going to do at our job. And we'll reap all the usual kind of rewards that come with that, whether that's a higher level of salary or more accolades and promotions at work, we'll just wind up doing better. 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? Yeah. I mean, what researchers tend to do is like do experiments where they force people into a good mood and look at what happens to their performance. One of my favorite studies did this with medical doctors. So you bring medical doctors into the lab and you give them a kind of tough medical problem. You all are old enough to remember the TV show House or even Quincy MD. You know, these shows where like doctors get these kind of tough problems. That's what these doctors got in the study. But the key is that half of the doctors were able to be in a good mood

first. In this case, they just did it very locally. They let doctors watch some like silly cat videos. So it was kind of they were laughing and sort of enjoying themselves. What happens? Well, the doctors who are in the good mood wind up coming up with the most innovative solution to these tough problems. Right. And so that's just a kind of local, you know, put yourself in a good mood when there's a tricky task on the line. But if we can do that a little bit more chronically,

right, if we can just look forward to going to work every day, the 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 in a positive mood of what happens to other individuals in our organization. You know, social psychologists have long known that emotion is contagious, right? We know this in our own work life when you walk into a team meeting and there's that team member who's kind of down in the dumps or really pessimistic, right? Whether you want it to or not, that can wind up affecting how you see that meeting, how you view it. But we forget that we have the same effect on other people. Sigal Barsade used to call this affective spirals, right? We can kind of contagiously give our affect to other people. Sigal Barsaid used to call this affective spirals, right? We can kind of contagiously give our affect to other people. And that means if we put in some work to kind of increase our own mood

on the job, that winds up helping our team members be a little bit more optimistic too. I often hear people ask, you know, well, what can I do to make, you know, my coworkers 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 effect on your team members. Sometimes that can give the really type A folks some permission to take care of themselves because you recognize it as a mechanism for caring for others too. That's a beautiful reframe. I love that. So 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. We 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 call job crafting, which as 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 during the day.

So tell us about this approach. Yeah, so this is an approach that comes from Amy Resnensky, used to be my colleague at Yale and now is at the University of Pennsylvania. 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 kind of values and sort of habits that you like to bring in. You know, positive psychologists have long talked about this set of character strengths that all of us have. You know, there are things like humor and bravery and a love of learning and a zest for life, prudence, you know, any kind of value that you might think, you know, is a good thing for humans to have. But the key is that they've recognized that we have these things in kind of different amounts. You know, some of us really resonate with an approach where we want to be brave all the time.

Maybe that's our signature strength. Others of us like care about humor or sort of social connection, right? We each have these different strengths. And Amy's work shows that if you bring those strengths to your job, whatever your job description, you wind up not even not just being happier at work, but you wind up thinking of your job as more of a calling. Your supervisors will also say you work better. And I love Amy's work because she actually studied job crafting in hospital janitorial staff workers. Right. You know, these are people who are cleaning the linens on hospital beds or, you know, cleaning up bedpans when people get sick. Right. This is not the kind of job where you have a lot of flexibility. You kind of just do what your manager tells you. But even in this very kind of constrained job description, Amy finds that around a third of these janitorial staff workers wind up job crafting.

They wind up building in some of their strengths. And Amy tells these really beautiful stories in her work. She talks about one staff member who worked in a chemotherapy ward, which unfortunately meant that he was dealing with lots of patients who were very sick all the 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 said his job was social connection and humor. He wanted to connect with the patients and make them laugh. And he had this standard kind of shtick that he did where he joked about like, oh my God, you vomited again. Now I'm getting over time. Like we'll do a little,

you know, handshake 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 talks about is a staff worker who worked in a coma ward. So this staff member couldn't interact with the patients. But every day she kind of just like moved the paintings and the plants in the hospital room around sort of thinking that that kind of creative infusion maybe would help patients recover. Who knows? But it meant something to her that she was able to do it, right? I mean, I think the key is clear here. Like, no manager told these employees to be doing this stuff. It was just their own way of making their job more palatable to the things that they cared about. And the reason I love Amy's work is I think if hospital janitorial

staff members can do that, then pretty much all of us in our jobs can do that, too. members can do that, then pretty much all of us in our jobs can do that too. Yes. No, this one is really intuitive to me. And I'm someone who has 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. All right. The second tip that really struck us 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? Yeah, well, one of the big ones is just to actively and intentionally try to connect with other people.. Yeah, well, one of the big ones is just to actively and

intentionally try to connect with other people. This is, I think, something that we, like a lot of people reject. I see this a 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 in the remote work culture in which a lot of young people have found themselves, you know, during their start of work. This is the kind of thing that we see comes up a lot. 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 sense of belonging. And one of the main things that predicts a sense of belonging at work is saying yes to the question,

do you have a best friend at work? In fact, you know, some folks have made the claim that we could make everyone in the workplace much happier if each of them could get somebody at work that they thought cared about them and felt like a really close friend. But then the key is that you have to make friends at work. And work by Nick Epley has shown that one of these biases is we assume that we have to stay on very surface topics, right? You know, we talk about the weather or, you know, what happened at the Olympics and so on, but we don't go into the more personal kinds of things, how we're really feeling about work, you know, the things we really value, the hobbies and the people we care about. But research suggests that if you do that, if you dive into a little bit more of a deep conversation,

it winds up making you feel closer. Another thing you can do to increase closeness is just to ask 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 us look kind of needy or not able to do our jobs. But overall, when you ask a coworker for 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 are just the kind of quick things. We need to get more intentional about creating these friendships.

And we do that from being a little bit more vulnerable and even asking for help when we need it. And the way you're defining vulnerable is not, you know, open the kimono and expose all of your deepest, darkest thoughts. and expose all of your deepest, darkest thoughts. It's really just showing up as an imperfect human being in the workplace and connecting with other people on that level. Yeah, there's this lovely effect that social psychologists have talked about, which they call the beautiful mess effect,

which is this idea that we think when we seem a little messy or we kind of show our vulnerabilities that people won't like us, but it's actually just the opposite. Like you don't want to get like, you know, extreme messy, but the idea is like showing that you occasionally need help or, and kind of being really grateful for that help winds up 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, 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 friend. Does that fit into this? Do you have your best friend at work? Are you giving me cover for experimenting with this idea? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really smart strategy, right? You know, some universities and business schools think in terms of what they call cohort hires, right?

Where it's like, I'll hire somebody that does something really in one field and then pick a second person who's in a really similar field to them, right? And so we can kind of build up a particular area. But I love the idea of hiring people's friends because you're instantly bringing in a team that has a sense of belonging, right? That maybe even are going to model the kinds of friendships that other colleagues would benefit from having too. So I'm into it. Drop the spousal hire and go for the BFF hire. It's great. I love it. 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? Yeah, well, we talked already about how as an individual, you would want to be happier if you want to perform better on your job. I think for employers, the logic is very similar. If you want all your workers to be doing the best job that they can to increase retention, to have everyone think of their job as a calling so they can't wait to get to work on Monday morning, the way to do that is to make them happier at work. morning, the way to do that is to make them happier at work. But there's a recent study that I love that paints an even more compelling business case for making your employees happier at work.

It was a study that was done in collaboration with a group of researchers at Oxford led by Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve and the job website Indeed. And so if listeners don't know the job website, Indeed, this is a place where you can go to look for jobs, but also to rate things about your current job, right? You know, how much salary you get and how happy you're at work, your sense of belonging and so 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 on average, how happy are their employers based on these Indeed data. And so what the Oxford researchers did was they said, well, let's just make this sort of well-being

composite score. So this is kind of the on average, how happy do your workers rate being based on these Indeed data. And they could 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. And in particular, they were interested in, you know, the usual metric that business school professors think about, which is, you know, shareholder value, like how well are different stocks doing of different companies. And what they did was just to plot a correlation

between the happier companies and to look at what was happening with stock prices. And what they found was a strong and significant correlation showing that the happier companies wound up having better stock prices. And what they found was a strong and significant correlation showing that the happier companies wound up having better stock prices. They actually took this one step further and said, well, you know, we have these usual metrics of, you know, economic success based on successful companies. We have, you know, the Dow Jones or the S&P 500. What if we make the well-being score 100? So these are the 100 companies in this Indeed data set that had the highest happiness ratings. And the researcher said, well, why don't we kind

of plot that against the other standard metrics? So use this well-being score metric to compete against the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ and so on. And they have this lovely graph in their paper, which shows that this well-being 100 set of companies winds up beating the S&P and the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones at pretty much every point in the economic cycle of the last couple of years. 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 basic metric of success of your company, what you tell shareholders that are going to get, you know, in terms of the actual money over time, that you'll do better in that very important metric

simply by making your workers happier. And what I love about this study is like, it didn't need to go that way. Like it could have been a really compelling ethical case for making your workers happy, but maybe, you know, you have to take a little bit of hit in terms of the money you pull back. No, it's really a work-life harmony that if we make our workers happier, we wind up reaping the benefits in terms of a more successful company. Okay. So say I'm the boss, I'm listening to this conversation, I buy it. Where would you coach me to begin? 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? Because as an employer, that's what you'd want to intervene on. If it's higher salary makes people happier at work, you'd want to pay people more and so on. And what the researchers found was kind of surprising. The top thing on the list was workers' sense of belonging at work, which was made up of three different metrics. One that I've mentioned already, do you have a best friend at work? And the second two was the things that I 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 to the people at work. So there's this kind of reciprocal mattering plus your friendship at work. People care about what you do. And also I matter to the people at work. So this kind of reciprocal mattering plus 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, of 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 you have to ask yourself is, what does my belonging at work look like? Do people feel a sense of meaning that they matter and that what they're doing matters? And have I promoted situations that can increase friendship at work?

Especially if you kind of move to a more remote environment, these things become all the more important that that sense of belonging is really something that you're working on. belonging is really something that you're working on. And so that's the data are pretty clear. That's the spot to intervene to get the biggest kind of happiness boost to everyone in your organization. What's really exciting about particularly two and three, the reciprocity of mattering, it feels, at least in my first thinking of it, very inexpensive. It's like intentional, but not costly. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the thing is you assume like I have to pay all this 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?. He's the CEO of this manufacturing company called Barry Y. Miller. You know, they build kind of capital equipment for places like Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. It's like, you know, the standard kind of company where you wouldn't think building and belonging is going to matter to this kind of organization. matter to this kind of organization. But they had a moment where they really had to think about people's mattering at work that came during the 2008 economic downturn when they lost nearly all of their contracts and they were facing what many businesses were facing back then, which is the possibility of laying off a bunch of people. And Bob had this idea that if mattering at work

is really important, I'm going to kick out, you know, 30% of my company. I'm going to leave the other 70% there thinking that that could have been them. And like, what are they going to be next? And so on. And he said, is there any other solution? And the solution he came up with was to say that everyone in the entire company, including, you know, the C-suite, you know, down to the like the lowest level worker, they all had to take a month without pay. They were all going to take a little bit of a sacrifice so that the company could get through it. And everyone responded incredibly positively. Like people were thrilled. You know, they were so scared that they were going to lose their job.

And now they saw everyone pitching in together to kind of take the hit, including the people at the highest levels. And Bob said that an even more interesting thing happened, which is that people so felt this sense of meaning and belonging that a lot of them stepped up to take an extra month so that other team members wouldn't have to take theirs. to retirement already. Let me take two months so that, you know, young Mary or Bob who just, you know, had a baby or just bought a house, they wouldn't have to take that like little, you know, short period of time off, right? This is that sense of mattering in action, right? And if the C-suite winds up creating a culture where that is important, where they really embody that importance to their organization, what you find is that people step up. They not only matter, but they realize that their actions can help the company and they're excited to do those even more often. And, you know, the end result of the story is that Barry Way Miller, you know, not only survived the economic downturn, but has gone on to become a kind of juggernaut of the manufacturing

industry, pulling in, you know, $3 billion in annual sales a year, in part because they created this sort of culture of belonging and care. Beautiful. What a powerful example. 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. Frances, you'll be delighted to know that you make a number of appearances on the happy list. Delighted and relieved and relieved and relieved. Do you have your own happiness list, Lori? And can you give us a couple entries on it?

Yeah, I mean, 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 you're grateful for. It's like stuff that makes you happy, things you're grateful for. Lately, I've been into delights, which are just things that you notice in the world that almost make you like, you know, put your hands up in the air and say, oh, my gosh, what a delight. 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 jamming out to some really old school 80s rock, you know, in his car thinking he was alone. But you get to see the like headbanging. And I was like, you know, that is just such a delight. And honestly, you know, the other

thing on my list is just I get to with this podcast, just talk to so many interesting folks, interesting folks like you, all my amazing guests from Bob Chapman to others. And that's just a delight that I 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 from the tiny to the big. And my husband, Mark, is on there as well. So he's often featured on the delight list too. Beautiful. Well, it's been such a privilege to host you and have this conversation. Big fans. Very big fans. And now bigger fans. Yeah, which was impossible to imagine. Thanks so much. So, Frances, I see you're recruiting gears.

Speaking of your academic job. Yes, Lori is currently at Yale, is what I'd like to say to our listeners. Currently. But let's stay tuned for the future. Yeah. So, what surprised you during this conversation? What do you hope listeners take away from it? 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's, and I watch you do this all the time and, and 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 structure. People are so stingy about the titles. My God, hand them all out. 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, not our intuition, capital O, our intuition on 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, like everything we talk about, inclusion and performance and the idea of bringing your humanity into the workplace and that also jumpstarting impact and performance and all of your other hopes and dreams. Like all of those hopes and dreams, they run through happiness, your own happiness and the happiness of other people. And to your point, those things are intimately connected. So I'm just thrilled that we're able to share this conversation with our listeners. 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 someone you want to hear from, or you suggest we bring on the show, we'd love to hear from you. Email us, call us, text us,

fixable at TED.com or 234-FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253. Thank you. Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Heilash. This episode was mixed by Louis at StoryYard. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.