Discover proven initiatives to reduce stress and increase happiness in the workplace

Description of the video:

Kelley faculty presenter: Nichole Alspaugh Williams, Ed.S, LMHC, NCC

Hi everyone and welcome back to week two of The Power of Positive Psychology. This week, we will be talking about stress management and happiness in business. So today's agenda. We will first talk about stress in the workplace, both costs and programs that particular companies have put into place. We will then go into defining happiness, both our working definition of happiness and a little preview of what has been proven to make us happy. The third item on our agenda today is positive psychology in the workplace. Both what other companies are doing and easy ways to implement it in your office. We will then go into a famous study, On of the very first studies on positive psychology and a company that happened to take place at, KPMG. And then finally, we'll go over your happiness habits and your tasks for next week. So first off, stress in the workplace. This is a slide that we had last week. I added a few more items on here. Again, these are things that are pretty well documented costs of stress. The interesting thing about this slide, and if I had you in person, I did this with my students, is looking at how all of these are connected together. Like of course, high turnover is connected with increased training and recruitment. A lot of these are connected with a decline in productivity. Accidents are connected with increase healthcare costs and legal problem. So there's a lot of connections here. But this, as I mentioned last week, is, is pretty well documented in terms of the cost of stress in the workplace. Now, forward-thinking companies have created mental wellness programs and these have gotten a huge boost over the last year. These things are, are mostly centered on - they're based on traditional psychology. They are, if you remember what we talked about last week with that trend line, the, the people that are below that trend line, the people that are depressed and anxious. These programs are designed to get them up to that, that average level and they are absolutely, very much needed. Positive Psychology, if you remember, is the study of moving people up from that trend line to that outlier to get them to flourishing. So let's define happiness. I've been talking about happiness, but let's have a working definition of it. One that, that is very common is just the idea of feeling good, a sense of pleasure, gratification. This definition tends to be fleeting. Like, you buy something new and you get that rush because you got something new to play with. But after a few days it goes away. So this tends to be more of a fleeting definition of happiness. The definition of happiness that we are working on with this series is living a rich, full, and meaningful life. Now the next slide is a list of the things that have been proven to increase our happiness. I said I wasn't going to cover it until week five. But as I was going through this, I realized that as we're going to start talking about what different companies are doing, you need to have this knowledge. So here on the screen, you guys can read it faster than I can read it to you. And in week five, we're going to go into depth as to why each one of these increase our happiness. But for now, you can just take a look at it and see that these are all the types of things that companies who are embracing positive psychology are bringing to their employees. So positive psychology in the workplace. So companies using positive psychology. If I, if I were to ask you, probably the first company that would come to mind would be Google. They have scooters in the hallways, free snacks, you can bring your dog. They have chefs in their cafeteria, video games that can be played. But the biggest piece that connects to positive psychology is their social connections. There cafeteria is open hours longer than normal cafeterias are so people can go grab a coffee, sit, connect with their friends and colleagues. Their onsite daycare allows parents to go and connect with their kids during the day. So social connection is a big piece of happiness, and is something that Google does really well. Patagonia has a policy that they call the "Let my people go surfing" policy where they actually have surf boards in a closet, and people can go grab them surfing during the day. And I came across a quote from their founder that says, we have a policy that when the surf comes up, you drop work and you go surfing. I don't care when you work, as long as the job gets done. And that give their employees the flexibility and the freedom that can really help increase their happiness. We saw on the previous slide that, that exercise is something that's really important to your happiness.  And Coors instigated a - or started a fitness program where they saw a $6.15 return on every dollar spent. Toyota did a strengths based training. And as you saw on the last slide, that using your strengths, happiness and they saw a jump in productivity after, after creating that training program. The order of the elephant is really cool. This was a Danish car company who had a two-foot tall stuffed elephant that employees could give to each other for something that they were grateful that the other person did. So it wasn't just the passing of the elephant and telling the story in the moment of why the person was receiving it. It was the, the idea that people would walk by that person's office or cubicle and see that two-foot tall elephant sitting there and ask what they did to get it. And so it was the continual telling of that story that really boosted happiness and boosted, boosted morale. MIT did a study at IBM where they studied the social ties of 2,600 employees. And what they found was that the more connected, the employees that were more connected, better performed better. In fact, every email contact of the people that they studied added $948 in revenue. So because of that, IBM created a program to introduce employees to each other that didn't know each other. So they were introduced a program to better connect their employees to create those better relationships and those better social connection. And then finally Genentech, which is a company of - with Roche. Did - they had a smaller group in their organization, the product development group, tried Headspace, which is a meditation app. That app, as you probably know. And they reported that they were happier and more content at home and at work. And so the company he started decided to investigate, do some surveys, crunch the data, saw that it was so good that all 14,000 employees now have access to Headspace. And as you saw on the previous slide, meditation increases happiness and we'll talk more about that next week. Implementing positive psychology. How can you do this? Well, a focus on gratitude. Whether you are a manager in your company or whether you are just starting out your career. You can focus on gratitude. You can drop by, do a gratitude visit. Drop by a co-worker and just sit there for a couple of minutes and let them know and thank them for something that they did for you. If you do manage an apartment at your, your monthly or weekly staff meetings, have a standing an agenda item where you appreciate specific things that your employees did, and then open up the floor for them to express gratitude to each other. A really easy way to implement gratitude and introduce gratitude into your company. Encourage connections between coworkers, social connections. It's just, it's a big deal when it comes to happiness, increasing happiness. And encouraged team-building exercises where your team can build those genuine relationships. Even encourage them that socializing is something that's good for them to do. Because remember, if you make your employees happier, they're going to be more motivated. They're going to be more creative. They're going to be more productive. So as long as, as, as performance isn't decreasing, of course, encourage those, those social connections. Encourage your employees and you yourself to use your strengths in new and innovative ways. There's a survey out there called the Via Character Strengths Survey. And it gets into your character strengths. And we'll talk about that in a later week. And you'll actually take it in a later week. But basically, if you use your character strengths in new and innovative ways each day, it boosts, gives you a happiness boost. Introduce exercise, whether you are - and this  probably would only work for smaller meetings obviously. But if you have a meeting with just two or three people, consider making it a walking meeting. Walk around the block, walk around your building, introduce exercise into your day. Think about bringing a yoga instructor in if you have the room in your, in your office to lead a yoga class a couple times a week. Just really simple things that you can do to increase, increase, introduce exercise which helps increase happiness. And then finally bring in happiness trainer. A happiness train could do a seminar. They could do a workshop. They could do one-on-one sessions with your, your employees. They could design a program so that your employees know what they should do each day to, to boost their happiness. Now this happiness trainer idea brings me to that famous study that I was talking about. And this is the beginning of positive psychology. Towards the beginning of positive psychology in businesses. So during the global, global economic collapse in 2008, banks were the hardest hit. And then other large companies. So they reached out to Shawn Achor and, of Harvard who wrote The Happiness Advantage, we talked about him last week, and asked him to come in and do some positive psychology programming. So the banks and these large companies that I'm bringing up here as examples, were the first to adopt positive psychology as a way to rethink how they did their work. So basically it was tax season 2009 after the global collapse. So you can imagine that it was not a fun time for KPMG. And so what Shawn did was he took half the managers in New York City and New Jersey and did a three hour introduction to positive psychology and also how to apply it to their lives. They were evaluated three times, once before the training, once a week after, and once for months after. Every metric improved between the before assessment and one week. That could've very well been attributed to the Honeymoon Effect of when you go to a training. I don't know about you all, but sometimes when I've gone to a conference in the past, I come up with these great ideas that I'm going to do when I get back. And then I get back and I'm under a mountain of emails and a mountain of work that, that built up while I was gone. And then these new ideas just kind of get pushed by the side. And so that's what they're referring to as the honeymoon effect. So what they were concerned about is whether the metric, those metrics would stay high even into the fourth,  four months afterwards. And let me share - I forgot to share this earlier - The, the metrics that they surveyed were life satisfaction measures, perceived stress, social support, perceived effectiveness at work, and work optimism. And at the four month mark, the four-month mark showed that the effect held. And the most interesting piece and the coolest piece is that life and the life satisfaction metric, which is personal and professional happiness, was significantly higher than the before assessment and significantly higher than the untrained managers. So, you might be wondering, what did they tell these managers to do? Well, I'm here to tell you. And the first one on here is going to look really familiar to you. He asked them to keep a gratitude journal. He also asked them to write for two minutes a day about a positive experience that happened in the 24 hours prior. He asked them to exercise for ten minutes a day. Meditate for two minutes a day. And then finally, every morning, spend a couple of minutes writing a brief email, thanking or praising someone on their team. So these are very, very simple. And let's talk about, let's look at how long this would take. So there's 14 minutes up there, right there. Let's say another three hours - three hours - ha! Three minutes. You can spend three hours in your gratitude journal - another three minutes on your gratitude journal. So we're at 17 minutes writing the email, maybe another three minutes, so you're at only 20 minutes a day for a huge boost in your happiness. So this kind, these kinds of, of simple things is really what, what positive psychology is about is these habits that increase your, your happiness. So Shawn writes about this survey a lot. And in the, the, the article I happened to pull about it  he ended it like this and I wanted to share with you: These findings clearly indicate that not only can a company with a short intervention and a low investment of resources, but the effects are sustained even in times of great challenge. In other words, investing in happiness pays great dividends. So I hope you will join me this coming week in these new happiness habits. I would like you to continue your gratitude journal. I would also like you to take a look at the happiness quadrant from your happiness hamburger model that you created from last week. Look at that. Commit to doing something on your happiness list. List it in your journal, and just write a few sentences about why - how you felt after doing the item on your happiness list. And then finally, strive for one random act of kindness per day. We haven't talked about why that makes you happy, but I think you probably know. You probably have an idea of why that would make you happy, and list that in your journal. So those are the only three things I have for you this week. I hope you will join me in doing these tasks and these happiness habits. And I will see you next week.