This is a eye-hopard cast, guaranteed human.
No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. For some who is not generous cannot be an artist, the world will be at peace, only when it is ruled by portraits and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pujabha show on the eye-hart video app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Only one in four people, less than a quarter, in the states, report high-workplace well-being.
That's really, really worrying. The way you drive home from the office, the mood that you're in, will impact your wife, your children, this feeds into our societies and our communities, big tone. We should not have had to write a book on why workplace well-being matters. The world of work in which God knows how much time we all spend, it ought to be naturally supposed to fleece.
And it isn't. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Today's guest is someone who's going to help us do exactly that. I'm speaking about Jan Immanuel Denerv, a professor of economics and behavioral scientist at the University of Oxford and director of well-being research centre.
Jan is a leading expert on the economics of well-being and co-leads the world's largest study on how people feel at work. His latest book, "Why workplace well-being matters, explores how happiness at work, shapes our lives, businesses, and society.
“If you want to lead better, if you want to know how to have happiness in your teams,”
in your workplace, and in your life, go and grab a copy of this book. I promise you, you won't regret it. Please welcome to the podcast Jan Immanuel Denerv. Jan, it is great to have you there. So thank you for having me as so wonderful to get the opportunity to reconnect this book.
First question I want to ask you is, "You're part of the biggest study on happiness in the world.
What's the most heartbreaking thing that you found?" In the Western world, a special in the United States of America, a breakdown of our social tissue. And that underpins the decline of well-being as we pick it up thanks to the Gallup World poll metrics, the decline and the ranking of the United States in particular, which has now tumble out at top 20 this year again, whereas about a decade ago the US had been 12th or 13th in the world.
“And that I think is a worrying decline given how important the United States is,”
needless to say, and we've been digging into why there's this gradual decline in the US in terms of their well-being as measured through how people experience their lives themselves, so self-rated life satisfaction, and what we're finding is huge inequality. So there's a very wide distribution in terms of well-being. And then there is the inequality is also in terms of generational differences.
So we find that youth, especially in the United States, have tumbleed off a cliff in terms of their self-reported well-being, the way that they experience their lives.
If you were to look just at youth in America by itself, they'd be 60 second or 63rd in the world
happen in support ranking. Look at the 60 plusers, they still be in a top 10 of the world happiness report. And I think that's really telling. But I think if there's one thing that stood out in recent years looking out from the world happiness support, the general well-being perspective, it would have to be the precipitous decline in well-being in the US in particular. Why younger people becoming unhappy?
There's a variety of things that play with youth. People are swift to point in
“direction of social media, but I think that's a little easy. It's easy to vilify the tech”
companies, but if you actually talk with youngsters and do qualitative focus groups, what you find is it's affordability, first and foremost, affordability of studies. The cost of studying has outpaced inflation by a long mile in the United States, and so you find that that's your will worry. The second thing that comes to the fore when you really dig into why youth is off a cliff is the fact that they're very worried about the future of work. And I cannot blame them.
How in the world are you going to catch up with Chad Jipiti at this point? And in terms of studying engineering, or law, or medicine, or what have you? And so there's real worries and concern about
what they'll be doing. And so there's sort of social contract that's always been there about,
okay, we'll always do better than our parents, and every generation will make its step forward. There's a lot of doubt around that at the moment. And then there's no way around that there's also social media. Social media is an extraordinary tool, but that does distracts us from a lot of the
Things that we'd otherwise be more productive, or potentially more purposeful.
has done a lot of good, and has the power to do a lot of good. And I think your podcast and the
wisdom nuggets of wisdom that you share through social media are extraordinary. But we really ought to be thinking hard, kids, parents, policymakers, all together to see, can we put the social back into social media somehow and do it together? So let's not cut corners and sort of blame social media and ban social media. No, we ought to really work together. It's not something you're going to be putting back in the box anytime soon. It's here to stay social media. It's not making it work for
everybody in a way that is posted for well-being. So the drop in use is a combination of factors. It's uncertainty, anxiety, distraction, and affordability issues for youth at this point. So there really are really sort of an existentialist side-kised crisis that they're having to deal with. And that's not easy for them to grapple with. And we pick it up in their self-reporting life situation. Yeah, I really like the fact that when you've actually sat down and talked
into videos, you don't get this glazed overview of what the issue is. Right, you get a very specific set of factors that are affecting well-being. When you talk about affordability, you mentioned education. What has shifted in the affordability of education? How different is it in the last 30, 20, 10 years from when these 15 to 24-year-olds, their parents were growing up to where they are now, what have been the biggest shifts in affordability? Everything has become more expensive. But if you
look at the cost of education, the cost of tuition fees has risen quicker and faster than inflation. Because companies and organizations require you to have degrees, instead of a monopoly, if you
“will, at a national scale, around you have to have a degree in order to obtain a good job.”
And so then obviously there's a premium to be extracted. And in markets, that's the way economics tends to work. But now I think there shouldn't be a lot of pressure being put on that now, because it's not quite clear the extent to which learning through universities is going to happen and how that can be compared to learning through other means that might be less expensive. If chatGPT is so good as we've all seen it in action and the other large language models,
then the whole question around learning and how to use your skills is going to be very different. Maybe other types of jobs, nursing, plumbing, the kind of stuff that chatGPT is not very good at. As far as I can tell, maybe those kind of jobs will come to the fore and people will
opt back into those kinds of jobs and not always feel the need to necessarily go into
“tertiary education of the liberal arts type. We hire a lot of people and I can't remember the”
last time I looked at what Khalid someone went to because it's just not become an important factor because the skills that we need to grow are not the skills that people are learning in college. We are expecting them to be able to prove it on the job to show experiments to create work and of course we are not hiring at the scale of the largest companies in the world so there's a different task for sure but it's interesting to hear you say that because I think we are moving away from
that as time goes on. I think so depending on what career path I'm going to take and I think tertiary education universities and colleges in particular they're in for a ride because they'll have to both subsequently the courses and what the skills that are being taught cannot be outdated and universities they take a long time to change the chatchipity is really catching up. When you talk about uncertainty when I was at college we were being told that everyone should
“dream of being a data scientist like that was the goal that's what would be the ideal career.”
If you were talking to parents today what skill would you encourage them to think about exposing their children to or college students to think about learning in the uncertain environment that we're at right now. No and frankly myself the team chatchipity does all the coding at this point for us but it may not be far off that the real skill in the future of education will be asking the right questions and not the skill set to find answers through data signs or engineering
because tools and machinery and large-ingledge models will do that for us but we still need to ask the right questions to prop the machines to do the job for us so I think maybe we'll shift back to questions and the right questions rather than the skills to make and build that answers to questions posed by somebody else. I'll be teaching for the first time at the University of Oxford a class on the science of well-being in business policy and life and the fact that this new
elective was over-subscribe from never having been taught. The bit-like Lori Santos at Yale
do in this case within the business school with a third of the entire MBA court signing up for this.
A class that never been taught, no word of mouth and nothing.
you just raise around uncertainty looking for answers asking the right questions and so that's exactly
“what we'll be doing in this class and speaks to the point we just raise I will be asking in this”
class more questions than providing answers and we will debate it will be asking questions around purpose and meaning and the role of income and well-being and how much is enough and what's the human case not just the business case for investing in workplace well-being and so on and so forth and so maybe that's the sign of the times that I'm starting to teach this class with Oxford and that students are signing up for it and droves as about asking the bigger questions rather than just
looking for tools and tricks and skills. I agree with that approach and we grew up at a time where answers made you smart and today we're living at a time where questions make you smarter because
the answers are available it's easy Wikipedia and even calculation yeah it's it's easy
you the smartness comes through the right questions exactly and I can agree with you more that whether it's art whether it's math whether it's engineering whether it's design it's like do you know what you're searching for I want to go off what you just said about the conversations in the debates you want to start in your class and I'm so glad that that class exists because I think it's been needing for a long time especially in business schools because the people that are
at the business schools are going to go off to be leaders of organizations and companies and if they don't understand the value of well-being it's pretty impossible for that that anyone else will you just said there are a question that you think people will debate is how much is enough I wanted to
get the empirical take on how much is enough so first and foremost two Nobel Prize winners
Angus Dean and Danny Connemmon in 2010 they published a paper showing that you may remember the figure about $75,000 was the golden number now truth be told it depends also on how you define well-being if it's about sort of positive experiences in the moment then yes they were right back in the day so obviously you would have to inflation adjusted today was about 75k but if you if
“what matters to you is sort of life evaluations how you evaluate the quality of life as you stand back”
then incomplete is a bit more of a role and it went up a bit higher like a hundred and twenty thousand again I would need to inflation adjust the thing that all economists and all of the science agrees on is there's huge diminishing marginal returns to further income and so for as soon as you reach about a hundred and twenty hundred and fifty thousand then it becomes difficult a more more difficult to pick up differences in well-being for further income the relationship is logarithmic
as I say to have the same impact on your well-being from moving from twenty thousand to forty thousand you would need another forty thousand to then have the same impact again you would need from eighty two hundred and sixty thousand to then have the same impact on your well-being again you would need to move from a hundred sixty to three hundred and twenty thousand and so that's how it sort of creeps up there's continues to be increases but it requires way more money to find the additional
increase now you ask the question why and the reason is unless you're inheriting money or you're winning the lottery you still have to work for it and you're starting to make compromises and you're making compromises in terms of work life balance seeing your friends and family stress you're rising in the hierarchy you're responsible for our people and so you're straight off at that point and while yes more money may allow you to do more things and live bigger and nicer
you will be missing out on other drivers of well-being and this is where we come back to the science of well-being is that in our societies we've been lots of good even today so in the United States that money does make you happy and the more the better yes but the trade-offs you're starting to make are real and they're real in terms of sharing meals with your friends and family they're real in terms of looking after your own health physical and mental and so all in all it weighs it
back down and you find little or no difference anymore in people's life's satisfaction above a certain point and so there is a bit of an optimal point for well for for well-being in terms of income it's interesting because it's not that we don't all want and need more money it's the fact that those roles and responsibilities come with more work more sacrifices more choices more more difficult options could be more stress mentally and physically if you're not prioritizing
that and it's interesting to think about that because you would hope that if people had more money
“that they would be able to reduce some of their problems which is true I think it can decrease some of”
your issues but it's interesting to think about the proportion of happiness and you're absolutely right but only up to certain points so the real issues that you're solving with money the deeper issues like daily anxieties paying off mortgage paying off your loans paying for the basic necessities you're
There after say a hundred or hundred or hundred twenty thousand dollars unles...
New York or LA or London yeah of course but that but that answer this is always a complex
“dependent and inflation needs to be inflation just etc etc etc but the the trade-offs”
starting to weigh in after that sort of situation point way more heavily than the benefits of further money at the same and that's real and but the fact of the matter is the proof of the putting is in the eating and the data's right there I could show you right now if I run on my computer that extraordinary line so if you don't have much money it matters a great deal because the souls real issues as you were leading to but after a certain point obviously depending where you are
LA New York will be a bit more but after a certain point in the basic the amenities and necessities the the real worries are taken care of then aspiring for even more money will by all means go for it but beware of the trade-offs you're making and then that will start putting a real break on the opportunity for improving your well-being because you're going to be your integrity might be out of the window you'll be more responsible stress family work-life balance
physical mental health everything we've just alluded to and the the fact of the matter is people underestimate these other drivers of ones well-being in our societies and particularly in the United States there's this real focus on wealth and income and everything around us from my thinking so on and so forth pushes us to think in the direction of okay gotta make more money it'll make me happier but we forgo and underestimate the importance of something like a social connection running into people
having shared meals and we can talk about this we've got new data on this it's just the extraordinary in the United States and this is brand new research just come out in the world-happiness
port published in March 20th of this year international day happiness and one of the most we always
knew social capital the importance of social connections in the field we know that people underestimate
“the importance of social ties are social ties I had no idea just how powerful and important our social”
lives were for our well-being until this in the United States we've got data on how many of your meals are being shared on a week two week basis so how many of your lunches how many of your dinners so a variable runs from zero to fourteen seven lunches seven dinners fortune we don't have anything about breakfast but anyway lunches and dinners in the US on average people now have about seven of the fourteen meals together that means half of your meals on average in the
US are essentially dining alone what we've seen is an increase of fifty three percent to be precise in America over the last two decades and dining alone if you slice and dice up by age groups it's been an increase of an almost doubling for youth so below thirty year olds are now it's almost twice as likely to be dining alone on a day-to-day basis as compared to two decades ago now why does this matter going back to the point we made earlier is if you run a regression
think of it as a horsephrase between variables income social connections as proxy through number shared meals employment status etc you would obviously think that while your income and employment status matter more that coefficient will come in more strongly no the simple indicator that number around how many of your meals over the past week were shared is as influential in explaining people's life satisfaction as their relative income and their employment status no way yes way
and it's really striking even for us this was a real sort of um i opener oh my god we
“we knew social cattle and social ties were important didn't quite realize just how important”
and we've been very lucky to have to be able to get information around sharing meals we've got this over the past two decades thanks to the American time use survey and we have globally thanks to the Agina Motum module on the Gallup or Opole which has just gone in for one year and my god there's such variation the extent to which people have social lives around the world there's countries where at the 14 lunches and dinners in a week there's countries where there's
only three or four meals shared and then there's others mostly in Latin American countries where it's sort of like 12 11 12 out of the 14 meals are being shared and in the US it's about seven wow why why is it that millennials are becoming unhappy and boom is it becoming happier so
first of all you got to know and i'm sure you noticed Jay but in one of the what we thought was
one of the universal facts and well-being science was the u-shaped the the relationship between age and well-being is one that has the form of a u people start higher in terms of well-being to lose that happiness and well-being over the years reach a midlife crisis so everybody talks about midlife crisis but you actually pick it up in data it exists and then from there on and the midlife crisis sort of like early 40s the peak of the pressures um mortgages small children
responsibilities I work and all of it coming together and then from there on on average people go
Up again in terms of well-being as measured through their satisfaction of lif...
very end you see come down again when physical issues and disabilities come into play what we're
“finding in the United States in particular the generally in the West is that first leg of the u”
the high what is meant to be high levels of well-being for youth that has gone so I got in the news quite a bit with quotes along the lines of use in America are experiencing their midlife crisis today we find that that is imperative in case so there's this long thought universal truth that we thought was the case around the u a shape relationship between well-being and age it's just just gone now the question of course is why and in the United States we touched up on
an earlier there's a number of reasons why we believe youth are having their midlife crisis today
and it's got to do with the affordability crisis it has to do with absolute distress and
anxiety worry about the future of work for them and the questions it raises about decision of rest studies for example now and then social media being a very a force for distraction and not really social or social it should be and all of these things sort of come together and you see come together in the likes of people feeling more and more lonely and if we look at the extent to which people share meals together you find that youth especially in America is now almost twice as likely
to be dining alone on on a on a day-to-day basis as compared to two decades ago no glass no filter just stories spoken without fear addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease how did you come with a reckless father like me join me would you up heart as I sit down every week with directors actors musicians technicians and beyond you don't need to work with the biggest people in the biggest sound to have great music I have gone through
their sub-steady hajjaka reach the pinnacle stung by this day and up falling down again yeah I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work with kind of silence me I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave I'm gone but don't shut the mirror the show must go on listen to my weekly podcast the pooch of her show on the iHard video app I'm a podcast over ever you get your podcast come for the honesty stay for the fire
what is loneliness actually due to us because we talk about a lot but what does it actually do a lot so obviously loneliness is the bigger concept and the indicated indicator that we have here is the extent to which we share meals and that's coming down so in in the world happiness port this year we dig into precisely question your after and what we're finding is if you are less social so if you're less social interactions in other words you're more lonely you will have less social
support duh needless to say so if you're having less social connections it means that in times you need you'll have less people to call on you also are less socially trusting of others people
“and Jay this is important and I owe this to professor John Hallie well the founding editor of the”
world happiness port who well we did chapter three he did chapter two he found that and he's always
been very strong on this particular aspect we underestimate the kindness of people by factor of two and so left your own devices and by ourselves lonely we underestimate the kindness of others so we need to get in touch and in front of other people to find out that they're actually all right other people left your own devices and in echo chambers within social media we obviously polarize in our thinking and so this too the near times really dug into this but I spoke with them
is loneliness as for example proxy to the fact that we're having less or less meals shared is also important in in sort of radicalization of opinions because if you think about it and I don't have strong empirical evidence for this this is more so of conjecture but still when you speak with other people everybody has slightly different views on the world their their frames of views of the world and our people but the more you speak with people the more you moderate your own views
you generate sense of empathy necessarily and you find that your views need to be moderated because not everybody thinks the same way if we are less and less social we eat by ourselves or with our phones in our hand rather than with others around the table and this is clear in the data that it's also one of the reasons why we're polarizing in terms of opinions it's because we're no longer moderating our views very much and are stuck in our echo chambers
“and so the result of which is more polarized political behavior and this by the way is very important”
generally because wonderful colleague and co-author of this book George Ward his early studies and some
Of them co-authored including published in the American Journal of Political ...
how you feel about life is predictive of your political behaviors, your voting behavior interesting in what sense took to me whether well think about it if you're unhappy with the
“way life is going you're not in favor of the incumbent obvious and so you're way more likely to vote”
anti-system and as in the United States we've now seen in the last decade as exemplified in the world happiness where you see a decline in general well-being there's inequalities if people are happy about people are less happy but generally speaking decline in well-being in the US to be sure for use you find thus a more fertile ground for anti-system votes populist votes now that can go towards a Donald Trump that can go towards a Bernie Sanders depending on a number of indicators
but the fact of the matter is the increasing number of people being unhappy makes them angry makes them one of the against the current system and that is most reasonable and most normal but we've picking this up very strongly and what's really important here to know is that this is really an advantage of our kind of data subjective well-being data they capture how people feel about
“their lives and it's how they feel about their lives that makes them choose and vote a certain way”
and what's really powerful and we owe this to George and others we really find that if you
compare this with the economic proxies it's how we feel about life it's a lot stronger and predicting how we vote quick example GDP in the United States is growing but well-being is dropping so if you look at it from a traditionally economic perspective like an alien landing and you're new classical economist alien and you arrive and you see the United States and you're like oh wait they're doing well there's growth so people must be happier because there's more growth and the
GDP has grown as compared to last year and it isn't and yet you have these and well-being is dropping and as a result you'll receive these anti-system votes now I don't want to be scared mongering but when we picked up these big differences where there's growth and yet people are getting
unhappy are the first time this was picked up and we owe this to John Cliff and the CEO of Gallup
“was the Arab Spring if you looked at Egypt Syria remember this is now about a decade and a half ago”
the Arab Spring you would have said things are going great in Egypt they had almost double-digit growth and yet well-being was dropping guess what happens the next time in our textbook and well-being science we'd read the analysis for the Hong Kong riots back in 2019 used in Hong Kong really stood up and it was real riots it was really real concerns if you look at the GDP of Hong Kong it is through the roof and the decade before is like plus 60% in the space of a decade yet if you look at
life of the satisfaction is particularly that of youth it's gone down it was minus 10 or 12% over that same decade wow so you're looking at it from the outside saying like wait whoa growth fantastic and you look at how people feel in that society and it's actually come down and it's when you see that difference and obviously we're now starting to pick it up greatly in the United States as well whether continues to be economic growth but well-being negative and dropping that fuels anti-system
sentiment and obviously makes it a fertile grant for for for discontent and possibly more yeah
it's incredible to see the connection between something like individual loneliness
and then national outrage yes right like that kind of you don't necessarily put the two together and one should because it's the loneliness that makes us unhappy and being unhappy makes us not wanting the current system and voting anti-system and us approving everything and so that's sort of the linkage is there and this is where well-being science and actually capturing how we feel which is what you're all about it's really capturing how we feel about our lives and how to improve that
if you can put numbers on this like we do in the economics of well-being you can capture this and this is I'm not new I'm part of a larger moving called the Beyond GDP movement we're at a population level we really try and think more holistically and capture what really matters which is real progress in society is people's quality of life improving as they experience it and not GDP is it means to an end growth in GDP will likely enable if it's on properly
greater and better lives but the proof of the pudding is maybe not in the eating but is in the measuring if people's well-being and so we urge so strongly to do a lot more in the measurement you know most countries actually do united came then we've been doing really well since 2012 the UK Office for National Statistics measures in the annual population household survey well-being how satisfied are you with your life these days we have that data since 2012 in UK and the
official national statistics in the United States it is not there the viewer of labor statistics the the statistical age in the US do not measure how people feel about their lives
Crazy isn't that's crazy it's actually crazy didn't even ask they don't even ...
an entire field of well-being economists we've been lobbying we've been working and Washington said like
hey no it's subjective why do you think that is because it's subjective as the argument and then
“we make the case but wait a second subjective well-being how you feel about life is that what ultimately”
matters and then there's still not convinced and that we have to make the case for well but how you feel about life it drives objective behaviors like productivity and we can talk about it or voting like what we're seeing in the United States and yeah it's difficult yeah I mean it impacts whether people get married or not impacts you know children you have the impacts everything yeah like our behaviors are and we are again titled a column and others the extraordinary Nobel
price winner like why we do think the things we do is because it makes us feel a certain way
and the US government is not interested or at least a Bureau of Labor Statistics is not interested and measuring people's subjective well-being I want to dive into work if we can because I think that's the core of this book why workplace well-being matters the signs behind employee happiness and organizational performance and the reason why I want to talk about this is because I think what's interesting is probably around three decades ago we found happiness and meaning in multiple
different places we had church or temple or community you had home life children you had other friends that lived close by you probably lived close to your family I don't have close to my family
you're not that close to yours and then you had work whereas now it feels like church temple
community has gone where further away from our families it's all the pressure is on work
“absolutely to provide all of this and that's why I think the work conversation is so important”
because we're now living at a time where that's the place that we're looking for meaning for belonging for connection but as you talk about it in the book we're not getting it we're not getting it there no no only one and four people less than a quarter in the states would report high workplace well-being it was high workplace well-being I'd say it would mean a four or five out of five in terms of job satisfaction for example and so that's really really really worrying
and the other reason why we know why work is just so important for all the reasons you just mentioned is if you're being made redundant of the English say which is probably the worst term to use um being laid off as that I guess it's in the states is we see a huge drop in life of this function but to your point only about half of the drop in life's faction of being made unemployed is due to the loss of income most of the drop has actually been by the loss of identity
and social ties which is exactly the point you're making people side entities are now tied up with their work and their titles less so than with family or church or temple as you say and so makes it all makes work all the more important so this blew my mind on page 74 of your book figure four two only feeling sick in bed is a more unhappy activity than working which means we would rather care or help for adults wait in line do admin or organizing do housework chores or
“DIY more than working and studying the only thing we'd rather not do than work is saying”
it's a good bed yeah so I'd be able to study to a George Macaron who developed mapiness which is extraordinary and like looked at what people are doing day to day and the work but uh and especially spending time with your line manager as it turns out was really the worst thing now truth be told while in the workplace you do a number of things you're also socializing at work you're having lunch together one would hope or you're also exchanging and being excited
about by projects and developments here what George Macaron was after was really the work work bit and so that is is not particularly liked whether it's the the mapiness study that puts work a solo in terms of emotional well-being terms daily activities whether you're looking at the the world's largest study thanks to indeed where we find and crowdsourced data and find that only a quarter of people actually less than a quarter of people feel happy but you look at our friends
at Gallup who do engagement surveys around the US and the rest of the world they also find the less than 20% of people are actually actively engaged in the work they're doing which was a proxy for well-being and so there's a lot of room for improvement what can individuals do differently to find meaning it well can I start with leaders yeah let's double leaders let's go there don't just talk to talk walk to walk and I'll I'll back this up I feel kind of sad about
this and it took me a while because I came out of the family of actual people managers my dad ran business and he was an actual people manager and so that's what I thought good managers were
Starting in the study of work baseball being is so drove me because I thought...
is interesting and important and I care and it's a part of my DNA and lo and behold and
“it was only about a year or two ago we were able to advise and set questions on an HBR survey”
of senior managers are HBR being Harvard Business Review what we found is that 87% to be precise of manager senior manager would say yes I care about my people and it would give a competitive advantage and it's the right thing to do bottom up in that same survey we actually started
testing them to look for what they prioritize when it comes down to it only a third if people
actually prioritize their people over other stakeholders how did you test them essentially asking questions and sort of in a situation having to prioritize particular stakeholders so for example because customers and clients would be prioritized or people for example but actually J the real point is only half of that third 19% actually has actions against people management and well-being if you're people being strategic priority study by my colleagues Stefan Meyer Columbia Business School
“great friend great guy a sit tight he studied with an army of research assistants all the earnings”
calls of the big listed companies in the US and that's typically the CEO and the CFO talking about financial results every quarter and they speak to the investor community what Stefan found was that the word customer business development side came up eight times more than people employee side of the business so obviously a business is essentially you got to have clients and you got people delivering so you're two main stakeholders here and delivering and running business obviously
the clients and the people who make it possible and yet somehow customers the business development is so much more prevalent in their minds as their own people who deliver on the business but worse when they then sent sentiment analysis around when the word customer was raised it wasn't the context of positive words opportunity when the word employee was raised it was in the context of challenge problem risk and so the fact of the matter is and this is the sound
“truth is that and again this is about 20 I think only about 20% of senior leaders actually”
care invest act on the notion that take care of your people until take care of business most leaders about 80% unwilling to put that number out there talk to talk but don't walk to walk. What I find about that having worked in the corporate world is I found that a lot of leaders
were never cared for themselves so they don't know how to care for others possibly.
They were the person who came in and they had to carry around laptops there to go run around and grab everyone's coffee there to go and walk someone's dog or drop their kid to school or whatever it was and now as that person's come up the ranks they have never even known what it feels like to have someone say how are you feeling how are you doing and because they don't give themselves that permission they don't know how to do it for anyone else the amount of
times I've coached senior leaders inside of organizations and they'll always be like yeah we wish people were more productive more proactive more organized more this more that I'm like yeah but you realize people need to break then you this then you know whatever it may be and then they go
yeah but I never did it exactly. I don't take my vacation so why do they need it right and it's
that but it's it's the senior leaders they're so driven they're so ambitious are we going back straight back to where we started with this conversation and they make trade-offs with their health with their humanity they're the empathy brothers who may not be in the same spirit of one thing to be at the very top of the organization the partial reason why senior senior leaders just don't walk the walk as much as they should in terms of investing in people is because they didn't
invest in their own work-life balance enough so they don't quite see it for the others so they need to be reminded and one of the ways of reminding and speaking to that caliber to that level in the organization is to build out the business case and so anyway I this is something I really have to get off my chest because and it took me a while to really get this is Georgian I we should not have had to write a book on why workplace well-being matters when you think about it J as you know the
human case ought to be self-evident. I mean we're human beings we ought to care about each other it's in the scriptures and our religions and our just our nature we all we we like being cared for and we ought to care for others so the world of work in which God knows how much time we all spend it ought to be naturally pulse to place and it isn't as as we show through the crowds for a state of within deed and many other places so it's the business case if that then tries to
resonate with you with with those senior leaders who have the power and the tools and the influence
To try and raise workplace well-being for others but they have a tough time b...
invest in their own well-being perhaps sufficiently so to actually care about the wellbeing of others
“but they do but does resonate with them is numbers the business case and so that's obviously”
what the book sets out is to show that investing in workplace well-being is actually good for the bottom line as good for the bottom line so there's the human case which ought to be self-evident but that then work out all too well and so the business case needs to be made and what the book does is to show the business case the links between well-being and productivity retention and talent
attraction and ultimately the bottom line in terms of profitability and even stock market
reforms in a way that's never been shown before and it took George and me oh god that could in a half to put it all together and different academic papers and large large studies with major companies and to finally bring it together in the book it makes a very strong case for why investing workplace well-being is not just the right thing to do but also the clever thing to do
“no glass no filter just stories spoken without fear addiction is a disease I naturally looked upon”
as any other disease how did you cope with a reckless father like me join me who job heart as I sit down every week with directors actors musicians technicians and beyond you don't need to work with the biggest people in the biggest sound to have great music I have gone through their subsidy hatchica these the pinnacle stung by the snake and I fall in down again yeah I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work with kind of sardines me I'm only as good as
the last shot that I gave I'm gone but don't shut the mirror the show must go on listen to my weekly podcast the pooch of her show on the iHard video app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast come for the honesty stay for the fire do you think it's possible for people to have work life balance and be at the top of a company that is such a good question it's hard to in every case is different so one thing one caveat
that listeners need to know is that we study big samples and is there's averages and there's always
the case by case might be different but on average it is the way we find it I'm afraid the answer
“is to your question is yes I think people who make it all the way to the top have given up”
on a chunk of work life balance and I think it goes back to write the start when you ask the question about money does money make it happy and these high levels these very very big salaries it's surprising how little extra happiness applies them and that is because they've given up and and trade off other things like work life balance yeah and I think we need to change that as well because it won't change for everyone else and as it changes for someone at the top
and then you start to see that oh someone at the top sleep say hours and therefore they're more effective oh someone at the top works out and so they're more productive because I remember it appeared in my life when I was working 18 hour days seven days a week and my wife would say to me she'd say hey if you took care of your health like if you worked out and you slept a little bit more and promised you would be more productive and effective and I'd say no no no
you don't understand got to work this hard and there's only when I started to listen to her that I started to see the value of that and I was so much more effective strategic I didn't get ill as often I wasn't dealing with migraines or headaches I didn't have to take an adville or whatever to suppress that feeling like you just felt better but my wife had to literally coach me to that I'm very proud to be able to say that not only is your wife right we have the causal
field evidence to back her up okay and you'll know the company that we had the took us 10 years
to get to this point the company with whom we worked to be able to show for the first time
the causal effect of how you feel whether that's through better sleep working out whatever but how you feel from one week to another impacting how you perform that week it was with British Telecom BT you'll know them what it large as some floors in the UK we tested all of their calls and companies this was back in 2015 when this project started took us 10 years to finally get to calls and friends the way we did it Jay was by every week on Thursday at 4 p.m. we pulse these
call center plays across all the BT call centers to see how they were feeling that week and whether that was because they slept well or whether they've been working out or private or work live we had an extraordinary data set around how we felt from one week to another and then we tied that to very granular levels of performance which is call center at least 10 to half which is seconds per call customer satisfaction come back for every call weekly sales which is obviously
That the big headline performance number and what we find is a standard devia...
to a significant change in how you feel from one week to another just like you were experiencing
“let to a 12% increase in weekly sales now that's actually a lower bound effect of how you feel”
on how you perform because what we found is that these BT call center plays depending on the types of tasks they were doing the effective how they felt was greater on the performance so if the task was just plain order taking the effective how you felt didn't have that much impact on hair perform but the higher order tasks the types of tasks that you and your team and most companies these days will do and the future work will only be consisting of which is sort of tasks that
require social and emotional intelligence and creativity to stuff that you do there the effective how you felt from one week to another was much greater we're talking 20 to 25% impact on performance and so yes to the point your wife is 100% right if you invest in yourself and you you feel better in your skin as they say in French so something to be honest up with like feeling good then you will be performing better and all of this is super super intuitive because
these tasks dealing with customers the the social and active in your social and emotional intelligence is really only possible when you feel good yourself if you're not in a good place and you're thinking about your worries or problems with in your household or what have you and that is very difficult to raise and generate the empathy to deal with a customer and really
perform and come up with something creative or do an amazing interview or be really present and
engage while you have other worries and so we picked this up in the data from one week to another people would say I'm feeling good I'm feeling better not so feeling so good and you see this picked up especially in the task that requires social and emotional intelligence so long story to tell you how we actually nailed causality but it has to do with whether differences around the call centers and all spare you that story because it took us 10 years to nail the causal inference but we got
there in the end no I love that I mean I'm happy to share everything it's important but I love what
“you're saying because and the bigger point you made that I think I won't be able to make no”
of is in 25 years time that will matter even more yes because AI will take away to the routine task in order taking tasks well already by now I think we started studying 2015 2016 I bet if we were to rerun this study these sort of more manual tasks ordered to take it from here no longer there to begin with by the way on the the causality issue no need to go into technical details but it's an important point to raise which is that senior leaders when a their chief people off-served chief
HR officer comes to them and says like oh we found a study and and happier workers are more productive a typical response and not fully wrong would be well yeah but is it is it happiness driving performance roads it the business going well and us being able to invest in there well being or the business going well and then making people feel good in the first place so that chicken the egg problem that to there's what we call reverse causality it's a dynamic relationship if you feel good
you perform better if performance is going good if it feeds back into you feeling better in the first place so it's a dynamic relationship performance and well being yeah and we were able to disentangle the two arrows and that dynamic relationship by leveraging weather differences because yeah long story and I urge you to read the paper that came out of management science on this
“what employee programs well being programs actually helped because I think the challenges there's”
so many well being programs now every company subscribed to a million of them they're all available
but the actual take up is low exactly or people don't know what to do or people don't know what's available to them so what actually helped versus what people thought would help so our well-being research centers quite well known now in the HR space for pushing a basic but very important argument a lot of the benefits and programs that you're referring to are individual options mindfulness apps you name it and those are good and by all means continue them but you're right you're typically
a pickup problem so a selection bias and you actually uses them and typically people who don't need them the most who actually use them and people who would benefit a lot from them are not using them and so we find that there's mixed evidence on those sort of more individualistic interventions and then others let yoga and others are fantastic but you cannot yoga your way out of more structural issues so if you're underpaying people offering yoga classes not going to help them if
there's bullying in the in a company you're not going to yoga your way out of that if the CEO is not setting the right tone or or or or a culture that generally cares about people it's like it's not yoga or mindfulness apps that's going to there's just too much work and you're stressing people out because of overwork don't ask them to then also in the office of the yoga on top of it while they're stressed out and then it's ways of working and so we've made a lot of claims and evidence
and research on the fact that we've got to look a bit more broadly and so then and then we've even
Done a huge systematic lecture review around what interventions actually work...
how to generate more sense of belonging how to improve the impact of people feeling they bring paid fairly etc etc and there's a lot there we've got a whole playbook that we've put out where we summarize and highlight about five or six studies for each driver worked with myself being out about four thousand papers that we've analysed a rank order we've called the playbook the interventions playbook and it's published by the work well being movement and
partnership with indeed and so that's out there and no charge free free to use for everybody
“but I think you're going to be asking me so what actually works like give me examples and here”
I'm going to I want to give you one because as an economist I do feel a large incentive do matter so how much you pay people does matter especially at the bottom of the pay scale and so pay people living wage for crying that loud and particularly so and context reference I had the context dependent places like Los Angeles or New York where the cost of living is so high but and here this is really important it's not just how much you pay people it's also how you pay
people like I make a difference in terms of how they're made to feel while at work which is definition of work this well being and so if you look at just we've compared actually colleagues of mine Andrew Clark and others have looked at similar pay packages overall on the annual basis but those it would just be straightforward salaries versus those that are a combination of salary plus variable pay that is for example a group bonus or actually join equity schemes where
“you become so however small it might be like cool when they're of the company during anization”
and it helps raise the purpose it helps raise a number of elements run how you feel engaged in a sense of agency and whether at the organization cares about you as a person and if you are a part however small owner of the organization that's a real change in the way you view it the organization to begin with then no one becomes a transactional thing but much more one where we're all in the same boat and we are not just a stakeholder role so the shareholder and that's
really really critical it's the first thing to really urge people as to think beyond just the individual
if if there's a workplace well being problem in your organization don't put the responsibility all on the individual it's probably if not more than half of the various workers will be probably due to the environment of the organization and work on that and that could range from pay to setting a culture belonging and so on and so forth and there's ample evidence for types of
“interventions that work on each front I love that I'm so glad that that's available we should”
link to that in the resources as well please be great for people to dive into that absolutely kind of sure and it's easy accessible it's just like bullet points suggestions and a lot of these interventions will already already been some of them you'll have in your workplace already some might inspire to do better and so it's a real resource I wanted to ask you a question about page one two four of your book figure six two you talk about the determinants of work well being
what people think versus reality walk us through what we think makes a work base have better well being versus what actually makes a difference this is one of the big insights generally in the study of workplace well being but also coming through the big crowds or study within
the where we've got over 25 million workers 250 million data points by now and counting
where we've looked at how people feel at work and why they feel the way to do it work and we've done a little cute test which is we you ran a survey where we ask people so what do you think makes you happy it work what drives your workplace well being it what comes through is pay and flexibility is what people would put on top in terms of what they think makes them happy it work but when you actually run the analyses of what actually explains
differences in job satisfaction for example work well being more generally you find that people hugely underestimate it the social elements a sense of belonging feeling like you're being treated as a person in your musician having friends at work and the Gallop engagement survey there's a nice one called do you have a best friend at work people laugh at it when they have to answer it
the reality is the answer to that question is most predictive of jobs of this function
wow anything else do you have a best friend at work exactly that's so good it is it absolutely is and so if we've now picked up in the indeed data and the Gallop engagement survey data but other more academic data sets people always and consistently underestimate the importance of our social capital in the workspace as the thing that is actually most all things matter but some things matter more than others and there's social capital in the workplace that is
way more predictive of how we end up feeling generally at work compared to other things now that's not to say that pay doesn't matter or flexibility don't matter in fact it's sort of more like half of middle of the pack in terms of the relative importance in driving workplace well being the people underestimate feeling like they belong having friends at work and feeling like the company
Cares about them as a person and I think that's really important in the HR sp...
saying people don't quit their jobs to leave their bosses where you could refrain as they don't leave their jobs they quit their teams and that's true think about it for whomever's listening think about this yourself when would you make the decision to leave the company when
when are you second hired a new large sticking it out is when you're not getting along with people
when your line manager is not treating you like a human being when you know and your friends that work that's when you actually start making the move to start thinking about going somewhere else more so than when the job is not that interesting it to you anymore or you feel like pay isn't all that fair but you can sort of live with it it's to social elements that trigger people's work as well being and their behaviors more than anything else no gloss no filter just stories spoken
without fear addiction is a disease I naturally looked upon as any other disease how did you come with a reckless father like me join me will job hard as I sit down every week with directors
actors musicians technicians and beyond you don't need to work with the biggest people in
the biggest sound to have great music I have gone through the sobsteady Hachika reach the pinnacle stung by the snake and I've fallen down again yeah I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work with kind of silence me I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave I'm gone but don't shut the mirror the show must go on listen to my weekly podcast the pooch of her show on the iHard video app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts come for the honesty stay for the fire
there's two things that that stood out to me one is when you realize that you need a best friend at work one of the biggest challenges I find is versus step you said flexibility and money
“which are both important as you said flexibility means working from home friendship generally means”
being in person and now with more people working from home versus being in person it's harder to
have a best friend on zoom what's that looking like for work plays well being do you believe that companies and people should want to be in person or the flexibility of being at home is actually outweighing having a best friend at work it's a classic he can all make answer on the one hand on the other hand but Jay I feel very strongly and passionately about precisely this question and I came up very strongly at the start of COVID which was March 2021 it really hit
and the lockdown started two three months in so we're talking mid 2020 the likes of Facebook and Twitter were saying brilliant people are working from home we don't see a drop of productivity that's the end of the office I really can work remotely and I came out strongly in the the UK newspapers coming out saying careful careful yes there's short-term benefits of the fully remote working from home approach no commute no cost of commute more flexibility you can take care of
XYZ and you can sort of work live balance and job craft a bit more but I said careful careful what you wish for because your social capital and your intellectual capital are capital's they
“need inflows because yours outflows all the time so you need to re-stock that stock of”
so capital stock of intellectual and social capital and so people were relying on the existing social intellectual capital they had but essentially that got undermind and about six months in or a year into the pandemic these calls for fully working remotely were starting to be dialed back and talk came around hybrid working and truth be told we owe a lot of this work by the way to to Nick Blum at Stanford colleague in the economics department who's done most research on this
it's now clear that we can have the best of both worlds we need to have a hybrid way of working where people can work part-time at home part-time in the office set it's looking like the best is three days office two days home but we need to do this cleverly it needs to be accorded it's slash smart and hybrid the worst thing that can happen Jay is half of your team in on Monday Tuesday and the other half on Thursday Friday because you're not building that social capital
“and essence of belonging that we know is so important same thing for intellectual capital you need to be”
having the sort of water cooler moments there's no point coming into the office if it's to be doing emails report writing or zoom calls again and so what does this mean it means that we need to
Have conversations within teams or units okay are we going to coordinate on b...
beginning of the week or midweek or the end of the week and what kind of tasks so we need to think throughout the week what are our tasks what are the synchronous and the asynchronous tasks what do we do together what do we do solo and to separate the tasks and to do the asynchronous task email writing report writing zoom calls at home and where is it's the client meetings the engagements
“to brainstorming sessions the interviews that happens together and so I think if we can nail”
hybrid working and then we'll have the best of both worlds we'll see improvements in productivity and improvements in well-being I agree with that we've done that too where we have flexibility in the
sense I mean I'm always as easy when I'm traveling team worked from home when I'm in LA the team
is in the office and that worked exceptionally well for us because we get enough together community time and the team has enough time to be productive at home or have flexibility and and I couldn't imagine being on a zoom call everyday with my whole team like I just couldn't imagine it and the amount of social capital you lose the connection the best for now that ideas some of these ideas that you've shared today the eating meals you know taking that from 50% up to 75% of our
meals every week to be with people the big advice right now of having a best friend at work I think
“for so long we've started to think work is work and life is life and I always like to remind”
people you spend at least eight to nine hours a day at work you're basically saying that a third of
your life it doesn't matter if I don't feel good there no and how satisfied we are with our job feeds into how satisfied we are with our lives so job satisfaction is a huge predictor of you've guessed it life satisfaction you don't check in to the office leaving your home life behind and you don't check out of the office leaving your work life behind and so the two are integrally connected but that's puts a lot of responsibility on duringization because how you treat
people their workplace well-being feeds into the larger society and there's a degree of separation of even three people away will have been touched by how you were made to feel coming back from the
office it's amazing studies by Nicholas Kristakis and James Fowler their book connectors are real
real recommendation where they essentially show that the way you drive home from the office the mood that you're in no well impact your wife your children and they'll pick up sentiment changes with the school friends of your children so there were three degrees of separation out will be impacted indirectly so people you don't even know they're well-being will be marginally impacted by how about how you're feeling so if you're driving home from work and a bad mood because
bullying for example in the office that's impacting not just a person who gets bullied the victim it impacts three degrees of separation out so when we're actually goes back to the fact that if only about a quarter of people actually feel good at work you're so much room for improvement within the workplace but this feeds into our societies and our communities
“big time did you find anything about what the fact is where around the toxic work culture,”
toxic work place you mentioned bullying a few times but did you have you done any research on that? Not specifically in in toxic workplaces as such what we have done obviously it's as the reversal like all the drivers of work was well-being then go into reverse people are stressed out not satisfied with your job find a little purpose in meeting the work they do if and are not happy day today if there's no belonging if there's no flexibility and there's no room
for job crafting if they're poorly paid etc etc etc. Is it possible to find a meaning and purpose in a job that is purely functional and repetitive to raising a good question but because we started by saying "God there's so much room for improvement here" but what's the upper limits? It's what you're really after is like can we make everybody happy at work all the time? Can we go to 100% if people saying four or five out of five in terms of say job satisfaction?
I think yes I know. I think yes we can do frankly we can do a lot better still and the way we notice is thanks to the large crowdsourced data within deed we know that even in tough industries in tough areas of the US for example in companies that are not necessarily known to be good workplaces will still find examples of warehouses, units where people feel good even within industries that are difficult say hamburger industry flipping burgers selling them you'll find
big differences and no naming and shaming but applauding our friends in and out burger and I know we're in Los Angeles that's a real shout out and so they're doing the same job as other hamburger
Chains and somehow and we've put in the book somehow workers are reporting ab...
worthless while being than another hamburger. No way that's cool and it shows it shows in the way they connect to people to smiles and their faces etc so it is possible so we can do a lot better than we're currently doing now back to the question of the hand can we raise everybody to like 100% all the time your original question was a bit more profound is like can we
“raise levels of purpose and meaning can we and there I think it's a that's a higher bar to”
clear in and out this an amazing job at raising workers while being in a job that is
difficult otherwise so they connect with clients there's camaraderie between workers etc they do whole thing a whole of things right but when you say actual high purpose and meaning I think of the notion of being in flow so consumed and within the work you're doing you're losing track of time you don't even think about being happier not you're sort of obsessed with what you're doing and so the kind of people at you and me or musicians or mathematicians get into a state of flow
but I think that's not a given for everybody and we're very fortunate to found our niche where we can unleash our talents and be in a state of flow because we're so engaged in the significance of what we're doing and we find it purposeful and meaningful that we think about nothing else and
“the whole notion of working life become yeah that I think is not realistic for the majority or”
the vast majority of people yeah and I really appreciate your in and out example because that's that's
great that and also I've always loved Amy Riznuski study from Yale of the hospital cleaners
and how half of them sort themselves as cleaners and the other sort themselves as healers because of job craft exactly that they really believe that a clean hospital was integral to the healing journey of the patient so so I think you are right it is possible of course flow stay and everything else you know they're sent careers and maybe not everyone wants that needs that is searching for that but it is good to know that we can do so much better we can and
there are jobs that externally seem repetitive and functional and yet there are places that have made them enjoyable because I think a lot of people think oh yeah well I'm an ex and I don't need
“my job to be meaningful it will never be meaningful and the truth is it will be better for”
your health if it is it will be better for your well being absolutely if you feel that work is a little bit meaningful even if you're not inflow that's the goal absolutely I want to ask you about what work life balance actually is because I think lots of the time we think when we hear the word work life balance the word balance in and of itself makes us feel equal and we all spend at least five days at work and only have two days off a week so it's already not equal so that
with the evenings the work and evenings yeah the work they evenings yeah this you're asking a tough question and I know lots of there's people out there who will vehemently go after oh work life balance overrated what have you Jeff Bezos for example Amazon I are a member seeing a clip of him saying oh work life balance if you're in a state of flow at work it will feed positive into life and it should also flow over into one another and I agree with them it is since for
entrepreneurs like him like you like me really loving what I'm doing with that the two flow into one another but I think the vast majority reflecting to the discussion we just had it is a bit more transactional and we do have to respect work life balance and we cannot expect as leaders as managers as entrepreneurs that everybody the staff the team members are necessarily looking to be fully engaged all day all night weekends included engaged with work um and and I think
we got to be honest about this and we cannot expect the same of of everybody and so I I actually feel strongly that most people do care a lot about work life balance and being able to check out and not have to think it might work like you and I will typically do after say five or six piano and I think we got to respect that yeah I think we have to respect that an employee should
never have to work as hard as the owner and that the member of staff will never have to be as strategic
as the founder it just isn't fair it doesn't work no and yet founders or senior leaders expect no less of their team and as we refer to earlier they themselves have given up on a number or trade it off a whole host of things possibly their own health, mental and physical to be where they are and taking the risk that they are taking as entrepreneurs or senior leaders and so it's hard for them to raise the empathy to realize that a majority of people are not CEOs and are not
meant to be CEOs I think again we perhaps respect that and have the wisdom to take a bit of distance
Out of our own mental frames and understand that we're all a bit different ye...
so illuminating talking to you I'm wondering what have I not asked you the you wish I had well maybe one last thing or work with spulping sadly I've Georgian I've spent and teams I've
“spent a lot of time developing out the business case and I think that's obviously what the”
book that ultimately works its way towards is giving the best evidence to date on how we feel it
work matters for how you perform it work whether you stay at work or whether the work is well track talent in the first place and those are all the benefits of workplace well being but if you then actually look at the organization level and you look at whatever it might cost organizations to raise well being or do the right thing and by the way some of these interventions don't cost the earth at all being a good boss opening up a mental health, culture and and
sensible longing and developing a care community doesn't need to cost anything it's by setting the right example of the right leadership whatever companies can do to improve workplace well being it pays and so we've then shown leveraging the indeed crowdsourced data for
“all the U.S. listed companies on the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange that that we link”
their work well being score because we have data from behind the back of their CHROs we've
we've pulsed and the crowdsourced 25 million workers around the U.S. and so we know that the levels
of workplace well being these companies correlate and predict very strongly their quarterly financials and if you were to invest solely based on workplace well being you'd find that you out perform the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ and so on and so forth we've now been doing this since 2020 and so that's obviously that's gotten the attention of the business world at NASDAQ business case right there for you. I love it yeah and thank you so much we end every on purpose episode
with the final five each question has to be answered in one word to one sentence so yeah these are your final five the first question is what is the best well-being advice you've ever
“had received if you want to move for ill-being to well-being change focus from eye to eye I like that”
literally and empirically that's great a question number two what's the worst well-being advice you've ever had received I'm gonna upset some of my colleagues flow I think it's it's only a few people who will actually achieve the state of flow and I find it annoying and disrespectful of majority of people to think that that is to be as far too whereas they may not wish it and have
never achieved it. Question number three if you are speaking to a room of a hundred CEOs and leaders
right now what would be your number one piece of advice for them read why work for swallowing matters please seriously question number four if you are speaking to a group of employees team members standing in front of you right now what would be advice to them slam why work for swallowing matters when you're CEOs that's today I'm not immensely fifth and final question we asked this to every guest who's ever been on the show if you could create one law that everyone in the
world had to follow what would it be if there's a law that I would love to really implement which I would think have short term and positive consequences immediately a four-day work week it's been since Henry Ford almost a hundred years ago that we've made the weekend from into two days from a Sunday to also include a Saturday it's high time to try and think about giving us off another half a day or a day but we would have to do it all together the entire
US or the entire world we have to come together and coordinate on this and doing so we'll make the future work more exciting for youngsters to know that the gains of productivity will also be given back in time so you're saying just a hundred years ago we were working six-day weeks yeah so it's Henry Ford who realized that caring for their people for his employees and their health and they're well-being meant that he couldn't keep squeezing them six days a week and so he's
the one so obviously Sunday was Sunday because of religious reasons and even that was a heart fault fight and then so the Saturday came up in fact the Saturday was Henry Ford but you know for example my grandparents still had to work the Saturday mornings and says only in the 1950s that that we extend it the weekend to not just be the Sunday and the Saturday afternoon but also the Saturday morning included but we're talking the 1930s 40s 50s when we got the weekend and yet
we've become five times more productive in the century that followed and yet we're still working the old fashioned five day work week but our brains are still the old monkey brains or the hunter-gatherer brains I should say and yet they're having to process so much more so people are surprised that we're having all these burnouts and people are unhappy and stressed out and so I think I've lost faith in the fact that these gains and productivity get redistributed to people
Because most of the gains productivity go to shareholders and and happy few I...
think that one week we could make the future work more exciting and have the gains of productivity
“redistributed in terms not just of trying to give back money redistributed but also give back”
time which ultimately these are most precious commodity and so I do think it's high time frankly
to start thinking about a shorter work week and if we do that then it will make the future work plus anxious, less work, where is some for for use today? Really great answer.
Everyone the book is called "Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters" decides by and employee happiness
“and organizational performance, Jan and Danielle Denev Jan honestly this has been certainly”
illuminating conversation I find it so insightful to sit and talk to you about these things I
love the way you think about them and I'm so glad you're doing this work it's massively
needed and I know I'll be given this to every leader I know for sure so thank you so much for
“coming all the way from Oxford to be here with us and I'm really grateful for you and your work thank”
you so much. Thank you Jane thank you for everything you do the Saminating your own nuggets it was them and helps spread those of others thank you. If you love this episode you love my conversation with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to tap into your creative potential and the number one thing people get wrong about success the best people in your life will be people who see potential in you that you didn't see in yourself and I often wonder no gloss no filter just stories
spoken without fear. Boston who is not generous cannot be an artist the world would be at peace only when it is ruled by points and flaws for it. Listen to my weekly podcast the Pooja of her show on the iHard Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast come for the honest stay for the fire this is an iHard podcast guaranteed human
