KF #16. Drives Engagement Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome!

Michael Norton
Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book and rituals. Could you kick us off by sharing one of the most important or meaningful or fun rituals for you personally and what makes it special for you?

Michael Norton
One of the weird or most specific idiosyncratic ones in my family is that we do, we started this during COVID, during the pandemic when joy was in short supply, I guess I would say. And so, we decided that we would start sticking candles in foods other than cakes. And so, we have a tradition now of happy meatloaf to you where we sing, we put candles in meatloaf and sing the happy birthday song to the meatloaf, and then blow out the candles and then have the meatloaf.

And it’s, on the one hand, completely ridiculous. On the other hand, it’s completely ridiculous we put candles in cakes also, it’s just that we’re used to it. So, for me, it’s just an example of how random rituals really are. Even the ones we’re used to, when you unpack them, turn out to be often pretty strange in their own right.

Pete Mockaitis
But what I love about that is, yes, it’s weird and it’s idiosyncratic and all that, but it does, I think there’s more joy, there’s more connection, there’s more family fun in the food experience by doing that. So why the heck not? Just go ahead and do that.

Michael Norton
This is one of these things that many, many rituals can bring much more emotion to things than, otherwise, we can get out of them. And I think that’s kind of a gift, actually, of rituals is that they can elevate things from boring to something more meaningful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s fun, now you got me thinking about family food times and whenever I make something and the kids ask, “Oh, what’s in it?” I think they know what’s going to come. I’ll mention a few of the ingredients, but then I’ll take on sort of a super sweet tone of voice, I’ll say, “But you know what the most important ingredient of all is?” And they’re very much onto those, they’ll say, “Love.” And I don’t know, it’s just fun. It’s just fun, so we do it.

Michael Norton
The other day I made a “joke” that I thought was funny, and my 9-year-old daughter, she didn’t react, she was silent. And so, I said, “You know, that was supposed to be a joke.” And she said, here’s how she did it. She paused and said, “Sadly, I know.” That was the biggest burn maybe of my life from that. So, I feel your pain on they know what’s coming and they’re not always super impressed, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, Michael, rituals are kind of fun. They’re kind of nifty, but could you share with us, what makes them a potentially valuable, important things for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Norton
Yeah, I think that when you look at people’s work lives, what we found was, so one of the things we did with rituals is we started in a couple of domains like grief. And then we would talk to people and they would say, “Oh, but have you looked at it in this domain, like marriages? Have you looked at it in families? Have you looked at it?” And, eventually, of course, “Have you looked at these at work?”

And one of the things we found was that rituals really pattern our entire workday because, starting at home, actually, because we have our morning ritual that we do with our coffee and the things we read and the people. Many people have stuff they do on their commute. That’s kind of a ritual that they do every single time.

Then you have something when you get to your desk. Often people have a thing that they do every morning. Then there’s lunch, they have a thing that they do. Then there’s team meetings and different teams have different rituals. Then at the end of the day, you close stuff down to leave. Then when you get home, you’ve got something to kind of leave work behind and get back into your life mode.

And so, you just have, I’m speaking quickly because all of these we’ve looked at, but you can just see how they, we think of rituals as these weddings or something, kind of they happen very rarely, but we see, really, that they’re embedded in our lives at home and at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so they happen, sure. They are ever-present. And you make a distinction between a ritual and a habit. What is that distinction?

Michael Norton
Can I ask you a ridiculous question?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m listening.

Michael Norton
Do you, in the morning, brush your teeth first and then shower, or do you shower and then brush your teeth?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I shower and brush my teeth.

Michael Norton
You’re saying that as though it’s obvious.

Pete Mockaitis
More specifically, I dip into cold water and then brush my teeth while warming up with hot water simultaneously because it was cold in that cold water.

Michael Norton
Interesting. And how would you feel if tomorrow I said, “Change that up. Change the order”? Can you do the toothbrush first?

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, we could. It just feels disappointing.

Michael Norton
So, the first question, oddly enough, about half of people brush first and then shower, and the other half shower and then brush, this is true like all over the world, so humans haven’t decided what the right order is. But the more important question to your question about habits versus rituals is about half of people, if I say, “Do you mind switching the order tomorrow?” they say, “Sure, absolutely. No problem.”

And about half of people say something like, “I don’t want to. It would feel weird,” you said disappointing, “I have some negative emotion around changing the order.” And for me, I mean, those are the simplest behaviors we engage in, but you can see, for some people, brushing their teeth and showering, it’s like a habit, “You know, I have to do these six things in the morning and I can check them off in any order. It doesn’t matter to me.”

And for other people, even these silly innocuous behaviors, have something in them, some emotion in them that makes them quite different from just a boring habit because we care about what order they’re done in. And when we do it in the right order, people say, “I feel ready to face the day.” And when they do it in the wrong order, they say, “I’ll feel weird all day.”

So, rituals, you know, people in robes with candles is further out on the continuum. But even with tooth brushing and showering, you can see how the same behaviors, for some people, they’re kind of black and white, “Let’s get them done.” And for other people, they get imbued with something more, like putting candles on meatloaf imbues it with something more.

And one thing that I like about the shower and toothbrush thing is you can see it’s not just that rituals are good. Rituals provoke emotion in us, which can be very positive, but sometimes very negative as well. So, it’s almost like a risk-reward. If you have a morning ritual, if you do it the way you like, you feel great, but you run the risk of, you know, your kid comes in and interrupts you, and now you can’t do it the way you like, and now you feel worse than you would have if you never had the ritual to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a helpful distinction. There are some emotional stakes in the world of ritual. Okay. And tell me, any other surprises you’ve learned as you were studying this in depth?

Michael Norton
I asked people, so if something bad happens and you have a superstition and you say, “Knock on wood,” how many times do you knock?”

Pete Mockaitis
About two-ish?

Michael Norton
Two-ish. So, about half of people knock twice and half knock three times, and they don’t know why. They don’t know when it started. They get very upset with each other. I can do it in a classroom and see half of them do it one way, half do the other way. They look disgusted at the other people, like, “What is wrong? What kind of a person would only knock twice instead of three times?”

And if you’re a three-knock person, and someone knocks twice, you have this potential energy of you’ve got to have the third knock or everything’s going to go really wrongly. And this is, again, this idea that, first off, it’s just knocking on a thing. We knock on things all the time and we don’t worry about how many times we knock, but it gets imbued with a crazy amount of emotion and meaning that I actually feel like I’m warding off bad things happening to me and my loved ones if I knock the right number of times.

And that’s what’s, to me, really so surprising about it is that, again, like brushing your teeth, knocking on a table, they’re so mundane. They’re so, in a sense, unimportant. Well, dentists would say brushing your teeth is very important, but in the grand scheme. But they provoke this insane amount of emotion, feeling good, feeling bad, with knocking on wood, feeling angry at other people for doing it “wrong” so that it constantly surprised, honestly, in all the work that we did, and how it’s often the small things that provoke an enormous amount of emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is surprising. And I’m intrigued, when it comes to rituals and work, you opened the book sharing tales of writers Flannery O’Connor and Maya Angelou with their rituals. How might we get some of the reward side of these rituals and more of it?

Michael Norton
You can spend, basically, a day of your life, if you want, Googling a celebrity’s name and the word ritual. Any athlete, any musician, any politician, just type their name and then type ritual, and it is astonishing how many of these people have some kind of ritual that they do at some point during their day or during their life. And they’re very elaborate and they’re very idiosyncratic.

And so, one of my favorites is Rafael Nadal, who has, if you are a tennis fan, you already know where I’m going. Before every serve, he has a very elaborate thing that he does with his forehead and his wristbands and everything. And he even, it’s been described as he picks his wedgie before every single serve. So, he’s got very elaborate sort of thing.

And when you ask him, “Why do you do that? Would you be okay without it?” he will say, “Yeah, no, of course, I could still serve without it. But when I do it, I feel ready.” And I think that’s really, really key because it’s not that…well, there’s two things. One is, if he doesn’t do it, he’s still Rafael Nadal, one of the greatest tennis players ever.

The other thing is, if I copy his ritual, I still stink. Unfortunately, rituals aren’t magical, where somehow if I turn around three times, I get to be amazing. That’s not how they work. But what they can do, again, is change how we’re feeling. And he’s telling us that he’s feeling nervous about the next serve. And this ritual that he’s come up with makes him feel like he’s in the zone and ready to go.

And we see people using those kinds of rituals, even every famous person, as I said, but also people just in their everyday lives. And one of the most common ones that people will say, if I say, “Have you ever done anything before a meeting or before a big talk or you had to present to the whole team?” and people say, “You know what, I do actually do something.”

And I say, “Well, what do you do?” And they kind of lean in kind of like they’re conspiratorially, and they say, “Well, I go into the bathroom and I check under the stalls to make sure nobody else is there. And then I stand in front of the sink and look at myself in the mirror and tell myself, ‘You can do this.’”

And I say, “You’re like the ninth person today to tell me that you do that.” So, people think it’s very weird to do that. And yet it’s incredibly common in our, again, everyday lives that people do something when they’re feeling nervous to help them feel subjectively like, “I’m ready to go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. But that specific ritual of going to the bathroom, making sure it’s empty, and then checking, looking at yourself in the mirror and the pep talk is something you’re hearing again and again.

Michael Norton
That’s right. And what I love is it’s not like it’s in some ancient text, and it’s been happening for thousands of years. For example, there weren’t mirrors at one time, so you couldn’t do it even if you wanted to.

But people often develop independently the same kinds of rituals. Because if you think what they’re doing, you need privacy in order to do this, to psych yourself up, because you’re going to talk to yourself sometimes. And the place to do it is in the bathroom rather than in the lunch room or something like that.

So, we’re pretty creative when we come up with rituals, like picking your wedgie also is not in ancient text as far as I know. But then once we have them in place, they’re our go-to. And we really try to do the same thing every time when we’re feeling nervous before something big.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, does it work? Will we give a better speech if we give ourselves the pep talk or we pick a better serve if we pick the wedgie?

Michael Norton
This is, mean, the sad thing is, so when we started studying rituals, we did have the hope that, somehow, we would discover some magical sequence that humans could engage in that actually would make them different people. You know, that somehow if you clapped 19 times, you had the strength of, something like that. And, unfortunately, again, that’s not what we see there. They’re not magical.

But what I teach undergraduates, many of them are really gifted athletes who, by the way, all have their own pre-performance rituals as well. And one of the things that they say is that when they do their ritual, they’ll often use the phrase, “It kind of helps me get out of my own way, that my thoughts and nervousness are getting in my way of performing the way I know I can perform, and making me actually mess up in a sense. Like, I’m not in the zone, I’m not ready to go.”

And so, I see these rituals, it’s not so much that they make us magically better, although I wish they did. It’s that sometimes they’re actually just allowing us to perform at the best level that we’re capable of. And that, in and of itself, is a useful tool to have. For me, even if rituals didn’t affect performance at all, one reason they’re so ubiquitous is because they’re still working in the sense that they’re helping us psychologically deal with something that’s very difficult to deal with.

And we often see that with rituals, is that they work not so much that they change something dramatic in the world, it’s that they change something dramatic within ourselves. And that’s very, very useful for humans in all sorts of different situations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, if I can go from, I don’t know, average level of Pete Mockaitis, sharpness, creativity, enthusiasm, empathy, whatever, whatever I’m trying to drum up to, you know, near peak levels relatively quickly with a ritual, that sounds super handy. So, let’s go for it.

Well, now you got me thinking about Tony Robbins and Power Moves, and some of that “Rah! Rah!” I guess that’s just one of many flavors of ritual that some folks may engage in to shift their internal state to something that’s helpful for what’s ahead of them.

Michael Norton
That’s right. And we do see, we’ve looked both at the level of the individual, “What do I do when I need some emotion that I’m not having?” And we’ve also looked at the level of the team or the group and see whether those are the same or different.

So, for example, I will sometimes have, like an audience will stand up and I’ll show some things on the board, like clap twice, stomp three times, clap six times, stomp six times, etc. And I just kind of show it to them and see what they do. And what audiences do is they start clapping and stomping and they very quickly sync up with each other.

So, they’re all stomping, I didn’t tell them to sync up, but they all sync up. So, by the end, they’re really, really in unison, everybody doing the same thing. And when we asked afterward, “How close do you feel to these people?” they say, “I feel closer than I did before.” So, we can a little bit engineer via group rituals, something that changes how we feel about the group.

But the other thing that’s important, again, it’s the risk-reward thing with rituals, that’s true that it can make us feel connected to people like us. But if I have people who do the ritual on purpose wrong, so everyone else is stomping and I’m still clapping really loudly, people are enraged at the person because they say, “You’re doing it wrong.”

And so, at the same time that they’re helping us sometimes bond together with people, they’re also making us dislike people who are doing it differently from us. And it’s this fine line between, if I’m doing a ritual or we’re doing a ritual and we think it’s good, that’s terrific. But if we start to think that our ritual is right, is correct, that’s where we start to see, “Well, now if we’re correct, anybody else doing anything different is incorrect.” So, we’re not just good. It’s that they’re bad.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fascinating. It reminds me of some of Bob Cialdini’s work with regard to troops marching in unison and formation, it has an impact, or siblings or friends doing a song dance piece that’s coordinated, it has a similar uniting impact.

And you used the word enraged. It’s so funny because I have had the experience of like I’m in church, right? And someone is praying the prayers way slower or way faster than the collective, and I find that irritating. And then I’m like, “Hey, Pete, we’re in church. We’re doing a good thing. Maybe, like, just try to be patient with it,” you know.

But so, I find that encouraging. It’s like, “Okay, that is a common human phenomenon. When the vast majority of people are doing a thing in unison and someone is deviating, it’s irksome.”

Michael Norton
George Carlin had this line where he was talking about driving a car, and he said, “Anyone going slower than you is a moron. And anyone going faster than you is a maniac.” And I think, unfortunately, it’s still true that we feel that way about people doing things differently than we’re doing them.

But when you add this ritual element, you’re talking about religious rituals, but even with clapping and stomping in a classroom, we do see that people start to say, “We’re doing it right, you’re doing it wrong. And I don’t like you. I don’t like what you’re doing over there.”

Even though I’m aware, it’s fine. As you said, they’re praying. It’s not that they’re disrupting everybody on purpose or something like that, but we have it in us to say, “No, no, this is the way that we do this. Everybody should agree on this is exactly how we’re going to get this done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s eye-opening in and of itself in terms of human nature and what’s inside us. I’d love to hear, since you’ve talked to so many people about their rituals, we’ve heard a common ritual associated with doing a speech or presentation. What are some useful rituals for we’re about to hunker down and enter into some productive deep work focus mode?

Michael Norton
So, again, there’s the individual level, and then there’s the if we have to do it on a team. We’ve done lots of research on the team dynamics on how to think about rituals and how they affect teams. And one of the things, so if I go to a company and I’m supposed to be some ritual guru or whatever I’m supposed to be, even though I’m not, what often companies want is, “Can I give them kind of an out-of-the-box ritual that they can have all their employees do that will somehow make the employees really happy and everybody likes it?”

And if you’ve ever been in a company where they tried to do that, your number one reaction is not, “I love this.” It’s, “Why do I have to do this stupid thing?” It’s like everyone’s had a manager who watches TED Talks over the weekend, and then comes in and demands that you do whatever the TED Talk told them to do.

So, there’s this sense that what organizations want is, it’s a pejorative word, but like a cookie cutter ritual, and that can lead to real reactance from folks and from teams. And so, what I do instead is I encourage people and their teams to think about what they’re already doing, “So, what are things that your team does that other teams don’t do that are kind of idiosyncratic to you that are meaningful to you?”

And teams will have all kinds of different things. Once they start to think about it, inside jokes are a good example, actually, that we have this little ritual where, you know, we always say this one thing. Those are the kinds of rituals that are already having an emotional impact on us. We see that.

We see that teams at work that report having these rituals actually report having more meaning in their work, that there’s some transfer between this meaning of this ritual that we’re sharing and the meaning of the work that we’re all doing together. And so, lots and lots of examples.

One of my favorite examples of a team ritual actually happened again during the pandemic when people were working from home. This team that had daily meetings and had had them for years had to go remote. So now, of course, they’re all on Zoom with little faces on the screen. And what they started to do was, at the beginning of every meeting, everyone would click the emoji that reflected how they were feeling.

And so, you would look at this screen with 20 faces and you could quickly see kind of the average, sort of extracted from emojis, but also see who’s doing well and who’s not doing that well, “Maybe I should follow up with them later.” And it became a ritual at the beginning of every meeting.

And what was fascinating to me is they had never done anything like that when they used to meet in person. So, there was no going around the table and saying how you’re feeling, because you can see how different that is. It’d be weird to make everyone at the table, one by one, go around and say, “I’m struggling today.” That’s not typically something we do at work.

So, even though remote work distances us from people, this team used it actually as a way to use the technology to bring them closer together via something silly, like clicking emojis. And so, the randomness again of the things that people come up with on their teams, that very quickly become very meaningful to them, where if someone starts to start the meeting without the emojis, people will stop them and say, “No, no, no, wait, we have to do the emojis first and then we can start the meeting.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michael, it’s interesting, you say going around and saying how you’re feeling is not typical of meeting behavior, but I have been in some workplaces where they do that. They call it check-in and that’s come up a couple of times with the podcast.

And so, in a way, that’s kind of intriguing how a ritual that emerges in one context can really serve as an inspiration for, like, when they do go back to the office, like, “Hey, you know what, it’s like, it feels like we’re missing something. Well, this is, maybe feels out there to us, but let’s give it a shot in person,” and away you go.

Michael Norton
And my guess is, I don’t have the data just to be clear, but my guess is that the average report when you’re doing it in person one by one is more positive than the average report if you’re clicking emojis. Because it’s much harder as a person in a meeting to say, “I’m really struggling today.”

People do, of course, but it’s a bigger barrier. So, it is this question of, “How do we do a check-in in a way where people feel that they’ve been heard and also that they’re able to really share how they’re really feeling?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Okay. Well, lay some more on us, favorite rituals that seem to really be impactful for folks at work.

Michael Norton
Very, very simple one, and this will be no surprise, is how teams deal with lunch. Lunch at work is a funny thing because we have to eat lunch. We usually eat it, in the US anyway, we usually eat around noon.

And other than that, what we do and how we do lunch is really up to us. So, you can go and get something and eat it in your cubicle by yourself and never talk to anybody. Or you can, you know, go out to a 300-person restaurant. You can do whatever you feel like doing.

But what we see teams doing, and they report it when we survey them, is they often have something they do at lunch that makes lunch just a little bit, back to our earlier conversation, a little bit more emotional, a little bit more meaningful, not just putting food in our faces because we need caloric intake.

And just as an example, one team, it’s a five-person team, they would, every day of the week, was one person brought lunch for everybody else. So, you do it on Monday and then I do it on Tuesday. And in the end, what they’re doing is everybody’s eating lunch every day. That’s not that interesting.

But if you think of what they’re signaling with that ritual, it’s that on one day a week, I’m taking care of everybody else on the team. And every other day of the week, the team is taking care of me. It’s a very strong signal.

And this team felt it was very important to be not just like automatons at work, but human beings. And you can see how their ritual that they came up with really, actually, tries to reinforce this idea that we care about each other. It’s not just that we’re here to punch the clock.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Well, tell me, Michael, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Norton
I guess I would say, if you think of how to kind of incorporate rituals, I think people often are thinking, you know, “Should I add something to my life to make it more ritualistic?” And the idea, of course, is not that the more rituals you add, the better your life is. I can get messy very quickly.

But what I do encourage people to do is kind of take almost an audit of your current rituals and see when you’re doing them and how you’re doing them. You can think of family dinner, what do you do? You can think of you and your spouse, do you have little things that you’ve been doing for years? Your teams at work, even what you do in the morning.

And just notice, actually, all the places that you have these little behaviors that you’ve been doing for a long time that are meaningful to you. And even if you don’t add new ones, appreciate those ones a little bit more so the next time you do it, you’re really owning it as, “Oh, we’re doing our silly thing we do when we have dinner every night. We’re doing it again. This is our family thing that we do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I like that a lot, and I think you can bring savoring to so many things and enhance them.

Michael Norton
Love that.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember, I was at a class and someone talked, we were talking about rituals or things they really appreciate. This man talked about how he savors the candy, if I’m saying it right, Ferrero Rocher, you know, those little balls with the crunch.

Michael Norton
My daughter loves them.

Pete Mockaitis
And he described it with such detail and sensory language, it’s like, “Is this person a poet?” And it really struck me, it’s like, “You could do that to anything, savoring the warm water or scent of soap on your hands you wash them.” And I think it speaks to what you brought up at the beginning, the difference between a habit and a ritual, “Yeah, I wash my hands,” or it’s like, “Ooh, I savor the multi-sensory experience of hand washing.”

Michael Norton
One of my favorite examples on savoring is Oreos. So, Oreos are just a cookie like any other cookie and, yet, there’s an entire culture around eating Oreos, which is, “Do you twist them apart or not? Do you lick the filling out first?” And people have very strong preferences about this. If you go online, you’ll see, actually, there are serious debates about the correct way to eat an Oreo.

From my standpoint, it’s not that there’s a correct way. It’s that you’re taking a cookie, which is a nice thing to eat, and you’re turning it into something a little more interesting. It’s got a little, to your point, a little more in there because, “You know what, I’ve been dunking it this way for 20 years. And, by the way, my mom used to dunk it this way as well.” So, you get these really strong emotional reactions on, as you said, things like eating something or washing your hands.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Thank you. All right. Well, let’s hear now about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Michael Norton
I heard a quote a few years ago, “Fame is a mask that eats at the soul.” And I think of it, not that I’m a famous person, but all of us in life, we move forward in our job and we start to feel like we’re important. And so, it’s fame, it’s going to give us, it’s like importance is a mask that eats at the soul.

And I think, and I should say, and also my tendency to, as I move forward in my career, start to think that people are treating me a certain way because I’m amazing, instead of because I’m their boss is a very common mistake that people make. And it does change who you are.

So, I think a lot about, and I can see people the world where fame or importance kind of changes their soul a little bit. And I’m always on the lookout in myself and in the people I love, we check each other to make sure that we’re still staying true to ourselves even if we got a big promotion or we get famous or whatever it might be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michael, after this conversation, you’re slightly more famous in the world. So, I hope your soul doesn’t get any nibbles from this conversation.

Michael Norton
Well, I was at zero, so anything is going to bump me up past my current level.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michael Norton
I completely love this study. Chris Hsee, who’s at the University of Chicago, the paper is called “Overworking.” And he sets up this thing in the lab where you can do two things. You can watch funny videos, or you can do a really boring task and get a Hershey’s Kiss. And you can do this for a while.

So, you can always choose to watch a video or you can choose to work in order to get paid with a Hershey’s Kiss. So, he’s basically setting up life, which is you can work for future rewards or you can goof around right now.

And the thing that he finds is what people do is they overwork, meaning, he’ll say, “The only Hershey’s Kisses you can eat are the ones that you eat. You can’t take any with you,” which, again, is a metaphor for life, like you can’t take it with you. But what he finds is people can’t stop working. They just keep accumulating Hershey’s Kisses, and there’s this giant stack of them.

And then when the thing is over, they try to eat as many as they can. They don’t feel good about it because they’re eating too many, and they leave them behind. And I love, obviously, the metaphor that he has in that thing, which is we really get stuck sometimes in there’s some currency that we’re earning, often it’s money, but it could be respect or fame or anything like that.

And we become so consumed with getting more of it that we forget everything else about life that might be an enjoyable kind of thing, like our families and our hobbies and things like that. So, I think of that very, very frequently. One, I just love the elegance of the design and also the funniness that it’s Hershey’s Kisses. And it really relates to this fundamental human question about how we’re managing our well-being and our time here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Michael Norton
My favorite book is The Gift by Lewis Hyde. And it’s a book about gift giving across kind of the human lifespan, meaning as long as humans have been around, we’ve been giving gifts to each other. And so, he really looks to see what’s the role of gifts in human life. And they play an incredible amount of roles in everything, in our relationships, at work, at home, all of these little gifts that we’re giving.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Michael Norton
That would be, I guess the tool, not quite a tool, but my lab group. So, we have some faculty, some PhD students, some postdocs, some undergraduates, we meet and we brainstorm. And social science really is about trying to notice things in the world that nobody has noticed, and then trying to study them. And the only way to do that is to use a bunch of brains.

Yes, you could sit in your office by yourself and try to come up with all the ideas, but, really, when you’re thinking about social life, social brainstorming is the way to get it done. So, I couldn’t do any of the things that I do without the luxury of using all these other smart brains that are around me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Michael Norton
I think one thing that people have told me is that when someone says something like they’re struggling with something in their life, having a problem at work. And then they say something like, “I know it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, you know, there’s wars happening and things like that.” We have a very common instinct to do that, to downplay our own problems.

And I think one of the things that I always say to people is, “Whether that’s true or not doesn’t help you with your own problem. It’s still your problem and it’s still very important to you or we wouldn’t be talking about it.” So, let’s not judge our problems against other people’s problems to determine how important they are. Let’s deal with them together because they’re problems that are affecting you and we’d like to do something about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Michael Norton
It’s very difficult to remember. It’s MichaelNorton.com. It’s a very boring website, I’ll say, but there’s one part on it that is a quiz. It’s a rituals quiz. And it doesn’t take that long, but we ask you questions about rituals in different parts of your life. And then we give you a little feedback on how you’re doing and where you might think differently about it. And it’s fun to do with your spouse or partner as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Norton
I would think about being intentional in meetings, actually, like thinking about what the beginning of a meeting is supposed to do and what the end of a meeting is supposed to do instead of just starting and just trailing off at the end. Really think, it could be a ritual, obviously, that you do at the beginning and end.

But even more, I think, just kind of making the meeting about something, and then at the end summarizing what the meeting was about so we don’t just feel like we’re sleepwalking through everything all day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, thank you.

Michael Norton
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Zach, welcome!

Zach Mercurio
Thanks, Pete. It’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your work on a very important topic, and I’ll kick it off by just getting some of the goods. Can you share with us a particularly surprising and fascinating thing you’ve learned about us humans as you’ve done your research and put together your book, The Power of Mattering.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, there’s this notion that we, as people, should be valued once we add value. So, it shows up everywhere, right? Like, we get a good grade, we get rewarded, or we add value at work and we get recognized. And so, we wait for people to add value for them to be valued and to value them.

But what we’ve discovered is that the opposite is actually psychologically true. People need to be valued in order to add value. We need to feel valued, feel seen, heard, needed so we can develop the self-confidence we need to add value.

And what’s interesting is that, when you think about what’s invested in, we tend to invest in the lagging indicators of valuing someone once they add value, and tend to leave the leading indicator which is making sure someone feels seen, heard, valued, making sure they feel worthy and capable so they can add value up to chance.

So that’s been very interesting reframe is that we tend to think that we need to add value to be valued, but we actually need to be valued to add value consistently and sustainably.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And, in a way, this topic is as real and as deep as it gets. And I’m having flashbacks to episode 500 with Victor Cheng, when he talked about how to have unshakable confidence. And so, we went into some deep topics about, like, value.

We might not feel it, but, in a way, some of like our fundamental societal beliefs, law, religion, philosophies, wisdom, traditions are like the sort of the ground truth foundational thing is, whether I think about the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights or some, you know, biblical stuff, humans being made in the image and likeness of God, is that the fundamental like human beings have value just cause fundamentally, intrinsically.

And that’s why it’s like just very basic. That’s why you can’t kill people, like, “But why? Like, you can kill a cockroach, there’s no laws against it. No one gets upset about it. You can’t kill a person.” Like, well, fundamentally that’s because people have value in and of themselves. And yet, we cannot feel that way internally, and that can create a cascade of not-so-great implications.

Zach Mercurio
There’s a lot there. Can we go back? Well, I want to share a quote from Dr. Paul Farmer, who was a doctor that revolutionized the treatment of tuberculosis worldwide. And he said that the idea that some lives matter less is the root of what’s wrong with everything in the world, is the root of all that’s evil in the world.

And so, when you’re talking about worth, independent of what you do, don’t do, who you are, where you live, you’re talking about dignity. Dignity is that inherent worth that a human being has independent of what they do, don’t do, where they live, who they are. You also mentioned confidence. We don’t develop confidence by sitting in our offices, or wherever we are, chanting self-affirmations to ourself.

We develop confidence because we can go out, try, fail, and experiment. Why? Because someone has our back. This goes back to our rooted need for secure attachment as children. One of the things I like seeing is when I go to a house, a family, a friend, and they have kids, if their kids are loud in front of them, I know that there’s secure attachment there because I know, seriously, I know that their sense of mattering to an adult is not threatened by what they do or don’t do.

They can be corrected, but it’s not threatened. So, they can go out, experiment, take risks, learn, build relationships, play, and know that they have a secure base to come back to because they already matter to someone else. This is how mattering plays out instinctually. And as we age and as we develop, as we go to work, you may have heard of the term psychological safety.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Amy Edmondson on show.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah. Now, I haven’t talked with Amy about this, but I don’t think many books would have been sold if it was called adult attachment at work. But that’s essentially what it is.

Psychological safety is adult attachment, because when someone feels that they have a leader who has their back, that they matter to enough, that they can go out, experiment, take risks, learn, speak up, and they know that that sense of mattering to another person will not be threatened, then they’re more likely to thrive and innovate in all of those things because they have that secure base. I mean, that’s what psychological safety is.

And all of this goes back to what you mentioned as our primal human drive to be significant to other people. The first thing you did as a baby when you were born, scientists find, is you grasped your arms out in a hugging motion. It’s called the grasp reflex. And you actually searched to grab onto somebody before you searched for food, because your survival depended on you mattering enough to someone else to keep you alive.

So that drive to be significant to another person for our very survival motivates and animates almost all human behavior. And when that’s satisfied, we experience what psychologists call mattering.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s talk about the definition of mattering. So, we’ve got that psychological definition there. Can you run that by us again?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah. Mattering is the experience of feeling significant to the people around you. And psychologist, Isaac Prilleltensky has theorized that it comes from two areas that’s well supported in the research – feeling valued by others and knowing how we add value to their lives. And, again, that feeling valued and adding value dimension, they have a reciprocal relationship. The more we feel valued, the more we’re likely to add value. The more we see the evidence of our significance and how we’re adding value, the more we feel valued.

Motivation, resilience, productivity, performance, all the things we say we want comes from that virtuous cycle of mattering. It’s different, and I think distinctions are important because it’s different than belonging or inclusion. I had a friend, recently, who moved abroad, and I asked her, I said, “How is it going?” And she said, “Oh, you know, it’s great. Like, I get invited to all of these conversations, dinner parties. I’m doing a soccer club after work, but I’m around all these people, but I feel completely unknown. I feel completely invisible.”

So mattering is different than things like belonging or inclusion. She felt like she belonged. That’s feeling welcomed and accepted in a group. She felt like she was included. She was able to take an equal active role in that group, but she didn’t feel that she mattered. She didn’t feel significant to individuals in that group. She didn’t feel seen, heard, valued, and needed. That’s why I can belong on a team.

Well, let’s use this conversation. I can belong in this conversation, but you might not notice that I’m a caretaker for a parent who’s in the hospital. You might not be able to name my unique strengths or my unique gifts that I bring. I can feel included here. I can speak. I can take an active role. But I may not feel that my voice is truly heard by you when it’s given. So mattering is the interpersonally generated experience of feeling significant to those around us.

And something we get to reinforce that inherent dignity that we mentioned earlier, strengthens that dignity, and it’s also something we give to others. And, actually, the more we show others how they matter, the more we see the evidence of our significance and the more we feel that we matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like these fine distinctions that you’re drawing here because, in a way, I think this might be sort of like the missing factor for a reasonable segment of folks and work or their home lives or wherever, is they say, “Okay, yeah, I’m included. Yeah, okay, I’m doing the stuff. Okay, I share what I think and I am part of the team and I do the things and it’s kind of interesting, but something’s kind of missing in terms of I’m not vibing with this team and feeling awesome in my experience here.” This may be the thing.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, it’s that feeling of being in a room of a bunch of people, even your friends, and feeling completely invisible and unknown. We’ve all had that feeling where we’ve been around people, but felt like people don’t really know or see that our inner experience, that inner voice that we bring and that we have. And that’s that feeling of not mattering. And the data indicates that what we’re really facing is a mattering deficit, not necessarily an engagement crisis or loneliness epidemic.

For example, more people than ever report that they’re disengaged in their work, as an example. We’ve heard that from Gallup for 20 years, how disengaged we are. It’s about seven out of 10 of us are emotionally uninvested in our work. This is despite DEI programs, wellbeing programs, perks, wages increasing even with inflation 42% in the last eight years, a collective $1 billion investment in services to improve engagement, 100 validated surveys, right? We’ve programmed the heck out of this. Yet people are still disengaged.

And there’s a couple data points that weren’t well publicized in Gallup’s latest report. One of those was that this is the lowest it’s ever been. Just 40% of people strongly agreed that someone at work, where they spend one third of their one waking life, cares for them as a person. That’s the lowest that’s ever been.

Pete Mockaitis
That just feels very sad.

Zach Mercurio
Just 30% of people said someone could see, name, invest in their unique potential. Workhuman did a study in 2024, found that 30% of people self-reported, they felt “invisible in work.” When it comes to loneliness, we’re more lonely than ever, but, ironically, we’re more connected than ever. We send about 30 to 40 text-based messages to peers and colleagues every day. We’re on more platforms than ever. There’s 38 million people probably right now exchanging messages on Slack.

We are on Teams chats. We’re sending messages. We’re sending short texts to each other. We’re more connected. We’re more lonely than ever. And the conventional wisdom on how to address loneliness has been to connect more, put yourself out there, join clubs. The organizational response has been more meetings. So, Americans’ time spent in meetings has tripled since 2021 because of this loneliness epidemic, but we’re more lonely than ever.

And one of the reasons why is that, psychologists find, it’s not the quantity of connections that matters. It’s the quality of connections. And we are having lower quality connections than ever. And what makes a quality connection? Psychologists call it experiencing companionate love. It’s not passionate love. Companionate love is experiencing the behaviors of attention, of care, of affirmation, of compassion from another person. That’s mattering. That’s experiencing that we matter.

So, the opposite of loneliness isn’t having more people around you. It’s feeling that you matter to the people around you. And what’s going on now is that we’re having lower-quality interactions. And one reason why is because we’ve lost, over the last 25 years of using technology obsessively, we’ve lost a lot of the skills that allow us to truly see, hear, value, and show the person across from us how they’re needed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s so much there. And, well, the notion of feeling invisible, I mean, I imagine this can be a whole spectrum, you know, in some ways, feeling invisible versus visible feels very binary, black and white, one you can see, one you cannot. And yet, there is a whole continuum in terms of care and attention. I was just a little bit versus ample.

And I’m thinking, I remember one time I was with my podcast mastermind group, and they’re awesome, and we really do care about each other and attend to each other. And they were having some sort of weird technical glitch because I said something and no one acknowledged it. And I said something else, and I said it like a third time. They’re like, “Oh, what was the name of that software tool?” I don’t know. And I was like, “Oh, it’s called Claude.”

And then it was like, see them talking, “It was Claude was the name of it.” Then he was like, “No, it’s called Claude.” And then it’s like, “You know, I’ll Google it.” And so, it was about as invisible as you can be, because like I’m literally saying the thing and there is like zero acknowledgement of it. And even though I figured, “Okay, this is probably something with a microphone or an AirPods switch over something somewhere,” it felt terrible. It’s like, really did.

I even had the thought, it’s like, “Am I invisible to you?” And then I sorted out and we had a little laugh, but I think that’s very striking that even a brief moment of technical difficulty-induced invisibility was severely distressing. And to have some folks have that be their daily existence in work and/or home day after day, I got to imagine that results in some pretty spooky health implications. Can you tell us, Zach, what’s at stake here?

Zach Mercurio
So, what we know is that what you experience is a brief moment of what psychologist Gordon Flett calls anti-mattering. And anti-mattering is the opposite of experiencing mattering. It’s feeling insignificant, feeling unseen, feeling unheard. And there’s two consequences to feelings of not mattering.

One is withdrawal. So, leaving, it’s pressing leave. Like you try, you try, you try, nobody sees you, you leave. You isolate, you stay silent, you withhold. That whole quiet quitting trend was totally misdiagnosed as a lazy generation choosing not to work when, really, it was a generation who was responding to perpetual experiences of feeling insignificant to the systems and organizations around them. That’s the inevitable.

Quiet quitting is the inevitable withdrawal response to feeling insignificant in perpetuity. Or, let’s say that your microphone incident kept going. You could have lashed out and slammed something down, right? So, acts of withdrawal, or it can be much louder. And this is actually dangerous, societally. It can result in acts of desperation, “Hey, I matter more than you think.”

Acts of acting out. Destruction, protesting, complaining, blaming, gossiping. When we look at the research on childhood bullying, for example, what nobody wants to talk about with childhood bullies is that bullies, that bullying behavior is actually the last-ditch effort to get attention and control that one is not getting in their family life and in their personal life. It’s actually a consequence of not mattering. We see that in the workplace, like workplace gossip, for example.

Negative workplace gossip, a lot of people think is because of toxic narcissistic employees. But, really, the number one predictor of negative workplace gossip is called psychological contract violation. It’s a fancy word that just means that, “My expectations of fair treatment from my leader were violated. So, because I can’t speak up to them, I’m going to go speak out to someone else. I will do anything, even if it’s talking negatively about someone else, to feel that I matter.”

Societally, when people don’t feel that they matter, this results into division, and it results into clinging to small groups or people that help me feel that I matter because I’m not experiencing it in my everyday interactions. And you talked about the health implications. There was a researcher, John Taylor, he’s a sociologist. He studied thousands of people for six months, and he actually took blood and urine samples, and he was measuring hormones, cortisol, fight or flight hormones, objectively in the blood.

And then he rated them, had them rate the number of relationships they had in their life in which they felt they mattered to, using this general mattering scale. And the people who experienced more relationships, in which they felt seen, heard, valued and needed, actually had objectively lower cortisol levels in their blood after controlling for the same life circumstances than those who did not experience mattering.

So, literally, the experience of mattering, because it’s a survival instinct, can serve as a protective resource for a lot that life throws on us. But when that protective resource is absent, we tend to succumb to life rather than surmount when it comes to resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is powerful stuff. It’s a big deal. Well, could we maybe zoom in and get a picture and some hope in terms of perhaps a team or an organization that wasn’t doing a great job of having folks feeling like they mattered, that they had any significance, and then what did they do to turn it around and what kind of results came out on the other side?

Zach Mercurio
I’m actually going to zoom in on the power of the individual manager and supervisor. Because I live in Colorado, and we try to grow gardens every year, but I live on the front range. It’s super dry, and you have to, like, obsessively create micro climates for these plants to grow. And what I’ve been finding through looking at organizations who do this well, there’s a lot of leaders who are in systems that are really difficult that create micro climates where people feel that they matter and feel significant.

One of the things that we find, and if I were to ask everybody listening, “When is the time in your life or your work when you most felt that you mattered?” Most likely you are going to think about a small moment, a small interaction, not a big initiative, not a big program, not getting your direct deposit, getting a promotion, getting an award. You’re probably going to think about a small instant in which you felt seen, heard, valued and needed by other people.

And I’m going to take this back to my first study that we did on the experience of meaningful work. And we embedded ourselves with a group of custodians, so university janitors, for a year and a half. And we were trying to understand what made work meaningful in a very difficult and overlooked occupation.

So, if you want to think about experiences of anti-mattering, I remember sitting in a break room with this group of custodians, and a building user walked by, crumpled a piece of trash. He threw it and it hit the trash can, bounced off and just kept walking by. And the custodians were sitting right there.

That experience of everyday anti-mattering could rake on a group. But this team, this group was profoundly joyful and connected to this bigger purpose. And we wanted to know why. And we found out that it was their supervisor who did very small things to regularly remind them of their significance. For example, one of the custodians said that she was miserable in her first couple of months on the job.

She just took the job so she could put food on the table for her two young sons. She got rejected from 14 jobs before she applied for this one. And she said she kept saying to herself, like, “Why couldn’t you have done something more with your life? Why are you just a janitor?” And during that first month, she would clock in, clock out, that’s it.

And her supervisor brought her into this break room, and said, “Hey, I just noticed that you’ve been struggling. I want you to read this.” And he put in front of her a dictionary and he had her read the definition of the word custodian out loud to him. And the definition was a person responsible for a building and everyone in it. And he goes, “I want you to read that again. Now I want you to look outside.” It was a glass conference room.

“I want you to look outside of all of these students walking by. These are someone’s precious child that’s trusting you to keep this place clean. Look at them. I mean, that’s why you’re here.” And she said that it was that moment, that was the first moment in her life that someone showed her she was worthy. And it went on to change her belief systems about herself and her job. She was actually at the university for over 30 years. She just had a retirement party.

When I asked her what’s the most meaningful part of her job, she said to me that it’s cleaning the bathrooms in the university dormitories after the weekends. And I said, “That sounds gross, you know. Why?” And she goes, “Because after that moment with my supervisor, every time I go into that bathroom, I say to myself, ‘I’m cleaning this bathroom so that these kids don’t get sick.’”

And what happened was, is that over time, this group had developed a collective so-that mentality, because this supervisor was creating repeatable moments, interactions where he was showing them the evidence of their significance. And that’s how we develop these three major practices, right? He was noticing them. He noticed that she was struggling in that moment. He affirmed her. He showed her the difference that she made. And then he reminded her how she was needed.

And so, organizations that are doing this well tend to scale the skills, those skills that that supervisor had, to create repeatable moments where people feel noticed, affirmed, and needed. But I think that what’s an important distinction, it doesn’t come from big projects, big initiatives. It comes from small interactions.

Like, I mentioned the engagement data from before. You can’t tackle employee engagement problems with a program. You can only tackle it through optimizing daily interactions. And that’s where we’ve missed the mark. But that’s why there’s hope. I mean, I think that you asked, “Where’s the hope?” The hope is, is that your next leadership act, your next great leadership act is in your next interaction.

I mean, we can do something about this loneliness epidemic, disengagement crisis in our next interaction, because mattering happens in moments. Mattering happens in moments, not through programs.

Pete Mockaitis
Zach, this is so good. You’re bringing me back to my second job. And I was placed as a temp, a temp worker, at the Danville Area Community College in my hometown in Illinois. And I had this wonderful woman, Anne Weigel, and she was creating some documents associated with the nursing curriculum at the Community College.

And so, I was just sort of helping out with a bunch of these things. And so, I’m cruising along, cruising along, cruising along. And at one point, we got a bunch of them done, and so it was sort of bound and all done. And she said, “Pete, look at this.” And so, I looked at it, I was like, “Yeah, that’s cool. That looks nice.” And so, I went like right back to like, you know, just kind of cranking through my things. And she’s like, “No. Stop.” She’s like, “You did this.” And I was like, “Huh! Well, yeah, I guess I did.”

And it was awesome because my nature was, “Oh, I got a list of tasks. I’m going to continue checking them through.” And then she, like, somewhat forcefully, like redirected me, paused, and I was like, “Well, yeah, I did.” And I don’t remember what more she said after that in terms of like how the nursing students will be using this and what, dah, dah, dah. But it really stuck with me such that, “Yeah, I’m doing a bunch of documents, you know, copy-paste format, dah, dah, dah, dah,” but, really, it stuck with me that people who are learning to become nurses will be referencing these documents.

And so, to the extent to which they are clear and visually engaging and helpful and accurate will, in some small way, improve their ability to, ultimately, care for people in hospitals and healthcare settings. And so, she really transformed it. And it was a lovely experience.

Zach Mercurio
What she did is a practice that we can all do, right? She showed you how you made a difference. I worked with the National Park Service, and there was one park in the West that had a really high morale, low turnover with their maintenance staff.

Maintenance in the National Parks is incredibly grueling work because many of these locations are in rural areas, the weather’s not always great. It’s sort of harsh conditions. It’s tough to get employees. But this manager had, again, created this microclimate where it was this outlier, high morale, low turnover.

And I asked him what he did, and he said, “I go around the park and I take pictures of projects my team worked on. I’ll take pictures of visitors walking over a bridge they repaired. I’ll take pictures of a shorter line for a bathroom because they opened up a bathroom that was needed repairs. I’ll take a picture of people working on a trail, and I send them an email every Friday, and the subject line is just ‘Look what you did.’ And then I just attach the pictures.”

And he said that, “They can’t argue that their job matters or doesn’t matter. I give them photographic evidence.” And I loved that because leaders and people who show others they matter, don’t just tell them that they matter. They show them exactly how they matter. I mean, one way to do this is to simply start giving better gratitude for one another and expressing that gratitude.

Like, for everybody listening, think of someone you’re grateful for. Now, think about the last time you explicitly told them. For most of us, there’s a gap between our feelings of gratitude for someone and our actions of showing that. When we ask people, “What does meaningful gratitude look like?” they mention four things, right? One is describing the setting, like when and where, what you’re thankful for someone doing, when and where did it happen.

Two, describe the behaviors, “What did they actually do when they did this thing that you’re grateful for?” What gifts did they use? So what perspective, what strengths, what wisdom did they use?” And then, finally, impact. Show them, and this is most important, show them the impact that it made on you, that, “If you didn’t do this, this wouldn’t have been possible for me,” and showing them very vividly.

So, in your daily routine today, go beyond saying thank you or good job and show someone vividly the difference they make and how they make it. And you will see someone come alive. You’ll see some go, “Oh, well, wait, wait.” Like you did, “I was just doing some tasks, but wait, I did do this.” It jolts people out of this routine, out of this sort of inertia of the routine. It reminds them that they matter and shows them how.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Could you share with us, let’s just do two example demonstrations of how that is articulated?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, sure. So, Pete, at the beginning of this podcast interview, before we got on, we had a really good conversation, and you mentioned your interest in this topic of mattering. That it was deep and philosophically important for you. And, for me, that demonstrated your interest, your wisdom, your intentionality, your preparation.

And as someone who’s trying to create a world where every single person feels valued so they can add value, I felt really comfortable coming on this platform, and I’ve been on a lot of podcasts, but that made me feel really comfortable.

And so, the way I’ve been able to explain things today, and if one person just is able to name that they may not be experiencing mattering or someone in their life or work might not be able to experience mattering, and they can do something about it, well, that’s because of you and the prep that you put into this and how you welcomed me on. So, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I wasn’t expecting it to be about me, but…

Zach Mercurio
But that’s the difference. The difference between the, just saying…

Pete Mockaitis
“Thanks. Good job.”

Zach Mercurio
You know, “Hey, you know, thanks for being here.” Or, I’ll give another example of me, personally. Like, I travel a lot. I’m in airports a lot. And I was in an airport bathroom, and there was a cleaner or a maintenance worker, he was in the bathroom and he was fixing the paper towel dispenser, and I was washing my hand next to him.

Now, I saw about 10 people just walk right by him, brushed by him. And I stopped and I just said, “Hey, thanks for getting this working again. By the way, it looks great in here.” And he was like, “What did you say?” Like, that’s what he said. He was almost defensive. He was like, “What?” I was like, “Oh, I’m just saying thanks. Like, thanks for fixing this. It looks great in here.” And he goes, “Well, thank you.” And I said, “Okay.” But he was shocked, right? And all it took me was 30 seconds, but that may have been the only time he saw the difference that he made that day for someone else.

And this is what’s so maddeningly simple about the work that I do, is that I’m teaching people how to optimize moments with people in everyday interactions, whether you’re leading a team, an organization, or using the bathroom at an airport, that can introduce somebody back to them the evidence that they are significant so that they can go home and have that evidence to reinforce the belief that they are significant and that they matter.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect, yes. And I honestly, mostly what you’re doing in airports is waiting anyway. So, let’s make it count.

Zach Mercurio
But just notice how often there’s so many, you know, another example that I have that we can extend to all areas of our life is, you know, my kid is seven and he likes watching the trash truck come. And there was this guy, I mean, he was like, he did not look happy this day to be there. And he was like throwing the bins down and all this. And my seven-year-old’s out there just waving at him.

And when that guy caught the eye, I mean, this is powerful, that guy was seen by this seven-year-old, his demeanor completely changed. He got the biggest smile on his face, jumped off the truck, said, “Hey,” right? And I wonder what it would be like if we were more astonished at other people’s presence in our lives like that on a daily basis. You know, like honestly, not that, but really just when you go through the grocery store line, say, “I know life is hard, I’m really glad you’re here.”

Your team members saying these five words that we hear often in our interviews that are so powerful, “Hey, I just want to remind you, if it wasn’t for you, this wouldn’t be possible. If you weren’t here, this meeting wouldn’t have been like this. This week wouldn’t have been like this.” But I think that there’s so many people around us that make our lives possible, that make what we do possible, and they don’t know it because we don’t tell them.

I mean, that’s why we go back to the beginning of the conversation. You can believe that you matter on your own. You can develop a sense of self-worth on your own, but others can either strengthen or shatter it through the evidence that they’re feeding back to you. And just that act of being acknowledged by my kid completely altered this person’s entire demeanor. That’s the power of mattering.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, I love that example when you talk about kids. It reminds me, one time I was at church and I just caught some woman’s look, and she was like beaming with a huge smile and bright eyes. And I was like, “Wow!” And I was like, “Well, hi.” I waved and was like, “Well, that feels amazing. All of us should, like, greet each other in this way all the time.” And then it’s like, “Oh, you’re looking at my kid.” It’s funny. It’s like we do that for little kids, but we big kids still need it.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, I mean, next time you’re in line for the construction person, you’re at a one lane road and they have that annoying stop sign, we have to stop and wait, and you’re driving, roll down the window and say, “Hey, I know this is a tough job, I just want to thank you for making sure I get through here safely,” and do it authentically. And you will be shocked at what happens. I bet that person will go home and tell their kids, their parents, their siblings about that.

And you know what’s interesting, is that we were talking about these moments and they seem just very simple and mundane, and someone may be listening and be like, “Well, what does this have to do with work or my job or being a leader?” This is precisely what we find creates mattering in work, motivation in work, and engagement at work. It’s these small moments where someone sees us, they hear us, they remind us of a gift they had, they remind us of a difference we made.

For example, one of my favorite studies is researchers had freelance editors who were contract workers go on and they would edit this fake document. And on one document, there was edits from someone who had worked on it before, and then there was nothing else there. But the other document there was edits that someone else did, and then the lead editor, the head publisher wrote thank you notes on the comments on someone else’s edits before that editor found it.

And the editors that saw those comments actually ended up catching almost double the amounts of mistakes and spent more time on their edits than the group that didn’t even see a hypothetical thank you to someone else. So just even the anticipation that someone might notice our work, that someone might notice us, can actually compel our performance and commitment and engagement and motivation to do something.

So, while we’re talking about like saying hi to a trash truck operator, which is powerful, this also translates to these everyday moments of seeing, hearing, and valuing people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and this is such a master key that unlocks so many things and has so many implications in so many little ways. I think it’s well worth just reflecting on it for a while and how it intersects your world. I’m thinking about, one time, I went to Midas and I got some car work done, you know, and they were, super helpful and I really appreciated it, and they were honest.

And they said, “Hey, actually,” point at the records, “It looks like you got this issue and it’s still covered in your warranty, so you should really just have the dealer do this for free.” It was, like, that’s awesome. And I thought that was really cool. So, I thanked them. I appreciated them. It was all good. And then it was also interesting, these Midas guys, they’re crushing it, I got a phone call from someone asking me how my experience was with Midas.

And it’s so funny how that struck me as extraordinary, even though, in some ways it’s not, like, we hear, “How likely is it that you’d recommend us to a friend or a colleague?” like everywhere. And, hey, I worked at Bain, the net promoter score stuff, but, like, we see that everywhere. But when it’s a push button on a screen, or they email you, “Hey, take this survey,” part of me, part of us always wonders, like, “Does anyone care at all? Will they read it? Will they think about it? Will this have any impact? Does it matter?”

But when I had a human being spending time in her life, inquiring about my experience, well, one, I just thought, “Man, Midas is even more awesome now.” I had good vibes, and appreciation, goodwill toward them. And, secondly, it was like, “Well, I will tell you precisely how my Midas experience was in some detail and how cool I thought it was,” because it was just transformational in terms of a human being called me, and you might say, “Oh, they interrupted me. Argh!” I was in a good mood, whatever, I had some time.

A human being called me and I was like, “Oh, you actually want to hear what I have to say about my experience. So, I’m actually going to tell you, as opposed to ignoring all of the emails that ask me to take a survey.”

Zach Mercurio
Let me mine out two practices there, actually, in the customer service example with Midas. That’s an act of compassion, right, of knowing that you could spend this money, that’s the struggle, taking an action to alleviate that struggle. I mean, one of the things that people who help other people feel that they matter do is they move from empathy to compassion relatively quickly.

Empathy is coming to understand what someone’s going through, like feeling your pain. But compassion is taking an action to alleviate that pain using what’s in your power in the moment, even if it’s small, in a customer interaction, to alleviate a potential future pain is something that you’re biologically wired to respond to. So that’s why you felt that commitment of, “Wow!”

That’s what helps us feel noticed, helps us feel seen when somebody actually sees our struggle and offers an action to help. The second though is that someone called and took an interest. Asked you a question, a deeper question. A lot of people in a lot of organizations, they do the net promoter or they measure satisfaction, “How satisfied were you with this?” And they don’t measure impact, “What impact did this have on your life?”

And the questions we ask can also demonstrate whether we see somebody. One thing that people can do right now is start asking better questions. Take an interest in people, instead of, “How are you? How’s it going? How was your day?” Those are all greetings, right? Again, I have a 10 and a seven-year-old, I travel a lot. When someone asks me, “How are you?” my brain can’t compute the last, like, eight hours of living a complex human life, so I just say, “Good. You?”

It doesn’t help them. They don’t learn anything about me. It doesn’t help me share my experience, help me feel seen. But if someone asks me, “Hey, what is your attention today?” Or the question I ask everybody, like I asked you at the beginning is, “What have you been working on before today?” And I learned that a carpenter is helping you work on your studio. I would have never known that if I didn’t ask that question.

Or, “What’s been most meaningful to you today? What’s been important to you today? What are you struggling with? How can I help?” If you’re a leader, “What logjams are you coming up against on your projects today? Anything I can do to remove them?” Those clear, open, and exploratory questions, the art of asking the question, the art of having a human being call you and check in authentically, helps us feel seen.

So, those are two practices that you can mine out of the Midas example, the Midas touch, whatever it is, is the compassion, seeing a potential struggle, anticipating a potential struggle, offering an action to alleviate that, but also taking a genuine interest.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Zach, in many ways, this is just super simple, but could you give us some top dos and don’ts as we think, “This is awesome. I want to spread more good mattering vibes around me”?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, the top do is to simply go out and ask the people in your life, or in your work, or the people that you serve, this question, “When you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing?” and listen and write it down, and do more of that. It doesn’t matter where you are in the organization or where you are in life, you have a relationship with somebody.

And asking that question can really, as you said, be the key that unlocks what actually cultivates healthy relationships, which is feeling seen, heard, valued. But everybody experiences feeling noticed, affirmed, and needed in different ways. So, when you ask that question, it’s very powerful. So do that.

The second is to make sure that you’re taking captive the interactions you have on a daily basis. Don’t underestimate. So, this is a do and a don’t. The do is overestimate your impact. The don’t is don’t underestimate your impact.

There’s a psychologist named Nick Epley, and he did studies where he had people write thank you notes out of the blue to certain recipients, and he rated the giver of the note what impact they thought that it would have on the person, what emotional impact it would have and then he rated the actual emotional impact it had.

And almost every single time, the giver of the thank you note underestimated the emotional impact that they would have. This has been replicated time and time and time again. So, overestimate the value of small gestures of seeing people, of affirming them, of showing them how they’re needed. And that will get you out of this gap between your good intentions and your good practices.

The final do I have is to schedule your good intentions. Like, I don’t think anybody wakes up and it’s like, “I’m going to be an uncaring person today.” I just think we get caught up in all the things we have to do, and we lose that. Like, I’m the kindest person in the world when I’m out walking my dog. I think about all the people I should thank, all the letters I should write, and then I get back to my office and I have a big to-do list and I put it off.

Schedule your good intentions. If you have that thought to reach out to someone, put it on your calendar. Put a reminder in your phone. Don’t leave acts of kindness and compassion up to chance. The don’t I have is don’t do this to get more out of people. That’s manipulation. Don’t do this as a tactic. Don’t do this if you don’t believe that this is how you want to show up in the world.

Because the moment we start treating someone as a means to our end is the moment we actually stop seeing them as human, and we start seeing them as “a cog” or a piece of my puzzle. But do this because you see a person as a worthy end to themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful stuff. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Zach Mercurio
I’m going to go back to my favorite book, which is Man’s Search for Meaning. And in it, Victor Frankl quotes Nietzsche, a philosopher, but he says, “He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how.” When we know that we matter, when we know that someone else relies on us, it can pull us through even the most difficult times.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And can you share with us a favorite study or a piece of research?

Zach Mercurio
One of my favorite studies is actually by the organizational psychologist Adam Grant. And he did a study, when his daughter was born, he was in a hospital that was struggling to get clinicians to comply with handwashing procedures, which sounds gross, but it’s very common in healthcare systems. And what he did was he took all of the handwashing stations in one side of the hospital, and he looked at the signs.

The sign said, “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases,” and he replaced them all with “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases,” focused on others. And he left the other side of the hospital signs the same of the handwashing stations. And what he did was he measured, he had covert raters go in and rate frequency of handwashing behaviors per clinician, and then he had people going in and actually measure the amount of soap that was used in the dispensers.

And the sign that just changed that one word to focus us on our why, that other, had 33% more soap gone on average at the end of every day than the signs that had the focus on you. And there were 10% more handwashing behaviors per clinician per hour in the signs that just changed you to patients.

And I think it gets to our natural human desire to feel that we matter because when we know that we matter, we act like we matter as human beings. And that’s why when we know how what we’re doing is significant, we act like we’re significant. And I love that study because it’s just one word that reorients our mind to focus on our contribution.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite tool, something you use to be able to make your job?

Zach Mercurio
This tablet here, it’s remarkable, because I used to have piles of Moleskine notebooks. And now it’s all organized into one piece.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Zach Mercurio
Every day, I play with my kids in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, a Zach original?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, “It’s hard for anything to matter to someone who doesn’t feel that they matter.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Zach Mercurio
You go to ZachMercurio.com, or I’m on LinkedIn at Zach Mercurio. I’ve a small group of engaged people there doing all sorts of different types of jobs that really engage in this work and are trying things out, so it’s a cool community.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Zach Mercurio
Don’t be a passive recipient of culture in your organization or wherever you are. Be an active constructor of the culture you say you want.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Zach, this is fabulous. Thank you.

Zach Mercurio
Thanks, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Angela, welcome.

Angela Jackson
Hey, Pete, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom, talking about “The Win-Win Workplace.” And I’d like for you to kick us off by sharing any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans at work during the course of you putting this together.

Angela Jackson
So, the research that I do at Harvard University that really undergirds this book is really around what helps people thrive in the workplace. And just a simple one-liner that came out for me that was really surprising, that won’t be surprising to others, that at its base, people just want to know that they matter.

And that can be realized and seen in many different ways. And what we tried to do in “The Win-Win Workplace” book was to identify nine ways that, when people experience these strategies, these behaviors, that they feel like they matter at work.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel like we could talk for 40-ish minutes about that sentence alone, “We just want to feel like we matter.” So, can you maybe unpack that a little bit in terms of what are some work experiences that just say, “Wow, I feel like I matter a whole lot” versus some work experiences that are like, “Wow, I feel like I absolutely do not matter”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, and I just want to be clear. A lot of my work, and I’ve looked at over 1700 companies, I’ve never met a CEO or a leadership team who said they don’t care about their employees. But what’s so fascinating is that when you go and ask rank-and-file employees, does the company care about them, you have upwards of 60% saying that they don’t. So, there’s this huge disconnect in between what employers, management teams, leaders, executive leaders think that they’re doing and what’s being actually felt.

And so, when we talk to like actual everyday workers, things that they said mattered to them was that, one, that there’s a recognition from their manager or from the company that they have a life outside of work, and that their life outside of work, their lived realities, really impacts their ability to show up engaged in work.

So, being very specific, if you think about, like, we’re all in this sandwich generation today where we have kids of our own, we have parents who are elderly, and we know the numbers of boomers who are retiring. And so, because of that, what we’re seeing more and more are that workers are asking for flexibility, not because they want to sit at home and twiddle their thumbs. It’s because they’re playing defense at all levels.

You know, how are you there for your parents, how are you there for your kids and showing up. And so, a bit of flexibility in saying to people, “Can I adjust your hours by coming in maybe a little bit late? Is there a one or two days that you can work from home?” To them, to employees, they told me that means that their employer actually sees them as a full human.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, yes. What’s intriguing is, with regard to the senior folks, you said they don’t say, “Our people don’t matter.” And yet, it is felt at 60% perhaps that it feels that way, that as though, “We don’t matter,” or, “They don’t care.” And it’s intriguing in terms of just like the mental processes at work. What’s behind that? Is it perhaps that the senior folks are just so fixated on the results and the pressure and bottom line and delivering, delivering, delivering, or what do you think is at the root of this?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, Pete, I think about this a lot and I talk about, in the book, we’ve got these win-win workplaces and we have this other phenomenon that I call zero-sum workplaces. And how I describe a zero-sum workplace are these are very traditional workplaces. They’re the ones that say, “You have to come into the office because I came in the office. And when I came in the office, this is the way I was mentored.”

So, it’s really anchoring what that leadership’s experience was. It doesn’t matter that they’ve been 20 or 30 years out of the rank and file. And so, it’s what we’re asking for is like a re-questioning and a re-imagining of the workplaces for this moment. And so, one is a lot of leaders are tied to nostalgia. They’ll tell you the great ways that they’ve been mentored and invested in and how they rose through the ranks. And so, it’s hard for them to reimagine how mentoring could happen, how development could happen at distance.

I was very fortunate early in my career. I worked for Nokia and we were a global firm, and I led teams that were based in Singapore, I had colleagues that were in the UK. I worked remotely 50% of the time and, because of the distance, because of the time zones, you really had to put trust in your people. And what I found as a manager is that if people weren’t doing their job, it became evident really quickly. But we shouldn’t penalize everyone because there are some people that might take advantage of a policy.

Pete Mockaitis
And what you said there really resonated in terms of, “Well, when I did this, it worked like this. Like, I had to hustle, to stay till midnight, to be abused verbally by higher-ups.” And it reminds me, we had a conversation with Rahaf Harfoush, who used the turn of phrase, performative suffering, which I thought was just perfect in terms of, like, “Whoa, well, we did it, and so look how much we suffered and we experienced the hardship and so, too, you must. And if not, something is going wrong, or it’s unfair, or I was cheated, or there’s something that ain’t right here.”

Angela Jackson
And people today have a different type of social contract with work. I’m Gen X, and I would think about what I was taught to do is you go into work, you put your head down, you get in before your boss, you leave later. And what you get in exchange for that is a good paycheck, right? Hopefully, a good paycheck.

What we’re seeing now when we’re looking at this next generation of workforce, many of them report, 42% said that they would take a pay cut if they could maybe work remotely, if they could have more flexibility. And what we’re seeing with all of the research is that people want purpose in their work. They’re willing to take less. Some of people want to go away from the big cities and want to be closer to home.

What I’m saying is there’s a very different calculation today than it was in previous generations. Gen X, the Boomers, you know, if we were born and raised like I was in Chicago, I was willing to go out to LA and go out to New York. Like, we’re willing to run and go wherever for that next milestone. And what we’re seeing with today’s generation, they’re not doing that.

The second thing is, I think about my grandfather who worked at a Chrysler factory, he was there for 40 years, he was part of a union, I was able to go to college because of that. That’s not the same social contract we have today.

So, you have everyday workers who are watching, mass layoffs, when we see that with government jobs that are typically the safest, people immediately think, “What’s in it for me? What’s in it for me to work at a job that could lay me off and I haven’t seen my kids in seven days because I’ve been traveling, because I’ve been going in late?”

And so, really, today when we think about employers and CEOs, they’re really thinking about, “What’s the value proposition that’s going to resonate most to employees today? That is how we’re going to keep people. That’s how we’re going to attract people.” And they’re actually putting a number on that.

So, by meeting their needs, reimagining their benefits, reimagining how people are trained and placed in their positions, they’re seeing lift on the financial side by implementing these practices. And I just think they’re going to be ever needed when we think about the climate now where no one’s hiring, right? Everyone is trying to do more with their incumbent workforce. Well, it becomes, “How do we keep them and keep them engaged, they’re not quiet-quitting?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, there’s so much to dig into here. Let’s talk about the social contract in terms of just really articulating that in terms of the old world versus the new world.

You highlighted that job security is no longer a thing, that’s just kind of not around, and so that changes the calculus. Could you elaborate on your articulation of the social contract between executives and lower-level employees in the olden times versus the now times?

Angela Jackson
So, one, you would have, and I think about my parents, your parents, people would stay at their job 20 or 30 years, right? There was loyalty. There were pensions at the time. There was sharing in the success of the company. It was beneficial for people to stay. They were getting bonuses at that time. They had factories and unions that were looking out and making sure that people had benefits and that they could pay for the latest hospital bill or emergency bill.

And what we’re seeing today is that people still expect those things, when I say people, everyday workers. For example, there was this Edelman Trust Barometer that came out, and it said that when people think about where they should be up-skilled for the future or learn these new future work skills, generative AI, they’re looking to their employer for that.

Typically, in the past, employers did invest in training their people. What we’re seeing now is the shift that people are left on their own. And so, what does that mean when you are thinking that you’re a cog in the wheel, at any time your job could be eliminated? And maybe that’s not because sales are down, maybe sales are great. And we’ve seen that with a lot of the tech companies, but they want their share price to rise. So, they’ll just, again, let people go as a signal to the market that they’re being more efficient.

Those are things we didn’t hear about in the past when we talk about that social contract. You were let go because typically you were underperforming. Someone had, whether you disagreed or disagreed, they had a real rationale. It wasn’t because we’re trying to manipulate the stock market, for example. And also thinking about that social contract, the other thing was the stability that you had raises. And you know, there was more employee ownership. There were more pensions.

Right now, when you negotiate your wage, that’s the best that you’re going to do when you’re going in the door. Most people know that. And so, to get that next raise, right, even if you are awesome at your job, you have to go somewhere else. And what we’re seeing now are companies who are letting their best people go because of small things.

This return to office is becoming a big thing. We have A-players, and there was research by colleagues out of MIT, where companies are losing their A-players because there’s inflexibility. And what I always say to CEOs are, “A-players always have optionality. So, it may not be just in this moment, but they’ll have one foot out the door.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, as you sort of lay out the social contract before versus now, it seems kind of like the employee’s contract is just worse now than it was then, and the “compensation” to keep it fair-ish, is that it’s like, “Well, loyalty is no longer something employees bring to the table.” And it just seems like, “Why would they? That’s normal.” So, is that a fair characterization? If the social contract is worse, what are the employees…are they just kind of out of luck or is there a counterbalance on their side?

Angela Jackson
I absolutely think it’s a counterbalance. There’s a set of employers who are still interested in that contract, and they’re interested in centering what employees want. I’ll give you an example. A couple months ago, Spotify put a billboard in Times Square, and it said in substance, “We let our people work remote because we hire adults.” And some would say, “Okay, that’s cheeky and it’s cute, but why did they do that in Times Square?”

Well, if you look down the street from Times Square, you have JP Morgan Chase that is requiring people to come back in the office. And they know some of those people will leave. And what Spotify is trying to do is say, “We’re different.” And they’re using that to actually attract talent, get A-talent. And they’re seeing a tangible benefit.

When I connected with their CEO, he was saying, “We attribute our flexibility and our policies and our people policies with keeping our teams. We let them work from wherever they want in the world. We want them to pursue their passions. Why? Because we know that if they’re excited in their lives, that they’ll bring that excitement to work, if we can sustain that.”

And so, while it’s broken with certain companies, there are a set of these companies that I write about in that I call win-win workplaces are actually using this as their competitive advantage, this moment and this differentiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, so in this new contract, Spotify is bringing some things to the table with regard to flexibility, etc. They will still fire you readily because they’ve had rounds of layoffs and such, but they’re bringing some other goodies, such as the flexibility. And any other key things you’d highlight there?

Angela Jackson
I think it’s flexibility. I think it’s passion. When you talk to their employees, they’re passionate about what they do. And what gets exciting about that piece, is when you’ve got employees who are passionate about the mission, that they feel supported, what you’re building towards is what I call an ownership mindset.

And those are the employees, my research shows, are the stickiest, the most loyal. Like, they feel bought into what the company is doing and they want to go the extra mile. And it’s not just about the paycheck. It’s because that company matches up with their values, the way that they live their life. There’s not that gap, that air in between the two.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. It seems like there’s got to be something going on in terms of bought into the mission or purpose, or we’re having fun solving problems, or there are colleagues that were just a blast to be around who inspire and are fun. Are there any other key bits of value on the employee side that are really getting accentuated these days?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, the big one is around agency. And so, we have a number of companies, the most famous one is we think about Google and their 20% time off to pursue an interest or an innovation. We’re seeing more and more companies actually give their people time to tinker. And by that, I mean some of them are doing it in different ways.

They may bring a problem of practice to an ERG group or a group of employees, and say, “If you can come up with the ideas, all ideas are welcome.” And giving people funding and budget to actually work on some of these ideas. Coca-Cola bottlers, in North Carolina, is doing something very similar. They had a challenge around frontline workers and how we retain them. And so, they challenged a group of rank-and-file employees to come together and solve that problem.

And that was an acknowledgment that these people are closest to the problem. So, of course, they might have some loose solutions to solve it. And so, it’s innovations like that where people are bringing rank and file into the thinking of the company, into the challenges, and also giving them the agency to begin solving some of these problems.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like that a lot in terms of, like, the Coca-Cola bottling example, with the solving of the problems, because when I think about purpose, and maybe I just have too high a standard, but I don’t imagine, I guess it depends on how you define purpose, and I’d love for you to expand on this, that folks are saying, “I am deeply inspired at my core by the mission of getting sugar water into the hands of more and more people and growing the market share,” right?

Like, I don’t think that purpose sense in the Coca-Cola context specifically is resonating. So, when you say purpose, are you thinking about something with more, broader, with additional facets, or maybe it’s like, “Hey, know what, purpose isn’t going to be so much of a motivator in certain organizations. So instead, hopefully, we’ve got some of that autonomous problem-solving goodness to offer”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, I love that. And I love your push on this too, Pete. Purpose means different things to different people. And so, say you’re at a Coca-Cola bottlers, for example. For them, the purpose is, “At my job, can I be really good at it? And do I have a company that’s investing in me? And do I feel like my work matters?”

So, that’s having purpose versus being at the front line and you’re feeling, you’re just a number. No one knows your name and what you do. You don’t know what you do, how that connects to the overall vision of the company. And that’s hard sometimes when you’re at the front lines. How do you connect that to the overall strategy and show that through line? So that’s one set of purpose.

Then you have the other set of purpose where, you use a Spotify, or I even use my job at Harvard. I love the research I do. It gives me a sense of purpose that I can work on research around workplaces that help connect people to better companies that are willing to invest in them. And so, really thinking about, like, this is something I’d probably do for free, that I would talk about. And you have a set of people who are just really connected to what the business is delivering, and they find deep value in that.

And I believe if you go to some of those employees, they’ll tell you why they’re excited to get up every day and go to work, what they’re learning, how they’re growing, being an international company. They’re doing a lot of exciting things within the company to keep their people engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it if you could share perhaps a favorite story of an organization you’ve seen really make a transformation or an about-face in terms of getting with the program to creating more of a win-win workplace?

Angela Jackson
One that just came to mind was a CEO of a fast casual restaurant. He brought in me and my research team because, again, with their frontline workers, they were having a challenge around getting them to take advantage of the benefits that the company offered.

And the CEO, he was so excited and proud of himself because he offered rank-and-file employees, access to the 401k plans, but he was perplexed because no one took advantage of it. And so, he called me in, and he’s like, “Dr. Angela, tell me, what does your research say about this? Like, I would have killed for a benefit like that.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” “Have you asked them?” And he hadn’t asked them.

And to his credit, fast forward, he did end up asking them. And what he learned from his rank-and-file kind of employees is that the 401k was great, people appreciated it, but they had more present-day issues that they needed help with.

Pete Mockaitis
That was my guess, it’s like, “I’m paycheck to paycheck. Saving for retirement would be nice, but that feels more like a luxury at the moment.”

Angela Jackson
“Will I be able to retire,” right? And that was it. And so, to his credit, he acknowledged that. We did the listening, and what he did was the money they had allocated for that, they put into a flexible fund so that employees would have choice about how they wanted to spend those dollars. So, they could spend it on caregiving. They could spend it on transportation. They could spend it on a massage for themselves in the area.

But what he was able to acknowledge, and when we went back and talked to employees, one thing that they told us when we asked that same question, “Do you think your employer cares about or give us some examples?” they start citing that they had some agency over how these funds were spent. And everyone spent them differently.

And what was so interesting that we found after we tracked where they spent the dollars, many of them spent them in their local community, with local small- and medium-sized businesses. So, not only was it great for these employees and giving a sense that this company was actually shoulder to shoulder with them in what they need today, they also felt good that this was money being driven in the community where the business does business.

And I’d say one thing is, when we talk to actual employees, they would say, “We’re appreciative for the 401k, but I’m so happy that I actually get choice. I feel like they really see me and understand me.” And again, all of this is around perception, when we talk about how we feel at work.

So, there’s intentions, and then there’s like how those intentions are received. And what I’m seeing with these win-win companies are they’re really keen on tracking how it’s being felt and experienced by the rank-and-file employees so that they actually get it right and not assuming that they know what’s best and what they want.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, that is, in my entrepreneurial journey, I have made that mistake numerous times, like, “People should want this because it’s cool,” as opposed to, “Well, do they actually?” and “You must ask.” So that’s handy. So, you lay out, in your book, “The Win-Win Workplace,” nine strategies for creating better workplaces. Could you share with us a favorite in terms of it just being tremendously transformational and high ROI? Like, “This is not that hard and yet it makes a world of a difference. So, come on, workplaces, everyone should just go ahead and do this.”

Angela Jackson
Yeah. And I have to say, a lot of this book, and what pleased me about it, is these are common sense things. And what we noticed with our conversations with leadership is that it’s harder to put them into place because what it really takes is, one, intention; two, and what we write about this in the book is a commitment to measuring this.

We do lots of things for people. We don’t ask their feedback on them. The second thing is we don’t measure if it’s effective. And this is a problem with a lot of the plans and trainings that we do in the world and, again, billions of dollars spent, but the outcomes, we’re not really seeing any of them. And so, what we’re asking companies to do in this moment is to reevaluate how you’re training people, how you’re developing people, and really think about what’s adding value for them and making sure that it’s actually adding value for the bottom line.

And these nine practices, in particular, they show a correlation to output, a lift on the financial side, and that’s really important because what we’re trying to do is move conversations around investing in people just as an expense or the charitable thing to do to, one, actually seeing it as a revenue driver.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I totally buy it in terms of, maybe if you could just specify the mechanism of action here, because it kind of seems like the extent to which people, human beings, are feeling good things, and able to take care of themselves, their lives, that which is important to them, their health, they are able to show up and be smart and creative and engaged and rocking and rolling. And so, that just seems intuitively commonsensically true, but it is kind of a trickier thing to measure.

Angela Jackson
It is and it isn’t. So, the one way that we’ve mapped out, and for this case study, we talk about the private equity firm Blackstone. They have hundreds of portfolio companies, and one thing that they did is they did their research across their portfolio companies. They saw that, investments in talent, they were able to map out an ROI.

And so, what we found were, and what they found were, investing in actually training people to manage people had an ROI. And how they mapped that was amongst retention. They did pulse surveys about frontline, “How did they feel about their managers? Would they recommend their managers?” And then what they were able to do in terms of some of the financial institutions that they looked at, they had measures, for example, on like cash on hand and assets under management.

They noticed that people, when the employees were happier and that they felt great about their manager, that some of their businesses had more assets under management and they had higher sales. And so, they were able to disaggregate that. And so, we tell employers, “Find two to three metrics that you think are key, that you think would show you the health of your employees.”

“Have those metrics on the same dashboard that you’re thinking about, ‘What’s our sales over this quarter? How many products have we produced? What services have we put out?’ And have those same three metrics? So, you should be looking at them. So, one, get a baseline. Two, think about the problem of practice or opportunity you see with your talent. Is it around training? Is it around training managers? Is it about reimagining benefits? Is it about like building your deep pipeline? And just think about what those two to three measurements are, and begin to measure them quarter over quarter.”

And again, it’s going to vary from company to company, but just once you have those three metrics, you’re going to have two measurements that you’d say, “If this is going right, this is how we know. This is the effect that it will have on the bottom line.”

So, it’s an art and a science, but it’s absolutely doable and it doesn’t have to be cumbersome. We’re not saying measure 20 different things. We’re saying, “What are the two to three people metrics that are most important to your business and the business model and the bottom line?”

Pete Mockaitis
This brings me back to one of my favorite consulting projects in which we were trying to reduce attrition at some call centers. And so, as a lowly analyst, my job was to create an actual tool that actually measured real attrition.

And so, I was creating this spreadsheet, and it was so fun because, like, every day or a couple days, more people said, “Oh, hey, can you add me to that daily list?” And so, it’s like I was the keeper of the real attrition numbers. And I had, I guess, my first professional audience, the email list was growing and growing and growing. And, sure enough, once they got engaged, there was real numbers, the excuses disappeared, and we got real about the interventions.

And we could see, in terms of more experienced representatives have a lower average handle time on the phone, resulting in more cost-effective solutions and answers to customers. And so, we could sort of see that line very clearly and it’s cool. Can you share with us, in terms of you mentioned higher sales or assets under management, can you connect the dots a little bit between “We did a thing and it made people happier, and somehow dollars came out the other side”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, absolutely. So, there was a healthcare system, and what they were having issues with, with all healthcare systems across the country, is retaining talent. You have nursing shortage. You have frontline kind of worker shortage in healthcare. And so, what they did was implement two things that they did were great. One was a flexibility around scheduling.

So, many people who are listening and know healthcare, it’s one of those tenured issues. Like, if you’re the new nurse in, you get the worst shift. If you’re tenured, you get the better shift. They tried to, one, is just reimagine that, and be more equitable, and fair in their scheduling so that new nurses don’t always get the most terrible shifts, because what they found out through measuring it, that was actually burning them out.

They were able to reduce turnover with nurses by 10%. That was really significant because the average turnover they said of a nurse cost them $180,000. So, when you think about that across 3,000 nurses, that’s real dollars and cents that they were able just, by tweaking the schedule and understanding they started with listening, trying to understand “What were the barriers? Why were people leaving? And what would make them stay?”

Two, they knew what their baseline is. And then, three, they got real about what you said, the cost of attrition. I was surprised with my number of companies that how many of them didn’t have a real grasp on the cost of attrition. So, most people might think attrition is just the person leaving their job. Attrition is also the time that you spent finding that person, the time that you spent training them over the years, the value that they had.

And now it’s the cost you need to find someone else and to train them, and they’re not going to be as good as the person who’s been there for four or five years because it takes that onboarding time and getting up to productive speed.

The second thing this healthcare center did, and we found, they found that one thing in common is that people wanted training. And so, what they begin doing is offering training benefits. If it was anything related to a person’s job that they wanted to learn, or if they wanted to go back to get their degree, they were giving them a pool of funds. And they watched, of the people who took advantage of this training, how longer they stayed versus others.

The people who took advantage of training stayed 30% longer. And, again, in a healthcare field where tenure actually really matters, people get better at their jobs and costs are going up when you’re trying to replace talent, like 30% longer became very substantial to their bottom line. And so, they reinvested those dollars into more training, more internship, and just doubling down on what the nurses and other healthcare providers said they needed.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Angela, I’d love your take, if we could shift gears for a moment away from the executive strategic level, to, let’s say you are an individual contributor listening to this and saying, “Okay, that sounds really cool. I’d like some of these goodies,” do you have any pro tips on how we can make the case for whatever it is that we think would help us to flourish?

It sounds like we’ve got a clear situation along the lines of getting some numbers and a financial ROI case to be made? What are some of your other pro tips for folks who find themselves in that position?

Angela Jackson
I think the biggest thing you can do to be awesome at your job is to know your value. You need to understand how you add value in ways that line up with the business and the business strategy.

So, for one, every company that I’m out talking to now, they’re thinking about their generative AI strategy. This is new for everyone. And what a rank-and-file person who’s working, you know your job intimately, you’re an expert at your job, you should be thinking about how do you add value with the new technology? How are you saving money? How are you saving time? How are you being more productive? And have an analysis on that.

When you go in and you’re talking to your manager, the second thing you need to do is speak their language. And so, going in and knowing how you’ve been more productive, what you’ve added in your value, and talking about that in terms, starting with that, and then telling your manager or leadership who you’re in front of, what they can do to help you be even more efficient.

So, you’re really couching it in it’s in their best interest to do this. You’re saying, “I’m an A player. This is what I’ve delivered. And from my job, I’ve noticed if I could get XYZ support, I could be even more productive.”

So, for example, I’m in Boston. We have the worst traffic in the country. And so, what I saw one employee do, she went in and instead of saying, “I want more flexibility to work,” she’d say, “You know, this is what I produced last year, but I did notice that I spent four hours,” her commute was two hours back and forth, “in traffic.”

“I think that if I could leave and show up to work either flexible 6:00 a.m. and get off earlier, come in late, that I could be more productive. I could also be more productive if I could have one day of non-commute time.” Laying it out like that, she got a great response because you’re leading on with curiosity, you’re coming in with data, and again, you’re centering what matters most to them and helping you, you’re helping them help you help them.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that a movie, “Help me help you help them”? That’s good. Well, Angela, tell me any other key things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, I think the biggest thing, and I just want to just double down on the point I just made, in this time and in this moment, particularly, we have to advocate for ourselves. I think about people who are in jobs today who have ideas on how to improve the company, how they can be more productive. Make sure you’re communicating those to your direct manager. Make sure that you’re getting face time with a more senior management. Make it your business to do that. People need to know you exist.

I’ll give you an example. I have a very dear friend that was in DC and she was part of the latest rounds and cuts at the IRS, and she’s a tax attorney. And she goes, “You know, for a time I didn’t even have a manager for months.” And I told her, “I wish I would have known, because if you can’t find the person who manages you, or if they’re not paying attention, you need to find the next person up the rung to do that.”

And then, two, these strategies give you that economic case and argument. And so, once you make it to your employer, they may respond favorably, they may not. I always say that’s data. If they’re not giving you what you need, there’s a host of employers who are looking for people like you, who are adding value, and who are thinking differently. So, I’d say be on the lookout for those employers and also bring the ways that you’ve been adding. Lead with the ways that you’re adding value when you speak to them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Angela Jackson
“Whatever you can, do, and whatever you do, do it to the best.” And that’s one of the Goethe quotes. And then I love this other one by Howard Thurman, and I actually just write it in my book.

It says, “Whatever you want to do in the world, do something that lights you up because the world needs more people who are lit up.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Angela Jackson
Oh, gosh, my favorite one was putting up a worker advisory board. We had 200 workers from across the U.S., red states, blue states, across different sectors, and really worked with them to help place them in jobs that were impacted by the pandemic, and we’re able to study what happened to them once they were placed in the jobs.

And that actually became the research that undergirds the book. You know, we found somewhere in these, what we now call win-win workplaces, and the others were in what we call a zero-sum where people didn’t want to work there. They were quitting. They weren’t staying. They had regular turnover. And just really understood that the difference between the workplaces were these nine strategies, how they were investing in their people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, as we contrast a win-win workplace versus a zero-sum workplace, could you give us a couple telltale signs, maybe it’s a number or a metric, or maybe it’s a vibe that’s like, “Okay, yeah, this sounds like what a win-win workplace is versus this sounds like what a zero-sum workplace is”?

Angela Jackson
So, I’ll give you an example of one and it just popped in my mind. So, a few weeks ago, some of your listeners may have seen Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase. They had a town hall meeting. They invited all of their employees to ask questions.

One brave soul, he stood up, and he asked this question around the return-to-work policy to Jamie Diamond. I think Jamie would say it wasn’t his best day. He totally went off. And then the person went back to their desk, and their direct manager said, “I can’t believe you asked that question. You’re fired.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really?

Angela Jackson
Oh, really.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t know that part of the story. Okay.

Angela Jackson
Yeah, let me tell you more about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Keep going.

Angela Jackson
So, Jamie Dimon didn’t, I’m sure, and I’m certain that Jamie didn’t say to that manager, “Fire him for asking that question,” but what that manager was operating on is that zero-sum workplace. That zero-sum workplace means if you say anything that ticks off the big boss, you are gone. No questions asked. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, right?

And what that did in that moment, you know, they subsequently told him he could keep his job. And so, the person stayed there, but you have to think about all of the thousands of people who were watching that moment. We say centering worker voice and these town halls are important, but as leaders, how we show up in those spaces really matter and it builds or decreases psychological safety. Like, who’s going to ask the next question that they think, might think, might tick off Jamie? Probably it’s not coming anytime soon.

The second is, “How do we train our managers differently,” right? This manager had an old-school frame, and if he had been actually trained, knew the policies and procedures, had talked to someone and got advice, that person wouldn’t have lost their job, and I wouldn’t be able to tell this story today, which is not the best shining example of JP Morgan Chase.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just…I am shocked at that notion. It’s about as antithetical to psychological safety as you can get, “You said a thing we didn’t like, so you’re fired.” It’s like, “Okay, well, good luck getting any kind of creativity or quality constructive friction in conversation that leads to goodness if that’s the vibe that we’re all keenly aware of here.”

Angela Jackson
Yeah, and you’re being invited into a town hall, right? And so, this is why we talked about that disconnect. Companies spend billions of dollars on saying that they listen to their people, but it’s not felt. Those are just one of those moments, “You invite me in to listen. You ask for my advice and then you blow up.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Angela Jackson
And so, that’s a classic. There’s many more samples and flavors of that zero-sum workplace. I’m sure what your listeners can listen and lean in on how that looks like. Like, we’ve all had the bad bosses, but it becomes the norm, right? And that’s really unfortunate because instead of operating out of creativity, there’s a lot of fear. And in general, there’s a lot of anxiety in the world today. When you’re bringing that in the world of work, it just becomes closer to home.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Angela Jackson
I think my biggest one is “Outrageous Openness” And it’s just around being open to what’s happening in the world, being curious and outreaching.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Angela Jackson
Right now, my favorite tool, honestly, is ChatGPT. And can I tell you why?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Angela Jackson
When we talk about being productive, some people have zero inbox, I’ve not gotten there yet. But it helps me be more productive with my responses and doing it in a more timely fashion.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a huge fan of the Superhuman email app, and they’ve incorporated some AI features that I’m genuinely impressed. It can now clearly label podcast pitch in all of my incoming emails. And so, I can just very quickly go, “Hmm, forward, forward, forward, forward, forward, so my producers get those fast.” It’s like, “Okay, well, that’s 90 emails out of my inbox in about three minutes. That felt pretty productive. What else?”

Angela Jackson
And don’t you feel good at the end of the day? You’re like, “I’ve done my job. I’m not the bottleneck.” It’s like playing tennis, you know, get the ball over the net.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And a favorite habit?

Angela Jackson
My favorite habit is meditating. Every morning, I don’t do it for long, I’m not one of those gurus. I do about five minutes. I get clear on the day. I say what I’m grateful for from the day before and it actually centers me to have a better day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks that you’re known for?

Angela Jackson
The time to make friends is before you need them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Angela Jackson
So, they can go more in the book, they can go to ReadWinWinWorkplace.com. Also, I’d love to share with your listeners. We’re doing our first summit on “The Win-Win Workplace.” We’ve got 80 employers who are actually practicing these principles and using these strategies to see their ROI. We’re doing that in Chicago on May 5th and 6th, and it’s open to everyone. I say employers, managers come, but even people who are looking for their next opportunity, these are the employers you want to be in front of. They’ll be in that room. And you can go to WinWinSummit.org for that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Angela, this is fun. Thank you.

Angela Jackson
Pete, thank you again for having me. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Jen, welcome back.

Jennifer Moss
I’m so glad to be back. It’s been a while.

Pete Mockaitis
It sure has. Eight whole years. Boy, a lot could happen in that timeframe. Can you share with us something transformational you’ve learned over the last eight years?

Jennifer Moss
As I’ve gotten older and I think become a little bit more, aware that change takes a really long time to happen, and you sometimes move sideways, and you move backwards.

And yet there has been, when I look back to when I first wrote Unlocking Happiness at Work, and now Why Are We Here, there has been some real advancement in the discussion around happiness and well-being at work and that’s a positive thing that I think has been really impactful on me and my level of hope for the future.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hope is good. We like hope. More of that, please. So, tell us, in your book, Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants, any particularly fascinating discoveries you’ve made along the way?

Jennifer Moss
There is just such brilliant research going on out there that’s been untapped and we need to spend more time, I think, with our academic partners in workplaces because it’s just so necessary to learn that there are ways that we can actually improve the workforce.

And I broke the book out into these three parts, the foundations, which is really hope, purpose, and community, and then I go into the second part, which is all of these unbelievable shifts that have happened at work in the last five years that feel like we’re in the multiverse of work. This isn’t the future of work. It’s the multiverse of work. And it really is dealing with AI and the rapid evolution of technology and generational bias and how that’s polarized the workforce. And then also just flexibility now, a right not a perk.

And so, I talk about that from a sense of compassionate leadership and leaders having a sense of openness as a leader, and really around understanding freedom. And then the third part is how we’re going to get there as a collective, and that’s belonging and recognition. And so, this, for me, across the board, every single chapter was this real understanding of the psychological barriers that we’re all facing as human beings that keep us from feeling and behaving with those kinds of traits. And so, it was a lot of learning and a lot of self-discovery too, as a leader myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a lot of rich stuff to dig into here. Thank you. Can you tell us, in terms of the academic community, sort of researchers doing studies and publishing them in journals, is there a particular discovery or thing that is well understood amongst academics looking at this stuff, that is generally not at all, or not frequently, implemented in the real world?

Jennifer Moss
Yes, and, one, is I would say it’s the first chapter, which is really interesting because today Gallup just put a note, basically, that hope is what every single organization needs to be fostering to be able to build out a future-ready organization, and it is the first chapter of my book. And, actually, John Clifton was interviewed, and he’s the CEO of Gallup, and talked about kind of the book and the importance of the book, and I think it’s because he had been seeing this hope need and this loss of hope inside of organizations.

And the thing is we constantly say in leadership, “Hope isn’t a strategy, and we can’t make hope a strategy.” And the thing is that leaders are getting that completely wrong. When I interviewed senior leaders in the military, they said hope is their only strategy. They always make hope foundational to the mission because how is anyone going to put their life on the line if they don’t have hope that they’re going to be able to achieve the end goal?

And so, in the book, I talk about how practical it is to build hope. It’s easier than building empathy and almost any other trait because it’s really, it’s tactical and you build it through these small incremental settings of goals, having the agency and the support to get to those goals, and then creating plan Bs and plan Cs so that if one plan to your goal fails, you have another plan as a backup.

And so, I talk about how we can do this, like 20 minutes every single week can build cognitive hope in an organization. It’s not hard, and I think that it’s been easy to put it off as something that’s simple and too simple to be valuable, and instead, it’s actually so needed right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so hope, we need it, got to have it, are missing it. Can you define, specifically, what do we mean by hope?

Jennifer Moss
Hope right now is this kind of key trait that we need to get people to feel like they can see themselves inside of society, writ large, but also inside of our organizations. If you don’t have hope, you feel disconnected from the mission because you don’t see yourself as part of the future. You also have anxiety around things that are new. AI, for example, if you see yourself as becoming obsolete, and you don’t have hope that you are part of that picture of an organization, you disengage, you’re less productive.

Hopelessness makes you have to be in a survivor state every day and you’re not thriving so you’re not actually thinking about the future, which is what we need right now. We’re just moving so quickly that if we don’t have a future perspective in our organizations, and people are in just survivor mode every day, we’re going to see attrition or we’re going to see what Gallup calls the Great Detachment, which people are at work, but they’re extremely unhappy, they’re actively disengaged, and they’re actually spending time trying to get other people to be as unhappy as they are, which creates a social contagion and it’s really unhealthy.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, hope, very important. And so, what exactly is hope?

Jennifer Moss
Hope is a sense of feeling that you are encouraged by the future, that you see that yourself in the future, that you feel like you have a legacy, that you have a sense of mattering and meaning in the world, that the world itself cares about you, that the world itself is safe, and you feel psychologically safe in it. Hope comes a lot with a sense of community. So, you believe that there are people there for you in a time of need.

Whether it’s actually tested or not, it’s a perception that you have social support, and that’s a big part of a sense of hopefulness inside of your community, inside of society, and your place inside the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m hearing that hope is a belief, and it seems to encompass a lot of things. Could you tell me in one sentence, how are we defining hope in this context?

Jennifer Moss
I think I just described it, but, yeah, hope is…

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I guess it’s like a lot of things, but like what is the umbrella that is encompassing all of those things?

Jennifer Moss
Hope is a sense that everything is going to be all right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. A sense that everything’s going to be all right. And so, then we’ve sort of already gotten a sneak peek at some of those segments there. And so, within everything being all rightness, there’s a component associated with the future, like what will unfold. There’s a component associated with community and people and relationships, like I feel a sense of comfort and belonging in their midst. And I guess, are those the key pillars? Or, what would be the subcomponents of this belief?

Jennifer Moss
I mean, you just listed really all of what those subcomponents are to hope. But I think the important part right now to, I think, for us to focus on is the fact that we have a high rate of hopelessness inside of our world right now.

Globally, the sense of hope is significantly reduced. And that’s because we have moved from a state of the pandemic being a crisis, but we’re in poly-crisis right now, which is a cluster of crises that have all come together to make each crisis actually worse than if it was individually on its own. And so, that poly-crisis, that sense of always feeling uncertain, that fluidity of our lives and never feeling on solid ground, that is creating a lot of questioning.

This is why I wrote the book Why Are We Here? because people are feeling like a lot of “what’s the point-ism?” And you feel that if you don’t have a sense of hope that you are doing something that actually is going to make a difference, that the belief systems that you had and the infrastructure that you trusted is going to stay a trustworthy institution. And our hope is being eroded by a lot of the issues around the world and poly-crisis and this political instability, and that is eroding our connection to each other and our sense of who we are as human beings.

I mean, progress and cooperation are a big part of what make humans, humans, and successful. And we’re not going to feel cooperative if we haven’t felt hopeful that there’s a reason for it. And hope gives you a reason for being, and without that, we lose progress, we lose innovation, we lose a sense of societal congruency, which is, I think, one of the biggest problems that we’re seeing right now is this real separation and disconnectedness amongst people today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s a cluster all right, Jen. Poly-crisis, that’s a good turn of a phrase. I hear you in that when there’s multiple things, it does really feel greater than the sum of its parts, like, “Let’s worry about one thing, and take your pick, politics, climate change, my economic footing, AI is going to take away my job, like, fill in the blank.”

And then if you have multiple, you can just leap from crisis to crisis and really dwell in it. And once one gets boring for your brain, oh, not to worry, we can anxiously stew and ruminate on another one. I served up right for you. So, a cluster, indeed. And so, the “What’s the point?” I think that really hits it for me.

And I was grilling you a few times on the precise definition of hope, it’s like I think the “what’s the point-ness” really does feel, at an emotional gut level, like the vibe, the experiential definition of hopelessness. And then I guess if we take the opposite of that, it’s like, “Well, what’s the point?” I mean, like, “Hey, we’re making a cool thing happen with people we care about to make things better for all of us and a group of folks that we’re serving. That’s the point. So, we’re going to get after that, and that feels pretty good to our just basic human longings for progress and cooperation.”

Jennifer Moss
Yeah, and if people feel like everything they’re working on is some sort of pipe dream that’s not going to be realized, you can imagine inside of organizations that want to build new things and get people excited about new innovations. productizations of cool stuff that it just will, you know, it just makes people feel like, “Why bother? If I’m going to see this thing through and at the end, it’s just not going to actually matter or it’s not going to affect any change.”

And when you look at the data around people that have a sense of purpose and their goals being realized, it’s such a different type of mentality and level of performance in an employee. If you feel like, “Okay, I have leadership that’s going to see my project through, they support me, they give me the resources, and then they’re going to amplify it or use it,” you’re much more eager to try new things and experiment and put yourself at risk.

You’re not going to see that if people feel like they’re constantly in this rotation of projects that never actually end up going anywhere, or that the organization is only building something that isn’t going to improve the world. You see so many Gen Z’s attracted to organizations with purpose, they feel tied to the end goals, and they’re rejecting organizations that don’t foster that.

And so, we need to be able to recognize that when there’s hopelessness, people are seeking hope, so they’re going to be more even more inclined to be attracted to companies and work that support that sense of purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
And you said there’s a 20-minute practice that builds hope. What is it?

Jennifer Moss
Well, and I keep saying, like, culture can be built in 20 minutes or less, and middle managers play a huge role in that, and hope can be built just through this idea of setting a goal and having a manager and the organization support you getting to that goal without micromanaging you or making it about hours worked, not the goal itself. Like, the productivity measure shouldn’t even be relevant here. And then having people come up with different pathways to getting there.

This is Snyder’s theory of hope and it’s really applicable in the workforce. You see Google with their OKRs they’re really looking at, and the way that they do goal setting within the organization. It really is peer supported. They co-create their goals. They talk about it transparently with the organization so people can support. There’s a lot of support for continuing development to hit those goals. Those goals are challenging enough, but not so challenging that you can never actually achieve them, so you’re always building hope.

And it’s also that you have milestones, so you’re celebrating along the way, instead of it being like, “Oh, we sold a million-dollar, you know, whatever product,” or, “Landed a client,” and/or, “The project is finally done after three years and then we finally celebrate.” It’s about incrementally reminding people that they’re hitting milestones, which builds cognitive hope. So again, it’s just weekly and then incrementally, and then over time it really does change the atmosphere of innovation inside of these organizations that obviously are known for their innovative thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, this is resonating. And it just sounds like we’ve had previous guests talk about the intrinsic motivators of play, like it is fun to solve problems. You feel like you’re actually getting to use your brain. And some people pay good money for the pleasure of solving problems with video games or whatever, they’re at kind of escape rooms, activities that they’re into.

So, could you tell us a story about a team that had a cool shift in terms of they were doing things the hopeless way, and they made some changes, they started doing some things hopefully, and cool results unfolded?

Jennifer Moss
Well, I go back to Atlassian, who’s a great example of distributed workforce, and they just do things really well. They were finding that people were not using the space, and they were dealing with a sense of loneliness, and they started to test, “How do we make it so that people feel excited and that they’re inspired by the organization?”

And they started their hackathons as one, where everyone comes to the table once a quarter, and they just play and do cool things, and everyone’s so excited about it, and that really has led to some incredible innovations, but, plus, it also created this other part of the hope strategy is that they were bringing people together. And there was another part of, again, that these satellite offices were, now they’re 91% occupied in an, interestingly, fully remote workforce.

They have all this in-person time, and they realized, “Okay. Well, at this point, we’re not necessarily giving people a sense of their product or their work being seen.” So, they started this togetherness focus and started to have people go and work in other offices, and really championed and supported people actually going and spending a week with a peer in another market. So, at any one time in New York, 50% of the office is occupied by people from around the entire organization.

And in these environments, they also are bringing CEOs and C-level executives to come into these spaces, so there’s an opportunity for everyone’s ideas to be seen, which makes you feel like, “I’m not just doing things in a vacuum. I actually am being evaluated and supported by some of the senior people around the organization.”

And so, they’ve done a really great job of pushing back on this idea that you can’t have remote workers be cohesive or have friendships or it’s just always loneliness for those people working remotely. They totally bucked that myth. And they do that by building up their workforce to still feel like when you’re together, it’s not about distraction, it’s about getting what they call “getting s**t done,” that’s their motto. And you go in the office to still get s**t done, but you are also focusing on building a sense of pride in the work that you do, and for others to see what you’re working on.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool and fun, and that just lights me up in terms of whenever there’s just a beautiful win-win in terms of people experience, as well as organizational functioning and profitability. And, like, building the remote offices, I’m sure like, from one frame of reference, I imagine there is a finance employee somewhere at the spreadsheet, saying, “No, no, no, no, this is not net present value positive for these funds into this purpose.” Because it can be hard to see a measure. Well, what is the value of people feeling like they’re seen, and like they belong, and like they have friends, and the engagement and reduced attrition that comes with it? It’s hard to quantify.

But I recall, and I just sort of thought Bain was really nice to us with regard to some of the investments they made. Like, you could just transfer to another office in the world for six months, and I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of cool of them. How generous.” And maybe there’s a part of that, but, really, it was a deliberate move to facilitate best practice sharing across the worldwide network.

Jennifer Moss
I love what you’re saying because I’ve been, for many years, an advocate of spending money on making sure that people get to see each other and investing in that travel spend. I mean, right now, we’re supposed to be saving money on our commercial real estate, hopefully, the people that have downsized. Why aren’t we moving people around so that we can get them to see each other?

Because one of the things in the book that I learned is that we have this real shift in the last five years where people used to see other people in their organization. They used to make friends with people because you talked about your kids’ baseball team, or you were friends because you like the same type of movies. And it would create these ad hoc kind of outside of work relationships so we move from these simplex relationships, which are just transactional to multiplex relationships, which include knowing about each other.

And since the pandemic, we are really much more focused on simplex relationships, it’s much more transactional, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we’re only seeing our team. And I’ve heard this across the board in my interviews, “I just feel like I only know my team. I don’t know anyone else in the organization. We’re so siloed.” And that was already problematic, but there were ways that we fixed that by just creating opportunities to meet and connect.

And so, it doesn’t need to be five days in the office. Lots of data shows that’s actually counter to cohesion, but it is concentrated focus on getting real time with each other, that has more meaning and develops these multiplex relationships. And we’re not doing that very well, so we just blame it on it being remote work that’s created loneliness. But it’s actually so much more complex than that, but the solutions are much easier than people think. And it isn’t just like, “Yeah, that strategy of forcing everyone back through return to office mandates.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, a couple follow-ups there. Five days in the office is counter to cohesion. What is optimal for cohesion?

Jennifer Moss
Well, Gallup says one to two days in the office per week and then you have others that say, I mean, hybrid is optimal if hybrid is done right. I mean, Mark Ma, from University of Pittsburgh, and Nick Bloom from Stanford, they’ve done lots of lots of research and found that, from a purely capitalist standpoint, the most financially viable is hybrid. People feel like that’s an okay meet in the middle.

And that five days a week, it ends up, actually, making people feel less connected, they’re more resentful to the organization and feeling less loyal, so they don’t invest in relationships in the same way. We also see organizations that have been focused on return to office mandates tend to also, as part of their kind of work personas, they’re overworking and there’s a lot of burn out there. And when you’re burned out, you also don’t really want to hang out after work or spend a lot of time chit-chatting. You feel like that 20 minutes of just having lunch every week could mean an extra hour in your pajamas at 11 o’clock at night so you avoid it.

And so, we’re seeing a lot of data that shows that that’s not great.

And fully remote is not great either in many ways. Some organizations, like Atlassian and others do it well, but from a purely capitalist standpoint, it is kind of that Goldilocks zone where there’s a little bit of both. But ones that are most successful are like the ones like Microsoft where it’s 50% of your time, not Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It’s sort of fluid, and managers get to say, “Hey, let’s talk about what makes sense.”

They have moments that matter, which is like, you know, an onboarding or a project that they really want to work on, or some specific reason why you’re in it together, but that can be fluid from week to week. And so, that kind of autonomy but a little bit of time together that’s used in a better way is where we see higher cohesion and happier workers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we talked about hope a lot, but you actually mentioned eight areas for folks to address. Could you give us the quick one sentence, what do you mean by this area, and then maybe one quick tip for giving that a boost?

Jennifer Moss
So, purpose is the second chapter. I was able to talk with Adam Grant. He and I are really aligned on this idea of that leaders get this purpose wrong. It’s like part of the mission statement, your values and your purpose, and it’s always tied to this big grand mission statement. But no one really cares about that unless you’re in this executive group. There’s about 20% at the highest level that really feel connected to the purpose. Most people just want to tie their daily values to work.

So, one of the things that we recommend is that leaders of their teams have this one meeting every single week. And I know we’re meeting fatigued, but it’s 20 minutes, again 20 minutes to fix culture, and it’s a non-work-related check-in. You ask, “What lit you up this week? What stressed you out?” and everyone goes around and talks about that. And then, “What can we do to make next week easier?”

Because purpose really is about, “Does the thing I do every day, even the tedious and boring things that I do every day, do they matter? Does anyone care about it?” And if that’s connected to who you are and you feel good about it, you feel like you have purpose. And so, “What lights you up?” that’s like pure magic for managers to motivate. You know, “Okay, now I know you like this. Now that makes you excited. Oh, let’s try to create some of that thinking and fuel your work with that.”

And then, “What stresses you out?” that’s how you prevent burnout. That’s how you make sure that someone saying they haven’t slept every single time you ask them this question or they’re not sleeping, you can dig into it. Then you have managers as mental health conduits, not professionals, and they’re just able to get to it.

And then, “What can we do for each other to make next week easier?” builds that sense of shared goal-setting and helping each other and quick wins, which also builds cognitive hope. And it really, from the interventions where we’ve tried this, it’s really done incredible shifts in morale. And so, I think, like, that’s purpose and why I really feel like that’s a key critical thing that we should be working on.

Pete Mockaitis
And community?

Jennifer Moss
Community is just we’re all lonely. We need to have friends again. And the way that we’re seeking out friendships right now are based on accountability and conscientiousness. It’s a huge switch from pre-pandemic, where we were looking at shared interests, likeability, someone made you laugh, but now it’s like, “Can you get your job done because that’s all I care about?” And so, we need to bring rituals back.

We used to have what is called, I think, before it was called forced fun. And we don’t want forced fun, but we want rituals because that’s how you build social contagions, and people feel like going to work isn’t just like going to school without our gym or recess. It’s super boring right now. So, building friendships through rituals.

And then when we look at solving the big problems, compassion is how we, as leaders, address AI anxiety. We have to understand that there’s a lot of people, especially our younger cohort, one in two are feeling AI anxiety, which Gallup calls FOBO, fear of becoming obsolete. And so, compassion is how we do that because empathy is listening, compassion is taking that listening and putting it into action.

And then when it comes to really looking at openness, if we create openness, this is going to solve that generational divide that we have right now. A lot of mature workers say, “I don’t fit into this workforce. Like, this is not at all my philosophy, and I don’t really want to worry about obsolescence in my final years of work.” So, we’re seeing them, a lot of mature workers leave early, and I think that’s actually going to be a major labor force catastrophe if we’re not careful with that group.

And young people are just opting out. So, we need to stop this hyperbolic, “Boomers can’t Google, and they’re micromanaging,” or, “Gen Z’s are lazy and entitled, and they’d afford a home if they just stop buying avocado toast.” That, to me, is just like, people think it’s funny, and, actually, it’s creating a real sense of ageism at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so you’re saying, in both directions.

Jennifer Moss
In both directions.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the Millennials think that the Boomer is an idiot who can’t Google, and the Boomer thinks that the youngsters are irresponsibly burning their cash. Whereas, like, there are realities associated with, like, affordability is harder now. And then on the other side, it’s like, “Hey, technology is changing much more rapidly now.” Like, that’s also true, and that is also hard, and it needs to be acknowledged.

Jennifer Moss
It is. And you know what? I keep saying, like, stop using terms like “reverse mentoring.” We use that all the time. And it assumes that an older worker knows less about technology or something than a younger one, and we talk about Boomers know this and Gen Z knows this. We see this always when we talk about technology, and it’s just assumed that one generation knows something more than the other, which is not accurate.

Like, look at Dr. Hinton, he was the founder of AI, probably knows a lot about AI, and he’s in his late 60s. And so, this idea that we have to learn in this reverse way, instead of peer mentorship is a way better approach to talking about it. And, really, in the book, I just go through all the language that we don’t realize we’re using, the narratives that we use a lot, and that it just creates this continued labeling of an entire generation as being a very specific thing. And instead of just taking those assumptions away and looking at it, I think, with an openness, that’s what leaders need to do.

And then I think my favorite chapter was freedom because this whole idea of the reason why workers don’t want to have these RTO mandates, or don’t want to go back to work is that we’re missing the psychological barriers that people are feeling right now, which is, “I had my freedom in this certain area of work,” and it goes across the board, not just with return to office, but across the board.

There was more investment in well-being, DEI, you know, all of these commitments, and promises that were made to people. And when they started getting those clawed back, it felt like, “Wow, now my freedom, my sense of freedom is being taken away.” I talk about this from a neuroscience standpoint, and our sense of freedom is deeply baked in our neural wiring. It’s something we would go to great peril to stand up for, and a lot of this resistance is subconscious.

It’s conscious and subconscious because we’re fighting for something that we feel like is ours now. And so, that trust is a big factor, and so organizations that are making these choices really quickly and just sort of throwing it at employees is why I believe that this whole issue has continued to be so polarizing. Instead of understanding that people shot up when it comes to the rates of social anxiety from 4% to 36% of people explain that they had social anxiety through the pandemic.

So, you’re not just saying, “People, go back to work. Deal with it,” and if they’re resistant, it’s because they’re lazy. It’s because they have generalized and high levels of social anxiety. So, I think this, for me, was a big aha, recognizing why the pushback and why the resistance is so, so difficult for leaders and employees to get on the same page.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, could you share, if folks are in the individual contributor role of things, and they’re vibing with what you’re saying, like, “Yes, Jen, this sounds right and true and good, and I wish my organization would do some of this enlightened stuff,” what do you recommend they do?

Jennifer Moss
Well, as an individual contributor, your life is still—you’re still in charge of it, and although happiness at work, it really needs to have societal and policy change. You need to have leadership and high-level executive managers and individuals all play a role to make it the kind of culture that everyone wants. We have a lot of responsibility too of our own choices. It’s a privilege to just quit so I don’t just say, “Oh, everyone can quit.”

Not everyone can quit. It’s not that easy to do. But I do say that there are a lot of things that have happened, habits that have been imposed on us and self-inflicted habits. Like, I just wrote this article for HBR that was really, I think, well-received and it was titled “Let’s End Toxic Productivity.” And we’ve become toxically productive. We’re waking up in the morning and checking, we’re sitting in our pajamas, we’re calling it fun work. We have our glass of wine while we’re doing admin, and it’s like, “Oh, this is fun work because I’m drinking and I’m doing my admin work.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s one way to do it.

Jennifer Moss
Yeah. It’s like, “No, this is still not healthy.” And you see this increase specifically in women that are just completely burning out, and they’re hitting that wall. So, we do feel a sense of pressure that, again, it’s like institutional stress, but it’s also us feeling like we need to perform at these high levels. And a lot of that is because we’re still in this sense of urgency mode. We’re still in surge capacity mode, and we haven’t stopped that, reset that habit and replace those with more boundaries.

We can’t always make those choices because there’s a lot of reasons for it, but in the book, the first chapter was me interviewing Kara, who was on track to be the first female black partner in her law firm, and she lost three members of her family. And when I met her, she was driving an Uber, and I said, “Wow, that’s intense. And what made you choose to do that?” And she said, “Life is short. I’m working on my nonprofit in Costa Rica, giving microloans to women, and, yeah, I’m making less money, but I just feel like I needed to do this. Like, I’m compelled to do this.”

And you’re seeing more women, why we have the thinnest executive pipeline in history right now. And for the first time in a decade, we see the global CEOs of females decline, and a lot of it is just a purpose shifting, and we’re going to lose a lot of talent because people are just, overwhelmed. But we do have the choice, and I have had so many interviews.

I interviewed over a hundred Uber drivers for the book, and every single one of them said, “I feel better.” And it’s shocking because we would think, “Really?” Our perception is, “No way. You had this opportunity to be the first black female partner, like, how could you be happier?” And she said, “I am. It’s extraordinary how much healthier I am and happier I am in this role.”

And I think, when you face your mortality, you realize that. And a lot of us have collectively faced our mortality over the last five years or have a sense of it potentially being uncertain, and that changes you. And this is what we need to look at, it’s like, “What are our deathbed regrets?” And if that doesn’t fit into the schematic of, “Okay, is answering an email at 11 o’clock at night drunk, is that going to be our deathbed regret? Probably. Or, is missing time with my family, or is being healthy, or is actually setting boundaries?” And that is where I see a lot more people making those choices for their own happiness and healthiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s zoom on this, you interviewed a hundred Uber drivers, and all of them said they were happier driving Uber than doing another job.

Jennifer Moss
Well, I would say maybe 80 to 85 percent of them did, 15% were just like, “I’ve been always driving this car and it’s good for me because I…” That 15% and I found were really proud of making a paycheck to be able to put their kids through school or giving them a better life, and so there was still a sense of pride. They hadn’t left another job, but the majority of them had.

And there was three people I interviewed that had left Wall Street. They were making lots of money and, fortunately, they had some money to be able to support that. I saw a lot of retirees that took early retirement but didn’t want to return to corporate, so they were driving an Uber just to continue making money, but they had no desire to actually go back. And a lot of them had very solid positions within their company. They made good money, but they didn’t want to be in that environment.

This is where they would say things like, “I just don’t fit. Like, this is good for me, this pace.” And I also found, too, what was a really interesting data point is that 20% of American grandparents are primary caregivers. And so, we never think of that, and now we’re seeing more organizations have grandternity benefits, which I think are fantastic.

But we think only older Gen Z’s and Millennials need that help with the kind of paternity and maternity leave, but grandparents are taking on primary care, so flexibility has become extremely important for them. And so, so organizations that didn’t offer that, that was leading them to go into places where there was flexibility. And I would say across the board, that was one of the main factors, was just “The flexibility to be able to do what I needed to do as a parent, as a grandparent, or even just for my own passion pursuits.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, I think that is so stark in terms of many workplaces are failing their workers so profoundly, in terms of flexibility, purpose, belonging, that folks would prefer to receive a fourth or less the compensation in order to just drive a car and not have to deal with all that crap.

Jennifer Moss
Yes. And, really, again, it’s the focal point of the book because people described what they were missing, and the data shows that the big Gallup whirlpool that goes into the happiness report found that people would take 37% less pay if it meant higher work-life balance and flexibility. I mean, we can solve these problems and yet now we’re seeing more people double and triple down on less flexibility, which just erodes that trust, and I think the data is there.

There’s so much evidence to show that if you provide autonomy and trust in your workers that you hired, that you spent a lot of money to recruit and retain, they’re adults, you hired adults, so why are you treating them like children when you bring them into the organization? And so, to me, the freedom chapter of flexibility, specifically, it’s like, it’s just such a no-brainer, and organizations are just making this real play to have control, and it’s turning people off.

And they are willing, at this point, to take much less pay to have a life that feels like that there’s a sense of freedom in it. And that’s why you’re seeing this high level of disengagement, this constant turnover. People, even if you’re in the organization, are just not feeling like they care about work. Quiet quitting, and disengagement is so high, that you’re not even getting the most out of your people. You’re actually getting a fraction of what you could be getting from your people if you just let go of the power and looked at this as a mutual respect of transferring skills and just working together.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, Jen, tell me, anything else you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Jennifer Moss
I just really hope that people just start caring more about each other, and putting five percent more of their effort into just being kind and altruistic. And, you know, it really is 20 minutes, 20 minutes of eating lunch with each other, Cornell found, actually improves well-being and happiness at work. It’s just one lunch every single week together.

If I can tell people to just take 20 minutes of thinking of some sort of tactical strategy that you could do to make someone in your organization’s life better, you will feel better for it. And if we could create a bit of a social network or contagion around that, I think it would spill over into something really, really transformational.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jennifer Moss
“You can have anything, not everything.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jennifer Moss
I love Dr. William’s study that he did for the Oxford Wellbeing Institute this year, and he said, basically, well-being programs aren’t working, wellness is not working, but the one thing that does work is volunteering and altruism. So, just being nice to other people is the one well-being program that we should be focusing on this year.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jennifer Moss
I love A Little Life. It’s so painful but it is the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Jennifer Moss
One of my favorite tools right now is ResearchGate. Being able to have the ability to go through there and be able to use it for really incredible research that you can, as a journalist and as an author, be using so that we aren’t spreading misinformation, so that we really are getting it from peer-reviewed sources.

That makes me feel so much better about the content I’m putting out, and that people are reading something that I know has been backed through evidence. And I think every single writer and journalist, and anyone communicating to the public, should be using that source instead of some of the AI sources that might be not as accurate.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Jennifer Moss
I do practice gratitude. And I know that sounds hokey but it’s something that I really try to do. We do it around the dinner table but, lately, just for me, it’s like, “What went well this week? What can I work with that I have versus what I don’t have?” and it does work. It gets me out of my habit.

And just taking a moment to take a breath, and realize that there’s still a lot of good things in the world that I appreciate. It does ground me in this time of poly-crisis.

Pete Mockaitis
And, if I may, when it comes to practicing gratitude, I think that there’s some nuance in doing this excellently, because sometimes I can list a thing that is objectively a blessing or, “This is a good thing, and I am noting it, I am listing it, I am acknowledging it.” But sometimes when I’m doing gratitude, I actually feel gratitude for the thing that is objectively good, and other times, I don’t have the feelings. And since you’re a good researcher, can you tell me, does that matter in terms of doing a gratitude practice? Or how should I do it optimally?

Jennifer Moss
Dr. Robert Emmons in his book Thanks, and a lot of his research, are so useful on this concept of gratitude and how it impacts. And sometimes it is tail that wags the dog, you know, like that idea that you think about these things, it is a narrative that your brain is using. So, anytime that you refocus on something that maybe you’re not feeling, but you know is valuable, like, “Oh, be thankful for having clean water.” And at the moment, I’m just not like, “Oh, I’m so grateful for clean water,” but I’ll mention it.

And it does help you have perspective-taking because from a neuroscience standpoint, it does take out the things that you could be focusing on that are not positive. You have only so much you can attend to at any one time. It’s like 40 things that you can attend to in the moment while you’re processing tens of billions of pieces of information. But if you’re attending to something, even if you don’t feel those, you know, necessarily those chemical reactions to it, it is creating a desire path in the brain.

So, the more that you put that focus, that neural wiring, and you go over it and over and over again, you create what is called gratitude fluency. So, you go from practicing gratitude to being grateful, and that happens over time. It’s like a language that you learn and you become fluent in gratitude, and so then it’s an automatic response to feel gratitude towards something versus having to practice it. But it is something, as it works through your life, it does change the chemistry as well. It just takes time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is helpful. And if nothing else, the fact that I have oriented my thoughts towards a thing worthy of gratitude means that I wasn’t like whining about “This water doesn’t taste very good. And a key nugget, something that you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Jennifer Moss
One of the things I would say is that we have more agency sometimes than we think if we’re really stressed and burned out. And one of the best things that we can do is really do a values assessment. What do you care about? What do you love? And then make your priorities for the year. Focus on that.

And if you’re saying yes to something, like a project that maybe you’re excited to participate in but it’s going to take that extra 20% of your time, put it on that scale of “Is this FOMO? Is this something I have to do? Or, is this another thing where I’m going to regret saying yes in the future?” And take some time to rest.

Rest is not a four-letter word. Look at what you can be doing with that time for work, and instead refocus it on making sure that you’re well and healthy and prioritize your own well-being and the well-being of the people around you first. And then, hopefully, you’ll start to see the benefits of that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more get in touch, where would you point them?

Jennifer Moss
Jennifer-Moss.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jennifer Moss
I would love for all of you to spend the next month and every day say something nice about another person behind their back. Spreading positive gossip inside of an organization actually improves psychological safety for those people coming into the space. And when it gets around to someone that you said some awesome thing about them, it really does make them feel incredibly special. So, just for the next month, just talk nicely about all your co-workers and see how that spreads a positivity contagion.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jen, thank you. This is fun.

Jennifer Moss
Thank you so much, Pete. It was great. Too many years in between, but maybe it’ll be less next time.